Celebrities Love Free Speech! (If It Hurts Trump)
Anyone remember the collective Hollywood outcry when the NFL threatened to fine Avery Williamson for wearing cleats honoring 9/11?
Or when the league nixed a plan for Dallas Cowboy players to wear decals supporting the local police?
No?
You’re probably right. Celebrities in general took a knee during those two “free speech” sports moments. This past weekend was different.
An army of stars rushed to Twitter to praise football players for exercising their free speech by taking a knee during the National Anthem.
I think: By kneeling, players don’t disrespect the flag.They ask US to respect the flag. They ask us to make the anthem true for all of us.
— shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) September 24, 2017
Colin Kaepernick, began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, to highlight, he has said, police brutality & racial injustice.
— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) September 25, 2017
When my grandchildren take US History in school, @Kaepernick7 will be in the textbooks as a hero & this President will be there as a thief.
— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) September 24, 2017
The NFL is the biggest stage in America. Claim it on behalf of those Americans denied justice. #TakeTheKnee
— Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) September 24, 2017
Free speech lives, they cried. Hmmm.
No outrage over the first two free speech violations cited above. Plenty of praise for the latter example.
Why?
President Donald Trump.
The president excoriated the Colin Kaerpernicks of the world Friday, saying NFL owners should sack players who disrespect the country by kneeling during the anthem.
So stars felt obligated to praise the protests … in order to ding the Commander in Chief. It’s almost as if their comments were politically motivated.
Too harsh?
How do you explain their silence in the former cases, then? (The same media currently outraged over Trump’s comments were mostly silent, too, to be fair).
RELATED: Media Ignore Carolla, Shapiro Defending Free Speech
More importantly, where have celebrities been in the biggest free speech fight of our times?
Conservative on college campuses today speak at risk to their lives. Think that’s an exaggeration? The fizzled Free Speech Week set to start yesterday required $800,000 in security to protect speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos.
For a speech.
Right-of-center speakers risk their well being by simply appearing on campus. Just ask Charles Murray. His speech at Middlebury College led to 67 students being disciplined for their outrageous behavior.
Students and other protesters surrounded Murray’s car and physically attacked a professor who helped arrange for his visit.
Did Midler, Silverman and co. rise up en masse to defend Murray for speaking his mind? Maybe they will if he slams President Trump in his next speech.
Photo credit: E’s Adventures in Life via Foter.com / CC BY
I don’t know of a single professional liberal who stood up for the google engineer fired fir his views.
Trump is a genius with whom he picks fights with. His critics and some of his supporters think that Trump impulsively tweets about stuff that those tweets gets him into trouble. Interestingly, most of those ‘impulsive’ tweets ends up changing a conversation in a direction that favors Trump.
I think Trump is very calculating with his tweets. If he was so impulsive, why go after the kneelers now rather than last year? So now he’s picked a fight with coddled millionaire athletes, 0.01% owners and bedwetting sports columnists. Seems like a win, win, win to me.
There is a very simple, effective way to deal with Trump’s trolling. Be polite, be classy and don’t react…. however, that’s everything the left isn’t. They are used to being the pig that’s gets everyone else muddy. Trump has doubled down on that tactic and owns it.
I did watch some of the sports commentators on Fox and ESPN. It was interesting, most were in mindless outrage mode but some were very uneasy with this story. I suspect a few smart ones realize it might not go the way most of their colleagues think it will.
Heck, not reacting is hard for the right.
That’s why you got to give some respect to Scott Walker, the first major candidate to bail in the face of Trump. He’s the only one with dry powder in the wake of 2016. Other than Trump, who is having an amazing year even if he hasn’t yet MAGA.
When history is written it will say that some millionaires virtue signaled their entire industry into oblivion rather than using their money and reputations to stop the insane levels of gang violence that causes the police in their communities to seem so trigger-happy.
#protesting wrong thing idiots
In 2040 every MBA candidate in America will read a Harvard Business School case study entitled ‘How to capsize your business in a single weekend’.
The thing you have to remember, through all the changes in strategies and positions (federalism one day; no federalism the next; free speech one day; political correctness the next) is that the motive and worldview behind the “liberal” Hive is always more or less the same: what helps the State and statism is good; what advances liberty is bad. I remember when, during the Obama presidency, “liberals” (and by that I mean of course :”tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping government sniffers and State fellators”) talked about any pro-freedom dissent from, or criticism of, “Il Dufe” as sedition or outright treason. (For more on the Hive–a term I “borrowed” from the late Joseph Sobran–see: http://www.sobran.com/hive/hive.shtml