As expected, a handful of football players presented National Anthem protests during the preseason openers on Thursday night.
The now-familiar arguments were trotted out on various media outlets, following the script of this being a First Amendment issue vs. a property rights issue.
For the record, I don’t care. I walked away from my lifetime political affiliation because I stood on principle. I can certainly walk away from an entertainment venue when I have unlimited games and news streaming to a pocket device. That’s not a boycott, it’s just finding something else to occupy my time.
It’s not that I haven’t heard all of the arguments – that President Trump weighing in lent a governmental aspect to the restrictions, that players are playing for other people’s teams but in semi-public venues – it’s that the arguments are meaningless.
The protests don’t matter.
Has anyone noticed that Black Lives Matter, once on the forefront of national attention, has effectively gone away? That’s because their protests are worthless. They never consisted of tens of thousands of black racists demanding superiority or separation. They consisted of a few hundred such people who had rallied tens of thousands of people tired of being targeted for things such as “driving while black” or just wanting to participate in a popular activist causes.
With the rise of white supremacists, the aggressive black supremacists have groups against which they can fight and the average citizen can see that most police are nothing like the true racists in our midst. Protests are still going on, whether because a couple of people get tossed out of a Starbucks or a person is shot by police, but for the most part “Black Lives Matter” is yesterday’s news. Most people always thought black lives mattered, they were just unwilling to value them more than other lives. The protests that happen now generate a small percentage of what they did a few years ago, and they don’t tend to spark associated protests in other cities.
Antifa is the flavor of the day, as the participants there are able to actively perform violence with comparative impunity. Taking a knee is so 2015, no matter how much attention-hungry NFL players or Republican politicians may want to pretend otherwise.
Immigration marches, gay marriage protests, TEA party, “occupy”, pussy hats, #MeToo… movements happen, movements die. BLM has waned and the new fashions are in.