National Review
Nike has set a political trap for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections, and the party’s candidates are walking right into it.
"The Democrats’ winning midterm campaign message would seem simple enough: Trump is bad and must be opposed. Yet at the moment the party risks being associated with a somewhat less attractive message: The American flag is bad and must be opposed.
"Last week, left-wing Democrat Ayanna Pressley ousted long-term incumbent Michael Capuano from the John F. Kennedy/Tip O’Neill House seat in the Democratic primary while praising the NFL anti-flag protests, which her opponent called “wrong.” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says — in Texas! — that there is “nothing more American” than kneeling for the national anthem. The judicious center-left New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes in his daily newsletter that “the anthem is a trap for Democrats.”
"That Nike rolled out Colin Kaepernick as its new spokesman not only knocked a couple of billion dollars off the value of the company, it also amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Republican party. The Left and its base of activists, pundits, and (increasingly) woke capitalists simply can’t let this issue go, much less acknowledge that its flag-dissing is conceptually flawed. Demonizing a huge population based on stereotypes derived from the actions of a few of its members is exactly the kind of anti-American impulse that liberals once stood so valiantly against.
"The Kaepernick-led anthem protests were wrong-headed to begin with. Try to follow this logic: The misbehavior of a few police officers means the police in general should be reviled. And if we revile the police the entire American project is to be rebuked by protesting the anthem. Martin Luther King Jr., by contrast, said his stirring vision was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” He called upon us to live up to American ideals. That isn’t Kaepernick’s message.
"Now the protests have gone meta: They’re not about policing, they’re about Kaepernick." . . .
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