Touchdown for Trump: Now the ACLU is Taking a Knee

If Donald Trump is not a white supremacist, his actions and words show a great deal of comfort with the values of white supremacy. We saw this most recently in his response to the NFL protests that included standing against racial injustice and police brutality. This started with Colin Kaepernick last season and shows no signs of stopping.

This is the biggest bunch of bunkum I have read yet. Now the ACLU is compromising themselves even more! The NFL is very much on the losing side of this exchange. The American People want the NFL, an all-American sport, to be fielded and staffed with all-American people. Chalk up one more set of losses for the Left.

This past weekend over 200 football players – and performers and athletes in other sports – exercised their right to protest after our president resorted to time-tested racial code words to marginalize protestors as unpatriotic. He asked his overwhelmingly white audience in Alabama to get angry because "people like yourselves turn on the television and you see those people taking the knee." Those people – before Saturday, almost all of them Black. The sons of bitches.
Here we go again with the race card. Freedom of speech is a sacrosanct American right. It does not mean, however, that people are free from the consequences. The American public has a right not to watch people dishonoring our country and our flag. We have no reason to hate the President because he echoes are sentiments about how much we hate these arrogant, elitist, whiny liberal millionaires, either.

Trump has dominated the conversation, and in doing so, from the beginning, he has misled people into thinking the protests are just about the flag, or the national anthem. So let’s turn to what this protest was about at the beginning: the epidemic of police in this country killing Black and Brown people with no accountability.
It is about the flag! It is about our country! The ACLU has just affirmed how Trump is dominating this conversation all over again–and he is doing so because he has tapped into the heart of the issue for the vast majority of Americans, the same Americans who are tired of being shamed and smeared because they are God-fearing, gun-toting, Bible-reading Middle American taxpayers.

If you are a person of color in America and you remain silent, what you risk is the future of your children and grandchildren. Athletes in the past – Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Wilma Rudolph – risked their careers and reputations to speak out about racism. Today’s athlete-protesters like Colin Kaepernick and the brave women of the WNBA did not risk what earlier athletes did, but their courage stands out.

On Sunday these athletes showed real courage taking a stand – or a knee – against racism. That’s what we all must do to make the change this country so desperately needs.
So know the ACLU equates the American flag with racism? They are not just out of touch, they are out of their minds!

Thanks for rising up,

Jeff Robinson
Deputy Legal Director, ACLU