On Monday, a writer for The Huffington Post posited that white athletes who don’t kneel for the national anthem are defending white supremacy.
The author of this piece of nastiness is Jesse Benn, the same guy who endorsed violent resistance against Donald Trump in June 2016, when Donald Trump was only the presidential presumptive nominee for the GOP. Benn wrote in HuffPo:
In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this. In spite of this, such resistance is apparently more offensive and unacceptable to societal norms and liberal sensibilities than the nastiness being resisted in the first place.
Unsatisfied with endorsing violent resistance, Benn decided on Monday to target white athletes who won’t join in protesting the national anthem. Here’s how he started his diatribe:
See, for white athletes the anthem and American flag do represent freedom, liberty and whatever other amorphous American values one might ascribe these symbols. So, from their view, kneeling would be disrespectful to the privileges a white supremacist nation affords them.
Then, mocking American patriotism:
We’ve all heard the typical argument against kneeling. “Kneeling during the anthem disrespects the flag and the soldiers who fought for your right to protest and blah blah blah patriotism!”
It gets worse; Benn then decided that American history, repelete with instances of America’s generosity and soldiers risking their lives for citizens abroad threatened by brutal invaders, should be disparaged: “In the fairytale we Americans tell ourselves where soldiers fight wars for freedom and not imperial conquests …”
So why does Benn think white athletes stand for the national anthem? It can’t be patriotism; it must be … racism!
If white athletes can’t fathom kneeling because they feel soldiers fought for their rights and blah blah blah patriotism, it’s because they are treated as full citizens and afforded those rights they imagine soldiers fought for. Interpreting their own experience as something more universal, they struggle to understand why anyone should kneel.
Benn opines “ … disparities along racial lines regarding wealth, education, healthy food, employment, health care, housing, wages, criminal charges/sentences and practically every other imaginable measure of quality of life … are the results of centuries of systemic white supremacy, plain and simple.”
Benn concludes:
Understand this. White supremacy—as in the structures of opportunity, the legacy of/ongoing oppression of non-whites, and the asymmetrical hoarding of resources by whites—is what affords us the privileges that limit our view, making a peaceful act of protest seem offensive in spite of the broader context of what’s being protested. And the ignorant result of that privilege was on full display Sunday as white players stood next to their Black teammates. So let’s at least be clear that what those players stood for on Sunday was white supremacy. Full stop.
From endorsing violence to calling whites who honor America by standing for the national anthem white supremacists, Benn’s vile rhetoric is emblematic of the Left’s hatred for everything American.
Which you can always easily find at The Huffington Post.