Last year, Nike tied itself to the muddled message of professional malcontent Colin Kaepernick. Apparently, he has moved up the corporate ranks at Nike, making decisions like which shoes the company produces. The Betsy Ross American flag on a pair of shoes was ceremoniously nixed by Kaepernick around our Independence Day because it offended him.
Ron HartWe have to be careful not to anger Kaepernick; he might call off Memorial Day for all of us. We seem to have no choice but to cower to every ill-conceived grievance this idiot ex-athlete conjures up.
Kaepernick has a lot of neck tattoos, so we know he is a great long-term thinker. He uses Fidel Castro, a man who killed up to 33,000 people during his brutal socialist reign in Cuba, to make his point.
Nike gave Kaepernick this maudlin slogan when they signed him a year ago: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." The truth is, if you believe what he stands for, you will fall for anything. Its old slogan was "Just Do It," which was also Trump's for years and which cost him $125,000 each time.
Kaepernick was a bad quarterback in the NFL and was cut from the San Francisco 49ers. Now he has a multimillion-dollar annual Nike deal for his "sacrifice." What did he sacrifice? He was unemployed. Like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, he learned to make a living by conjuring up gripes and offering no solutions, then race-baiting corporate America into paying him to provide them cover. That's not heroic.
After nosediving when all this kneeling by Kaepernick began, NFL viewership is now at about a 10-year low. The numbers are particularly down in the South. We lead the country in football and love of country, followed closely by meth, diabetes and obesity. But SEC football is king. The only reason Southerners kneel at a football game is if our bourbon flask falls out of our sock.
What is important to know about Kaepernick, and any celeb or athlete like Megan Rapinoe, is that they cannot factually articulate their beefs. Some of the things Kaepernick says should trigger the NFL concussion protocol.
For example, Kaepernick's complaints ("Hands Up, Don't Shoot" and Black Lives Matter) are based on lies that the media then amplified.
It has been proven that Michael Brown did not have his hands up in Ferguson. He was a two-bit thug on drugs who had just roughed up a store owner during a robbery. As for Kaepernick's anti-cop, pro-Black Lives Matter assertion that blacks are being shot by cops at alarming rates, the facts prove him wrong.
In her book "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe," Heather MacDonald, Yale and Stanford Law School graduate, cites simple Obama administration FBI crime stats that disprove the lie on which Black Lives Matter is based.
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She concludes that black and Hispanic cops are far more likely (3.3 times) than a white cop to shoot an unarmed black suspect. While they are only 6% of the population, black males make up 40% of all cop killers. And a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male to be killed by a cop.
Blacks commit homicide at a rate eight times higher than whites and Hispanics combined. Blacks are 13% of the population but commit 52% of all homicides, most by men. That's the issue Kaepernick should articulate, if he can, but he almost never gives interviews - unless they are to a fawning leftist magazine. If you have a protest, be able to back it up with facts. I would love to see Kaepernick debate Heather MacDonald, Tucker Carlson or Rush Limbaugh on his position.
Kaepernick's buddies with Black Lives Matter even had the audacity to protest at my man Elvis' birthday at Graceland. Elvis sang gospel and blues, danced, wore bling, and bought Cadillacs when he got rich. He took care of his mom, and his daughter married Michael Jackson. Good Lord, people, study history and leave The King out of this. Has any white man met you halfway more than Elvis?
Contact Ron Hart at Ron@Ronald Hart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.