Jerry Jones: Either Stand for the Flag Or You'll Be Benched
Jemele Hill: If You Don't Like Jerry Jones' Rule, Punish the Cowboys' Advertisers
ESPN Suspends Jemele Hill

Jerry Jones has decided to put an end to the Cowboys' anthem/flag protests.

Benching players for national-anthem protests? Or will Jerry Jones go so far as to forfeit games? "If we are disrespecting the flag," the Dallas Cowboys owner said after yesterday’s loss to the Green Bay Packers, "then we won’t play, period."

In response -- once again deciding her job was political agitation on behalf of Civil Rights, Inc. -- Jemele Hill called for going after the Cowboys' advertisers.

In fact, she specifically called for boycotting the advertisers of a team which itself is a partner of her network ESPN, through their MNF contract with the NFL:

Maybe someone from the NFL or ESPN told her that someone working for ESPN, the NFL's broadcasting partner, should not be calling for an advertiser boycott against the Cowboys -- especially given that large chunks of America are one hot minute away from boycotting ESPN's advertisers -- because fourteen hours later Jamele Hill said she wasn't calling for a boycott of the Cowboys' advertisers when she explicitly called for a boycott of the Cowboys' advertisers:

Pretty neat-- going from "boycott his advertisers" to "I'm not advocating an NFL boycott." I guess she could mean she's not advocating an NFL boycott -- just a boycott of Dallas and maybe Miami too.

Well, these Social Justice Warriors sometimes go too far, even for ESJWPN, and they've announced that this non-talent loudmouth is now suspended for two weeks.

Speaking of, Colin Kaepernik reportedly said over the weekend that if the NFL gives him another chance, he'll stand for the anthem. But then he said that report was a lie. And the reporter now says it wasn't discussed.

As John Sexton remarks: This doesn't seem to make any sense.

Maybe Kaepernik just realized that the odds of him being signed were too low to justify a craven walk-back. Or maybe he realized that the odds the NFL will even survive his stunt are decreasing:

From the end of August to the end of September, the favorable ratings for the NFL have dropped from 57 percent to 44 percent, and it has the highest unfavorable rating -- 40 percent -- of any big sport, according to the Winston Group survey provided exclusively to Secrets.

Worse for football, which was already seeing lower TV ratings and empty stadium seats, the month of protests and complaints about them from President Trump drove core fans, men 34-54, away, the most significant indicator that NFL brass aren't in touch with their base.

The Winston Poll from the Washington-based Winston Group found that the attitude of those fans went from an August rating of 73 percent favorable and 19 percent unfavorable to 42 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable, a remarkable turn against the sport.

According to the poll analysis, "more critically for the NFL, the fall off in favorables occurred among important audiences. Among males, NFL favorables fell 23 percent, going from 68 percent to 45 percent. In looking at a more specific audience, males 34-54, NFL favorables fell 31 percent, going from 73 percent to 42 percent. Among this group the NFL has a surprising negative image, as it went from +54 percent in August to -5 percent in September.

Hit the link to see the favorability of the brand of other pro and college sports. Spoiler alert: They're a lot better than the NFL's.

Pro-Tip to corporations: Social Justice Warriors do not care about the health of your company. They only care about perverting your company into becoming a propaganda mill for their hard-left agitation.

And if your company should wither and die due to this transformation -- Good. In their mind, a business only justifies its existence to the precise extent it is perverted into being a leftist propaganda outfit.

If they kill the company outright, that's fine -- it's a lesson for the others, and it's just one more Capitalist Running Dog corporation to add to the bonfire.

Or, as Iowahawk said, the mission of the left is to:

1. Identify a respected institution.

2. Kill it.

3. Gut it.

4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

They've done this successfully to Marvel comics, which is in the midst of plummeting sales and rapidly-declining brand value, so much so that retailers are in open revolt.

As I Love Comics points out, fan criticism doesn't matter to Marvel because individual comic book buyers are not Marvel's customers. Nope -- it's the comic book shops that are Marvel's customers. They buy the issues -- individual comic book readers buy the books from the shops. So comic book readers are the shops' customers, but the shops are Marvel's actual customers.

And the shops can't return comic books like 7-11 can return the covers of unsold magazines for a refund. When a shop buys a comic book, that sale is final -- and if it doesn't sell, that's a loss borne by the shop, not Marvel comics.

But now with the comic book shops now in revolt against Marvel (because Marvel is basically driving them towards bankruptcy), maybe the jig is up.

People seem to act as if this NFL boycott is a "distraction." I strongly disagree. The progressive coalition does not have a good message, or good overtly political spokesmen.

It only propagates its message by pressuring companies to make Social Justice Warrior hires until the company is dominated by Social Justice Warriors, perverting the company into a leftwing (unacknowledged) political PAC and also acting as enforcers for leftist orthodoxy -- remember in 2015 when the NFL warned Texas that it might never host another Super Bowl if it passed a law against municipalities mandating transgendered bathrooms?

The NFL sharpened its warning to Texas on Friday about a bathroom bill targeting transgender people, suggesting for the first time that the football-obsessed state could miss out on hosting another Super Bowl if the proposal is enacted.

"If a proposal that is discriminatory or inconsistent with our values were to become law there, that would certainly be a factor considered when thinking about awarding future events," league spokesman Brian McCarthy said in response to an email question about the Texas bill, which was filed last month.

An awful lot of political power in this country is wielded by corporations. You are far more likely to be punished by your employer for Non-Officially-Approved Speech than by the government.

We cannot sit idly by as the Social Justice Warriors identify, kill, gut, and wear the skin suit of one powerful institution after another without any kind of pushback whatsoever.

The NFL sought to economically coerce an entire state away from pursuing their own democratic determination of best public policy -- and yet there's an entire chorus of corporate #FakeNews conservatives that shrieks and cries if one suggests using a little bit of economic coercion against the NFL in return.

So... the NFL can use the tools of social and economic coercion against citizens, but citizens cannot use the same tools to strike back at it?

Why? Are we moving past Romney's "corporations are people too" to an even stronger restatement: "Corporations are the only people whose political and speech rights should be absolutely respected and free from any external economic or social coercion"?

Is that where Conservatism, Inc. is now? A party where gigantically powerful, taxpayer-subsidized corporations have untrammeled free speech rights and the rest of us do not?

No. Unacceptable. Unamerican.

If the NFL can bully and pressure individual citizens, then surely individual citizens are justified in applying their own bullying tactics towards the NFL.

Especially given that the left is (quite successfully) bullying the NFL in their direction -- and without any pushback from the right whatsoever, we're essentially gifting the left with the NFL.

Just as we gifted them academia, the bar, the courts, and the media.

How's that workin' out for us?

Bullying a bully isn't bullying -- it's just kicking a would-be bully in the ass for a while until he stops bullying.

The left has decided that it can't win the political war on the current battlefield, so it has made it its mission to shape the battlefield by taking over the main transmission stations of permissible public opinion and using the power of those corporations to propagandize and bully citizens into compliance.

That is the war. Some on the Not-So-SmartSet right may proudly pat themselves on the back for avoiding that war, denying the existence of that war, and even white knighting corporations actively fighting that war on behalf of the left -- but that is the actual war.

And, as to any conservative too polite to fight the actual war -- then what is the point of you, and whose side are you actually on?

posted by Ace at 06:09 PM

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