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Anti-Trump Protests Tag

The NFL players' sideline protests over the National Anthem and flag have angered a lot of people. On the surface, that anger is about patriotism versus a sense of entitlement, with the players having too little of the former and too much of the latter. But there's another feeling of disgust I'm hearing a lot, how the NFL was one of the few remaining places to which we could escape from politics and just be left alone and allowed to enjoy something. The NFL was an escape. That's a sentiment I expressed in my post, NFL picked sides in the culture war, now it has to live with the consequences:

To kneel during the national anthem or not is one of the dumber questions of our time, but here we are -- grappling with the very basics of patriotism in the losing battle with cultural marxism. Sunday, Professor Jacobson wrote an excellent piece explaining how the NFL must live with the consequences of the side they've chosen in the culture wars.

Over time, I've lost interest in professional sports for many of the same reasons I've lost interested in the professional music, film, and other entertainment industries. They have become thoroughly politicized by the left as part of the culture war. So for me, the lastest public fight over NFL players protesting on the sidelines is just the latest straw, and in many ways, the last straw.

Charlottesville is being exploited to justify some of the worst aspects of the leftist culture war. Internet censorship by left-leaning internet oligopolies based on demonization of political opposition as "hate" and "extremist" groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center is one aspect. But the culture war has moved with rapid speed to statues and monuments and names, and it's not stopping at the confederacy. Protesters are taking matters into their own hands and defacing or destroying statues, like this memorial to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore, the oldest such monument in the U.S.:

Phoenix protesters stirring up trouble after President Trump's rally received a less than kind welcome from local police. Gas and pepper balls were lobbed into groups of hooligans in an effort to disband the juvenile chaos. One protester got a little more than he bargained for and is now part of internet lore.

The Antifa street thugs who have rampaged on college campuses and cities long before Charlottesville have been embraced by the anti-Trump Democratic Resistance. This should come as no surprise, because Democrats also embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement, from which the Antifa movement evolved, As discussed in my prior post, both are the outgrowth of the Black Bloc anarchists and Marxists, Gathering Storms And Threats to Liberty.

We're living in a very dangerous time. Several things are coming together that pose a serious threat to the liberty of anyone who is right-of-center. While there are many factors at work, I've been focused in recent days on three: (1) Antifa becoming a part of the anti-Trump Resistance; (2) politically-motivated denial of access to the internet at the gatekeeper level; and (3) attempts to weaken free speech protections in the name of social justice.

The media and political frenzy we've witnessed since the Charlottesville riots and death of Heather Heyer last Saturday has been as intense as anything in recent memory. I've often used as a measure of frenzy the media reaction when Mitt Romney made a statement during the 2012 campaign criticizing the Obama administration's response to Benghazi. By that measure, the current situation is off the charts.

In the case of Brexit, ordinary British citizens defied the elites in Brussels who thought they know what's best for the British people. Calexit is the opposite. Proponents of Calexit are elitists who are angry that Americans elected Trump and they want a divorce. Let's give it to them. The initiative has a chance to appear on the 2018 ballot, as my colleague Leslie Eastman pointed out in her recent post: #CalExit is resurrected as measure approved for signature gathering