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Will NFL Demand Respect for Old Glory?
Monday - September 25, 2017 at 9:28 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!”
That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in 2016. No NFL owner picked up his contract in 2017. But a few players began to copy Colin and to “take a knee.”
Friday night in Alabama, President Trump raged that any NFL player who disrespects Old Glory is a “son of a b—-h” who ought to be kicked off the field and fired by his team’s owner. And if the owners refuse to do their patriotic duty, the fans should take a walk on the NFL.
And so the stage was set for NFL Sunday.
Two hundred players, almost all black, knelt or sat during the national anthem. The Patriots’ Tom Brady stood in respect for the flag, while locking arms in solidarity with kneeling teammates.
The Pittsburgh Steelers coach kept his team in the locker room. Steeler Alejandro Villanueva, an ex-Army Ranger and combat vet, came out and stood erect and alone on the field.
For NFL players, coaches, commentators, owners and fans, it was an uncomfortable and sad day. And it is not going to get any better. Sundays with the NFL, as a day of family and friends, rest and respite from the name-calling nastiness of American politics, is over.
The culture war has come to the NFL. And Trump will be proven right. Having most players stand respectfully during the national anthem, while locking arms with other players sitting or kneeling in disrespect of the flag, is a practice the NFL cannot sustain.
The mega-millionaire and billionaire owners of NFL franchises are going to have to come down off the fence and take a stand.
The issue is not the First Amendment. It is not whether players have a right to air their views about what cops did to Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Eric Garner in Staten Island, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Players have a right to speak, march in protest, or even burn the flag.
The question NFL owners are going to have to answer soon with a definitive “yes” or “no” is this: Do players, before games, have a right, as a form of protest, to dishonor and disrespect the flag of the United States and the republic for which it stands? Or is that intolerable conduct that the NFL will punish?
Trump is taking a beating from owners, players and press for being “divisive.” But he did not start this fight or divide the country over it.
Kaepernick did, and the players who emulated him, and the coaches and owners who refuse to declare whether insulting the flag is now permissible behavior in the NFL.
As Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Sunday, team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell have strict rules for NFL games. No NASCAR-type ads on uniforms. Restrictions on end-zone dances. All shirttails tucked in. Certain behavior on the field can call forth 15-yard penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct, or even expulsion from the game.
Our Supreme Court has denied coaches of public high school teams the right to gather players for voluntary prayer before games. Why not an NFL rule requiring players to stand respectfully silent during the national anthem, and, if they refuse, suspend them from play for that day?
Or will the NFL permit indefinite disrespect for the flag of the United States for vastly privileged players whose salaries put them in the top 1 percent of Americans?
If watching players take a knee on the gridiron before every game, in insult to the flag, is what fans can expect every week, Trump again is right: The NFL fan base will dissipate.
Sunday’s game exposed a clash of loyalties in the hearts of NFL players. Do black players stand in solidarity with Kaepernick? Do white players stand beside black teammates, if that means standing with them as they disrespect the flag under which hundreds of thousands of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have died?
This conflict in loyalties among NFL players mirrors that of our country, as America divides and our society disintegrates over issues of morality, patriotism, race and culture.
We have been here before. At the Mexico City Olympics of 1968, gold and bronze medal-winning sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist as a sign of solidarity with Black America, and not the nation they were sent to represent.
A month later, America elected Richard Nixon.
In terms of fame and fortune, no professions have proven more rewarding for young black American males than the NFL and the NBA.
Whether they soil their nest is, in the last analysis, up to them.



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 2 October 2017
Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
Monday - October 2, 2017 at 10:34 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
“Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his most presidential moment, “and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever.”
Uplifting words. But are they true?
Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof — uniting us briefly in “sadness, shock and grief” only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.
“In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff,” said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries “taking a knee” in disrespect of that flag.
Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of “people of color” in Puerto Rico.
And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord.
To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.
Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.
Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.
This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.
The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.
The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.
Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
The German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling coalition of Angela Merkel’s CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.
Angela Merkel as the new “leader of the West” in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.
Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.
What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.
Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.
Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Race, tribe, borders, culture, history — issues of identity — are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT — all core constituencies of the Democratic Party — seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.
In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, “If you’re runnin’ down my country, man, You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”
A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics — our cherished diversity itself — appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
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The Dead Soul of Stephen Paddock
Friday - October 6, 2017 at 5:24 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
What was his motive? Why did he do it?
Why did Stephen Paddock, 64, rent rooms at the Mandalay Bay hotel, sneak in an arsenal of guns, a dozen of them converted to fully automatic, and rain down death on a country music concert?
“We will never know,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson.
“There can be no rational argument for mass murder … nothing can really explain the decision to spray thousands of concert-goers with automatic weapons fire, killing at least 59 and injuring hundreds more.”
But while there can be no justification for mass murder, there is an explanation. And like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” it is right there in front of us, in plain sight.
Having chosen to end his life, Paddock resolved to go out in a blaze of publicity. This nobody would leave this life as somebody we would have to remember. He would immortalize himself, as did Lee Harvey Oswald.
Reportedly, Paddock even filmed himself during his massacre.
Ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman, who murdered his wife and mother, and then climbed up into the Texas University Tower in Austin, 50 years ago, to shoot down 46 people and kill 15, is the prototype.
Whitman’s slaughter ended after 96 minutes when a cop climbed up in that tower and shot him. Yet, half a century on, Whitman remains famous. Many of us can yet recall his name and face.
Like Eric hαɾɾιs and Dylan Klebold before Columbine, and Dylan Roof before his sickening atrocity at the black church in Charleston, Paddock wanted to live on as one of the great mass murderers in U.S. history. And he has succeeded. We are today paying him in the currency he craved. He is famous, and we have made him so.
Monday, the president spoke at the White House on the “act of pure evil” Paddock perpetrated Sunday night. Network and cable TV anchors and correspondents stampeded to Las Vegas to dig into his background and motivation.
Commentators discoursed on the meaning of it all. Congress is aflame with demands for gun laws against “bump stocks” that turn semiautomatic AR-15s and AK-47s to fully automatic. Paddock’s deeds pushed Puerto Rico and North Korea out of the headlines. By Wednesday, Trump himself was in Vegas. Five days later, police and FBI are still searching for the “motive.”
Whatever caused Paddock to conclude that ending his life was preferable to living it is not the crucial question. ѕυιcιdєs are not uncommon in America. About 3 of every 4 are carried out by white males; 121 are committed daily, with gunshot a common method.
The real question is what turned Paddock into a psychopath without conscience or a moral code that would scream to him that what he was planning was pure evil.
Unlike ISIS terrorists who believe they are soldiers of Islam doing the will of Allah, and will achieve paradise for slaughtering infidels, Stephen Paddock did not believe anything like this.
He coolly and patiently plotted mass murder almost for sport. He rented a hotel suite with windows overlooking a coming country music concert, his fighting fort. He ferried in, over five days, half his home arsenal of 40-some guns, with the semi-automatic assault rifles modified to fire fully automatic. He installed cameras to alert him to when police were about to break in and kill him. Then he smashed the windows on his 32nd floor suite, and began firing for 12 minutes.
Paddock murdered 59 people he did not know and against whom he had no grievance. How did he come to be a man who treated fellow humans as vermin? And does this say something about our civilization?
In “The Brothers Karamazov,” novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky has his character Ivan say, “If God is dead, all things are permissible.”
What Ivan meant is that if God does not exist, the idea of God’s law, of heaven or hell as reward or punishment, is nonsense. And if it is, there is no man-made law that can deter men who have decided to “end it all.”
Consider. Nevada has a death penalty for the mass murder Paddock was preparing to commit. But as he had already decided to end his life after shooting scores of innocent people, no death penalty or any other threatened state punishment could deter him.
Why not carry out his atrocity and end his life knowing that, within days, all of America would know who Stephen Paddock was?
In Shakespeare, Hamlet declares, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” And so, fearing damnation, Hamlet recoils from ending his life or exacting revenge on the king he believes seduced his mother into complicity in the murder of his father.
In Stephen Paddock, the conscience was dead. He was a dead soul, a moral nihilist, a post-Christian man in a post-Christian age, a monster.
Yet, we are going to see more such men, for we no longer have a convincing answer to that oldest of questions, “Why not?”
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