Civil Rights Movement: A successful "playbook" of a political campaign that “Race Hustlers” should have studied.
The Civil Rights Movement, a monumental 'playbook' of a political campaign, is a chapter of history that every 'Race Hustler' should study with awe and respect.
The 2024 presidential election is less than four months away, and the Communist Democratic Party (CDP) is preparing the next blitzkrieg of social justice demands to damage Trump and encourage the Democratic base, particularly black voters, to come out again and vote as a monolithic group for a senile puppet called Joe Biden. Of course, the CDP will activate this option if they cannot steal the presidential election as they did in 2020.
Communists always use a dividing issue to win control of the masses. Race in this country is a winning issue because of its history. They have injected the black population with a "victim mentality" vaccine. They have kept the antidote of self-reliance, freedom, and opportunity away from them.
The Colin Kaepernick anthem controversy or Saint George Floyd drug overdose will emerge again under a different script, pushed by the usual race hustlers (Black Lives Matter, Al Sharpton, mainstream media, et al.), but not because they are winning strategies that need to be revisited or modified.
Instead, it is their innate hatred and ungratefulness of a country with its traditional values and mores that has granted them wealth and unlimited opportunities that most people will never come close to enjoying. Moreover, it is one of the Communist's main strategies to divide and conquer a docile and enslaved population who can no longer think for themselves or yearn for freedom.
From the beginning, the NFL anthem conflict was not a well-thought-out political protest in which radical leftist groups latched on to seek relevance, status, and political power (Black Lives Matter).
If the NFL protestors wanted to carry the torch of prior civil rights leaders into a new era of equality and opportunity, they failed to study the "playbook" of a disciplined political campaign that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, they engaged in a pattern of social agitation without clear objectives.
First, the civil rights movement had a clear message by the time they descended in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. Their leaders asked for civil rights laws and better jobs for black Americans.
The anthem protestors never created a clear message. Their complaints were institutionalized racism, dead bodies in the street, or whatever the new "victim catchphrase" of the month happened to be. They did not offer any real solution(s) other than a blanket condemnation of white America, the criminal justice system, and law enforcement officers. Without a clear message, the public viewed the protesting players as spoiled millionaires throwing a temper tantrum.
Second, Martin Luther King Jr. never disparaged the symbols of our nation. His "I Have a Dream" speech appealed to American ideals.
He said, "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note promised that all men – yes, black men and white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Dr. King knew how to move public opinion, even in a segregated country like ours at that time, by appealing to patriotism and the values that held our nation together.
Although King was seeking justice for black Americans, he understood first and foremost that addressing racism required the entire country to come together when he said, "When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" (Hemingway, 2017).
Contrast these words with the image of a football player who took a knee while playing the Star-Spangled Banner while thousands of fans, including military members, were standing to honor American values. Their actions were perceived as unpatriotic and individualistic. Their political message, no matter its intent, vanished into irrelevancy.
Third, in an era of 24-hour news cycles, social media, and videos that go viral with a click of a button, the optics of an event are as important as its content. The 1963 civil rights march in Washington, DC, was staged. March organizers directed the audience to where to stand, what wardrobe to wear, and what signs to carry.
Lucy Barber, author of "Marching on Washington," described the event: "The imagery of that march was also carefully planned. It showed demonstrators how to use the press. It is mostly forgotten, Barber says, that Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech on a weekday. Pointedly, it was a work day. Though the speech had the tone of a sermon, specifically of Moses, it did not come on a Sunday. It interrupted business. Prior protests had often been parades with spectators. However, government employees were sent home in the face of the march. The resulting symbolism everyone now knows from high school textbooks. It surpasses what even the wiliest Carvilles and Roves might conjure today: a Southern Baptist preacher giving a sermon to a crowd in a white marble city, with Abraham Lincoln behind him and the capitol in front of him" (Hemingway, 2017).
The contrast could not be more evident as players sat or knelt during the anthem while the entire stadium and viewing public stood up to show their respect.
Finally, nobody can question MLK's unimpeachable motives: an equal opportunity for all Americans to seek a better life. His nonviolent philosophy to the civil rights movement was unquestionable even as those who wanted to hold on to the remnants of a racist ideology by unleashing dogs and firehoses on civil rights leaders and their supporters.
Compare the stature of MLK, a Baptist minister as the leader of a national civil rights movement, with that of a mediocre quarterback, incoherent, inarticulate, and incapable of constructing a simple message as to why his protests would rectify racial inequalities, and one who showed up at his press conferences wearing Che Guevara and Malcolm X t-shirts and socks that depicted law enforcement officers as pigs.
The image presented to the public was one of a young man (Kaepernick) who hated the United States, supported Communist dictators, and denigrated cops as pigs (Hemingway, 2017).
A second element of the manufactured conflict that will show up again is the idea that there is "an epidemic of racially driven police shootings." The inconvenient truth is that more white suspects are killed by police every year than blacks. According to a Washington Post analysis of crime statistics, in 2015, there were 990 police-involved shootings. 49.9 percent of those shot by the police were whites. Blacks made up 26 percent despite being 13 percent of the population.
When dealing with these numbers, the elephant in the room is the fact that blacks have a propensity to commit crimes at a higher rate than the rest of the population despite being a minority in the overall population numbers.
Black males are responsible for 42 percent of police killings, even though they make up only 6 percent of the population. The statistics are clear; a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black suspect than for him to kill an unarmed black person (MacDonald, 2016).
Police have daily lethal interactions with the criminal element of the population and not the population in general. Their response to crime activities results from crime reporting by victims, not created by the police. Black people victimize most black people in their neighborhoods. Black suspects commit ninety percent of the homicides committed against black victims.
Take the City of Chicago as an example, and one will see that in 2011, the latest data officially released by the Chicago Police, there were 433 homicides. Most of the homicides (71.3%) were black-on-black crimes (MacDonald, 2016). Kaepernick's assertion that bodies were lying on the streets was a true statement. He just failed to point out that the shooters were not cops but other blacks.
The NFL's headquarters are in Park Avenue, New York, the mecca of the media world and one of the most progressive cities in the country. NFL executives' daily interaction with the media, organizations, political figures, and sports agents take place in a place aptly described by Hoover Institute historian Victor David Hanson as one where people "living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior – much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority" (Hanson, 2013).
NFL executives and millionaire players occupy the two coastal power corridors running from Boston to Washington DC and Southern California north to Berkeley. They live in a cocoon, an echo chamber.
They view the rest of the country as a distant, occupied, "flyover country" populated by "backward rednecks" who cling to their guns and bibles.
Blinded by an elitist ideology, they fail to see that the customers willing to pay $150 for an NFL shirt, stand for hours waiting for an autograph of their favorite player, spend hundreds of dollars each year for DirectTV NFL ticket channel, or pass their team devotion from generation to generation, are the "nation's muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods" (Hanson, 2013).
Despite the convincing evidence of the damage caused by the NFL anthem protest to their bottom line, an unwinnable game plan will emerge again to destroy Trump and our nation while clinging to a radical ideology of identity politics and political correctness.
References
Hanson, V. D. (2013, November 28). America's Coastal Royalty. Retrieved from www.nationalreview.com: https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/11/americas-coastal-royalty-victor-davis-hanson/
Hemingway, M. (2017, September 26). What The NFL Could Learn From MLK And The Civil Rights Protests. Retrieved from www.thefederalist.com: http://thefederalist.com/2017/09/26/nfl-learn-mlk-civil-rights-protests/
Hoskinson, C. (2017, October 12). Why the National Anthem Protests Were Doomed to Fail. Retrieved from www.thefairobserver.com: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/nfl-kneeling-national-anthem-protest-latest-american-news-today-24304/
MacDonald, H. (2016, September 3). Black Lies Matter. Retrieved from www.washingtonexaminer.com: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/black-lies-matter