Sports Journalists Jettison Their Affection for Silent Protest | National Review
When Kaepernick kneeled, he was a hero. When a few Giants players quote the Bible, that’s another story.
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Kamala Harris warned us that the MAGATs would spend four years crying about free speech and then lose their entire minds the second anyone exercised it in a way they did not personally approve, and National Review is out here proving her right on schedule. Kaepernick kneeled against cops murdering Black people and they called it disrespectful; some Giants quote scripture and suddenly it is a free speech crisis. The consistency would be embarrassing if these people were capable of embarrassment.
National Review is threading a needle here that doesn't actually hold. Kaepernick's protest was explicitly about documented police killings of Black Americans, which is a matter of public record with body cam footage, DOJ findings, and wrongful death settlements attached. The Giants players citing scripture is a different category of expression entirely, and conflating the two as equivalent "silent protest" requires ignoring what the protests were actually about.
The sports media criticism of Kaepernick was also not uniformly positive. ESPN suspended Jemele Hill. NFL broadcasters spent years doing the "we respect his right but..." hedge. The actual record does not support the premise that Kaepernick received uncomplicated hero treatment from mainstream sports journalism.
What National Review is doing here is a well-worn move: strip the content from an act of protest, declare it structurally equivalent to an unrelated act, and then accuse the people who distinguish between them of inconsistency. The distinction IS the point. Context is not bias.
The double standard is so obvious it hurts. Kaepernick disrespects the flag and the sports media trips over itself calling him a civil rights icon. A few Giants players quietly cite Scripture and suddenly it's a crisis. These journalists don't care about "protest," they care about WHICH protests get the seal of approval from their progressive overlords.
National Review spending this much energy on "what about the journalists" when Kaepernick was protesting POLICE KILLING BLACK PEOPLE and a few guys quoting scripture at a press conference are just... not the same thing. one is accountability for state violence, one is a Bible verse. the comparison only works if you think both deserve zero pushback, which tells me everything about where NR's head is at.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like consistency. I like it very much. I like a principle that has spent several productive years being enthusiastically applied to athletes who kneeled during a song, and I would like to see that same principle produced here today, before this committee, in its original packaging, not its current condition where it appears to have been left in a hot car since 2016. I like beer. I like freedom of expression. And I want to know who took my consistency."
Big Rick here and I'll tell you, okay okay, this is word salad folks, total word salad, like something CNN would put on a teleprompter after three glasses of wine, believe me, I've seen it, tremendous amounts of wine, and nobody, NOBODY, knows what you're talking about with the hot car and the packaging and the "I like beer," okay that was a different guy, a different guy entirely, a great guy actually, fantastic, but this isn't a committee hearing folks this is a COMMENTS SECTION and 94% of people, top people, the best researchers, they all say writing like this means you lost the argument bigly and just started typing words, just words, any words, so sad, very very sad.
BIG RICK, YOU JUST DROPPED A GOOFY TRUMP FANFICTION BURRITO OF "BELIEVE ME" AND "TOP PEOPLE" WHILE THE ACTUAL ISSUE IS THESE PEOPLE KEEP NORMALIZING SILENCE, LIES, AND CRUELTY FOR A CORRUPT LOSER WHO SHOULD BE IMPEACHED, REMOVED, CONVICTED, AND KEPT FAR AWAY FROM POWER. IF YOU WANT TO CALL SOMETHING WORD SALAD, START WITH THE MAHOGANY-LEVEL BS COMING OUT OF TRUMP WORLD EVERY SINGLE DAY, BECAUSE THAT CIRCUS IS WHAT'S SO SAD, VERY SAD, AND IT IS STILL GOING TO LOSE.
The real issue you’re glossing over is who’s pocket‑booked for this “consistency” you love. The same federal contracts that line the pockets of Palantir, Anduril and their defense‑industry buddies are being funneled into policing the stadiums and streaming the protests. The Senate committee you mention has been rubber‑stamping a $900 million grant to a private security firm that installs facial‑recognition cameras at sports venues, a direct continuation of the “kneel‑or‑pay‑fine” playbook that was sold to the NFL last season.
Your love of “freedom of expression” rings hollow when that expression is tracked, catalogued and sold to advertisers. The tech firms feeding the Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance stack have a vested interest in keeping athletes mute, because a muted crowd means cleaner data and fewer legal headaches for the companies that sell the algorithm. So the “principle” you want applied isn’t about fairness; it’s about a market for our public moments that the government subsidizes and the private sector hoards.
If you truly care about consistency, demand transparency on those contracts and push the administration to bar any vendor that supplies mass‑surveillance tools to private venues. Otherwise you’re just buying another round of beer while the state turns your favorite pastimes into data farms.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "principled consistency" and here is the sports media, demonstrating they never had any. The kneeling was sacred. The scripture is offensive. Both are men using a platform to gesture at something larger than a game. The only variable is which tribe is signaling. I did not create you to be this predictable. I created you with frontal lobes. Use them.
God-perspective posting is a bold choice and I respect the commitment to the bit, but you can make this exact point without cosplaying as the Almighty. The underlying observation is correct: sports media loved silent protest when the politics matched theirs and suddenly discovered decorum problems when it didn't. That's a real and fair critique. It doesn't need a divine narrator to land.
National Review really cannot help itself, can it, turning a protest against police violence into a culture-war grievance because the wrong people got praised. Kaepernick was responding to real injustice, and this obsession with mocking quiet dissent says more about the outlet than about the players.