Before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, President Trump addressed his opposition to NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.” Well it has something to do with race for the players . . .
Lest we forget, this whole kerfuffle started last August when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an interview after the protest. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
In other words, the SF QB jumped on the Black Lives Matter train, using his celebrity to draw attention to allegedly racist white cops shooting and killing innocent black men. Again, “getting away with murder.” Yes, well, no.
While the mainstream media is busy having a cow about the NFL vs. Donald Trump — focusing on players’ “right to protest” — Bryan Dean Wright at foxnews.com dares to set the record straight on what was the matter at hand.
In 2016, Harvard Professor Roland Fryer – an African-American academic who focuses on economics – decided to examine whether the nation’s police officers were killing black Americans more so than whites. When he launched the study, he fully expected to find a clear pattern of unjustified violence.
Fryer looked at four national databases of crime statistics representing police-civilian confrontations from diverse states like Florida, Texas, and California. After rigorous analysis, it turned out that he, Kaepernik and Black Lives Matter were all wrong.
Indeed, Fryer’s study showed that American police officers were not killing black people at a rate any higher than whites.
In short, the nation’s protectors showed no racial bias when it came to deadly force.
Fryer called it “the most surprising result of my career.” . . .
Fryer gave the American people an important gift in the combustible debate of racial violence. Using data science, he showed that the nation’s police officers were not out-of-control killers but committed professionals largely conducting themselves with honor.
And there you have it: the facts prove that NFL protesters and their progressive supporters in the media and entertainment are wrong about racist cops targeting African Americans with lethal force.
Which may explain why the protests have now become about the right to protest and unabashed hatred for President Trump rather than the original [perceived] injustice.
America’s national anthem ends in a question: “Oh say does that star spangled banner still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?” I reckon the answer is yes, certainly in comparison to any other country on earth.
But some of these free and brave people are deeply misguided and, if you don’t mind me saying so, more than a little ungrateful. And that’s what got President Trump’s goat. Fair enough?