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I'm not sure what's to justify there. Kaepernick has protested for Good Thing (TM), thus protest is good and exercise of freedom. Reimer has protested for Bad Thing (TM) thus protest is bad and should be suppressed. If you try to dig up any deeper principle behind this - there isn't any. If we're winning it's good, if they're winning, it's bad. Them's the rules and there are no others. All talk about same standards and one playing field and all that is racist anyway, I'm sure one could find a dozen of quotes from Berkley professors on that.
It's not the lack of self-awareness. They know how it looks - and they are fine with it. It's an exercise of power - yes, there are different rules for Good Thing and Bad Thing, and yes, we will claim diametrically opposing arguments to support those - what you're going to do? What you can do? Point out the hypocrisy and inconsistency? They don't care, it works for them just fine. Your next move?
Are you arguing that hypocrisy should not be called out or criticized because everyone does it and therefore the accuser is also a hypocrite (and a meta hypocrite, for complaining about hypocrisy?)
Or are you arguing that complaints and criticism are pointless because the targets can simply ignore you and keep doing what they're doing?
And if so, does this generalize to an argument that complaints and criticism about any bad behavior are pointless because the targets can simply ignore you?
I think he's advocating for something more like "be nice until you can coordinate meanness". A peasant calling out the king's hypocrisy is pretty meaningless until the peasant gathers a few thousand fellow peasants who share a distain for the King's hypocritical ways and put the king's hypocritical neck in a guillotine.
Is that not what this is here though? You can't gather a few thousand peasants towards a common cause without at least discussing it among the other peasants. Discussing bad behaviors that we observe, criticizing them as bad behavior and making a reasoned argument about why the behavior is bad is the peasant gathering behavior. While calling out the king's hypocrisy to his face would be getting into an argument with the person who was engaging in the behavior.
Maybe the metaphor isn't quite right. This is not a brigade squad, and even if we get a thousand members to all agree that the behavior is bad we're not going to then set out to get into arguments with hypocrites and gang up on them. But at least noticing the behavior and specifying it helps to warn people away from falling into that trap themselves. I expect that people here are more likely to hold principled and non-hypocritical views, at least more than average, but it's by no means universal, either across people or even within the same person: you might be a hypocrite on some topics but not others. So pointing out common failure modes and warning against them can be useful.
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