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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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While watching the Bears-Packers game last night, I saw an an ad defending Colin Kaepernick and how he protested against supposed police brutality and racism by kneeling during the national anthem during games. I was surprised to see at the end the commercial was sponsored by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly know as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

It seems like a very weird choice of issue to not just weigh in on but spend a huge amount of money advertising. My concerns break down to three issues:

  1. The commercial felt more like an attempt to make Kapernick's protest sympathetic and palatable than just a defense of his right to protest regardless. It focused on conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country. But if this is really a freedom of expression issue, it shouldn't matter!

  2. I am skeptical the core issue here is freedom of expression, not due to the content of Kapernick's expression, but due to the time and place. It was done as part of a televised entertainment project. I can't imagine anyone who thinks that an actor has a general right to choose their own lines rather than reading a script. The NFL exercises extremely strict control over on-the-field communications across the board. Athletes get fined for wearing different colored socks to promote uncontroversial social causes if they don't have official league approval. In addition, while it's definitely plausible the protests are why no one gave Kaep another chance, it's not cut and dry either. He was not immediately fired for them and he seemed washed up on the field before he even started protesting.

  3. I can think of other cases even just related to BLM within professional sports that are much less marginal. Cases where an athlete was explicitly fired for opinions expressed off the field. For example, Seattle Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger was suspended without pay and had his career ended explicitly for insulting BLM protesters on a private locked twitter account. Professional soccer player Aleksandr Katai was cut from the LA Galaxy because his wife insulted BLM protesters on social mediea despite the fact that he disagreed with and apologized for her comments. As far as I can tell, FIRE has never even commented on either case.

I would like there to be a non-partisan group devoted to defending freedom of expression. However, I worry there is some truth to Conquest's second law. My best guess is that FIRE chose this cause because they want to appeal to a wider audience including more left-leaning people. Will FIRE will eventually follow the ACLU in drifting so far left it can no longer serve it's mission? I'm a fan of a lot of work they did in the past and even contributed a small amount monetarily, so the possibility is troubling to me.

Their whole shtick (which I think most of the staff really does buy into) is that they're the last civil libertarians in Washington, and the spiritual heirs to the old ACLU. Everyone understands that they're at least somewhat right-aligned in the same way Cato, Reason, and the Institute for Justice are all right-aligned, so most of their marketing has to be geared toward convincing those good ACLU-donating liberals that they're not evil Koch shills.

For a supposedly "right aligned" organization, they sure have a lot of National Lawyers Guild members on staff. Along with libertarians, old school Republicans, Bidenesque Democrats, etc, etc.

Yeah. Just like the ACLU.

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