Sept. 4, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:44
4184 What Pisses Me Off About The Colin Kaepernick/Nike Controversy
The Colin Kaepernick National Anthem Controversyhttps://youtu.be/XQw3m-9sISMThe Truth About Slavery: Past, Present and Futurehttps://youtu.be/31E1gHowYcAThe Truth About The Native American Genocidehttps://youtu.be/WNHKDJzgqJgThe Truth About Crimehttps://youtu.be/TVBJ5m3sGfkYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I've done a whole presentation on him and his family, his history, and so on.
But right now, I want to focus on unpacking the lid that is lifted on this dantean hellscape of social justice warrior, mass provocation, and race-baiting that is going on.
Because this is almost two years after he played his last NFL game.
Nike has just made Colin Kaepernick one of the faces of their Just Do It.
It's the 30th anniversary.
Hey, you know what you get for your 30th anniversary?
A 2-plus percentage drop in your stock value and close to $4 billion wiped out of your market cap.
I think that comes right after paper and anti-diamonds.
So the ads, you can see it everywhere you want.
It's like the sad-eyed Colin Kaepernick face.
And on it, it says, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.
So, first of all, I don't really think it's a great marketing idea to put forward a slogan of commitment and self-destruction that could be equally applied to a suicide bomber, but I guess you don't go to Nike for your philosophical insights, unless, I guess, you're a complete idiot.
And the funny thing, just side by side, right?
So, if you've ever grown a beard, you know that it's kind of a ragged top, like it kind of...
Peninsula's out up to your eyes.
But Colin Kaepernick's beard is like space laser guided.
It's got like, he had to have a makeup artist working forever on that laser-like even beard.
Because you know, when you're fighting great evil in the world, it's really, really important to make sure that your beard line is really, really straight.
So Nike has a vice president of brand for North America, Gino Friesenotti, and issued a statement to ESPN saying, here's what we think about Kaepernick's involvement in our campaign.
And I quote, To help move the world forward.
Yeah. Moves the world forward.
Moves Nike's market cap down about $4 billion.
Now, it's going to be a big branding problem for them.
Hashtag Boycott Nike is the number one trending topic in Twitter in the U.S. as we speak.
So, for those who don't know the history, I'm sure you do.
He started taking the knee, Kaepernick, during the national anthem.
Why? Because... Social, racial injustices plaguing the country.
And the 49ers released him from contract following the 2016 season, and no team has signed him since.
Now, currently, because again, he's very much against injustice, he is suing the NFL owners.
He says that they're conspiring to keep him out of the league.
And actually, just last week, there was a mediator who announced that Kaepernick's complaint against the 32 owners can go forward all the way to trial.
And Nike, of course, the NFL's official supplier of sideline apparel and uniforms and so on through 2028.
And this was a deal that just came up in March.
So you see, for Colin Kaepernick, a couple of things are really, really important.
Number one is you have to be able to resolutely and sometimes viciously criticize the government and the society that you're in.
Very, very important.
Also, you have to be able to bring suit against people who don't want to hire you.
I mean, I think it's a free market.
People should be able to hire and fire whoever they want, but here's one of the marketing challenges of Colin Kaepernick.
A couple of years ago, he had a press conference, and at the press conference, he wore a t-shirt.
And the t-shirt had a picture of Malcolm X. All right.
Debatable. However, it was a picture of Malcolm X who was meeting with the late communist murder dictatorship owner, Fidel Castro.
Hmm. Now that's Pretty hideous because, well, for more than half a century, Cuba was groaning under the bloody heels of the Castro-ruled dictatorship.
Castro stifled, brutalized, murdered, threw into medieval dungeons pretty much anyone who disagreed with him.
And according to Human rights watch, and I quote, Cuban citizens have been systematically deprived of their fundamental rights to free expression, privacy, association, assembly movement, and due process of law.
Tactics for enforcing political conformity have included police warnings, surveillance, short-term detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions, and politically motivated dismissals.
So you see, he's very, very keen on living in a society where you can criticize your government, and then he wears a t-shirt with a picture of a guy who stifled and slaughtered dissent.
Now, what Kaepernick said when talking about wearing the t-shirt with Malcolm X and Fidel Castro, he said...
The fact that he, Malcolm X, met with Fidel, to me, speaks to his open mind to be willing to hear different aspects of people's views and ultimately being able to create his own views as far as the best way to approach different situations, different cultures. You know, if you have to pettifog that much about a t-shirt, it probably was unwise to wear the t-shirt.
Or maybe it was wise so people could know exactly where you stand.
Now, one thing he said about Castro.
He said, one thing Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their educational system than they do in their prison system, which we do not hear even, though we are fully capable of doing that.
All right, so a couple of things to break down in these kinds of statements.
Boy, I wish they taught more critical thinking in schools, but it's okay.
Here we go. Here we go.
So... The highest literacy rate.
That's not true. Even if it was supposedly true, well, this is the same island where regularly 100% of people who will risk shark-infested waters floating on a broomstick to get out, 100% of people continue to vote for the existing dictator.
You might just want to bring a tiny, tiny bit of skepticism to the wonderful literacy rates coming out of a blood-soaked communist dictatorship, Colin.
Come on! Think a little.
A little bit less time trimming the old beard lines, a little bit more time thinking about the people who've been brutalized or were brutalized for more than half a century under this murderous dictator.
Invest more in their education system.
What kind of education system do you think they have in a communist dictatorship, Colin?
Do you think it's objective? Do you think it teaches critical thinking?
No. Teaching critical thinking would be like teaching Russian roulette, because critical thinking gets you killed in a dictatorship.
And, well, as to why they don't invest that much in a prison system, see, when you have firing squads and kangaroo courts, you pretty much don't need to invest a lot in a criminal justice system, because your justice system is already criminal.
Ah. Useful idiots of the world, how much do they cost in time and energy?
Just absolutely astonishing.
Castro had concentration camps and labor camps.
Castro had forced conversion therapy for gay men.
Castro was a compatriot and a supporter of the child murdering Che Guevara.
Castro also helped precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis that took all carbon-based lifeforms on Earth to the very brink of nuclear extinction.
And a murderous dictator responsible for slaughtering tens of thousands of political dissidents, Cubans.
And by the way, Colin, no freedom of speech in Cuba.
So all the things that you value about America do not exist in the country that was ruled by the guy whose t-shirt image you proudly wore.
Colin Kaepernick also wore socks depicting cops as pigs.
Hmm. Depicting cops as pigs.
Cops, of course, are the thin blue line in poor communities, black communities, Hispanic communities, white communities.
Cops are the thin blue line that keep the predatory criminals from the decent law-abiding citizens.
So... When you've attacked the cops, you are harming vulnerable poor people in poor communities.
So, there's that.
There's the phrase, right?
Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.
So yeah, suicide bombers.
You know who else that would apply to?
Hitler believed in something and pretty much sacrificed everything, 60 million lives across Europe, the entire survival of Germany as it stood.
So mere commitment is not a positive thing.
It can be extraordinarily dangerous.
And what the hell is Colin Kaepernick sacrificing anyway?
He was paid over $12 million for a season.
He's got a net worth of the tens of millions of dollars.
He's passed his sports prime.
And basically, he's just pussy whipped by his social justice warrior girlfriend into going out and making all this noise.
You know, when people want a lot of attention...
But they go past their prime, whether it's women in terms of physical attractiveness or sportsmen in terms of athletic ability, what happens?
Well, they just start poking the hornet's nest of racial and social divisions, and then they get a lot of attention.
So this, I mean, it's wild.
This is going to hugely harm Nike in a very permanent way.
There are people, of course, a lot of them are in Florida, who've actually fled this regime, who when they see...
When they see someone wearing a t-shirt with a picture, a positive picture of Fidel Castro on it, well, it's like going to Israel and proudly marching around with a picture of Hitler on your shirt.
It's not a very good idea, because Fidel Castro, like Hitler, was stone evil.
So, the big slogan for...
Nike is, just do it!
You might want to rethink that slogan and the whole business model.
There's another one that says, just say no to all of this virtue signaling, this social justice warrior posturing this calling out to the most sinister elements in society and raising up, as a flag, the blood-soaked communist dictatorship leaders.
You know, when you are lockstep in alignment with former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who tweeted out his support for Colin Kaepernick, you might want to rethink your business model just a little bit.
You might want to think about closing up that unholy portal of HR wherein all of these leftist idiots stream in to destroy your business.
Because the question is, why do we have this astonishing idea This oppositional difference between National Socialism, which is on the left, and Communism, which is on the left. National Socialism, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, absolute stone evil.
I've got no problem with that. But there are very few Nazis left in the world anymore.
You get a gathering and it's just like some people milling around waiting for a mall to open on a Wednesday morning.
It's really not a big deal.
Not a lot of Nazis, but apparently the Nazis are everywhere.
Not a lot of KKK members, but the KKK apparently are everywhere.
The ghosts of horrifying movements past have taken up residence in everybody's haunted house of fevered imagination.
You know who there are a lot of, a lot of is communists.
Communists are infesting Western society.
There are tens of thousands of open communists in American universities outright propagandizing your children who are paying for the privilege of becoming unemployable losers who hate everything about freedom.
Now, if there were tens of thousands of Nazis Genuine Nazis.
Open, avowed Nazis.
Wearing little buttons of Hitler and swastikas on the arm if there were tens of thousands of Nazis.
Yeah, I'd say, you know what?
We've got a big problem with Nazism at the moment.
But tens of thousands of communists?
It's diversity. And communism has a far higher death count than Nazism.
So we say, you understand...
National socialism, Nazism, caused 60 million deaths in World War II. That's terrible.
Over the 20th century alone, death count still going on.
Still going on. Look at North Korea.
Started out as a communist country.
Communism in the 20th century alone, 100 million deaths, right?
So you've got 60 million. Nazism, Nazism completely discredited among all sane individuals, and there are just a couple of people out there LARPing as Nazis these days with no political power effect, no propagandistic power, no embedding in the institutions that are supposed to serve the freedoms of the West.
Communism is everywhere, and communism has a much higher death count than Nazism.
Slaughtered more people, destroyed more cultures, more countries.
I mean, in the famine in China, people were eating tree bark.
They were eating, you know, that little skin that comes off garlic.
They were trying to eat that. They were ripping open their pillows and attempting to eat bird feathers.
In the Holodomor, The political starvation of resistance elements in Ukraine under the communist regime, people had to turn to cannibalism to survive, you know, Venezuela down the road.
Venezuela! Now! Communism is worse than Nazism for two reasons.
Higher death count, wider spread across the world, and...
Tens of thousands of Communists, probably hundreds of thousands throughout the West, embedded in higher education, just to name one particular area.
More dangerous. And so wearing a picture of Fidel Castro, currently worse than Hitler, in terms of society's awareness of the danger and the death count as a whole.
So, of course, His criticisms, it's the one-two punch, the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery.
That is the big problem.
Well, I've done presentations on slavery and on the Native genocide.
You can check them out on my channel.
I won't go into the arguments here.
But, you know, slavery 150 years ago, Native genocides, even if we accept that they did take place hundreds of years ago, It was a Labor Day weekend in Chicago.
Six dead! Do you know that in Chicago, more than a thousand people have been shot just since Memorial Day?
See, that's quite a lot.
And why is he talking about potential crimes centuries old when there's actual slaughters going on in the here and now?
Care about slavery?
There are currently open-air slave markets in Libya!
Because of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama destroying Obama Gaddafi, opening up the gateways of migrants to pour into Europe and destroying the country as a whole.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton.
Well, 90 plus, 95% of blacks voted for Barack Obama and the vast majority of blacks supported Hillary Clinton.
Both of them have created conditions that have reintroduced slavery into Libya where you can buy a human being for $400.
Slavery is still being practiced in many countries around the world.
Why do you need to go back through this tunnel of time to find a slavery that has been repudiated and rejected and outlawed when you have over 40 million people around the world who are victims of slavery as of 2016?
A quarter of those are children.
You've more than 10 million slaves in the world right now.
Again, not even counting North Korea.
Do you care about slavery?
I think you don't.
I think you care about sowing division.
I think you care about getting money.
I think you care about fame.
I think you care about attention.
Do you actually care about slavery?
Because it's going on right now.
And what are you doing about it?
I don't think you care about slavery.
I think what you're doing is you're using the bodies of ancient wrongs as human shields for a modern-day socialist political agenda.
It's a horrifying use.
Of human beings, of human suffering, of human tragedies, of human evils.
Don't use it to shore up your political agenda.
I mean, is that what the slaves suffered for?
Is that what all the people suffered for to end slavery?
So you could use that suffering, use their suffering to shill for government control of health care?
That's what he wants. He admires universal health care in communist Cuba.
And here's the funny thing.
There's this contradiction in leftist thinking regarding exploitation and minorities.
Let's just talk about blacks. On the one hand, you see, the leftists say that the evil, exploitive, capitalist class will just pillage everyone for money.
They're so greedy. They will bypass all human norms just to exploit people as much as humanly possible.
All right. Now, they paid, these evil, in the leftist view, these evil capitalist employers, they paid over $12 million just in one year for Colin Kaepernick to throw and catch a ball and run and dodge.
And the question is why?
Why did they pay all of this money to Colin Kaepernick?
Well, because he was a good enough player, a skilled enough player.
To generate more than $12 million in revenue.
You can't pay people more than they generate in revenue.
So when people's wages are low, it's because they're not generating value.
The movie star gets paid $10 million.
The guy in the background, who's easily replaceable, who's just walking down the street to make the city look crowded, gets paid $10 an hour.
Why? Because the movie star is able to get people to come to the movie and pay more than $10 million worth in ticket prices, whereas the guy in the back is easily replaceable.
You need someone, but it could really be anyone.
So when people complain about low wages, what they're really complaining about is that people can't generate enough economic value to justify higher wages.
Just passing minimum wage laws, it's all just to make up for the fact that government schools are so terrible that after 12 years of education, people can barely read and write, they don't understand economics, they don't understand the freedoms of their society, they don't understand how to provide value, they don't understand how to service customers, they don't understand the free market, they don't understand trade, they understand virtually nothing!
Nothing! So they're worth virtually nothing after 12 years!
They're worth virtually nothing!
So they say capitalists will exploit everyone.
But they can't find ways for the poorer in society to pay them more.
They can't find any way to exploit people who've gone through these terrible education systems.
Where's the greed? Because here are the facts, here's the reality.
There absolutely is, and are, and will be, horrifying criminal injustices in the American legal system, and in all Western systems, and in all Eastern systems, and every other damn system in the world, subject to corruption, subject to abuses of power.
As the black community often feels about cops, well, if you're into Trump and you watch what Mueller is doing, what Mueller is doing, to Papadopoulos, to General Flynn, to Manafort.
If you look at all of this persecution, well, you can see, right, that there is a huge rot and corruption in the American justice system.
And that needs to be addressed.
It needs to be addressed for all people, regardless of race, regardless of gender.
But, that having been said, There is a problem in the black community that no amount of kneeling and sock wearing and proselytizing and t-shirt wearing is going to just make go away.
Blacks are at 13% of the U.S. population.
Black males, 6 or 7%.
And young black males, which is just a couple of percentage point Of the U.S. population is responsible for about 50% of homicides in America.
We have a couple of percentage points of the population responsible for about 50% of homicides in America.
And no, it's not just because of the corruption of the legal system that the blacks are found responsible for these murders, the young black men.
You understand.
The crime victimization surveys, which survey people, match this pretty much exactly.
So, you can wear all of the silly socks that you want, you can wear all of the t-shirts of communist dictatorships that you want, but it's not going to erase this basic fact.
And when you have a small proportion of the population committing an extraordinarily high number of murders, and this is just murders, other crimes are high as well, you can't just wish that away.
You have challenges you need to deal with, and you can't just say, well you see, The reason that young black men murder so often is white racism.
Come on. Come on.
You can't seriously say that that is the entire causality, that nothing else is going on.
That is the sole and only explanation.
The fact that around three-quarters of black kids are being raised in broken homes, does that have anything to do with it?
The fact that government schools are absolutely terrible in poor neighborhoods, does that have anything to do with it?
Nothing is going to shift those basic facts.
And there are explanations for some of those facts.
It's a complex question. There are explanations.
I've talked about them on this show many, many times before.
But there are explanations as to why some of this disparity in criminal activity is occurring.
And as long as we stay on this white racism, white racism, police brutality, police corruption, white racism, white racism, we're never going to solve these problems and more people Again, again, murdered.
And more families are going to be destroyed, both in the victim's families and the perpetrator's families, as the perpetrator goes to jail for decades or perhaps for life.
We have had an answer, which has largely been pushed by leftists, which is white racism is responsible for everything.
White privilege, white racism and so on, and police brutality and so on.
It has not solved the problem.
It is something that needs to be talked about, but it's not the only thing that needs to be talked about.
We need new answers, or at least complementary answers, to the one sole, single explanation that has not worked and for which there is very little empirical evidence, very little empirical data.
We need new answers.
I've provided new answers.
Interviewed the subject matter experts, talked about The causality.
Because the only freedom that we have, the only fundamental freedom that we have is freedom from illusion.
Freedom from the illusion of knowledge.
How did we end up controlling nature through science?
By subjugating ourselves to the iron laws of physics and biology.
Nature, to be commanded, as the saying goes, must be obeyed.
How did we end up gaining power over nature?
By submitting ourselves to reason and evidence.
The only freedom we have It's freedom from illusion.
If you think that illness is a curse caused by a ghost, you can't research germ theory, you can't research the effects of washing your hands, you can't develop antibiotics, because you think you have an answer.
You're not free of disease, as long as your causality for disease is illusory, is wrong.
We need to look at new information.
We need to find new solutions, challenging solutions, scary solutions.
