TARGET CONFEDERATE SANCTUARIES
What Trump ‘patriots’ should do instead of attacking athletes who take a knee
President Trump has a point. Americans should show respect for our flag and the people who’ve made sacrifices to safeguard our country. We can’t be politically correct about this. It’s time to get tough. We must stop sending federal tax dollars to state and local governments that are Confederate sanctuaries — that maintain memorials to Confederate scum such as Jefferson Davis.
After all, that’s what Trump says should be done to the NFL until the players show proper respect for our flag, and nothing could be more disrespectful of our flag than monuments to Davis and his ilk.
About 360,000 Union soldiers were killed defending our nation and our flag in the Civil War. Davis was a slave owner, a U.S. senator who betrayed his oath to our sacred Constitution, and the leader of the Confederacy that tried to destroy the United States. He is culpable in the deaths of more Americans than Adolf Hitler. Davis did all this so he, and a morally corrupt elite, could keep other human beings as slaves.
‘OUR INFERIOR’
If this sounds harsh, recall what Davis said: “We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book ... tell us to recognize him — our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude. ... You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.”
Davis to the end of his life was unrepentant, commenting in 1884: “I have not repented. ... If I were to do it over again, I would again do just as I did in 1861.”
Vice President Pence stated he will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our flag, or our national anthem. He should make clear this means he will not visit any city with public memorials to Davis or other Confederate miscreants.
Indiana was an abolitionist state; it entered the Union with a state constitution that banned slavery. In the Civil War, more than 200,000 of its citizens fought — and 25,000 died — in the quest to save our nation and end slavery. Pence, as a former governor of Indiana, owes it to those veterans’ sacred memory, their sacrifices and the sacrifices of their families to chastise any city or state memorializing the Confederacy in a positive light.
Moreover, we should track supporters of Confederate memorials and pressure their employers into firing or suspending them. That’s what Trump proposed for football players who protested police treatment of African Americans.
In the past few months, we’ve had: torchlight marches by white supremacists defending a Confederate memorial while chanting things like “Jews will not replace us”; a Republican congressman spouting conspiracy theories that Jewish donor George Soros was behind these anti-Confederacy protests; a GOP elected official threatening harm to people who proposed removing a Confederate monument; armed white racists holding vigils outside a synagogue; an innocent protester killed by a likely neo-Nazi, and much else.
AWESOME HYPOCRISY
Instead of confronting this plague of racism, the fake patriots of the Trump administration — with laser-like focus — are targeting predominantly black athletes who highlight the issues of racism and discrimination. Regarding Confederate supporters, however, Trump says the white supremacist include many fine people.
And no, I’m not expecting Pence to show any moral backbone by criticizing Confederate sanctuary cities and states.
For citizens of a dictatorship, swearing allegiance is compulsory — it would be suicidal for a North Korean to refuse to swear allegiance to the ruling dictator.
We, however, are a free people. In 1943 (in the middle of World War II), the Supreme Court held in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that Americans could not be compelled by their government to recite the pledge of allegiance. Perhaps the pseudo-patriots of the Republican Party should take some time to read our Constitution.
I understand that public patriotism at major events, such as football games, is desirable. What angers me is the awesome hypocrisy of people who criticize football players for quietly kneeling (rather than standing at attention) for our flag, but aren’t bothered that our public spaces are desecrated by monuments to Davis and other Confederates.
If you truly want to show respect for our flag and our armed forces, let’s start by getting rid of memorials to slave-owning traitors who opposed everything our flag stands for. And if you won’t support that commonsense action, spare us your hypocritical complaints about people taking a knee in non-violent protest.
Steven Strauss, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.