The Rapist, the Guy Who Sat Down, and the Sudden Death of Libertarianism

So all of last week was taken up with a jock who, judging from the trillions of words, cartoons, and ASCII devoted to him, committed a heinous crime.

I refer, of course, not to the Stanford swimmer rapist Brock Turner, who got half his jail time off for being white. That story hardly got a mention.

But Colin Kaepernick, who quietly protested by sitting there during the national anthem was subjected to a firestorm of opprobrium for doing so. Hoo boy! The end of the world! What an ingrate!

Granted, the *technical* description for what he did is “not breaking any laws” and “exercising his rights as a free citizen in a free country to address injustice”.

But from the hysterics in the Right Wing Noise Machine you’d think the guy pepper-sprayed an innocent 84 year old woman or something. You know, like this:

What does Kaepernick have to protest? Wasn’t this black man grateful to the people who granted him his wealth which he did nothing to deserve?

Didn’t this black man realize how much he owes to the society that made him a gazillionaire?

Across America, a vast chorus of FOX and Talk Radio outrage went up shouting at this ungrateful beneficiary of their largesse…

In short, all of a sudden, the entire libertarian narrative of the Self-Made Man who owes society and the state nothing–a narrative that was standard issue from the libertarianized Right until a second ago–vanished without a trace and this uppity black man was being denounced soundly for failing to recognize how much he owes society.  All of a sudden the white libertarian Right was echoing and mimicking “You didn’t build that!” to denounce the black guy in just the way they had denounced Obama when they totally misquoted him during that long-ago Panic du Jour.

So yes. We do owe a debt to the state that maintains our infrastructure, and gives us an education and defends our freedom and maintains the common good in a thousand ways!  Libertarianism *is* rubbish and those who deny their debt to society (including their debt in taxes) are selfish adolescents).

Only, here’s the thing.  In addition to lying about what “you didn’t build that” actually meant, the Right Wing Noise Machine now lies about what Kaepernick is protesting.  For Kaepernick was not butthurt about his pay.  Nor was he somehow insulting our troops like this guy:

On the contrary, he was registering his frustration at a nation where people who look like him so very often and so very disproportionately end up dead at the hands of the state when they have done absolutely nothing to deserve death:

…or jailed in a prison system larger than Stalin’s.

Protesting that injustice is the quintessence of being an American and protesting it peacefully is guaranteed by the First Amendment which says that the state cannot infringe “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

That’s what the troops Mr. Trump repeatedly and casually insults fought and died to protect.  And the troops themselves get this, which is why they sprang to his defense.

So a white rapist gets a slap on the wrist and goes back to being called a “swimmer”, not a rapist, in the press while a black guy donates a million bucks to charity and is vilified as a “traitor” on racist eugenicist Alt Right Breitbart for doing nothing but what the first amendment says he has a perfect right to do.

Moral: