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Country Music Star Uses Old Kaepernick Picture To Destroy Nike

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Colin Kaepernick is the new face of Nike, as you’ve no doubt heard by now. He hasn’t really done anything athletically in years, but he’s divisive and doesn’t like standing for the American flag, so he’s creating plenty of attention that Nike thinks will drive conversation and sales.

And that might work fine — until America begins remembering who Colin Kaepernick really is. Country star John Rich did.

See, Kaepernick is supposed to be the martyr of the flag protest movement. He’s supposed to be the guy who, according to the Nike campaign, sacrificed everything because of his commitment to social justice.

Just look at the advertisement:

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Except that’s not quite why he’s out of the league. Take, for instance, when he was about to get signed with the Baltimore Ravens. His girlfriend, radio personality Nessa, decided to kill any possibility of him getting signed with a tweet that compared the relationship between the franchise’s greatest player and its owner with that of a slave to his slave master, using “Django Unchained” as a metaphor.

Do you plan to boycott Nike?

It was certainly a message that he didn’t want to play for the Ravens — and lo and behold, the deal was off.

There was more. Kaepernick would have been a great backup in Miami, Tampa or Jacksonville. But before a game against the Miami Dolphins in 2016 — a city which has the largest Cuban exile community in America — he said this about a brutal dictator who killed or imprisoned an untold number of his own citizens: “One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we’re fully capable of doing that.”

And thus went any chance of Kaepernick playing anywhere in Florida, with its extensive Cuban communities. It’s one thing to tell your average patriotic fan that you’re signing someone slinging invective against America. It’s another to tell a fan who suffered under a brutal dictator that you’re bringing in someone who thinks that dictator is pretty great.

But what John Rich of Big & Rich remembered was a pair of socks:

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Those were the socks that Kaepernick wore depicting police officers as pigs. Here’s another good look at them:

His explanation, at the time, was that he had plenty of friends who were police officers.

Which, of course, is why he gave $25,000 to Assata’s Daughters, a group which “carries on the tradition of radical liberatory activism encompassed by Assata Shakur.” Assata Shakur was the nom de guerre of Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted of shooting and killing New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during an early morning traffic stop in 1973. She escaped jail and fled to Cuba.

Imagine if he were your uncle. Colin Kaepernick didn’t.

Either way, Rich didn’t even go that far; for him, simply calling police officers pigs was enough.

For an untold number of Nike buyers who aren’t country stars, it might be, as well.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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