Gold Star Widow Smokes Nike, Kaepernick: Challenges Them to Take Her on Personally
Colin Kaepernick’s advertisement for Nike has engendered quite a bit of talk about what “believing in something” means.
One Gold Star widow thinks the answer may lie in a far different place than Nike does.
In an appearance on “Fox & Friends” this weekend, Brittany Jacobs, who lost her husband in a training accident in 2011, said she wanted Nike executives and Kaepernick to meet her at Arlington National Cemetery where her husband is buried, according to The Daily Caller.
“They can personally look in the eyes of my son and see what a dear sacrifice was made,” Jacobs said. “And they can look around and see thousands and thousands of people who also sacrificed everything for something that they believed in.”
Jacobs said that Nike’s decision to choose Kaepernick was one that was deeply insulting to those who really do know sacrifice.
“They could have chosen anyone and they chose this person who disrespected the flag,” Jacobs said. “If they could look at my son for a moment, look at his eyes, they would see a dear sacrifice.
“There are so many great men and women in this country who have sacrificed everything and Colin Kaepernick, he’s not one of them.”
Jacobs told host Pete Hegseth that the decision was personally traumatizing for her.
“To me it’s upsetting. This is a man who knelt before the flag that my husband, and that me and my son, we love, it’s so dear to us,” Jacobs said.
“My husband did sacrifice absolutely everything for the flag, for the country and for all that it stood for. To see someone who knelt before it be able to say that he sacrificed everything, it’s hard.
“It’s sad. It’s not right,” she said.
Jacobs first came to prominence in 2017 when she and her son were photographed by The Associated Press with President Donald Trump at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day.
But rest assured, there are plenty of people who’ve never been in the public eye who feel this way. This is why the Nike campaign has sparked such intense feelings. While it might play well in Nike’s liberal home state of Oregon, the company is alienating roughly half of its potential market.
Or maybe it won’t even play well in a place like Oregon: A new survey by Morning Consult found that Nike’s favorability rating had declined from +69 favorable to +35 favorable in the wake of the Kaepernick advertisement.
In addition, the poll found that no demographic that liberals might think would be inclined to look favorably on the Nike advertisement — African-Americans, younger people and Nike buyers — felt more positively about the brand after the advertisement was unveiled.
The percentage of Americans who said they were likely to buy Nike products declined from 49 percent to 39 percent.
In other words, there area lot of people out there who agree with Brittany Jacobs — and who likely wouldn’t mind seeing Nike executives and Colin Kaepernick meet her at Arlington.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
