OPINION:
The Washington Redskins’ impending change to a politically correct name is the latest example of what happens when the right fails to unite against the left’s mobs.
It’s a predictable outcome when citizen groups, lawmakers and elected leaders of towns and states decide to flee instead of fight those mobs.
It’s what results when groups and elected officials who say they stand for individualism, personal freedom and equality of opportunity (not outcome) become onlookers in the left’s one-sided war to destroy America’s soul.
Shame, too, on corporations and businesses that resent, but don’t bother coalescing to push back against, the left’s unchallenged dominance of virtually every aspect of American life.
This is how democracy brings dictatorship on itself. Using “mostly peaceful” pawns, totalitarians are picking the lock and splintering freedom’s door.
It’s not hard for thoughtful people on the right to figure out what they need to do.
Fight back now.
Or lose.
No longer willing to keep pushing back against the left’s name-change campaign of intimidation, Redskins owner Dan Snyder is about to tell us the new name.
Let’s hope it’s “The Washington Warriors.” It at least conveys a fighting spirit — what the earliest inhabitants of North America demonstrated in trying to preserve their homeland from takeover by Europeans.
The National Football League’s D.C. franchise owner Snyder stubbornly — and yes, courageously — resisted the name-change importunities and threats of the Left for years.
Until, that is, the Wuhan-virus combined with Black Lives Matter, Antifa and mostly peaceful looters, arsonists and desecrators of historic and religious statues combined to put America in a hammerlock.
And FedEx (net worth $40.6 billion), Nike (net worth $23.3 billion) and PepsiCo (net worth $181.8 billion) sided with the left and kicked Snyder in the wallet.
FedEx is a more-or-less American multinational delivery service headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. Its CEO Fred Smith owns a minority stake in the Redskins, who up till now played — albeit not well — in a Maryland stadium that bears the name “FedEx.”
The Redskins and their fans wear Nike everything, from helmet to toe. Nike is a more-or-less American multinational corporation headquartered in the Portland metropolitan area.
PepsiCo supplies Redskins fans and the rest of the world with just about everything else. PepsiCo is a more-or-less American multinational food, snack and beverage corporation headquartered in Harrison, New York.
We’re told that FedEx, Nike and PepsiCo were merely responding to investors’ demands that the team change its name, which is purportedly offensive to the companies’ stockholders.
It’s of some relevance to note that “Redskins” is not offensive to American Indians, according to polling. But where were the stockholders on the freedom-loving right and center, who of course exist but who sat on their butts instead of mounting a campaign to keep the name?
Why aren’t freedom-loving conservatives and centrists not dominating the boards of corporate giants?
Where was the unity among political organizations from the sane center and liberty-loving right?
Where was the unity of Republican lawmakers?
Why weren’t they all urging investors and everyone else to resist the left’s name-change intimidation and bullying?
Why weren’t the center and right leading a resistance to the left’s campaign to defund the police? Or to destroy statues of people, good and bad, who are part of our history as a nation?
Think the people bullying Snyder, FedEx, Nike and PepsiCo may have a broader agenda in mind, rather the silliness of forcing a team name change?
Well, if you’re thinking that, you may be on to something.
Remember that embarrassing 2016 Washington Post poll (embarrassing to the Post)?
The poll found 90% of American Indians didn’t find the word “Redskins” offensive when applied to them. Go ahead, read that sentence again.
Most American Indian respondents in fact said they were proud of the team’s using the word as its name. No typos in the previous sentence either.
Do you remember the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey from 2004?
It also reported that 90% of the original Americans whom we used to call Indians said they had no problem with “Redskins.” Only 9% said they found the name “offensive.”
This Annenberg survey was one serious poll. Its margin of sampling error was a minuscule two percentage points.
Here’s how NBC Sports reported a new and improved Washington Post Native Americans-Redskins poll in 2019: “A new survey has found that Native Americans are more likely to be proud than offended by the name of the Washington Redskins.
“The survey, as reported by the Washington Post, asked 500 people who identify as Native American to pick from a list of words which one best described their feelings about the Redskins name. The word most picked was ’proud.’”
NBC Sports quipped that Snyder celebrated that 2016 poll and “will no doubt celebrate this one, as evidence continues to mount that the majority of Native Americans are not pressuring him to change his team’s name.”
That’s right, the majority of American Indians are proud of having an NFL team named “Redskins.”
Or at least were able to be proud until people who fancy themselves better than the natives who need to be protected from their own ignorance.
The worst kind of patronizing.
Who makes up the shady minority who decided the 90% of American Indians who don’t find “Redskins” offensive are wrong?
Who are the people who decided that 90% of American Indians are too stupid for their own good because if they were as smart as their betters, they would find “Redskins’ offensive?
And who are the people who think they’re superior to American Indians and are making America over in their image?
Antifa? BLM activists? Marxist professors? Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s operatives on U.S. campuses, in research labs and on shop-room floors? Or the party’s stranglehold — hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and game contracts — over America’s National Basketball Association?
NBA team owners, coaches and players can’t express support for Hong Kong or criticize China’s concentration camps and its complete suppression of freedom of speech and assembly.
The NBA initially told its fans it will continue to honor customer requests to print NBA shirts bearing the words “Defund the Police” and “Black Lives Matter” but not “Free Hong Kong”?
Or until Free Hong Kong fans created such an uproar that the NBA, despite its subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, appeared to relent.
It was a spontaneously generated counterpunch to the left, but it was not the overwhelmingly powerful, thought-out, planned unification of conservative organizations and elected officials at every level of government needed to drive off the left’s massive array of intrusions.
Is what’s carving the core out of America’s exceptionalism two generations of high-school and college students?
Is it two generations of students in whom America-hating teachers and professors instilled a colossal falsehood?
Is it the lie that the land to which the rest of the world eagerly flocks, legally and illegally, is nonetheless bad?
Is it the lie that totalitarian arrogance that brooks no dissent is good?
Every citizen organization that fails to unite and fight back bears the responsibility for the ugly transformation of America that is going on before our eyes..
Ralph Z. Hallow, chief political writer at The Washington Times, has covered Washington since 1982.
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