Ken Burns on the Tet Offensive: the good, the bad, and the propaganda

OCTOBER 3, 2017 BY BOOKWORM 12 COMMENTS

Ken Burns’ manages to be mostly honest in a stunning look at the Tet Offensive, but what he leaves out is as important as what he includes.

Here in the Bookworm home, we’re still working our way through Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary. Last night, we got to the part about the Tet Offensive. Having recently been in both Hue and Saigon, the footage of the running battles really resonated with me.

I don’t know why it is, but I find that wars are always more real to me when I see the actual ground on which they took place. When I travel, I visit battlefields, and that’s despite the fact that I’m stunningly unversed in battlefield tactics. Over the years, I’ve visited Carthage, Waterloo, Ypres, the Somme, the Ardennes, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Yorktown, and others I can’t remember now. After seeing the footage of the Tet Offensive, and combining it with my personal visual reference points, I have a better sense of the battle that raged then.

Overall, Burns did an extremely good job of explaining the larger outlines of the lead-up to the Tet Offensive and the offensive itself. He explained the North Vietnamese thinking about a major assault that would cause South Vietnamese troops to defect and the populace to side with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars.

Of the battles themselves, Burns uses footage that helps explain why almost 80 journalists lost their lives in Vietnam. These journalists were right there with the US troops filming away. I got breathless watching because the sense of immediacy was overwhelming. This was Call of Duty, except with real Americans shooting real guns at real enemies, with the enemies shooting back.

Burns makes it plain that the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the North Vietnamese. Not a single South Vietnamese soldier defected; civilians just hid from the fury, fearing the communists even more than their own government; the North Vietnamese lost almost as many fighters in the Tet Offensive as America did over the course of the entire Vietnam war; and the American military proved itself in battle to superb in terms of courage, strategy, and tactics.

Regarding those casualties, this data from the Wikipedia article on all three phases of the Tet Offensive tells you all you need to know about winners and losers:

Burns also covers the fact that, in Hue, the retreating Viet Cong fighters massacred some 2,500 civilians. It’s one of the few glimpses Burns allows into the murderous fury that lies behind all totalitarian movements — and communism is nothing if not totalitarian. When we were in Hue, our guide made an oblique reference to it, saying that the “killing was terrible, when they settled old scores.”

Burns also highlights LBJ’s waffling, which seems to have been driven by politics, rather than by any understanding of military necessity. His political needs even overrode his old-fashioned Democrat Party understanding that communism was a bad thing.

It became very apparent listening to LBJ’s taped conversations that he, rather like Barack Obama, was never a real “Commander-in-Chief.” He was always a “Party Politician in Chief” — and with much the same result for both those presidents, in that Americans died for no purpose and America abandoned her allies. It was this waffling that saw LBJ, in the wake of the significant American victory during the Tet Offensive, beat a retreat, rather than sound an attack. Had he chosen the opposite tack, the war might have ended with a definitive Americanvictory in 1968.

Part of LBJ’s problem was a single photograph, that famous pictureshowing Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the Chief of Vietnam’s National Police, summarily executing a Viet Cong prisoner on the street:

That photograph appeared on the front page of The New York Times, as well as myriad other American papers and magazines. The American people didn’t like what they saw. It told them that they were siding with the armed bully against the small, battered, unarmed civilian.

Echoing the increasingly Left-leaning 1960s media, Burns doesn’t bother to explain the back story behind that photograph. Terry Garlock, in an article warning viewers to be skeptical about Burns’version of history, explains what really happened there. He describes a talk he gives about the way in which images got manipulated to benefit the antiwar movement:

One of those photos is the summary execution of a Viet Cong soldier in Saigon, capital city of South Vietnam, during the battles of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Our dishonorable enemy negotiated a cease-fire for that holiday, then on that holiday attacked in about 100 places all over the country. Here’s what I tell students about the execution in the photo.

“Before you decide what to think, here’s what the news media never told us. This enemy soldier had just been caught after he murdered a Saigon police officer, the officer’s wife, and the officer’s six children. The man pulling the trigger was Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s Chief of National Police. His actions were supported by South Vietnamese law, and by the Geneva Convention since the captured killer was an un-uniformed illegal combatant. Now, you might still be disgusted by the summaryexecution, but wouldn’t you want all the facts before you decide what to think?”

I urge you to read Garlock’s article, as well as a follow-up he wrote. Other things worth reading are a WaPo article detailing five myths about the Vietnam War, and a Mercury News article interviewing both American and South Vietnamese troops about the problems with the documentary. (A tip of my hat to all who provided me with these links.) [UPDATE: My friend Earl directed me to a post about all the other myths in our post-Vietnam world, the ones that the WaPo did not address.]

Thus, Burns promulgates the same propaganda that the Left used to drive the anti-war movement in 1968: a photograph without its necessary back story.

As I see it, Burns is committing a form of fraud, one of omission, rather than commission. In plain English, a fraud of commission results, not from an affirmative lie, but from an affirmative information vacuum. The absence of necessary facts is a lie in and of itself.

There’s one other striking omission from the documentary when it comes to LBJ’s conduct of the war: The word “Democrat” is never mentioned in connection with him. I think we hear the word “Democrat” mentioned once in connection with Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, but I’m not sure. All I know is that I was struck when Peter Coyote sonorously declared that “members of the President’s own party” were starting to get cold feet about continuing to prosecute the war. And what party would that be, I asked myself. No answer was forthcoming.

Burns also included in the Tet Offensive episode the first few chapters in the personal narrative of Hal Kushner, a doctor who found himself a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. It’s a riveting story, from the helicopter crash that saw him captured, to the wounds he suffered and the torturous “medical care” he received, to the 30 night hikes he was forced to undertake, wounded and barefoot, through the jungle to a place of captivity. We’re just in the beginning of Kushner’s ordeal, but it’s already traumatic listen to his sufferings immediately after his captivity.

Overall, I think Burns did a good job covering the Tet Offensive itself — and he had a lot of help with this because of the superb contemporaneous footage. This episode, however, suffered from the same flaws as the other episodes: there aren’t actual misrepresentations, there are just absences.

There are no Americans or South Vietnamese troops interviewed who still think it was a good war, although badly mismanaged. There’s no back story for the pivotal photo that supercharged the anti-war movement in America. And of course, there’s the exquisite care taken not to tar the Democrat Party too closely with the Vietnam War brush. In other words, despite all the information the show provides, it’s just another piece of Democrat Party anti-war propaganda.

Wasserman Schultz IT Aide Allegedly Bragged He Paid Pakistani Police For Protection.

THIS IS THE GUY DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ AND OTHER HOUSE DEMS HAD HANDLING THEIR SECRETS:

Wasserman Schultz IT Aide Allegedly Bragged He Paid Pakistani Police For Protection.

A now-indicted IT aide to various House Democrats was sending money and gifts to government officials in Pakistan and received protection from the Pakistani police, multiple relatives claim.
A Democratic aide also said Imran Awan personally bragged to him that he could have people tortured in Pakistan. Awan’s lawyer acknowledged that he was sending money to a member of the Faisalabad police department, but said there was a good explanation.
The relatives said Awan and his brothers were also sending IT equipment, such as iPhones, to the country during the same period in which fraudulent purchase orders for that equipment were allegedly placed in the House, and in which congressional equipment apparently went missing. . . .
A source close to the investigation, who was not unauthorized to comment publicly, said the FBI generated suspicious activity reports on the suspects that were hundreds of pages long, based on their large cash deposits and international transfers.
A fellow Democratic House IT aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because of concern for his career, recounted a conversation between Awan and three colleagues in a House cafeteria several years ago in which Awan seemed to relish bragging about his ability to have people harassed in Pakistan.
“He wanted to build a CRM [customer relationship management software] but he wanted to do it in Pakistan,” the aide told TheDCNF. “But the government doesn’t allow that. They have to be American, but Imran said, ‘Well, we can say that they’re American, but really they’ll be in Pakistan. I have these guys that work for the Faisalabad police department, and all we have to do is pay them $100 a month and they take them over to the police station, strip their clothes off, hang them upside down and beat them with a shoe. And that person will work hard and be loyal from then on.’ And we were all like, ‘what the fuck.’ Two other people were there. We said, ‘he’s a fucking monster.’”

Weird that Schultz and other Dem House members have been so loyal to him. It’s almost as if they’re being blackmailed.

49Posted at 8:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

CLEANING UP THE EPA MESS:

CLEANING UP THE EPA MESS:

Reuters has seen the EPA’s proposal to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that was a major part of the last administration’s war on coal. That unlawful power grab would have raised the price of energy for most people and shuttered power plants to achieve a reduction in global warming of 0.02 degrees C by 2100. However, as EPA is actually following the law on regulations, which takes time, the various court cases could do the job before the administrative repeal winds its way through the process.

1Posted at 10:45 am by Iain Murray   

W

JIM BUCHANAN, IN MEMORIAM:

JIM BUCHANAN, IN MEMORIAM:

The Nobel Laureate economist and father of “public choice” economics, Jim Buchanan, would have been 98 today. Recently he’s been the target of a concentrated posthumous character assassination by Duke’s Nancy Maclean, who blames him for creating modern conservative ideology (and the all the ills that come with it) in her book Democracy in Chains. George Mason University historian Phil Magness has been relentlessly fact checking her sources at his blog, and the results aren’t pretty. Duke economist Mike Munger also did a detailed and devastating review. The left, of course, has characterized these careful critiques a “stealth attack on a liberal scholar,” because apparently there can be no other kind.

Posted at 10:36 am by Iain Murray   

For those of you who just want to learn a little about one of the great economists, here’s Ryan Young’s obituary from 2013.

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How Badly Is Neil Gorsuch Annoying the Other Supreme Court Justices?

I’M GONNA GO WITH “NOT BADLY ENOUGH:”

 How Badly Is Neil Gorsuch Annoying the Other Supreme Court Justices?

As Linda Greenhouse observed in the Times at the end of Gorsuch’s first term, he managed to violate the Court’s traditions as soon as he arrived. He dominated oral arguments, when new Justices are expected to hang back. He instructed his senior colleagues, who collectively have a total of a hundred and forty years’ experience on the Court, about how to do their jobs. Dissenting from a decision that involved the interpretation of federal laws, he wrote, “If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation.” Perhaps he thought that the other Justices were unfamiliar with this thing called “legislation.”

Maybe that’s because he’s read their work. But if they’re having trouble keeping up with him, they can always retire. . . .
Speaking of which, there’s no mention of another outspoken Supreme Court Justice whose public statements have been far less temperate than Gorsuch’s. I suspect that’s because she’s the source of the piece.

139Posted at 12:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

How Badly Is Neil Gorsuch Annoying the Other Supreme Court Justices?

By Jeffrey Toobin

September 29, 2017

There is a strong internal culture based on the idea that no Justice should embarrass the Court; Gorsuch might earn some advice from the Chief Justice to mind the unwritten rules.

Photograph by Fred Schilling / Supreme Court via AP

In 2009 and 2010, Virginia Thomas became an outspoken opponent of the new President, Barack Obama. Ginni Thomas, as she is known, travelled the country as a leader of the growing Tea Party movement, which was particularly focussed on overturning the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Around the same time, legal challenges to the law were working their way to the Supreme Court, where Ginni’s husband, Clarence Thomas, serves. Media attention began to focus on the propriety of such a close association between a Justice and a public adversary of a law whose fate was before the Court. Then, shortly before the A.C.A. case came before the Justices, in 2012, something happened. Ginni Thomas stopped her public advocacy; indeed, she has virtually disappeared from public view in the past few years.

Why? Neither Thomas has ever addressed the issue publicly, but it’s possible to offer some informed speculation. The Justices, and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, are assiduous defenders of the Court’s reputation. As savvy denizens of Washington, D.C., they understand the political dimension of their work, but they are careful to avoid any taint of outside political activity that might raise questions about their ethics. This view is shared across the ideological spectrum at the Court, as the Justices believe, with some reason, that an attack on one of them could quickly expand into an attack on all. So did the Chief Justice suggest to Justice Thomas, in a gentle and deferential way, that perhaps his wife’s activities were reflecting poorly on the Court? And did Clarence and Ginni Thomas subsequently decide that she might dial back her outspoken role? It seems more than possible.

The retreat of Ginni Thomas brings to mind the emergence of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Earlier this week, Gorsuch gave a speech before the Fund for American Studies, a conservative educational and advocacy group. The Justices do occasionally speak before groups with high political profiles. Most of the Justices on the conservative wing have appeared in front of the Federalist Society, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen G. Breyer have addressed the American Constitution Society, the Federalists’ liberal counterpart. What made Gorsuch’s appearance especially notable was that it took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which is the focus of several pending cases that may well wind up before the Supreme Court. These lawsuits allege that the Trump family’s ownership of the hotel, which is patronized by foreigners with interests before the executive branch, violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Gorsuch’s presence at the hotel could look like an endorsement of the propriety of its ownership arrangements.

Gorsuch’s Trump Hotel speech followed one he gave at the University of Louisville, where he was introduced by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, who was, more than anyone, responsible for blocking Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat that Gorsuch now occupies. Gorsuch rewarded McConnell not only with an appearance in the senator’s home town but with a speech that underlined the Justice’s own conservative approach to the law.

There is nothing unlawful about Gorsuch’s speeches, though it’s hard to say just what the ethical rules are for Supreme Court Justices. They are exempt from the code that governs the conduct of other federal judges, so the Court has traditionally relied on informal self-policing. There is a strong internal culture based on the idea that no Justice should embarrass the Court; Gorsuch’s tiptoeing up to the line of advocacy for and gratitude to conservatives might earn some advice from the Chief Justice to mind the unwritten rules.

Gorsuch’s speeches might appear less distasteful to his colleagues if he had made an otherwise more graceful début on the Court. As Linda Greenhouse observed in the Times at the end of Gorsuch’s first term, he managed to violate the Court’s traditions as soon as he arrived. He dominated oral arguments, when new Justices are expected to hang back. He instructed his senior colleagues, who collectively have a total of a hundred and forty years’ experience on the Court, about how to do their jobs. Dissenting from a decision that involved the interpretation of federal laws, he wrote, “If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation.” Perhaps he thought that the other Justices were unfamiliar with this thing called “legislation.” Gorsuch also expressed ill-disguised contempt for Anthony Kennedy’s landmark opinion legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Earlier this year, the Court’s majority overturned an Arkansas ruling that the state could refuse to put the name of a birth mother’s same-sex spouse on their child’s birth certificate. Dissenting, Gorsuch wrote, “Nothing in Obergefell spoke (let alone clearly) to the question.” That “let alone clearly” reflected a conservative consensus that Kennedy’s opinion was a confusing mess.

Perhaps Gorsuch will, as the years pass, prove to be a more clubbable colleague; or perhaps he’ll decide, at least socially, to go his own way. But what’s already clear is his ideology as a Justice. In his first fifteen cases on the Court, as the number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight discovered, he joined Thomas, the most right-wing Justice, every time—and he even joined all of Thomas’s concurring opinions. Gorsuch’s outside activities may draw a private word from the Chief Justice, but Roberts would never presume (or want) to change Gorsuch’s votes. And the new Justice is casting those just as his sponsors had hoped and his opponents had feared.

• Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002. He is the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.”
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NFL Protest, irrelavant??? VDH

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It has become a sort of reflex to object to the National Football League’s players’ bended knee/sitting through the National Anthem—while also conceding that their complaints have merit.

But do they?

To answer that question, one would have to know precisely what the protests are about. But so far the various reasons advanced are both confused and without much merit. That is why the players will eventually stand for the anthem before their tragic incoherence loses them both their fans and their jobs with it.

Inordinate Police Brutality Against the African-American Community?While there certainly have been a large number of well-publicized shootings of African-American suspects, statistics do not bear out, as alleged, a supposed wave of police violence against black unarmed suspects. Is the anger then directed at regrettable though isolated iconic incidents but not at prevailing trends?

White police officers are more than 18 times more likely to be shot by African-Americans than white police officers are to shoot unarmed black suspects. Does anyone care?

In absolute numbers, more white suspects were shot yearly by police than were black suspects. Given respective crime rates and the frequency of relative encounters with police, black suspects were not statistically more likely to be victims of police violence than were whites.

Given the topics of race, crime, and violence, the frequency of black-on-white crime versus white-on-black crime—depending on the particular category—while comparatively rare, is still widely disproportionate, by a factor of 7 to 10.

Roughly 40-50 percent of all reported U.S. arrests for various violent crime involve teen or adult African-American males, who make up about 4-5 percent of the population. Blacks are well over 20 times more likely to be shot and killed by other blacks than by police officers.

The Left often does not pay much attention to such facts—though it grows angry when others do. Or to the extent progressives acknowledge these asymmetries, they contextualize the alarming frequency of inordinate black male crime, and the police response to it, by citing the legacy of slavery and claiming contemporary racism as well as police and judicial bias.

But such rationalization is largely academic.

The general public—and by extension the NFL fan base of all racial backgrounds—feels these imbalances to be true and, in their own lives—fairly or not—make adjustments about where they live, put their children in school, or travel. The antennae of wealthy, virtue-signaling white liberals are the most sensitive to crime disparities; the latter are also the most likely to have the desire and wherewithal to navigate around them. The makeup of elite neighborhoods and prep schools of Washington, D.C., is a testament to that unspoken fact.

It is certainly true that black males, regrettably, may be watched or stopped by police with greater frequency than Latino, Asian, or white males tend to be; but arguably not in a disproportionate fashion when seen in light of the data of those arrested and convicted of crimes.

Such proclivities, while again regrettable, are due less to racism than to statistically based preemptive policing—or statistically-based (and therefore rational) police fears.

Colin Kaepernick’s protests allegedly focusing on inordinate racially biased police brutality had no statistical basis in fact. To the extent his argument was logically presented, the irate NFL fan base rejected it.

Racial Disparity Attributable to Institutionalized Prejudice?Were the players then frustrated about general racial disparities in landscapes beyond their own privileged positions? That larger question of why African-Americans have not yet statically achieved the same level of education, income, and family stability as the majority is more complex.

The exegeses usually break down politically. The Left feels that inequality of result is almost entirely due to racism and the inability of the government to provide financial reparations for past exploitation and legal protections to address ongoing bias.

The Right believes that what explains greater black disparity, in a variety of areas vis-à-vis the Asian-American, Latino-American, or white communities, are differing cultural attitudes toward family unity, education, and criminal behavior. The government, to the extent it can alter cultural assumptions, has largely acerbated the crisis through entitlements that reward conduct not conducive to achieving parity with other groups.

There are other disparate statistics that suggest race is not necessarily the bellwether criterion for ensuring a long, happy, and productive life. The white suicide rate is about three times higher than the African-American suicide rate, for example.

Asian-Americans on average have a higher income than do whites, despite a history of experiencing racism in the United States, from the Chinese exclusionary immigration laws to the Japanese internment.

The point is not to dismiss the unique historical ordeal of African-Americans, but rather to suggest that a majority of Americans does not any longer believe race is destiny, much less that being “white” governs one’s fate, especially at a time when intermarriage and integration are at an all-time high, and when the white working classes are increasingly disengaged from and at odds with the bicoastal white elite class. In other words, working-class white people often have much more in common with working-class blacks than they do with elite whites.

Furor at President Trump’s Intemperate “SOB” Comment?Were the players instead reacting to Donald Trump’s outburst?

Certainly, it is understandable to be angry when the president of the United States directed his animus (supercharged with the unnecessarily profane “son of a bitch”) at a particular athlete (singular): “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’”

It is true that the refusal to stand for the anthem peaked after the president’s comment. But here again, there are a number of reasons why the protests against an intemperate president still seem incoherent.

Obviously, the president of the United States will support the country’s tradition of respecting the flag. If the commander-in-chief is indifferent to iconic patriotic ceremonies, then who would not be?

Second, Trump’s SOB remark was directed nominally at an individual (“somebody”), and perhaps by inference Colin Kaepernick rather than, as reported, in the plural at a collective. His profanity was also regrettable, but past presidential vulgarity did not spark commensurate NFL protests.

Trump’s expletive perhaps was not as crude as Barack Obama’s writing off the millions of the Tea Party movement as “tea-baggers,” which refers to a graphic homosexual act. (“That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans,” he said.)

Obama’s delivery may have often sounded mellifluous, but his message was sometimes crass and cruel and did not earn much rebuke—such as his past joke about the Special Olympics, or his us-versus-them advice to Latinos (“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends’”), or his racial stereotyping of his own grandmother (“But she is a typical white person . . . ”), or his disdain for entire groups of people (“they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”)

For all his profanity, Trump would be facing impeachment charges had he written off the players, Obama-style, as “typical black people,” “tea-baggers,” or bitter clingers who express their racism to vent their own failures.

“White Privilege”?Were the multimillionaire players angry about “white privilege”?

The term was not in wide circulation until the Obama era, when it caught fire on campuses and with pundits on left-wing cable news outlets to denote the impossibility of obtaining parity, given the intrinsic “stacked deck” of white America. But the entire white privilege trope has proved incoherent for a variety of obvious reasons.

First, we are a half-century out from the Civil Rights era, and an entire generation of middle-class Americans has grown up in the era of affirmative action, not Jim Crow. Most young people on campuses and applying for state and federal jobs naturally assume it is an advantage to have a minority cachet, and a clear disadvantage to be a white male. If that perception was not true, we would not see those of mixed heritages using accent marks or compound names to accentuate, for example, their Latino ethnicity, in fear that it was not immediately apparent or not sufficiently emphasized to resonate ethnic bona fides (for example, California State Senate leader Kevin de León, born Kevin Alexander Leon), etc.

Second, in a multiracial society in which perhaps a quarter of the population is of mixed ancestry, what exactly is “white”?—half-Egyptian/half-Irish? One-quarter-Japanese/one quarter-German/half-Latino? If we cannot accurately define “white” other than through DNA badges or antebellum Southern racist laws, how then can we define white privilege?

In a complex multiracial America, class increasingly trumps race. Are we to think multimillionaire African-American football players or black CNN anchors have less “privilege” than white unemployed coal miners in West Virginia or tree trimmers in southern Michigan or Tulare County, California?

Privilege always exists, of course, and in many cases, it is “white elite privilege”—which only makes more problematic the sloppy generic notion of “white privilege.” Are we to trust that the Silicon Valley scion who has his dad call up Stanford to ease his admission, and who once on campus rehearses the politically correct mantras of the day, has anything in common with the son of a white baker from Elko, Nevada?

Too often, wealthy white people in the press, politics, and academia mouth their furor over “white privilege” to virtue signal, to seek exemption from their own clear class privilege, and to express a coded disdain for the white working class, which lacks the romanticism of the masses and chic culture of the elite.

Pro-football players cannot define white privilege, and to the extent they can it is because of familiarity with other highly paid elites that self-identify as white, not with the millions of the white working and unemployed classes who ironically enjoy watching the NFL and find its racial make-up incidental to their essential love of the sport and admiration for those who play it.

The First Amendment?Are the players kneeling to remind us of the sanctity of the First Amendment?

Hardly. The right of unfettered free speech has always been adjudicated in the courts by the allowance of limits on expression in the workplace.

Airline pilots cannot wear “Make America Great Again” hats if the airlines have contractual rules against political expression while at work. Police officers cannot demand to wear t-shirts and jeans in lieu of uniforms. UPS drivers can certainly be forbidden from wearing FedEx wristbands while driving or honking at friends they pass on the road.

The NFL players are free not to stand for the National Anthem, not because such a snub is protected by the First Amendment and they wish to emphasize that fact, but because for political reasons the NFL in fear has decided not to enforce a rule in its game operations manual—on the assumption that it is in the league’s short-term financial interest to ignore its own protocols.

When it becomes clear in the long-term that kneeling during the anthem alienates fans and loses the NFL hundreds of millions of dollars, then the owners mysteriously will make the necessary adjustments.

The league’s likely second-thoughts on standing during the National Anthem will have as little to do with the First Amendment as did its original response to respect the players’ gesture.

The idea of multimillionaire professional athletes—as part of the 0.01 percent of the nation’s income earners, in a meritocratic but quite un-diverse league made up of 75 percent black players—refusing to stand for the National Anthem out of anger at their country, racial unfairness, the president, or history is nonsensical.

Are the players betting that NFL fans do not care about a time-honored national practice or agree that they and their country are racist, or that they now think the NFL should be a showcase for political theater, or that about 200 protesting players are so uniquely talented in a nation of 320 million people that they are indispensable and could not be replaced, or that fans have nothing to do on weekends but to watch a politicized NFL?

For NFL athletes not to stand for the National Anthem is about as logical as it would be for ice hockey players or NASCAR drivers to take a knee in a potpourri protest over their own anger at American shortcomings, or racial disparities in the murdering of police officers, or the methamphetamine epidemic that strikes whites inordinately, or inordinate white suicide rates or disproportionate black-on-white crime rates—and then expect any insulted fan to continue to watch such incoherence.