Off The Wire – Legendary Chicago Bears’ coach Mike Ditka doesn’t suffer any fools.
He was fired from ESPN for being an outspoken conservative, and he doesn’t care.
In response to NFL players kneeling, coach Ditka had harsh words for them.
Ditka told the spoiled and misinformed athletes to leave the country and try to play professional football elsewhere.
From Breitbart:
There’s one thing you don’t have to worry about when asking Mike Ditka a question, and that’s not getting a straight answer. The Bears legend and Hall of Famer railed against anthem protesters in a recent interview…
Ditka appeared with Jim Gray on Westwood One’s Monday Night Football pregame show. Ditka said that he believes all players should stand for the anthem. Host Jim Gray then asked Ditka if he would benched players for kneeling, if he were still coaching.
What followed was classic Ditka.
Ditka said, “Yes, I don’t care who you are, how much money you make. If you don’t respect our country, then you shouldn’t be in this country playing football. Go to another country and play football. If you had to go somewhere else and try to play the sport, you wouldn’t have a job. . . . If you don’t respect this flag and this country, then you don’t know what this is all about. I would say, adios.”
Next, gray asked about Ditka about athletes like Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens using sports as a platform for protesting.
Ditka said:
“I don’t know what social injustices [there] have been. Muhammad Ali rose to the top. Jesse Owens is one of the classiest individuals that ever lived. Is everything based on color? I don’t see it that way. You have to be color blind in this country. You have to look at a person for what he is and what he stands for and how he produces — not by the color of his skin. That has never had anything to do with anything.
…I think the opportunity is there for everybody — race, religion, creed, color, nationality. If you want to work, if you want to try, if you want to put effort in, you can accomplish anything. And we have watched that throughout our history of our country.
People rise to the top and have become very influential people in our country by doing the right things. I don’t think burning the flag, I don’t think protesting the country, . . . It’s not about the country. . . . They are protesting maybe an individual, and that’s wrong too. You have a ballot box, you have an election. That’s where you protest. You elect the person you want to be in office. And if you don’t get that person in office, I think you respect the other one. Period.”
Ditka’s speech was, obviously, not well-received by the sports media. Pro Football Talk’s Darin Gantt essentially accused Ditka of being an angry, racist old man.
Gantt wrote, “Ditka won a title with the Bears in 1963. Perhaps caught up in the excitement, he missed the passage of the civil rights act the following year, or the problems that preceded it — and the ones which continue to this day.”
Also worthy of the charge of ignorance, is contorting Ditka’s remarks to make it sound as if he’s saying there are no problems with race in the country. Ditka never says that, instead he merely says there is no oppression in the country. Something that Gantt never bothers to correct Ditka on. Gantt alludes to oppression’s that occurred before the civil rights act and those that continue today.
Yet, never at any point does he say what those are.
Also telling that gantt has to use 1964 as his benchmark date of mass oppression. First, the fact that anyone would have to go back over 50 years to find a signature date of mass, organized oppression. Moreover, bringing up pre-1964 America is an argument for pre-1964 Americans, to protest. How in the world is that an argument for nfl players in 2017? How many of today’s multi-millionaire athletes ever saw a “colored” water fountain? How many were made to sit in the back of the bus? Or ever experienced mandated public school segregation?
The answer is zero.
The country is not perfect, Ditka never said it was. However, the real act of “willful ignorance” and “privilege,” comes from gantt, and those who believe like him. It’s the willful ignorance of the fact you live in the greatest country in the world, while having the freedom and privilege of pretending you don’t.
It’s a shame that 50 years of leftist rhetoric has essentially reversed the dream of Martin Luther King.
Ditka says people should be judged by the content of their character, yet the left finds him problematic.
Ditka also says people should vote, something Colin Kaepernick couldn’t be bothered to do. The main problem with protesters like Kaepernick is they don’t offer any remedies or policy prescriptions.
Ditka sees the charade for what it really is: Anti-Americanism.
And he’s had enough.
SF Source Off The Wire Oct 2017
Add Ditka to the list of Tyrants. This is a free country, allegedly. And in an alleged free country, one is not mandated to worship false idols.
Now, if the NFL requires it, that’s another story, as its contractual between employee/employer. But to tell people to leave the country for simply exercising their God given, Constitutionally protected right to protest, is the stuff of dictatorships.
I can only assume from your comment that IF you currently work or have worked for a major corporation that you were allowed to use the corporate platform to spew your personal social and political views. In case you haven’t noticed that is what these BLM “social justice” warriors are doing – they are using a corporate platform – their work environment – to attack the national flag of the country that has made them millionaires.
As far as I know NO ONE has stopped these players from presenting their personal views on their personal time. However, when Black Lives Matter spokesman Colin Kaepernick decided to disrespect the United States of America National Anthem and Flag on COMPANY TIME he was never stopped and this disgraceful, disgusting display of pampered millionaires would likely have mushroomed into a real show of ugliness complicated by a racially divisive message had Trump not nipped this Soros-funded Black Lives Matter Purple Revolution meme before it ate its host to death. The host? Why, the American FAN whose ticket purchases and TV viewing has created this trillion dollar business.
I worked for an international corporation, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but knew there were lines that were not to be crossed, the biggest being a corporate environment where company time was spent on company business.
As for Americans “constitutionally protected right to protest” – that’s a given, just like FREE SPEECH. However, go into a crowded cinema or restaurant and cry “FIRE” when there is none and you will discover rather quickly that FREE SPEECH does not apply.