The NFL is not a "safe space"

Now it is President Trump who is shouting, “Shut it down.” He doesn’t think African-American NFL players should be “allowed” to kneel during the national anthem as a political protest, and is demanding the league fire them. His stance requires a certain lack of self-awareness, given that Trump began his political career by saying deliberately outrageous and offensive things — insisting, for example, that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain was no war hero, because he was taken captive (loser!), and that the then-sitting president was a foreign-born Muslim impostor with no legal right to the office. In certain countries whose authoritarian leaders Trump admires, such impertinence can get you hauled off to a gulag, or your head chopped off by a hooded executioner with a scimitar. Look: Free speech can be very upsetting. But honoring everyone’s right to speak is the only hope we have of seeing anything from another point of view. Let’s deal with it, and stop acting like a nation of snowflakes.