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| Coach Orlando Gooden kneeling during the playing of the national anthem with his 8-year-old players |
A football coach kneeling on a field with a group of young players - a slice of Americana that is the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.
But in a reflection of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, these third graders were kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before their game last Sunday.
Under normal circumstances such a thing might have escaped the notice of the media spotlight.
But last week when the story broke, Donald Trump was enmeshed in yet another disastrous week defined by the chaos sewn by his own fragile ego, narcissism, ignorance of world affairs, lack of political experience and unprincipled reactionary bluster.
His belligerent and often incoherent 42-minute speech in front world leaders gathered at the United Nations last Tuesday marked a new low-point for American diplomacy and global leadership.
He drew audible gasps from gathered attendees when he threatened to "totally destroy North Korea", and in defiance of the advice of his own senior advisers, derisively referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as "rocket man" before awkwardly trying to define his isolationist "America First" foreign policy by rambling on about individual nation's right to "sovereignty" - even as he belittled other nations for their choice to pursue nuclear weapons programs or a socialist form of government.
In the aftermath, various outraged diplomats from other nations dismissed Trump as "unhinged", a "dotard" (senile person) and a "Goliath" among other choice names - so clearly the criticism was making The Donald feel defensive.
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| Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner |
Instead of trying to clarify, moderate or walk back his comments at the UN, Trump, evidently electrified by the media attention, decided to dial it up even further by doing what he always seems to do - he tried to change the media narrative.
When things aren't quite going Trump's way (as they usually aren't), his default MO is to launch a Twitter attack on something, or someone that his shrinking base of conservative supporters can obsess over and rally around.
Like the way he keeps ranting about Hillary's emails ten months after the election despite newly released documents provided to Newsweek via a Freedom of Information Act request showing that at least six top current and former Trump advisers (including Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner) all used personal email accounts to conduct official White House business.
Last week Trump's juvenile pissing contest with Kim Jong-un only seemed to earn him more criticism from mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike and increase the risk of a military confrontation - so he turned his focus to the NFL.
Now it's common knowledge that Trump watches a lot of TV, and despite his office granting him access to classified information from the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Pentagon and other government sources, remarkably he still relies on the conservative bias filtered through Fox News as his primary source of information on the world.
So there's little question that he was watching Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning the day after his unhinged UN speech last week when the target of their Fox-ian outrage was a group of African-American 3rd graders and their football coach.
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| Members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club in 2016 |
But where were the chirpy hosts of Fox & Friends directing their focus?
On a group of young American kids expressing their 1st Amendment rights on one of the most important human rights and justice issues in modern American history.
Now if you take a few minutes to listen to the tone of the indignant moral outrage of Fox News "contributor" Rachel Campos-Duffy, one might think that the small group of 3rd graders had burned an American flag and then pissed on it.
But the members of Cahokia Quarterback Club (8-years old and younger) from Cahokia, Illinois began their own little protest after asking their head coach Orlando Gooden, a former college football player at the University of Missouri who graduated from Cahokia High School, questions about the widespread protests in St. Louis after Circuit Court Judge Timothy Wilson found former St. Louis PD officer Jason Stockley not guilty for the 2011 shooting death of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith.
The kids were aware of who Stockley was, which in itself is a sad statement of America in the 21st century.
As Gooden told St. Louis Fox affiliate KTVI, (watch the automatic video volume if you click that link, it's loud) he asked the kids if they understood what the protests were about and one of them answered, "Because black people are being killed and nobody's going to jail."
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| Coach Orlando Gooden and Latia Cole-Gooden |
The kids asked if they could do it as well, and with the unanimous support of the kid's parents, Gooden told them could kneel during the national anthem at Little Devil's Field in Belleville.
When news of their actions went viral, that's when Fox & Friends seized on it as an example of the pending collapse of society - and brought Rachel Campos-Duffy on to vent her outrage.
I found it interesting how quick Fox News was to sort of hold her up as the "outraged conservative mother", defending American values and her children by vilifying a group of 8-year-old kids trying to understand why members of law enforcement are never held legally responsible for shooting and killing African-American boys and men.
As if she was somehow victimized by a group of 8-year-old boys kneeling on a grass football field while the national anthem played.
During her appearance on Fox & Friends she called their peaceful non-violent protest "shameless."
The Arizona-born Campos-Duffy first gained notoriety as a member of MTV's The Real World, where her outspoken conservative views and advocacy of the Republican Party at times caused friction with other housemates on the show.
These days she's a busy WASPish Latina mother who works as the national spokesperson for the Koch brothers-funded LIBRE Initiative, an organization which seeks to promote "free market policies within the Latino community" (whatever THAT means).
And she's married to her former Real World cast-mate Sean Duffy.
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| Rachel Campos-Duffy and her loopy Republican Congressman husband Sean Duffy |
As Jonathan Allen reported in Roll Call back in February, Duffy drew criticism after a CNN interview in which he "applauded 'the good things that came from' a white supremacist murdering nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, SC in 2015."
He also voted for a bill that would allow college ROTC programs to fly the Confederate flag and tried to blame liberals for the fact that Jared Loughner, a right-wing wack job prone to conservative anti-government hysteria and kooky right-wing conspiracy theories, shot Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head.
During a town hall meeting in 2011 after Republican Tea Party poster boy Scott Walker was swept into office on a wave of anti-Obama hatred and proceeded to propose draconian cuts to the Wisconsin state budget, when a construction worker complained that his wife's salary would be slashed, Duffy complained about he and his wife and six kids having to survive on his Congressional salary of $174,000 a year.
So it's no accident that Rachel Campos-Duffy would be called on to offer social commentary on the 8-year-old members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club deciding to kneel during the national anthem.
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| Fox-Ready: Links to the Koch brothers? Check! |
Campos-Duffy is tailor made for Fox because she's used to living in a distorted bubble - the same kind of parallel reality that Fox News pumps into Donald Trump's head every day.
In a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offered an interesting take on the distorted reality that Fox News propagates by immersing himself in watching it for three days straight as an experiment - he wrote:
"Fox gives Trump misinformation that makes him think his world is real: that he won the popular vote, that people don't think he's a racist, misogynist xenophobe. It's been reported that twice a day Trump is given a folder of only good news about himself, which some in the White House refer to as 'the propaganda document'. When those folders aren't enough, he can tune in to Fox."
As the unified rejection of Trump's recent criticism of the NFL and its players showed over the weekend, he's as out of touch as Fox News on the issue of men and boys making the decision to kneel as a form of silent, peaceful protest against injustice in America.
Leave it to Fox to call 8-year-olds "shameless" for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and Trump calling hundreds of NFL players "sons of bitches" for doing the same thing.
As many observers have noted, the simply doesn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the democracy he lives in - unfortunately that's not covered in his daily 'propaganda document'.
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