It’s Amazing How Few People Get What Landry Is Doing With The National Anthem

April 5th, 2024 MacAoidh

I had an American Spectator column a couple of days ago that got a lot more traffic than I thought it would. I wrote it because somebody needed to defend Kim Mulkey over this stupid national anthem controversy which blew up on Monday night after Iowa, who beat LSU in that classic Elite Eight contest, was on the floor for the national anthem and Mulkey’s team was in the locker room.

Which was not a protest of the national anthem by LSU. It was just an event management thing.

What I said toward the end of the column, though, is something which I thought was obvious but apparently I’m a sage genius who operates on a level you mortals can’t even grasp. It was this…

Still, the reality now is that Mulkey is going to have to change her pre-game routine because of the toxic optics and blown-up controversy this has created. And while nobody seems to get this, Louisiana’s new governor, Jeff Landry, just did her a big favor by weighing in on this:

Landry could have sat this one out, but what he’s done is pretty smart and an interesting little lesson in red-state governance.

Whether or not he understood the logistical nature of LSU’s absence on the court, he’s now taken this thing out of Mulkey’s hands. She’s got to have her team on the court for the National Anthem from now on, simply because if not they’ll turn her into an anti-American villain. But with Landry stepping in to mandate not just her team’s presence for the National Anthem but that of all the teams at all of Louisiana’s public colleges, it’s out of her hands, and she’s now removed from the controversy.

Then he went further and applied this to the individual players. No kneeling, period.

That’s the part that really matters here, though it doesn’t apply to Mulkey’s players, none of whom have kneeled or even expressed a desire to kneel (at least, not to my knowledge). But it ends any further potential for this issue to poison college sports in the Bayou State because nobody on any team — whether at LSU, Louisiana Tech, the University of New Orleans, McNeese State, Grambling State University, or any of the others — really wants to put his or her scholarship in jeopardy over kneeling during the National Anthem.

It’s a bit of opportunism on Landry’s part, but it’s also a way to fix a problem that has been irritating people for going on a decade now. And he’s doing it while protecting the coaches of those teams, who, regardless of their own political affiliations, might have to recruit players from heavily Democrat families: “Well, it’s state policy that we stand for the National Anthem, so we all do it and that’s that.”

Nobody else seems to get this, and I find it puzzling.

I was on the Morning Answer show in Chicago this morning with Amy Jacobson, who OF COURSE went to Iowa and was perfectly happy to rub in everything about Monday night’s game, and we discussed this for some of the segment. I think Amy actually got it…

Let’s explain it this way: what happens every time there’s a mass shooting? You know the answer to this – the left-wing politicians come out of the woodwork demanding that the government go after everybody’s guns. In every single one of these incidents the things they demand wouldn’t have stopped the shooter, but they don’t care.

They don’t care because they’re about turning the ratchet. They want to get your guns, not because they want to make you safer. They have a different reason – they know a society which is unarmed will necessarily be compliant to a government which has a true monopoly on violence, and that’s an end in and of itself, so they turn the ratchet toward disarming the population at every single opportunity they get. And a mass shooting is a prototypical opportunity.

Well, applying that to this case, on the right we’re disgusted by ungrateful athletes kneeling for the national anthem as a form of “protest.” Which it isn’t, by the way – it’s a form of narcissism and attention-whoring. A true protest would be to do something which carries a personal cost for doing it, like Rosa Parks on that bus for example.

We’ve wanted something done about this for a long time.

Now – the controversy from Monday night wasn’t about the kneelers. It was about logistics and event management. That’s why Mulkey’s answer to the question asked about the anthem came off so nonchalant – she’d just lost an NCAA Tournament game and there she was getting asked about standing for the national anthem? They’re never on the court for the anthem and there was nothing to read into that.

In that vein, you might miss the bigger picture and think that Landry was swinging at Mulkey. But that’s a mistake. You’re way off and you need to look past the nose on your face here.

He’s using this controversy to impose consequences on snot-nosed college kids who think a cool way to get attention would be to kneel for the national anthem.

This isn’t even an active controversy in Louisiana. We haven’t had much in the way of kneelers. Last year there was some dissatisfaction over some of LSU’s women’s soccer players kneeling at the anthem before games, and better known was that the Saints did some of that crap a few years ago, but generally speaking, that’s gone. So it isn’t a big issue anymore. But the people who voted for Jeff Landry are mostly still pretty angry about it happening, and efforts made to discourage it from happening again are in line with their preferences.

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Landry wasn’t swinging at Mulkey. He complimented Mulkey. And he took this issue out of her hands. People are now bitching at Jeff Landry, not Kim Mulkey. The only thing she’s faced with is that now she’s got to change her pre-game routine and put her team on the floor for the national anthem. But as I noted in the column, she has to do that anyway for PR reasons.

And meanwhile, this will be the end of the kneelers. Which is a win. And this is a way for conservatives to turn the ratchet.

What are we talking about now? We’re talking about this…

 Loyola University Law Professor Dane Ciolino says the proposal is unconstitutional.

“Doing it as a mandatory requirement or imposing a penalty for not attending the national anthem from the standpoint of the first amendment would be an unconstitutional exercise of state power.”

If you’re Jeff Landry this is a great argument to have, particularly where it comes to the larger debate about whether our tax dollars should pay for woke indoctrination factories where our public colleges once stood.

And by the way, Ciolino isn’t really the expert on this subject the state media thinks he is. Nobody has a right to be a scholarship athlete on a college team in Louisiana. There are rules, and consequences for breaking them, imposed on student-athletes as to conduct and public presentation all the time. The idea that honoring the country for a minute and 56 seconds before a game would be too much to ask of them isn’t all that well-established in law. But if we want to have a big landmark court case on the question, Jeff Landry would have absolutely no problem with that.

Nor would he have a problem discussing the First Amendment and how well it’s protected on college campuses.

At all.

In fact, Landry’s antagonists are probably the ones who would rather not have that discussion.

Turn that ratchet, Jeff. At least some of the soreheads who think this is about Landry attacking LSU, and there are a lot of them out there, will ultimately understand this. The ones who don’t, well…maybe they didn’t learn enough in college.

EDIT: And now, there is this…

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