Taking a knee is dangerous, stupid and cruel.
The English Rugby Team has submitted to Black Lives Matter. Getting back up will be harder than they think.
AS I WROTE IN DECEMBER, Black Lives Matter is an organized grift that starves its volunteers, enriches its founders and unnecessarily provokes the tax-generating middle classes - all with the help of daft but helpful volunteers in Hollywood and corporate America.
It is no secret that BLM UK’s convenors, including Gary McFarlane, have been known to burst out laughing when they see white people taking a knee - including terrified policemen, dwarf mayors, tube staff, footballers, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and his spitting deputy.
As its poison seeped through society last year, concern mounted that sport was vulnerable to BLM - but the speed at which submission to this wild and hugely contentious form of race theory occurred still beggars belief. Worse, resistance did not feature - the few individuals who attempted to thwart its momentum were dismissed as racist, humiliated on social media and in some cases, sacked from their jobs.
Chief amongst the sports BLM has no place in is rugby - for reasons that predate Nelson Mandela’s wearing of the No.6 jersey at Ellis Park in 1995.
The story of (most of) the English rugby team taking the knee is curious, and it would appear that the supremely talented lock Maro Itoje has been influential. Itoje has been attempting to craft a woke persona for some time - he was the first player in the side to demand that “politicians act on the death of George Floyd”. Before that, he publicly criticized the Daily Mail for an anodyne headline about former Prime Minister Theresa May’s legs and was praised by the obedient liberal stenographer The Times for some poetry he once composed on a team bus en route to a match.
But in contrast to the privileged, privately-educated Itoje, two other non-white players refuse to take the knee. One of them is Billy Vunipola, himself a great talent, who was disgusted by events in 2020 in which the so-called movement proudly torched Bibles (Vunipola is an observant Christian). The other is Courtney Lawes.
Lawes is a working-class lad who has become something of an anti-woke hero for his set of endearing if old fashioned views. He believes in the role of the father in the black household. He believes in individual responsibility. He refuses to kneel.
On Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th, England was the only team participating in the 2021 Six Nations Championship to boast players kneeling. Italy did not kneel. Neither did Scotland nor Wales who played later on Saturday. The French rugby team, a number of whose members are not white, did not take the knee on Sunday (The French government is reportedly nauseated by BLM).
The irony of course is that the moment is called “standing up to racism” (the platitudes that accompany it are 1987 in meaning - and expressed so reluctantly by the commentators you would think they were ads for male pubic waxing).
As South Africa - outside of its politicians - demonstrates, if impressionable minds are positioned to develop early together, the idea of racism - of one civilization being superior to another - is quickly dismantled. In a relatively short period of roughly 25 years, preparatory schools have been spectacularly successful in modelling this theory.
The kneeling by some in English rugby is symbolic of a wider crisis of identity, capitulation and embarrassment. The country has entertained so many commercially expedient provocateurs that it has lost its measurement of legitimate criticism, and continues to be beaten down by the likes of Megan Markle and his wife, Itoje and the legions of fake crisis actors and mentally unwell, left wing, lockdown-enthusiast Twitter addicts. With Prime Minister Boris Johnson now officially cuckolded and everyone else canceled, its only hope lies in people like Lawes.
It is unpleasant to witness. South Africans enjoy playing the English. We enjoy beating them more. But we don’t enjoy watching them being eaten from the inside out.
https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/crystal-palace-wilfried-zaha-taking-knee-black-lives-matter-shirts-degrading-b919545.html