Colin Kaepernick Should Move To Another Country If He’s Unhappy Here, Says Alabama Rep Mo Brooks
Colin Kaepernick should move to another country if he’s not happy with the United States, Alabama Representative Mo Brooks said in an interview that aired this week.
Brooks stopped by SiriusXM Patriot channel’s Breitbart News Tonight, and the subject of the controversial former NFL star came up. Kaepernick got back into the news recently after having been out of the headlines for months. Last week, Kaepernick convinced Nike, with whom he has a business relationship, to discontinue a new line of sneakers that featured an early version of the American flag, known as the Betsy Ross Flag. Kaepernick said that the flag had connotations to racism and slavery, and Nike agreed and discontinued the line.
Brooks, who represents Alabama’s 5th congressional district, had some choice things to say about Kaepernick’s activism. Specifically, he invited Kaepernick to leave. First, he said that there are some “very radical” people in the country who don’t like the United States of America and don’t like the “foundational principles” that made the U.S. a “great nation.” He then suggested that such people, chief among them Kaepernick, should move somewhere more to their liking.
“I doubt he will do that because in this country we’ve had over a million Americans die fighting for our liberties. All of these things that we enjoy he seems to frown upon, and so I just assume he’d leave,” Brooks said.
Mo Brooks: Colin Kaepernick "ought to consider moving to another country" if he hates America. https://t.co/nuCoEBF7E7 pic.twitter.com/o8OiS1up0v
— AL.com (@aldotcom) July 5, 2019
Kaepernick became one of the most divisive figures in the history of American sports in 2016 when he famously began kneeling during the national anthem rather than remaining standing. He said he was doing so as a protest against police brutality. Soon, his protest spread to other NFL players and to players in other sports, even going so far as getting the attention of Donald Trump, who said that “any son of a b***h” who doesn’t stand for the national anthem should be fired.
Kaepernick, who went into free agency after the 2016-2017 season, has been without a job in the NFL as no team has been willing to hire him.
As for the Betsy Ross Flag, whether or not it’s racist depends largely on whom you ask. It has indeed shown up among the iconography of some white supremacist groups, along with the more-familiar symbols of white supremacy. But it does not appear in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols, and in fact, even showed up in the crowd at both of Barack Obama’s inaugurations.
