Mayor Pete Buttigieg Defends NFL National Anthem Protests, Slams Donald Trump
Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg (in comments made to TMZ) defended NFL players protesting during the national anthem, HuffPost reports. Buttigieg, who is a veteran himself of the United States Navy, said that his own service was in part about protecting the rights of Americans to protest peacefully.
The remarks occurred on Thursday in New York, when a TMZ cameraman asked about President Donald Trump’s various attacks on former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick kicked off the practice of quietly protesting by kneeling during the national anthem prior to NFL games, and he did so (starting in 2016) to draw attention to racial inequality, particularly when it comes to law enforcement.
“The flag that was on my shoulder when I served represented, among other things, the right to free speech,” Buttigieg said. “You don’t have to like it but one of the reasons we served was to defend that right, the right to peaceful protest and the idea that we can protest what is wrong with our country.”
This is not the first time Buttigieg has weighed in on the issue, and he has spoken out in the past in support of the rights of players (like Kaepernick) to protest.
“I didn’t think of the flag as something that itself as an image was sacred. I thought of it as something that was sacred because of what it represented,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post‘s Robert Costa. “One of the very things it represented is the freedom of speech, and that’s one of the reasons I served.”
While the Costa interview was just this past week, the South Bend major has echoed the sentiments in the past. In a Twitter post from 2007, Buttigieg expressed a smilier view.
Here's what presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg said about Colin Kaepernick and NFL kneelers: https://t.co/duuOCtty3P
— JustJared.com (@JustJared) May 23, 2019
As for the president, Buttigieg has a few harsh words when it comes to military service. He suggested that had Trump himself served, “maybe he would feel a little more strongly about those freedoms.”
Trump was eligible for the draft in 1968 after graduating from college, a time when the United States was heavily involved in the Vietnam War. Trump, however, received a medical deferment attributed to bone spurs in his feet, which effectively prevented him from joining the war effort.
The legitimacy of that diagnosis was called into question in an article by The New York Times, which was published in December of last year. The article explores evidence that a podiatrist in Queens, New York, helped Trump avoid the draft through an invalid diagnosis.
Dr. Larry Braunstein, the podiatrist in question, died in 2007.
