Trump's Big CON: You Are Free to Speak, As Long As You Agree With Me

UPDATE:  Apparently the President called and ordered NFL players to stand during the anthem.

"The president was really throwing around his weight and meant business about the national anthem protests.

In addition to tweeting his feelings on the matter, President Donald Trump also called Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones multiple times Monday ahead of the team’s game with the Arizona Cardinals on 'Monday Night Football' to talk about the protests, according to a report.

NBC Dallas Fort Worth’s Jean-Jacques Taylor reports the news:

Jean-Jacques Taylor @JJT_Journalist

2 sources told @nbcdfw President Trump blew up Jerry’s cell Mon calling him 4 times throughout the day to talk about anthem stuff. Wow.
7:02 PM - Sep 27, 2017

Jones and the Cowboys ended up on somewhat of a compromise with respect to their handling of the anthem. The entire team kneeled in unity prior to the anthem, then rose and stood for the entire song."

Read MSN, Report: Donald Trump called Jerry Jones multiple times about anthem protest.

The Donald is a man without principles who demands personal allegiance, and otherwise you better stay quite or else.

Recently the campaign for loyalty to Trump continued when "Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered an extraordinarily dystopian speech at Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution . .

Trump is not alone in using his administration’s position and power to pressure private companies to fire employees who express political views contrary to his, or critical of him. Earlier this month, his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in the White House briefing room that ESPN sportscaster Jemele Hill’s tweet that Trump is a white supremacist 'is a fireable offense.'

Such abuse of the office of the president to call for the silencing and firing of private individuals is the real threat to free expression — one that is far more serious a threat than that posed by college students or public university administrators. . .

Sessions’s speech Tuesday strained to portray the national state of play as one in which conservatives are the victims of constitutional deprivations at the hands of liberals who demand conformity of thought, adherence to orthodoxy and unquestioning loyalty to the cause.

It might be tempting, under these circumstances, to dismiss Sessions’s remarks as mere hypocrisy. But they were far, far worse than that. They were deliberately aimed at misleading the public about whose rights are under more serious attack — and who is doing the attacking. His remarks were clearly calculated to portray certain people (conservatives) as victims of suppression of free speech, and certain people (liberals) as the perpetrators of that suppression. Given his position as the top law enforcement official in the nation, this is alarming, as Sessions is prejudging the motivations and rights of certain categories of people.

Sessions’s manipulations did not end there. He also had the audacity to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. 'Indeed, it was the power of Dr. King’s words that crushed segregation and overcame the violence of the segregationists,' he said. 'At so many times in our history as a people, it was speech — and still more speech — that led Americans to a more just, more perfect union.'

What makes this particularly galling is that speech protesting the injustice of racism is at the very core of the protests by the football players, which Trump has been attacking. They are protesting systemic racism, racist police brutality, racist sentencing laws and the incarceration state.

This, of course, is a viewpoint Sessions has spent his career opposing. . .

After his speech, Sessions was asked about the NFL controversy. 'Well, the president has free speech rights, too,' Sessions said, making clear that he would not dare cross the president. 'I agree there’s a big mistake to protest in that fashion, because it weakens the commitment we have that has provided us this freedom,' he added.

In other words, in Sessions’s telling, the 'big mistake' the players make is not conforming to the president’s view of what is patriotic, even though Sessions had only moments earlier decried universities as an 'echo chamber' of 'homogeneous thought.'"

Read the Washington Post, Jeff Sessions’s appallingly cynical defense of free speech.