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Notes -
To be fair, there is a steelman where Kaepernick's problems at least were partially downstream of politician opposition, and that these problems would be very hard to catch. And while Kaepernick's far from the most severe or most overt case, it still had the President of the United States wink-and-nodding about how much
political support for the next stadium'gratitude' an team owner would get for firing him.To be a little less fair, FIRE keeps finding people to interview who say "until Goodell mentions Kaepernick by name in apology, I feel like he has violated the spirit of the first amendment in an egregious way" without even trying to square that circle, or apply that same argument or broader respect for the "spirit" of the first amendment to nearly any other comparable case.
This rhymes a bit to me with the Just Impact criticism (previous discussion here). It's not that there's something wrong with a utilitarian calculus that suggests making this the centerpiece of their big ad campaign is a way to buy "credibility on the left as a hedge against getting painted as secret Republicans", to borrow from JTarrou, and hopefully FIRE's ad campaign isn't 200 million USD. If it doesn't compromise your underlying principles, that could improve your absolute impact, or even the specific aspects that your original campaigns promised to focus on.
On the flip side... there's already people betting on how long it lasts before we find out that those principles weren't as universal, or at least as universally-applicable as they seemed.
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