For the populist right, free expression is everything – unless you’re taking a knee | Owen Jones
10-Dec-2020 09:00:43 | The Guardian
Those who denounce the left as easily offended ‘snowflakes’ who revel in victimhood are the most guilty of such behaviour
When the populist right claim to be the standard-bearers of freedom of speech and expression, it is always a dishonest, cynical tactic. Take Nigel Farage’s reaction to Millwall fans booing their own team as they took a knee – a gesture of anti-racist solidarity. Farage cheered them for having “sussed out BLM as a Marxist mob”. He concluded with a decree by tweet: “There must be no more taking the knee.”
But taking the knee is a voluntary act by free citizens. In the months following the killing of George Floyd, footballers have repeatedly chosen to take a knee as a repudiation of racism, which – from street-level abuse to the discrimination that is hardwired into national institutions – remains an objective feature of modern western civilisation. Football players are not BBC journalists who are required to take a vow of neutrality, at least hypothetically. And even if they were, the persistence of racism is an inarguable fact, as much as the Earth being round and the sky being blue.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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