Earlier this week, Religious Right activist E.W. Jackson posted a video on his Facebook page in which he railed against athletes who have chosen to kneel during the national anthem, saying that doing so is “traitorous” and that any one who does so should leave the country.
Jackson was particularly outraged that players from the Baltimore Ravens and the Jacksonville Jaguars took a knee during the national anthem before the game they played in London last Sunday.
Jackson fumed that no American should ever “go to a foreign country and use the platform you have in a foreign country to criticize your own home.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he fumed. “To me, it’s traitorous. I know treason is a legal term, but it’s treasonous in its import to go to another country and use the platform of another country to criticize your own.”
The players who knelt in London, Jackson said, should “have the courage of your convictions and don’t come back. Stay there if you think that’s so great. Stay there.”
Jackson added that players who dare to kneel before games in America should also leave the country.
“Those of you who won’t stand for our flag, you won’t stand for our national anthem, who hate our country so much, just leave,” he said. “Renounce your American citizenship and go somewhere else. Go find the country that you think is so just and live there and leave us alone.”
