“Bend the knee” was what one had to do in Game of Thrones to keep Daenerys Targaryen from unleashing her wrath on you. If you refused to bend the knee, you were refusing her rule, challenging her authority, and subjecting yourself to whatever punishment she chose to mete out.
She had massive armies and pet dragons. Do the math.
There is no Khaleesi stalking these shores. Media and the cancel culture it whips up can cancel you if you criticize the Marxist Black Live Matters organization or if you decide not to kneel when the national anthem is played before sports events. Four years ago it was controversial when then-49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick (he’d lost the starting job to Blaine Gabbert by then) did kneel during the national anthem. Now not kneeling is a story. How far we’ve come.
Major League Baseball started up its COVID-shortened season this week, and as many have predicted, it’s woke. Sports will be woke for at least the remaining 2020 season, if not beyond. The NBA is woke to everything but the Chinese slavery used to make the products its players rack up millions of dollars endorsing. The Boston Red Sox unfurled a giant 254-foot Black Lives Matter banner outside their park. MLB is doing more, and there’s kneeling. A lot of kneeling.
San Francisco Giants’ second-year relief pitcher Sam Coonrod decided not to kneel for their season opener Thursday.
“I’m a Christian, like I said, and I just can’t get on board with a couple of things that I have read about Black Lives Matter,” Coonrod said. “How they lean toward Marxism and they’ve said some negative things about the nuclear family. I just can’t get on board with that.”
“I meant no ill will by it. I don’t think I’m better than anyone,” Coonrod said after the game. “I’m a Christian. I just believe I can’t kneel before anything besides God — Jesus Christ.
“I chose not to kneel. I feel that if I did kneel, I would be being a hypocrite. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. Like I said, I didn’t mean any ill will toward anyone.”
We’ve come to a time when hysteria passes for national discourse, the NFL football team in Washington cancels its branding without a plan for what’s next, “peaceful protesters” destroy property and set fire to a federal courthouse, defunding police is supposed to somehow make our streets safer, and identified federal law enforcement officers get called “secret police” by a deranged Democrat speaker of the U.S. House. The rot is deep.
So it somehow makes sense that a Christian baseball player has to explain himself for standing by his faith and rejecting Marxism, and that this is a national story. It’s just where we are at the moment—even though most Americans oppose cancel culture.
As things turned out in Game of Thrones, Khaleesi wasn’t the ruler anyone wanted or needed. She hid her intentions for as long as she could before she revealed herself to be a totalitarian monster.
But before all that, Khaleesi believably presented herself as a great liberator.
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