More corporate insanity

In PowerLine, John Hinderaker writes about Nike’s decision to choose

the star of its 30th anniversary #JustDoIt advertising campaign: Colin Kaepernick. At first glance, it seems weird for an athletic shoe company to select as its corporate icon someone who is no longer an athlete, and was never a star. At second glance, it gets weirder:

Nike apparently thinks Kaepernick has sacrificed everything, which tells you something about 21st century corporate America. Kaepernich is a multimillionaire whose “sacrifice” consisted of kneeling during the National Anthem, wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs, and generally denouncing his country. Which has led to a second career as a leftist spokesman. That is not exactly a contender in the annals of Greatest Sacrifice Ever.

Further, Nike’s tag line, “Believe in something,” naturally raises the question: Does it matter what you believe in? Any normal person would say that it does. After all, the worst monsters in human history–Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Nero, Hitler, Amin, bin Laden, Castro–all believed in something. It was just the wrong thing.

Kaepernick isn’t as wrong as Lenin and Stalin, but he is still wrong. Nike would have us believe that they honor the former quarterback because he believes in “something,” as though that were value-neutral. But would Nike have similarly honored, for example, Matt Birk, a retired center for the Minnesota Vikings and the Baltimore Ravens–a man who, for what it is worth, probably has 30 or 40 IQ points on Kaepernick–who declined an invitation to the Obama White House because of President Obama’s enthusiastic support for abortion? Heh. Just kidding. Of course not.

Read more here.