DALLAS – The Dallas Cowboys, along with owner Jerry Jones, took a knee before the national anthem on Monday night. Now, a sportscaster in Dallas is getting national attention for his commentary on the anthem and the NFL.
Dale Hansen has spent the last 34 years at WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas. He has earned several awards — but he is more recently known for his commentaries.
Hansen has spoken out on gun control, racism, and homosexuality. His most recent “Hansen Unplugged” segment deals with national anthem protests.
Here are some excerpts from his segment on Monday night:
“Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it’s an American’s right… but not this protest, and there’s the problem — the opinion that any protest you don’t agree with is a protest that should be stopped. Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60s had no right to protest an immoral war.”
“The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem. They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise. They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.”
“It has not gone unnoticed that Trump has spoken out against the Mexicans who want to come to America for a better life, against the Muslims, and now against the black athlete. But he says nothing for days about the white men who marched under a Nazi flag in Charlottesville, except to remind us there were good people there. And when he finally tried to say the right thing, not one of them was called an S.O.B. or should be fired. We have white men in America who waive the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag, and he’s concerned about taking a knee because it disrespects this flag. We use that flag to sell mattresses and beer. We wear it as a swimsuit. We wrap our bald heads in a flag bandana and stick it in our pants, because we disrespect that flag every day.”
“Maybe we all need to read the Constitution again. There has never been a better use of pen to paper. Our forefathers made freedom of speech the First Amendment. They listed 10, and not one of them says you have to stand during the national anthem. And I think those men respected the country they fought for and founded — a great deal more than the self-proclaimed patriots who are simply hypocrites — because they want to deny the basic freedom of this great country… a country they supposedly value, and cherish so much.”
