Nike came out with a set of shoes that had the Betsy Ross, 13-stars-in-a-circle flag emblazoned on the back of the heel.  Colin Kaepernick whined about it as resembling the Confederate flag.  Nike recalled the shoes.  Doug Ducey, Arizona governor, then rescinded the tax incentives his state had offered Nike to build a new factory in Arizona.

And well he should have done.  To accept Nike after this would have given tacit approval to Nike's decision.  If Nike is going to make business decisions based on the political opinions of football players, politicians should ignore Nike as an unserious and unreliable strategic business thinker.

The business world, maybe especially the shoe industry, needs to decide which it favors: rioters or rule of law.  Apart from having snubbed the American flag, Kaepernick sides with BLM, which has sought to legitimize lawlessness by defending lawbreakers.  Business needs enforced law to succeed long-term.  The two mindsets are not compatible.

Nike needs to listen to its own best spokesman, one Michael Jordan.  Mike understands that politics need not enter into business, and in fact should be kept out altogether.  Out of advertisements, out of public discussions, o-u-t — OUT.  Why?  Because, Mike says, Republicans buy shoes, too.  Nike has alienated half its customer base for no other reason than wanting to look politically correct.

The thinking that Nike supports by backing Kaepernick is that black thugs should get away with breaking the law because blacks are oppressed in America.  The examples given of black oppression usually involve things that happened 50 and 60 years ago, such as Emmett Till.  More modern examples are often just lies, such as Sandy O's lies about illegals having to drink from toilets.  Sometimes examples seem at first to support the black oppression line, but then they nearly always turn out to involve bad cops who treat all races, including whites, badly when they can get away with it.

In yielding to Colin Kaepernick, Nike displays not only business shortsightedness, but lack of civic courage.  We can fight political correctness if we all stand up to it.  When major corporations take the lead in sucking up to it, a bit of our freedom of speech gets sucked down the black hole of censorship, enforced by pressure groups such as BLM in league with the MSM.

Back up, Nike.  You're headed the wrong direction.