Now, personally speaking, I don't give a crap about respecting a piece of fabric. It's a silly primitive tradition that belongs with other silly primitive traditions, like sacrificing a goat so rain will come. The funny part of all of this is that Trump took such a massive hissy fit over sports players knealing to the flag during a sports game, and then committed an actual offense by SITTING through a flag ceremony at a military event.

The Republican party is the party of hypocrisy, hillarity, and whiney bitchery.

But anyway, this American youtuber seems to have covered the story best:

Ok

Just skimmed through the Australian flag ceremony protocol, no mention of standing up.

He's always been a hypocrite. He is the living definition of hypocrite (among other things), so him doing this does not surprise me in the slightest.

If you think it's just "showing respect to a piece of fabric", you'd be wrong. No one cares about the fabric of the flag, they care about what it represents. It represents our country, our personal liberties, and the men and women who die defending those liberties.

Which is an outdated mythical concept. You could argue that the sacrifice of the goat represents the hard work of crop growing, the feeding of the people, and the value of rains. It doesn't make either the flag or the goat sacrificing ritual truely representative in the slightest, and there is no reason to have such representations. It's very silly to assign a bunch of unrelated values to icons or rituals; practically rural/bumpkin paganism.

And obviously, within the US, there's a growing number of people who do not believe the US flag stands for those arbitrarily values. An increasing number are seeing it as a false mockery of those values because the people who uphold the flag with the most extreme displays are often, very blatantly, against those values.

And if someone thinks they're being disrespected just because someone is protesting the country they're full of themselves. I mean how much of an egomaniac do you have to be to feel offended when someone protests a something that's wrong in this country. If anything people should be honored that more people are trying to fight to make the country a better place.

He's the biggest fucking hypocrite of all time, and that trait more than anything sickens me. Fucking moron.

Yeah but if they actually wanted to incite change I feel like they wouldn't do it in such a devisive way. No good has come of the kneeling during the national anthem, it's created more racial tension in America and more division between the politically charged sides. I'd be willing to bet half the people that support the right to kneel don't actually care about what it represents, they just enjoy making the other side (mainly people with conservative values in this case) butthurt. It's the same thing as trolling on the Internet. When the Cowboys kneeled before the National Anthem I saw Republicans respond to it a lot more positively.

You could argue that devisive protests like these are what it takes to get people talking about the issue at hand but I whole-heartedly disagree. No one's talking about injustice to African-Americans, they're only talking about the constitutionality of kneeling during the National Anthem and what the flag actually represents. Meanwhile the people who argue for this think they're doing a good thing and receiving some sort of moral high ground when in reality they're doing absolutely nothing and injustice to African-Americans in America still remains the same. If these NFL players actually cared about what they're kneeling for they would find a different way to go about it that would get all Americans on board.

Actually people who are kneeling are not disrespecting the Military.  There is nothing in the articles that say you have to stan, just like there are nothing that says you have to put your hand over your heart.  These are more traditions than anything else.  I am sure most people do not even know why some players kneel instead of just sitting on the bench.

As for Trump, I would not say he is a hypocrite, instead like a lot of things he does or does not do, he just plain ignorant.  I am sure when they started to play retreat, he had no clue what it means.  When he saw all the service men and women stand, face the flag and either salute or put their hands over their heart, he still did not understand what was going on just from his comments.  I am also sure that once he did understand he neither cared or dismiissed it as something he doesn't have to respect.