Joey Jones reacts after the New York Times slams TV affiliates airing the national anthem
Fox News contributor and retired Marine Joey Jones says he 'takes issue' with a new New York Times op-ed calling the airing of the national anthem 'divisive.'
Fox News contributor Joey Jones said Saturday that he "takes issue" with a new New York Times op-ed alleging that the decision to air the national anthem on TV was drawing dividing lines within the United States.
The author of the piece, Julia Jacobs, wrote Wednesday that "...overt allegiance to 'the star-spangled banner' has become one of the lines that separate blue and red America."
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Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously began kneeling during the anthem back in 2016 to protest racial issues. The polarizing move angered veterans and was criticized extensively by President Trump, while Kaepernick emerged as hero of the far left.
Appearing on "Fox & Friends: Weekend," the retired U.S. Marine Corps bomb technician refuted Jacobs' stance. He said her case was "basically that it's partisan."
"I don't believe that's true," he told hosts Pete Hegseth and Ed Henry. "I know people that aren't quite there yet with their politics, but maybe we'll get 'em there someday. They're not quite conservative, but they don't hate the national anthem. They believe in their social justice platform, but they don't hate this country. They believe this country could be better, but they don't hate it."
At President Trump's rally in Mississippi on Friday night, "Fox & Friends" reporter Todd Piro hit the streets to get the pulse of the American people on the issue.
One woman told him that the country was "founded for one thing" that the national anthem represents, and "if you don't agree with it, maybe you need to rethink why you don't agree with it."
Another man said that he thought the anthem was "just beautiful the way it is."
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Jones told the "Friends: Weekend" anchors that while the anthem is "nothing more than a song," and the flag nothing more than colors on cloth, "what makes it something more is how it ties us together through generations, through coasts, through ethnicities, and races and religions, and vocabularies, and languages, and all these things that are uniquely American."
"It is uniquely American to be this diverse, and live together, and care about each other. That's what that anthem and that flag represent. We choose for it to represent that," he continued.
"It's when we stop making that choice and we narrow down what it symbolizes to the very worst of us -- that's when we've lost and that's what they're trying to do," Jones explained.
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