FPI / March 14, 2024

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer @Schaeff55

Two of America's biggest bread-and-circus extravaganzas – politics and professional and big-time college sports – are more transparently phony and more utterly bizarre than ever.

What does this say about us as a people?

News item: Installed President Joe Biden is suspected of being doped up for his feisty, combative State of the Union Address on March 7. From The Washington Times:
 

A psychiatrist who has worked with elderly dementia patients said President Biden exhibited signs of stimulant use to mask cognitive decline in his amped-up, aggressive State of the Union speech on Thursday.

Biden, 81, often raced through his remarks with the speed of an auctioneer, loudly shouting his words despite having a microphone in front of him.

Speed and volume of speech can be a sign of using Adderall or another amphetamine, said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist based in Beverly Hills, California.

News item: Top Major League Baseball prospect Noelvi Marte of the Cincinnati Reds is suspended 80 games for abusing an anabolic steroid used on horses. About boldenone, the drug Marte tested positive for:
 

There is no therapeutic or medical use for boldenone in humans. More specifically, it is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in humans for any reason.

In addition to being illegally sold and used for human performance enhancement, boldenone is used illegally in racehorses to enhance performance, despite being banned for use in horses competing in Olympic and Paralympic events. On an international and agricultural level, boldenone is also largely illegal for use as a growth promotor in farm animals, and most countries have surveillance programs that test for boldenone in animals raised for food production.

No one who pays the slightest attention to MLB should have been surprised by Marte’s ban. He is a native of the Dominican Republic, and MLB has known for at least 30 years that this poverty-stricken nation regularly dopes up its young athletes in hopes of getting them into the baseball prospect pipeline. The New York Times reported in 2022 that Dominican players make up 10 percent of MLB rosters... and 50 percent of positive PED tests:
 

According to M.L.B., of the 30,000 drug tests it conducts around the world each season, 0.2 percent are positive for performance-enhancing substances, half of which are from players from the Dominican Republic....

Of the 975 players on teams’ Opening Day 28-man rosters and inactive lists this season, 99 — just over 10 percent — were from the Dominican Republic. The percentage was believed to be greater in the minor leagues.

The sport once renowned as "America's Pastime" has been outsourced to drugged-up foreigners. This should be a Grade A scandal for MLB. But it is not:
 

“A scout looks at your player and if he’s already 16 years old, he’s too old,” said Felix Mena, a private trainer who began working with [banned Dominican player Jenrry] Mejia when he was 15 and said he runs a drug-free program. “So with a kid at 12 years old, you have to start getting him to compete and doing things that shouldn’t be done. It’s the system that sometimes carries people away. And there’s poverty, so it’s something social. And you can buy a lot of stuff without prescriptions, like pills and injections. It shouldn’t be like that.”

“Star” Dominican players such as Fernando Tatis Jr. of the San Diego Padres and Reds pitcher Frankie Montas, recently named Opening Day starter for the team, have been suspended for PEDs in recent years. But can you really blame impoverished Dominicans for taking advantage of such a grotesquely amoral system? In January, the San Diego Padres signed a 17-year-old Dominican to a $4.2 million contract.

MLB teams are positively inviting the fraud, cheating and physical damage caused by steroid abuse to continue unabated overseas. With so much money at stake, an extremely disturbing climate has emerged: Pro sports organizations do not care one whit about fan reaction. Only the financially-valuable player is of interest. Reds manager David Bell said of Marte:
 

“He's gonna be greatly missed.... I believe in Noelvi Marte. He's going to get through this. When he does, it's going to be behind him. When he does come back, he's going to be welcomed back with open arms, and it's going to be over.”

He was taking a steroid used on horses. What kind of lesson is that for America’s kids? In Feb. 2023, when star University of Alabama basketball player Brandon Miller was accused of bringing the gun used in a murder to the site of the shooting, his coach, Nate Oats, was remarkably nonplussed by it all. Oats had the gall to say:
 

“We knew about that. Can’t control everything everybody does outside of practice. Nobody knew that was going to happen. College kids are out, Brandon [Miller] hasn’t been in any type of trouble nor is he in any type of trouble in this case. Wrong spot at the wrong time.”

What was the fallout for Miller? He remained on the team throughout its NCAA Tournament run, was then drafted No. 2 overall by the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, and signed a lucrative multi-million-dollar deal that will pay him more than most Americans will earn over a lifetime.

Joe Biden’s open-borders agenda has killed a 12-year-old American boy in Missouri. Tens of millions of Americans will vote for him this year.

One of the most highly touted rising MLB stars of 2023 was Oneil Cruz of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was injured early in the year and missed most of the season. He is back for a much-anticipated 2024 campaign. Cruz, another Dominican, has not seen his career affected one iota by a 2020 incident in which he killed three people in an automobile crash in which he was accused of driving drunk. American fans will watch him play this year, and they will cheer him on. This is madness.

But perhaps the intersection of privileged sports and elitist degeneracy is most disgustingly illustrated by the unconscionable treatment afforded to the son of a famous NFL head coach who permanently injured an innocent American child while driving drunk. The Missouri Independent reported March 4:
 

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson drew condemnation from across the political spectrum over the weekend after he reduced the sentence of former Kansas City Chiefs assistant coach Britt Reid for a drunken driving crash that permanently injured a 5-year-old girl.

Reid, the son of Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, was drunk in February 2021 when he crashed his truck into two vehicles on the side of an exit ramp along an interstate near the Chiefs’ practice facility.

Six people were injured, including 5-year-old Ariel Young, who sustained a traumatic brain injury and was in a coma for 11 days. According to her family, Young continues to suffer memory loss and issues with speech and movement.

Parson overtly stepped in to give Reid’s son preferential treatment:
 

Reid pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.

But on Friday [March 1], with little explanation and without consulting with local prosecutors or the victims’ family, Parson commuted Reid’s sentence – allowing him to serve under house arrest until October 2025.

Parson’s decision drew immediate outrage.

“There simply can be no response that explains away the failure to notify victims of the offender,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a press release. She later added: “I simply say I am saddened by the self-serving political actions of the governor and the resulting harm that it brings to the system of justice.”

How disgraceful is Parson? This is the governor of Missouri: When the Chiefs won the Super Bowl in February 2023, he got a tattoo of the team’s logo, and boasted about it publicly:
 

“Last week at Chiefs training camp, I had the opportunity to huddle with our Super Bowl 57 champions and show off my new ink,” Parson wrote on Facebook.

Politics and big-time sports are merging in their contempt for regular Americans. The blatant disdain political elites have for citizens is overtly displayed via the mocking of their concern over massive unchecked immigration. Our elites do not care that you don’t like what they are doing to your neighborhood and community. Too much money is at stake.

The similarities found in the utter phoniness of big-time sports and big-time politics are eery. GOP Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama has been deservedly pilloried for her transparently artificial State of the Union response on March 7. Britt is a product of Alabama machine politics and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. Before being elevated to her current position, she served as deputy press secretary and then chief of staff to longtime Sen. Richard Shelby. She has zero qualifications to be a United States senator. Does anybody care? It’s no secret that money, nepotism and insider connections play a major role in politics today. As WorldTribune documented in January:
 

[T]he GOP establishment has actively recruited not one but two executives from a private equity goliath that boasts of its heavy presence in China and whose founder regularly espouses overt pro-communist regime propaganda to run for U.S. Senate seats....

“Bridgewater Associates has been managing Chinese state money since 1993,” Fortune reported in 2022....

Nella Domenici is the daughter of Pete Domenici, who dominated New Mexico politics for decades while serving as a U.S. senator from 1973-2009. Nella served as chief financial officer at Bridgewater during her lengthy tenure there.

Imagine the insanity of voting for this just because there is a capital R next to the name on the ballot. Hundreds of thousands will do so in Pennsylvania and New Mexico this year.

Money, nepotism and insider connections also play a big-time role in professional sports today. This is most pronounced in the National Football League. Does anybody care?

No case is as egregious as that of Arthur Smith. Smith, former head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, currently serves as offensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is the son of multi-billionaire FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith. Frederick Smith just so happened to be a part owner of the Washington Redskins when Arthur got his lucky break into the NFL coaching ranks in 2007. Arthur used that start to eventually attain the coveted role of offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans. Tennessee, of course, is the home state of FedEx.

Imagine cheering for a team coached by this. Millions of Americans will, wholeheartedly. And purchase authentic team jerseys at $385 a pop as they do so.

Take a look at this photo. This is your political culture today. This is ridiculous:
 

Raise your hand ✋️ if you want Trump to appoint a Special Counsel to go after every one of these liars 👇 on the J6 Committee pic.twitter.com/KaqJyHld98

— Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 (@Chicago1Ray) March 11, 2024

Would any of it have been possible without Americans being turned into spectators at the Roman orgy via a potent conditioning process that owes much to the overgrown popularity of professional and big-time college sports?

There's more to it than that, of course. It can strongly be argued that the Bill Clinton presidency was far more important than most Americans believe in bringing this sad state of affairs about. Clinton’s two-term administration was the first reality TV, trash TV presidency. Think Jerry Springer in the Oval Office.

Is it really just a coincidence that modern politics has been dominated ever since by unstable women, militant homosexuals, performative minorities and extremely strange white men?

Performative minorities simply means another demographic that is being manipulated, just as all segments of America are manipulated today. The result of all this transparent phoniness: Highly abnormal people – dangerously abnormal people – are prominently involved in the two-party monolith.

The answer to all this – culturally and politically – is to bring back a true meritocracy in our social existence. But that is not going to happen anytime soon in the America that exists today. Big money warps the soul.

Free Press International
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