FPI / September 28, 2020
Corporate WATCH
By Joe SchaefferNBA and NFL teams are officially allied with radical groups and persons trying to defeat President Donald Trump in the crucial electoral state of Florida — yet millions of Americans who view Democratic Party progressive extremism as a dire threat to the very survival of this nation are poised to avidly tune in to pro basketball's upcoming championship series and the regular weekly slate of football games on Sundays.
One of the most stunning developments since the election of Trump in 2016 is how major brand-name corporations have overtly aligned themselves with brazenly partisan organizations, unmoved by the threat of alienating a large chunk of their customers inherent in such an arrangement. By partnering with the Democratic Party, pro sports is taking this to a whole new level in 2020.
The NBA's Miami Heat and Orlando Magic and the NFL's Miami Dolphins have joined up with a group called the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). The thin and wholly unsupportable fig leaf these teams may or may not even bother to lean on is that they are working to restore voting rights to ex-felons regardless of party affiliation. The overwhelmingly substantiated facts of the matter reveal that this is a clearly marked Democrat canvassing operation meant to help flip Florida blue.
To begin, FRRC is directly plugged into ActBlue, the online fundraising arm of Democratic politicians and radical progressive groups. The donate button on the official FRRC website goes straight to ActBlue.
ActBlue is the source of online donations to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden's campaign. "ActBlue contributions comprise 99.64 percent of all funds raised for the 'Biden for President' entity and the total is nearly 773 times greater than the group with the second-highest donation sum," the National Pulse reports.
"ActBlue funneled more than $1.5 billion to leftist candidates in 2018 alone and has moved almost $900 million to assist progressives in the 2020 election cycle," a Sept. 21 WorldTribune article notes.
In its own words, ActBlue admits that it exists to elect Democrats:
As a nonprofit, we’re driven by the belief that our democracy works better when more people participate in civic life and when our campaigns and nonprofits are powered by the people they serve. That’s why we’ve built a powerful online fundraising platform for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, progressive organizations, and nonprofits.
We'll include much more documentation of FRRC's radical leftist ties below. It is all very disturbing, to say the least.
It's one thing for individual sports superstars to support a candidate or cause they believe in. That has been going on for generations. There's nothing wrong with it at all and fans can decide for themselves how they feel about an athlete's personal activism. But sports franchises directly aligning with a partisan political agenda is an entirely different can of worms. How can pro sports survive such a development? The carefully crafted narrative of universal appeal is being self-detonated to an astonishing degree.
The NBA's Orlando Magic openly stresses that it has a "partnership" with the FRRC and together they are working on election field duties. "The Magic, in partnership with the FRRC and its Executive Director Desmond Meade, have been conducting a voter registration campaign with the theme: Get Off The Bench," the team flat-out states on the official NBA website.
The NBA's Miami Heat, as part of its Black Lives Matter networking, announced in July that it would sell BLM team apparel with all sales funds going to three groups, one of which is FRRC. TV sports goliath ESPN's in-house Cultural Marxist website The Undefeated reported:
[T]he Heat will sell six shirt designs through their website and team stores that include social justice messages such as "Enough is Enough,” “Silence is Compliance” and “Love Black People the Way You Love Black Culture.”
All profits from the sale of the shirts will be donated to Black Girls Code, Health in the Hood and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). The Heat will also provide additional financial contributions through the team’s foundation. The three groups were chosen from an initial list of over a dozen organizations.
"FRRC is proud to partner with the Miami Heat to impact social change," the organization proclaimed on its Facebook page on Aug. 5.
The Heat has coined the phrase "United in Black" as the team's official 2020 playoff slogan and announced that merchandise sales of apparel bearing that mantra would go to benefit the FRRC and the other two "social justice" groups.
The team has been widely identified as a financial donor to FRRC as part of coverage of Democrat multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg's massive $20 million pledge to help felons pay off required financial debts in order to be able to vote in Florida on Nov. 3.
The NFL's Miami Dolphins are also eagerly supporting FRRC in its work to bolster the Democratic vote. From a Sept. 18 article in South Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper:
This week, the Dolphins' Social Impact Committee announced a plan to increase voter awareness and engagement throughout South Florida.
The committee, in conjunction with the Miami Dolphins Foundation and an NFL Foundation social justice grant, donated $100,000 to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition Fines and Fees program, which helps former felons pay outstanding fees so they can become eligible to vote.
The donation should allow thousands of people to restore their voting rights before November’s general election.
It is vital to stress that these pro sports teams are not only supporting a Democratic field operation, they are linking up with radical leftist forces that have the specific named goal of overthrowing the current American nation state and replacing it with something new.
Leftist website Mother Jones spills the beans with a whopping disclaimer in a July article decrying Florida's "racist" stripping of felon voting rights. "FRRC is a project of the nonprofit Tides Advocacy. Mother Jones has received contributions from donor advised funds administered through the Tides Foundation. Both the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy are affiliated with the Tides Network," the disclaimer reads.
There you have it. FRRC is outed by the Left itself as a program of a radical progressive foundation. The Tides Network is "one of the Left’s leading dark money groups," the Capital Research Center has reported, funneling money to a vast array of hardline extremist organizations.
The watchdog site Influence Watch states that Tides has received over $20 million in funding from globalist progressive billionaire George Soros over the years.
In fact, FRRC and Tides are quite open about the nature of their working relationship. Tides Advocacy relates how FRRC would not exist without its nurturing support:
In 2017, Tides Advocacy partnered with FRRC to give them the necessary infrastructure to fulfill their vision. Now FRRC has a constitutional amendment on the November 2018 ballot, over 30 full-time employees, and chapter volunteers in every part of Florida, from Pensacola to Key West.
[...]
Tides Advocacy has been nimble to respond to the fast-moving needs of this campaign. From hiring full and part time employees, to managing volunteers, to managing risk and compliance, we’ve stood at the ready as FRRC does what is necessary to win.
FRRC leader Desmond Meade personally thanked Tides for creating the framework for his organization:
Partnering with Tides Advocacy allowed us to take a lot off our plates and gave us the bandwidth to focus on our strategies, push our vision, and focus on the issue and the campaign. If Tides Advocacy hadn’t been part of the equation, we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are in such an accelerated fashion.
To this day, Tides Advocacy lists FRRC as an official partner on its website.
The Gatestone Institute also notes that FRRC has been the recipient of direct Soros funding:
The FRRC has received an unspecified amount of funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF). There isn't a specific grant listed in the OSF's 2018 Internal Revenue Service filing, but it identified FRRC as a grantee in an April 2019 Facebook post.
FRRC partnered with an organization called New Florida Majority (NewFM) to pass Amendment 4, the 2018 referendum that kicked off the ex-felon voting battle that is now raging in Florida. NewFM openly proclaims that it is working to change Florida politically via massive demographic change:
Florida is changing demographically and politically, and NewFM is poised to be the democratic engine that helps move the Sunshine State onto the path of equity and justice for all people and not just a small band of well-connected elites.
NewFM works daily to create an inclusive multiracial, multilingual and multicultural movement that seeks to unite people across economic, racial, religious and gender lines through a shared love of a democracy that serves all.
In 2018 NFM was part of the "Win Justice Coalition," a Soros-funded operation that Politico described as "a state political committee set to manage one of the Democratic party’s biggest 2018 field programs."
To patriotic Americans who still watch pro sports: They are trying to take away your country from you, and they are not even disguising it anymore. Isn't it time you stopped cheering them on?
Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com, LibertyNation.com and FreePressInternational.org.
Free Press International
