Two enormous businesses, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL), reap astronomical profits as the byproduct of legislation that effectively has given them legal monopoly status. The leagues, in turn, rake in more profits when large corporations pay huge sums for skyboxes and other perks, and then write it all off as business expenses with the IRS.
That’s all fine and dandy when the leagues do what they do best: Make small groups of large, sweaty, millionaire “college graduates”
(some resembling a hulking bipedal refrigerator with tattoos)move around a defined space with a ball.
These extremely rich, intellectual titans, who play children’s games for tens of millions of dollars, and whose products are illuminated numbers on scoreboards—totals that would not challenge the counting ability of a 7-year-old—are now dictating social justice slogans to hundreds of millions of their ticket-purchasing fans, fee-paying cable and social media users, as well as to the taxpayers who subsidize their arenas.
Here are a few of their chosen slogans: “Black Lives Matter,” “Say Their Names,” “Vote,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “Justice,” “Peace,” “Equality,” “Freedom,” “Enough,” “Power to the People,” “Justice Now,” “Say Her Name,” “Sí Se Puede” (Yes We Can), “Liberation,” “See Us,” “Hear Us,” “Respect Us,” “Love Us,” “Listen,” “Listen to Us,” “Stand Up,” “Ally,” “Anti-Racist,” “I Am A Man,” “Speak Up,” “How Many More,” “Group Economics,” “Education Reform,” and “Mentor.”
Here’s my question: As a viewer, why should I be subjected to a deluge of unpaid political commercials, when all I really want to do is watch these “intellectually astute” millionaire athletes dramatically move a ball around so that I might be entertained . . . or perhaps even given a chance to wager a bit.
Given that the aforementioned messages are tied to the expressly leftist sloganeering currently in vogue, one might ask: If the Left can get free political advertising, why can’t other groups have the same opportunities? Like pedophiles: “Not Too Young For Me!” or zoophiles: “Baa! Not Sheepish Anymore!”
And then there is the implicit holier-than-thou attitude of the various players who will be shilling for the Left.
To disclose the millionaire-player hypocrisy involved, shouldn’t the NBA and the NFL be required to release the police records of all its jocks? Or the birth records of children whose ballplayer fathers have not accepted parental responsibility? Or the records of prescribed drugs needed by those athletes to continue playing? Or the divorce records revealing domestic abuse? After all, wouldn’t a dogfight organizer, a felonious assault perpetrator, or a wife-beater look ridiculous with the words “Say Her Name!” or “Justice Now!” or “Enough!” on the back of his shirt?
Add to this the lunacy that many of the 2,146 (450 NBA players/1,696 NFL players) millionaire geniuses—who with stern faces and closed fist salutes take a knee against “oppression” and “slavery”—are completely oblivious to the fact that their league uniforms, sneakers, shoes, and promotional trinkets are made in China by 21st-century child slave laborers.
Yup, geniuses.
And then there is the blatant hypocrisy of the Marxist-Leninist Black Lives Matter folks: Given the horrendous slaughter of black lives by black gangs, a hard statistic which goes completely unacknowledged by the Marxist-Leninist BLM, wouldn’t it be fair (and within First Amendment rights we all share) to add the simple coda: “Black Lives Matter—only if it’s convenient for the Marxist BLM lie.”
Thus, a Marxist-Leninist propaganda slogan becomes a clear and accurate statement of fact.
Dear ole Tovarich Vladimir Ilyich must have been clairvoyant in predicting the behavior of the NBA and NFL; after all, it was Lenin who, upon seeing Western communist sympathizers, coined the term “useful idiots.”
If the NBA and NFL are now acting as advertising agencies for political organizations, shouldn’t the IRS and state and local taxation agencies review the tax breaks which allow them to operate as monopolies? How about now?