 I am old enough to remember The Rumble In The Jungle. The famous 1974 boxing match was staged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire), pitting George Foreman, the undefeated and undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World, against Muhammad Ali, who was the 4-1 underdog. Foreman was 25, in his prime, and known to have a devastating punch. Ali was looking slow and less powerful and was beaten up by previous bouts with Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry. Taking on the bigger, stronger Foreman who was seven years younger, seemed futile and desperate. The Rumble In The Jungle only happened because the promoter, Don King was able to get the two fighters to sign separate contracts, guaranteeing each at least $5M. King also had to enlist Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to underwrite some of the financing. King and his promotional team garnered the largest viewing audience in history at that time. Some estimated that over a billion people were able to watch the fight. Eventually it generated over $100 million in revenue. All quite amazing, but the more astounding part of the story was how Ali outwitted the bigger, stronger and younger Foreman. Ali was always good at trolling his opponents, exploiting emotional sensitivities using silly poems to belittle them during interviews and pre fight publicity events, so it wasn't hard to get them roiled up once the fight began. Knowing this, Ali planned to use the ropes to bring Foreman in close. He whispered in his ear, "Is that all you got?" to lure him into a frenzy of punches, to wear him out. He would move around the ring, laying on the ropes, absorbing the punishment, while preserving his own energy. By the eighth round, Foreman was exhausted and Ali came out swinging, quickly landing devastating headshots and eventually knocking Foreman out. The tactic, later known as Rope-A-Dope has been used many times since. Floyd Mayweather famously employed it in his 2017 fight with UFC star Conor McGregor. As I think about the tactics used in the fight, I wonder, is this a tactic being used today in the race for the 2024 Presidential election? Donald Trump's ego was deflated by his loss in 2016. He looked beaten and pouty when he proclaimed the election was stolen. His advisors told him to just sit down and be quiet. For a few months, he did. But as the time has passed, he is returning to the public eye, hosting massive rallies across the country. He has built his own media platform called TruthSocial, dodging the restrictions placed on his Twitter and Facebook activities. He has embarked on a campaign of highly visible candidate endorsements, putting his brand of Americanism behind candidates in the important and influential battleground states, and having great success! Meanwhile, President Biden has stumbled into one serious gaffe after another. His messy Afghanistan withdrawal, energy and economic policy miscalculations, are causing massive inflation and now the unfocused war in Ukraine is bleeding out our economy. The stock market is floundering and everybody is feeling the huge increases in gasoline prices. Republicans characterize Joe Biden as a dope. But Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said this: “Our country could not be better served, than with this most experienced, capable hands than yours, President Biden. He‘s just perfect!" Trump isn't getting any complimentary coverage from the Mainstream Press, presumably because he labeled them as The Fake News. Nevertheless, he remains one of the most trending persons on social media. The Democrats are allowing him to live in their heads while they use the power of the government to harass, intimidate and disqualify the former President from running again. But something doesn't add up…if Joe Biden won over 80 million legitimate votes in 2019, and he is the incumbent, and he has done everything he promised to do during his COVID-era basement campaign, then why would the Democrats have anything to worry about? If Biden is so popular and effective, wouldn't he be the George Foreman in a Presidential rematch? Is it possible Donald Trump is roping a dope? It is time to cancel the Cancel Culture.
By that I mean the Cancel Culture is no longer relevant. Our cultural evolution has moved on. We are now living in The Eraser Culture. It is no longer effective to just cancel people and their ideas and statements. The act of canceling people draws too much attention, and the resulting brouhaha actually has the opposite effect. In many cases those that were getting canceled have ironically become more famous, more influential than they otherwise would have been. For the past six years, Donald Trump has been the Poster Boy for the Cancel Culture. But it has failed miserably. Polls show Trump is more popular than ever. Up against not only the Democrats, Trump's approved Republican candidates are winning and most RINOs are being pushed aside too. So now the Puppet Masters that exert control over our culture, those that I refer to as The FrankenMedia Monsters, have turned to a newer and more drastic tactic. Throughout Trump's ascension, the complicite news media, academia, union leadership and the Beltway Brotherhood, have used the same tactics Communists have used to undermine their opposition throughout history. They totally obliterate the historical record. The FBI raid on Trump's private residence is a perfect example. FBI agents were observed walking out of Mira Lago with dozens of boxes of so-called "evidence". Whether or not it will ever be used in any legal procedure is irrelevant because everything will be destroyed. All of the history and documentation that would have been incorporated in a Trump Presidential Library will have disappeared. No library, no legacy, he never happened. That makes it a lot less complicated to answer annoying questions about the successes of his recent administration, especially when juxtaposed against the obvious calamity of Chairman Joe's vacuous and oxymoronic Build Back Better agenda. Look back at Mao Zedong's Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. Communist Party Chairman Mao shutdown schools, allowed overzealous thugs to abuse power, encouraged mass vilification of any opposing viewpoints, and established a cult of Progressive Thought Police by erasing anything old or historically in conflict with Communist Progressive Principles. Mao utilized his official ministries to harass and arrest opposition leaders, often sending them off to prison or execution. Frustrated and angry youth groups, known as The Red Guard, were allowed to roam the countryside acting as paramilitary enforcement agencies, just as ANTIFA and BLM are doing across America. They tore down statues, demolished libraries, and reordered the curricula of schools. Sounds all too familiar as Americans are witnessing Chairman Joe's campaign to demonize Republicans, criminalize descent, indoctrinate students with unscientiific gender and race theories,and to ignore rampant crime, illegal immigration, homelessness, drug smuggling and drug abuse. As supply channels continue to collapse, productivity stumbles, and store shelves grow empty, Americans feel increasingly anxious about losing our livelihood, our children and our freedom. The dictionary defines the term "trumped up" as: A clever use of the imagination to "invent, fabricate, or lie about" or to use "deceit, dishonest, unproven, fraudulent, or mendacious" evidence. Since the day Trump announced his candidacy for President, the Democrats and faux Republicans have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him to paint him as undemocratic, unpatriotic, unpopular, undisciplined, and criminal. They have spent enormous amounts of public funds to investigate and slander him. All of their efforts have proven to be nothing less than 'trumped up" despicable garbage. Let's hope Build Back Better, Biden's own version of Mao's Great Leap Forward, won't result in the same sort of unintended consequences where 60 million people died before the dictator was deposed. Let's hope we can erase Biden and his cronies before they erase America. I recently had a very disturbing discussion with a dear friend. He is recently retired and enjoying his love of research and writing. He spent a career flying multimillion-dollar passenger jets, and now he is piloting Google to uncover information he finds lacking in the mainstream media. We get together weekly, smoke cigars and exchange ideas and review each other's research. He is a diligent and creative investigator, combing through tons of websites and documents to get to the bottom of his inquiries. And I believe he is a very good analyst and writer. I have encouraged him to start a blog or write a book to share his ideas and his writing skills. He shook his head. "Not going to happen"... "Why not? You're talented!" He said he had recently floated the idea with his wife, but she forbade him from publishing his work online. She claims his views would be considered "dangerous" and "embarrassing" within the academic community. It would put her in an untenable position at work. And though he was hurt, he agreed to keep his work private. He has been motivated by the media's preoccupation with identity politics and by the near universal portrayal of white men in television dramas, situation comedies and advertising as insufferable buffoons. And he is angered by the media's obsession with characterising America as systemically racist, so he has been focused on studying the history of black activism, and the intersectionality of feminism and male domination of Western culture. Professionally, she is struggling with Pandemic restrictions requiring conducting classes online from home, and figuring out how to maintain important personal contact with her students and her colleagues. Additionally, she is concerned that his new hobby is making him bitter and resentful. The result is she feels increasingly stressed at work and at home. They have always agreed to respect each other's political inclinations and to refrain from engaging in arguments about the current state of affairs. He knows what her positions are and vica versa. So he graciously agreed to honor her request. But it raises a larger concern…When she said his views would be considered "dangerous" by her cohorts, he was taken aback. He was indirectly being censored. "We live in America. Discussing civil and social events and policy is classically American" he said. "Any thought of censoring, or discouraging the free exchange of ideas is memorialized by the 1st amendment of the constitution. If I was encouraging violence or the overthrow of the government, she would be right to caution me. But all I am doing is asking questions, connecting historical data points and expressing my opinions. What's so 'dangerous' about that?" I have always viewed academia as the petri dish of free thought. A place that encourages different points of view, and discussions about those ideas and conflicts. We are supposed to use schools to instruct people on how to think, not what to think. Her fear that the academic community would presume to label her husband's thinking as "dangerous" is itself a dangerous abuse of academic influence. That kind of GroupThink undermines the American Dream: that citizens can feel free to express themselves without persecution. For an institution of higher learning, or any of those working within it, to in any way stifle public expressions that don't threaten other citizens, is antithetical to the 1st amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression and association. In this case, it isn't a hill he wants to die on. It isn't worth putting her career and happiness at risk. Is it her job to stand up to such bullying when it could undermine her career and all of the good work she performs for her students? No. But isn't it frightening to think that both people are capitulating to academic bullying? China has economically and ethically compromised the Biden Crime Family and the Radical Progressives in the DNC to annex the USA. The potential exposure of their complicity in the corruption of the 2020 election solidified their command and control of not just the White House and Capitol Police, but institutions like the DOJ, FBI and CIA. America is now being operated as a ministry of the CCP. The resulting subjugation of transnational industries that serve nearly 80% of the Earth's population (Blackrock, Vanguard) could make restoration of American autonomy impossible. Unless the forces of freedom form a coalition amongst other freedom loving, and Chinese hating nations, the lifespan of the American Dream will be over. To the massive financial fraternities like Blackrock, money is their commodity. They do not trade in human rights or local political interests. All they care about is ROI (return on investment) and none of the 'social justice' and 'populist' intellectual exercises have any. Money transcends borders and collects like minded movements that need resources to survive. So most asset managers are risk aversive and apolitical and view popularity movements as nothing more than speed bumps along the worldwide economic highway. They straddle the K-Rails of geo-politics to obtain and retain as many investors and investments as possible. They have no dog in the fight between cultures and administrations, and only concern themselves with maintaining ownership. That is why they routinely donate money to multiple political organizations. Though Putin recently shook hands with CCP Chairman Xi Jinping as an ally, I don't believe it was done with sincerity. Russia has nothing to gain by submitting to Chinese worldwide hegemony. Putin has publicly pondered the demise of honor and respect for community in western culture, implying he thinks Russians still uphold human rights and dignity more than most, so maybe he is looking for a new partner against the Chinese Dragon. Obviously he is interested in expanding Soviet influence or why would he endure so much economic and political turmoil to invade Ukraine, just to subjugate his empire to a demanding and antithetical CCP? After confronting each other for six decades with the most powerful and destructive weapons known to mankind, without so much as a skirmish, perhaps it is time to recognize the enemy of our enemy is our friend. While America and the Soviet Union have been distracted by our compulsive need to build nuclear weapons and armed forces, the Chinese have been marching down the path of their '100 Year Marathon', quietly expanding their wealth and influence, all while planning to become the world's most dominant political and economic force. Can The Bear and The Eagle stop the Red Dragon? The very first time I listened to a baseball broadcast, I was treated to Vin Scully. I didn't know at the time how good he was because I had no frame of reference. I was just a young boy living in Pasadena, listening to my crystal operated transistor radio (inspired by Sputnik). It was something I found interesting and I could get a good signal while doing my homework or laying in bed. That was my experience with baseball until I got into Little League. Then my coach took me to a Dodger game at Dodger stadium. That night Sandy Koufax pitched a no hitter and most of the people attending the game listened to Vin tell the story on their transistor radios! There was no television coverage at that time. That is one of those transformational moments I will never forget as Scully described the ninth inning and the pressure on both Koufax and his teammates. The crowd was so quiet you could hear transistor radio broadcasts throughout the stadium. Vin's word painting, his skill at describing the electricity in the air, is beyond normal. That radio moment is still played in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and revered by radio professionals all over the world. Vin Scully broadcast Dodger games for 67 consecutive years! He started the year I was born. He is the Voice of My Generation. I listened to him describe many of the Dodgers' most historic moments, as well as NFL games ("...Montana ... looking, looking, throwing in the endzone ... Clark caught it! Dwight Clark! ... It's a madhouse at Candlestick!"), women's tennis, the PGA and he brought a unique point of view to The Masters in Augusta. Scully's call of Kirk Gibson's game winning walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series will always bring chills down my spine. Later, Scully retells the story of Tommy Lasorda behind the scenes, asking the injured Gibson if he could stand up long enough to bat, and only at the last possible minute he decides to stagger up to the plate on a seriously damaged knee. He has had so many special moments in the history of professional sports, it is almost unbelievable. Vin Scully represents to me the best of broadcasting talent and ethos. As a trailblazer in an industry experiencing explosive growth in the second half of the 20th century, he set the bar very high. There have been many DJ's, sportscasters, news anchors, talk show hosts, interviewers and singers that captured my attention in those days, but there was no one who could mesmerize his audience for 2 or 3 hours like Vin Scully. Scully was always a proud American who consistently gave thanks to God and to his country for giving him the chance to live his dream. Always a strong supporter of Americanism, in 2017 Scully stated that he would "never watch another NFL game again" due to some of the league's players kneeling during the pregame playing of our national anthem. He was more than a play-by-play man, he was a great storyteller, a great American patriot and I can only hope some of that rubbed off on me. |
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