Beware: Hillary Clinton loves that you love football—and the fact that Super Bowl LI is on pace to be 2017’s biggest live TV event fits perfectly into her plot to exact revenge on President Trump.
Around 140 B.C., corrupt Roman politicians found a way to placate their impoverished citizens into surrendering their inalienable right to voting privileges and political representation—in exchange for discounted entertainment and food. As a result, the Roman poet Juvenal coined the famous term “bread and circuses.”
Make no mistake: bread and circuses are making a comeback—ironically in the country founded upon the same upstanding principles Rome held before Rome fell—the United States of America.
Republican, Democrat or Independent—it makes no difference—we have all succumbed to this ploy. A 2016 Harris poll finds that football remains America’s favorite professional sport, and continues to grow more fans in contrast to America’s second-favorite sport, baseball.
So, Americans call football their “favorite” sport and happily—cold beer in one hand, greasy pizza slice in the other—subsidize billion-dollar NFL stadiums and multi-million dollar NFL salaries as they themselves struggle with groceries and rent. If there’s one thing low-income and high-income American families commonly prioritize—it’s a big-screen television.
Libraries and bookstores, meanwhile—which offer truly affordable entertainment that also happens to enrich the mind and soul—are struggling. The average American Millennial reads voluntarily for less than 10 minutes per day according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Even as Pew reports that the middle class is no longer a majority in America and the majority of Millennials in socialist Canada are homeowners in contrast to only 36% of Millennials in (more-socialist?) America—the NFL’s Oakland Raiders convinced the state of Nevada to raise taxes to build and subsidize their team’s brand new $1.9 billion stadium on 62 acres of prime Las Vegas real estate by 2020.
To be fair, the Raiders do plan to pay rent. A whopping $1 per year. Yep, that’s one dollar every 365 days.
Yes, we just elected a populist to the White House. And President Trump has used his first days in office to keep his promises of slashing regulations and stopping federal bloat. But you and I are both guilty of—or, at the very least, vulnerable to—Clinton’s plan to slow Trump’s strides. And there’s no better time for us to wake up than on the day when she most hopes to lull us to sleep: Super Bowl Sunday.
Hillary’s Plot to Pummel Trump
She’s no sports fan (after all, she recently said she hoped the Chicago Cubs would win the “Super Bowl” when they were up to win baseball’s World Series). But Hillary Clinton is a fan of using sports—as did the ancient Romans—to prey on the good intentions of an uninformed public.
I am too young to recall this personally—but Hillary Clinton chose January 26 of 1992—Super Bowl Sunday—to go on CBS’ 60 Minutes following the game to make her most notorious public remarks, sitting on a couch alongside her philandering husband, Bill Clinton.
“I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man… I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through…” Clinton gushed.
Bad Boy Billy went through quite a lot indeed in his political career. Court evidence showed he sexually assaulted innocent women. And being a supportive wife—who happened to have her own political ambitions—Hillary always had Bill’s back.
Fast-forward to 2017. TIME reports that Hillary wasted no time “in [placing] a phone call after the election” to tell the notorious henchman of George Soros—David Brock—that she would advise him to “sign up some top-notch litigators who would do pro bono work against Trump.” Specifically, Brock tells Time: “She spoke about trying to construct a suit that would get you discovery on potential or alleged contacts between the Trump organization and the Russian government.”
She didn’t mean it when she said we should give Trump “an open mind and a chance to lead” in her concession speech.
Where’s Hillary?
Photographer Jim Lo Scalzo captured the moment when Donald J. Trump emerges from the U.S. Capitol building on Inauguration Day. Trump is caught mid-stride as he steps onto a long aisle of blue-and-red carpet to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
Some pictures are worth a thousand words. In this photo, which consumes a two-page spread in TIME, you see the head of every notable politician—Republican and Democrat alike—craned backward, watching Trump emerge. Governors and senators strain—cell phones in hand—to snap a photo of their new president. Hillary stands out in this sea like a “Where’s Waldo?” aberration. Her head faces forward—in the exact opposite direction. Her eyes are set on the empty podium that could have been hers—and in moments—will be his.
Thirty-one million TV viewers tuned in for Trump’s inauguration according to Nielsen—sizable to be sure—but over 79 million fewer than will tune into Super Bowl LI to watch the New England Patriots battle the Atlanta Falcons.
As I wrote last week, hundreds of thousands of American women took to the streets to protest Trump—but these same women didn’t show up in droves to the polls to vote. Nor, apparently, did these women watch the presidential debates to learn what policies Trump actually embraced. None of the three presidential debate audiences (84, 69 and 71 million respectively) bested the Super Bowl.
We’re not paying attention to politics because, like the Romans, we’re prioritizing sports above all. And that’s the way Hillary likes it.
We Scorn Brady, Let Hillie Off Hook
When Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was accused of deflating footballs for a 2015 AFC title game, Americans were outraged. Brady was publicly scorned as if he were a wanton criminal who had endangered our country’s national security. He was suspended for the first four games of the NFL season.
When Clinton actually endangered our national security by using a private server to send and receive classified information over an unsecure connection—and then deleted the evidence—and lied about it, nothing happened. Literally. Because Americans by-and-large didn’t know. When voters did find out—a few days before the 2016 presidential election—it was several years too late.
Four Americans died in Benghazi because of Hillary’s incompetence—and she was still given an opportunity to run our country for four years. What is wrong with us as a people that we will punish and slander an entertainer—but willingly underwrite the corrupt lifestyle of a politician who endangers our country by her malfeasance?
Have we gone mad?
“What are Hillary Clinton's people complaining about with respect to the F.B.I. Based on the information they had she should never have been allowed to run – guilty as hell” Trump tweeted on January 13 in response to Clinton’s pouting and shouting that she lost the election because an FBI probe into her misconduct “stopped” her “momentum.”
Studies show that barely one in three Americans can name the three branches of U.S. government (executive, judicial and legislative) or has a solid grasp on how much our government truly spends on entitlement programs. Most Americans would be less hard-pressed to name the Patriots quarterback (Brady) and why he’s associated with a matter called “Deflategate.”
Enjoy the Super Bowl. Resist the temptation, however, to be swept away by the sensational entertainment to such an extent that you become vulnerable to Hillary’s plot to pummel President Trump. We can’t let America fall for the same reason Rome fell: bread and circuses.
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