I’ve never been a great fan of the Olympics—that quadrennial parade of fleeting patriotism for mostly unfamiliar sports, involving athletes who will, even in the best-case scenario of winning the gold, fade back into irrelevance after their 15 minutes have passed.
The growing politicization (and likely corruption) of the games, as with all things global, has done even more to spoil their mystique in recent years.
Amid this year’s anti-American virtue-signaling, COVID panic-mongering and letting a transgender man compete in women’s weightlifting, there is only one event where the games have truly excelled: shark-jumping.
Former President Donald Trump noted as much in a statement Thursday criticizing the US Women’s Soccer Team, led by loud-mouthed social activist Megan Rapinoe.
“If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze,” Trump said.
“Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has,” he added. “… The woman with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!”
SYMBOL OF DECLINE
The empty seats in Tokyo (due to pandemic fears) have been mirrored by the empty couches back home, with a record number of Americans, including myself, opting to tune out.
Consequently, there was little interest or investment for me in the ‘scandal’ surrounding gymnast Simone Biles.
Biles—who could not keep her head in the game after reportedly forgetting her ADHD medication—withdrew from early team events but finished the individual competition with an bronze medal for the balance beam. Without her help, the US women’s gymnastics team took home an overall silver after getting bested by Russia.
For conservative viewers (and non-viewers), the pervading response to her self-indulgence seemed to be an apathetic ambivalence.
Yet, leftists in the media were insistent that I, and others doing our best to ignore the games, absolutely must have an opinion on it.
Having staked out the turf of phony, disingenuous empathy, left-wing commentators projected onto their ideological counterparts the role of righteous indignation.
We, the deplorables, were supposed to be outraged over Biles’s decision let the Russians win the gold.
“Simone should have done it for the team!” say all the unvaccinated asshats.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) July 30, 2021
In reality, we expected nothing more.
Simone Biles’s withdrawal was the quintessentially American thing to do in the Biden era—an act symbolic of the fallen and broken mentality that has overtaken the entire country.
Biles became the Wheaties-box pitchwoman for the post-American dream, in perfect contrast to what used to constitute Olympic heroism and greatness: when gymnasts like Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug powered through excruciating injuries to triumph as the eyes of the world looked on.
In this new normal, those once driven to reach the top—like Simone Biles—may achieve the ultimate flex of socially conscious upmanship by tearing down the very systems that helped to elevate them on the backs and shoulders of others.
And America, like those faded athletes of yore, seems destined to retire into obscurity.
AMERICA ME FIRST
By putting herself first, giving our old Cold-War rival the opportunity to step onto the center podium, Biles’s actions, in fact, mirrored the Biden administration’s reckless and reactive policies.
These tend to couch devastating long-term impacts, such as weakening our geopolitical standing, beneath short-term sugar-rushes that play well to the obsequious and propagandist media.
Take, for example, the inflation created by massive infusions of debt and imaginary wealth being invented from thin air. The paltry stimulus checks that many received already have been offset by rising consumer costs.
But the entitlement spending programs that lie ahead will come with even more harsh consequences. The beneficiaries of today’s free preschool will pay for it in the long run with reduced spending power and marketplace autonomy.
Then, there is Biden’s utter capitulation to global superpowers like China and Russia in areas such as trade and military presence.
In return for being spared personal humiliation by the likes of Vladimir Putin, the president allowed Russia to step in and take control of European energy interests via the Nord Stream II pipeline.
Meanwhile, he has destroyed American energy independence for the sake of a vague, yet costly, Green New Deal agenda.
And Secretary of State Antony Blinken hinted recently that letting China move into Afghanistan—the country that Americans paid a heavy toll to liberate from the Taliban—might be a good thing.
UPENDING CULTURAL VALUES
Most alarming of all, however, is the Left’s promotion of a new anti-capitalist paradigm in which the perception of safety triumphs over the assumption of risk. Consequently, defeat is often more virtuous than success.
I often wonder why so many corporate aristocrats and billionaire oligarchs who have attained the ultimate in wealth and privilege, courtesy of capitalism, now wish to undermine it.
The obvious answer is that, after having already crossed over the bridge to personal achievement, allowing others to do so would threaten the ruling elites. They would much rather it be a drawbridge—to which they control the levers.
They succeed by fostering in the less fortunate a sense of helplessness, an inversion of the erstwhile American spirit to blaze new, uncharted trails and conquer new terrain.
Instead, the left-wing, pro-Marxist Establishment reroutes any would-be pioneers back to the well-beaten paths that invariably lead to their toll booths.
THE NANNY–POLICE STATE
The same is true of the recent push for new pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
The failure to muster widespread, popular interest in them, like the failure to capture Olympics viewers, stems from the lack of faith and trust that that those overseeing the process actually represent America’s virtues and values.
With some, such as coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci and CDC head Rochelle Walensky, it is clear that they do not represent the broader interest of the American people.
Their inconsistent diktats and divisive rhetoric have done nothing to help mitigate the spread of COVID—nor do they truly wish it to eradicate the virus that some, such as Fauci, may have been instrumental in helping engineer. Doing so would render them irrelevant.
As they try desperately to keep lit the eternal flame of the pandemic using scare tactics, it’s little wonder that healthy, young adults who truly believe in freedom would sooner accept some risk of contracting a 99% nonlethal malady than to mindlessly comply.
The only solution: impose a social stigma.
Overheard: “The irony of antivaxers saying they don’t want to be part of an experiment without realizing they are now the control group.”
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) July 29, 2021
Despite the claims of Lt. Sulu, so-called antivaxers who are resisting the experimental COVID shots tend to be fully aware of their part in the bigger picture.
Vaccine skeptics are, ironically, the only way to make Fauci’s pseudo-science into a true experiment.
But that terrifies the globalist powers, who know that having a control group to an experiment will help to expose the placebo effect of their own fraudulent stewardship.
KNEECAPPING THE AMERICAN DREAM
To the left-wing, Marxist mentality, the ends justify the means. There is no difference in how you attain power and domination, as long as you can retain it by any means necessary.
This pernicious spirit effectively makes them the Tonya Hardings of the great American narrative.
But Olympic glory was never about the outcome. It was about the spirit of perseverance, determination and struggle that gave those unknown athletes a shot to succeed.
Simone Biles’s great disappointment, thus, wasn’t that she lost a gold medal for herself, her team and her country.
It was that she never cared about winning it in the first place—and neither did we.
In spite of it all, their have been stories of redemption, such as Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin.
But they’re far less likely to be celebrated than the mediocre, losing athletes who prioritize public spectacles to grab headlines.
“There were, however, a few Patriots standing,” Trump said of the women’s soccer team.
“Unfortunately, they need more than that respecting our Country and National Anthem,” he continued. “They should replace the wokesters with Patriots and start winning again.”
