The Super Bowl is Coming... Panem et Circenses

Elon Musk told us we are NPCs, “non-player characters.” NPCs are background collateral damage in games he apparently enjoys when he’s not funding and amplifying right-wing extremism, exposing formerly secure Social Security and Medicare data, directing the construction of spacecraft that explode over the Gulf of Mexico, or overseeing the manufacture of self-immolating vehicles.

In Musk’s worldview, we aren’t citizens. We’re expendable scenery.

Lee Zeldin, of the Environmental Protection Plunder Agency, has updated the value of a human life.

Before Zeldin, the EPA used figures between roughly $9 million and $11 million per person in environmental studies and analysis. Under Zeldin and Trump, that number is now $0. If you wear a red hat, you are worth nothing. If you don’t wear a red hat, still zero. Your children are worth zero. Your grandchildren are worth zero.

People are being murdered in international waters by former Fox “News” pundit Pete Hegseth, or Kegsbreath as he is more commonly known.

Citizens and non-citizens are being shot, maimed, and killed in Los Angeles (Keith Porter) and Minneapolis (Renee Good) by Trump’s puppy-killing cosplay Barbie.

Venezuela has endured a military strike and the state-sponsored kidnapping of Maduro and his wife, while we pirate millions of barrels of oil we had apparently hidden under Venezuela for reasons known only to our criminal regime.

In between speeches where the criminal elect struggles to form a coherent sentence, he has attacked our allies by forcing American consumers to pay more for imported goods through his idiotic tariff strategy. His focus du jour is Greenland, a NATO territory. He has told Greenland we can buy them and they can become part of the United States willingly, or he will take them by force. Just like his history with girls and women, and let’s be honest, no one goes to such great lengths to hide their “innocence” as Trump has.

To be clear, it won’t be Trump or his children taking anything by force. It will be our sons and daughters, sent into danger by Trump and Kegsbreath against Europe and our former NATO allies. If this deranged malignant narcissist pedophile criminal elect follows through, every zero-value American will feel the economic reprisals. Beyond military options, our economy will be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of 27 European nations acting in concert.

So while the Trump-Bondi DOJ continues to ignore the law on releasing the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell files, while Trump threatens invasion, occupation, and domestic military deployment, and fumes about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize for ending wars that never existed…

We interrupt this fascist takeover of the United States with…

The Super Bowl!

Yes, in just a couple of weeks we will suspend our collective terror over the consequences of war against NATO, Minneapolis, Greenland, Iceland, Cuba, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, or whichever “blue” state or city this corrupt, lawless, incompetent cabal of executive-branch sociopaths decides needs a lesson in American military lethality.

We will be distracted from climate collapse. We will be misdirected from the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell files and every day the DOJ violates the Files Transparency Act, since December 19, 2025, if anyone is still paying attention. We will suspend our grief over the murders of Keith, Renee, and everyone else terrorized by Trump, Noem, Homan, and Bovino’s ICE thugs.

We will gather around backyard barbecues, eat chips and guacamole, knock down beers, and settle in for the annual Super Bowl spectacle. We’ll watch dogs playing football, ads for OpenAI and chip manufacturers like Intel, Pringles, and Frito-Lay. TurboTax will be there too, especially now that Trump canceled free IRS tax filing. Aside from the crowd in Santa Clara, nearly 130 million people will watch New England or Denver face off against Los Angeles or Seattle.

For the 30 percent of Americans who find worsening poverty, lost healthcare, mass corruption, and a ruling party building shrines to a pedophile criminal elect perfectly acceptable because liberal tears are delicious, enjoy the spectacle.

For the rest of us, regardless of political identity, we seek normalcy. A brief respite from a mercurial narcissist sociopath presiding over death, destruction, kidnappings, and crimes.

The athletes on Super Bowl Sunday are paid to suit up and battle because billions in economic activity will result. Money will flow to team owners, broadcast networks, municipalities, and the insatiable billionaires who underwrite our societal fall.

And when it comes to team owners, did you know that at least 94 percent of their political donations go to Trump and the criminal organization formerly known as the GOP? (see https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/nov/05/us-sports-team-political-donations-database).

I’ve boycotted the NFL since Colin Kaepernick was effectively barred. I had to research the teams still standing in the quest for this year’s contest. Football is the American system in miniature. Billionaire owners buried Kaepernick’s rights when truth, a protest against systemic racism and police brutality, threatened their bottom line. This wasn’t about sport. It was concentrated wealth suffocating morality in plain sight.

NFL owners are the same insatiably greedy billionaires who repay rabid fan loyalty by declaring every five to ten years that their stadium is obsolete, then extorting taxpayers for a new one under the threat of fleeing Los Angeles or Oakland, or Cleveland, or New York, for whichever city offers the biggest payout and the most lucrative tax breaks for themselves.

While the spectacle gives us an excuse to gather in homes, sports bars, casinos, and living rooms to eat, drink, yell at the TV, and argue about what play to call next, I would rather we join Colin Kaepernick, take a knee, and refuse to keep surrendering our attention to billionaires who are perfectly content with funding America’s decline while they extract, stockpile, and hoard money far beyond generational wealth.

Bread and circuses only work if we keep applauding.

Colin Kaepernick took a knee. Now it is our turn.

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• Upside Down and Sideways
• Blue Citizen 77
• The Dworkin Report
• Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
• Glenn Kirschner
• Resistance Media
• The Status Kuo
• LA Progressive
• The All American
• America’s Fractured Politics
• Timothy Snyder on Substack
• Liz Oyer, Former DOJ Pardon Attorney
• For Such a Time as This
• Polytricks
• The Great Progression
• Pete Buttigieg’s Substack
• James Vander Poel
• Ilene’s Substack
• Beverly Falls
• Martha Redsecker
• Heather Cox Richardson -Letters from an American (LFAA)
• Steady, Dan Rather