Woke Sox

FROM OUR PRINTED MAY 2021 EDITION

by Edward W. Wagner

Now that the Boston Red Sox are hosting games at Fenway Park with an actual audience, fans streaming over from Kenmore Square will notice, as they cross the bridge over the Mass. Pike, some new visual improvements in and around the Park: A football-field-long “Black Lives Matter” sign on the wall that runs alongside the pike underneath Landsdowne Street – brightly lit and in Red Sox style lettering. The digital sign on top of the garage at the end of Landsdowne Street also memorialized George Floyd’s name for about six months (I doubt that any of the victims of the marathon bombing got that kind of treatment). During last year’s fan-less season, if any TV camera panned across the interior of the ballpark, in addition to the cardboard cutouts of “fans” in the stands they would show the giant BLM sign covering the bleacher seats.

Since April of this year Republican sports fans have been witnesses to the breathtaking mendacity and cynicism of the major league baseball front office: At once colluding with the Democratic machine to enable vote fraud, preaching wokeness to its ticket holders and collaborating with the slave masters of the Chinese Communist Party.

What Massachusetts baseball fans probably don’t realize is that the Red Sox are the wokest entity in all of major league sports. Go to RedSoxFoundation.org (advertised alongside most of the BLM signage) and click on the “Social Justice, Equity and Inclusion” tab.

There you will find a declaration that in sheer woke Uriah Heepishness matches anything from a second tier college administrator or corporate HR department.

Here are the names of the S. J. Equity and I. Advisory Committee:

   Bekah Saltwasser, Chair

   Zineb Curran

   Raquel Ferreira

   Kensha Grandoit

   Adam Grossman

   Adan Severino

   Pam Kenn

   Janelly Rodriguez

   Marcita Thompson

   Amy Waryas

   Kurt Zwald

From a cursory Google search I have not yet found anything of interest (thus far) about these people except that they all have jobs as PR flacks in Red Sox Inc. Well, there is one exception:

The chair, Bekah Saltwasser, seems to be Suffolk District Attorney Rachel Rollins’ sister. There is nothing in the Red Sox promotional literature reporting this.

The rest of the Web pages carries links to just about every woke, racialist, anti-law enforcement organization that has a website, including:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd

George Floyd Memorial Fund

   Justice for Breonna 

   Reclaim the Block

   National Bail Out

   Nationwide Bail Fund

   Black Lives Matter

   Black Visions Collective

   Campaign Zero

   National Bail Fund Network 

   Unicorn Riot

   Massachusetts Bail Fund 

   Equal Justice Initiative 

   NAACP Legal Defense Fund 

   National Police Accountability Project

   The Center for Constitutional Rights

   Forward Together

   US Human Rights Network

   King Boston

   Violence in Boston

   The Okra Project

   He is Me

   The Teacher’s Lounge

   Love Your Magic

   DJ Henry Dream Fund

   The New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund

Then there’s the reading list! Which include authors such as:

   Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

   Ta-Nehisi Coats

   Angela Y. Davis

   Reni Eddo-Lodge

   Robin DiAngelo

   Ibram X. Kendi

   Mumia Abu-Jamal

   Layla F. Saad

   Jennifer Harvey

Frantz Fanon

The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee

With titles such as:

“Black Skin. White Masks,” “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race,” “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” “White Fragility,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?,” “How to Be an Antiracist,” “Between the World and Me,” “Waking Up White,” and “Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” “The End of Policing.”

I don’t know what the story is with other MLB franchises. I have not looked at the website of any other team. I do know that this corporate fish rots from the head down. John Henry is an emblematic NPR liberal, unctuous, petty and hypocritical. Curt Schilling, the hero of the ’04 championship, has been snubbed and blackballed for years simply because of his politics. Henry lives in Brookline, owns the Globe, and supports the Mass. Democratic Party establishment. But where did he make his money (a little more than $2 billion)? Before it closed, the John Henry soybean commodities trading outfit operated out of … low tax Boca Raton, Florida. So just as with the estate of Rose Kennedy – high taxes for thee, but not for me.

And it is going to get worse. Who is buying a piece of the Red Sox? Who is going to be John Henry’s and Tom Werner’s business partner? The most despicable figure in all of American sports: LeBron James, who will using some of his obscene Chinese sweatshop profits to take a ten percent stake ($735 million) in the parent company of the Sox. And he will not just be a passive investor. The Boston Globe reports: “LeBron James won’t be a hands-off co-owner of the Boston Red Sox, according to Fenway Sports Group chairman Tom Werner.”

I wonder: Will the souvenir shops, inside (at least two) and outside the park, sell merchandise labeled “Made in China by Slaves?” If LeBron attends a game, will he sit or stand in his VIP box during the National Anthem? Or will they just abolish playing it altogether?  ♦