Former UFC heavyweight champion — and therefore, the putative "Baddest Man on the Planet" — Cain Velasquez, is being denied his right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, as he languishes in the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose while awaiting trial for shooting at, and missing, a convicted "chomo," or child molester, suspected of repeatedly molesting a "young relative" of Velasquez at a day care center (one of the bullets did hit the intended "victim's" stepfather, who was in with him in the vehicle, which Velasquez has also been charged with broadsiding).
While the accused molester did not actually work at the day care center, he lived in the family home in which it is located — the same scenario as at the infamous Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, which became the subject of a major scandal.
And note the convenient omission of the "young relative's" gender — which as you might have guessed is male, obviously because our esteemed media outlets want to be seen as "politically correct" (some of them did, however, report the "young relative's" age as four years old).
By contrast, the alleged molester — Harry Goularte, Jr. — is free on his own recognizance.
Does anyone honestly think that this would have happened in, say, Texas?
And is racism responsible for Velasquez getting remanded? Since Velasquez is Mexican-American and speaks Spanish (as well as English) fluently, did the judge feel that this made him, ipso facto, a flight risk — with him fleeing to Mexico, never to return?
Just think: perhaps we could have been treated to an episode of In Pursuit With John Walsh, the far less successful sequel to America's Most Wanted, profiling the former UFC champion.
In any event, Judge Shelyna Brown explained her decision to deny Velasquez bail thusly:
"It is clear to this court that there is clear and convincing evidence that there is a substantial likelihood that release would result in great bodily injury, not just to the named complaining witnesses in this case but to Santa Clara residents at large..."
Would she have said that, and ruled accordingly, if Velasquez had blond hair and blue eyes — like, for example, Brock Lesnar?
That is a matter upon which one can only speculate.
Following a 14-3 career record in mixed martial arts (with 12 of the 14 wins coming via the knockout route) and holding the UFC heavyweight belt on two separate occasions (Donald Trump will very likely follow in Cain's footsteps — and more to the point, Grover Cleveland's — come 2024), Velasquez retired from the sport in 2019 after losing two of his last three fights. He then turned to professional wrestling, first in Mexico (where his parents were born), and then for the WWE, before COVID-19 forced budget cuts that aborted his stint with that promotion.
One would think that Cain Velasquez never envisioned that he would find himself sucked into the vortex of our fratricidal culture wars — yet that is exactly what has happened to him.
And the extremists on both sides are keeping this vicious vortex in motion: on one side, there are the "woke" extremists of the left who want to teach 5-year-old boys that there is absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with wanting to become girls (or far less commonly, the other way around) — and once they do, they are perfectly free to compete on girls'/women's sports teams (will there be any geldings in the Kentucky Oaks on May 6?), and use women's bathrooms.
How far we have come — and not in a good way — since 1973, when conservative parents at Monsignor Farrell High School on Staten Island (whose chief claim to fame was when its football team got plastered 30-0 by Cincinnati's Moeller High School, where Gerry Faust coached at the time, in 1977) protested a sex education course entitled Contemporary Moral Questions (which the protesters mockingly referred to as Contemporary Immoral Answers) which covered such controversial (and sinful, pursuant to Catholic doctrine) practices as oral sex (the course's instructor, one Father Aldo Tos, lost his job at Farrell over the protests, and died in 2014 while awaiting disordination proceedings against him for alleged child sexual abuse).
On the other side, there are the extremists of the right, who are demanding that kids should be taught that slavery was really no big deal, and that the motive for it was "economic," not racial. They are just one step removed from Holocaust deniers.
The plight of Cain Velasquez has not gone unnoticed in the mixed martial arts community, as letters have come pouring in from members thereof calling on the judge that denied him bail to do the right thing and reverse her ruling — a petition to do just that expected to be filed before his formal plea hearing on May 6, postponed from its original date of April 12 at the request of Velasquez's high-profile attorney (to say the least), Mark Geragos. The hashtag #FreeCain has gone viral on twitter.
The egregious injustice of Cain Velasquez sitting in jail while the accused molester is free on his own recognizance makes even the rants of the likes of Florida governor Ron DeSantis seem utterly reasonable by comparison.
At least "Oh Jay Simpson, Number Thirty-Two — the Juice," as the late Howard Cosell took a gleeful delight in referring to him, was accused of actually killing two people. Plus the slow-motion "White Bronco Chase" (until that point, everyone thought that a white Bronco was John Elway) clearly marked O.J. as a flight risk.
As the defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti asked nearly a century ago: is justice dead?
And this Cain isn't accused of killing anyone — let alone his younger brother.
Free Cain.
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