Wisconsin-based Swats Edge has made news lately with professional golfer Vijay Singh filing a lawsuit against the PGA for bringing to light his involvement with Swats. Swats Edge is a fairly new company that sells products like deer antler spray to replace illegal steroids, magnets to sleep on at night, athletic performance bracelets, and a fancy light that you need to contact the owner for more information on. I will let people come to their own conclusions about the validity of these products, but here is the product description from their “Athletic Performance Bands”:
The convenience of a S.W.A.T.S. Performance Chip on a convenient and sporty wrist band. Wear these bands for improved strength, balance, and flexibility. The hologram set within the band is programmed using our proprietary technology with a range of frequencies found in nature that react positively with the human vitality field. It has been showed to improve balance, flexibility, stamina and strength as well as contributing to an overall sense of well being among its users.
I’ll take the antlers and leave the rest.
Sure, I guess some people believe in items like programmable holograms and the positive effects of magnets or light energy… but how about the Tea Party? Sure, I’ll admit, it does seem like a big jump to start pointing fingers at the people who most likely are wearing tin foil hats to keep Obama’s CIA G-men from reading their minds. However, I did wonder about that connection for that reason. So, I went down the rabbit hole to follow the money on this company to see who it would lead to…
I can haz mind control?
The owner’s name is Alfred Anding, who was a realtor before he got into this sports science field in 2010. The business is located in Alabama, but was formed in Wisconsin in December of 2010. I was curious about that date when I first read up on Mr. Anding this morning, and so I decided to do a little more checking on his political preferences. The mid-term elections which had brought highly contested legislators like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker was too close of a coincidence for me. So I took a look at Alfred Anding’s political donations.
You can see a pattern in the donations by Mr. Anding who had been giving money to the Republican party, Citizen’s United Victory Fund, and Paul Ryan right up to the point that Wisconsin became a blurred red state encumbered by union-busting and shady deals with the Koch brothers. I will assume that he realized that putting money into politics wasn’t helping his real estate business, and so this side-venture into sports medicine came about. Then there were those odd fitness photo-ops for Paul Ryan…
The secret is the antler. Guess where I crammed it?
So we can establish that the owner of the company is most likely a fringe Conservative, he supported predominantly Tea Party interests, the IRS was recently seen apologizing for red-flagging Tea Party PACs, and Swats Edge suddenly appears after mid-term elections following donations towards forwarding the Citizen’s United ruling. It’s all thinly threaded together, but I currently don’t have the resources to investigate further into the matter. I would surely love to be able to conclude that the Tea Party actually does support something akin to wearing a tin-foil hat. This instead paints a picture of an old man wearing a colonial replica hat draped in tea bags, programmable anti-Obama holograms on his wrists, magnets on his feet, and every once in a while he sprays his junk with deer antler spray. For this I go back to one of my favorite movies to describe the Tea Party… Dr. Strangelove.
