Category: Culture

The Appeal of the New Totalitarians.

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom.

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote?

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.)

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.

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I and others think the comparison is closer to today’s commie China with its fascist corporatism than Hungary was back then, but whatever..

Comment O’ The Day:
“The people who told us that the election of Donald Trump would usher in 1984 are busily ushering in 1984.” Dr. Maturin

The culture curators want to think for you.

Sandor Mecs was a child when his family lived in the town of Szentendre, Hungary. Today, it is a picturesque town 20 miles north of Budapest that is lined with winding cobblestone streets, colorful centuries-old homes, cottages, and churches and is a tourism center with its flourishing museums, charm, and proximity to the capital.

While the picturesque footprint was the same for Mecs and his family and thousands of other Hungarians 60 years ago, life in post-World War II Hungary was anything but ideal if you were a free thinker.

“At that time, we had become a Stalinized state of the Soviet Union, and Matyas Rakosi ruled the country for over seven years as a dictator who demanded no one strayed from the collective approved government thought,” he said.

If you did, you disappeared.

“Everything in government was militarized, and everything in our culture, the arts, the media, where you shopped, was all part of the government,” he explained.

There was no freedom of thought. You believed what the government and, by default, culture and new organizations told you to believe.

The government force was so oppressive that it established a secret police called the AVH, or the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, to make sure everyone thought the same and that no one dissented from whatever the government believed. Mecs explained, “My parents and family members lived in fear of people overhearing a conversation that might deviate from accepted thought.”

He said his father understood that after the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 failed, it was time to flee the family’s home country.

“You have to understand when you leave, you leave everything behind, whether it is family members, belongings, or the roof over your head,” he said. “A week after the revolution, my dad realized we’ve got to get out of here, and we literally snuck across the border with Austria in the dead of night.”

Back then, there were people who, for money, would get you safely across the border. “They were taking groups of maybe 20 people at a time and getting them past the barbed wire. One of the border guards actually caught the group that we were in when a very familiar face caught his eye,” he said.

It was the guard’s sister, “so he let us go,” he said.

Within a short period, over 200,000 men, women, and children escaped their homeland, much like the Mecs family did. It was an exodus and scattered much of the educated and intellectual class. The only people who could afford to leave managed to spread globally, with many of them going to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Many intellectuals in the U.S. toss around the word “dictatorship” or “dictator” about political parties they don’t like frequently, and with such abandon, it is now deemed normal in some circles to use the terms without irony, primarily when referring to the Republican Party.

In their zeal to dismantle conservatism, they miss the true dictator in our country. They are our cultural curators. The corporations, much of the media, the entertainment industry, major league sports organizations, academia, and Silicon Valley all demand that we fall in line with how they think. They want to approve of how we speak, what books we read, what movies we watch, what words we use, who we support politically, how we educate our children, and what parts of history are acceptable to teach.

Many of these entities have gone from trying to appeal to a wide range of customers based on the products they sell or services they offer into social justice organizations, far removed from their core missions and their consumers.

When one of them deems something unacceptable in its version of the world, many others follow suit, often crumbling to their younger employees’ demands. The latter has been given enough power in this age of corporate social justice to destroy the very place they work if that corporation does not bend to their demands.

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The best interpretation of “woke” is as a synonym for “crazy, stupid, and vicious”.

When Will the Woke Go Full Caligula?

The other day, I was scrolling through Twitter when I happened upon this particular tweet, directed against the former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss:

“Imagine if @bariweiss offered 10% of the defense she gives white supremacy to all the antifascist, Jewish-allied, Black and brown women of color she has made a career putting in danger,” it said. “NYT staff of color felt so unsafe around her that she had to resign.”

Something about this tweet struck me instantly: it was completely insane. No thinking person can hold that Weiss is anything but a political moderate with no sympathies whatsoever for white supremacism and neither the power nor the desire to harm anyone.

I also understood, however, the likely motivation behind the attack: Weiss has recently emerged as a strident voice against cancel culture and the amorphous but potent phenomenon known as “Woke.”

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