A ‘Woke’ Minority Has Seized America

The 2021 All-Star Game logo is displayed on the screen prior to the game between the Miami Marlins and Atlanta Braves at Truist Park in Atlanta, on Sept. 24, 2020. (Todd Kirkland/Getty Images)

Commentary

The problem with “progressivism” is that—as current events plainly demonstrate—there is no end to it. Once the adherents of critical theory turn their basilisk glares on one crucial facet of Western civilization or another, they won’t stop until they have destroyed our entire cultural edifice, and all in the name of “social justice” masquerading as “progress.”

That “progressivism” is the destructive philosophy of resentful losers matters nothing to them when their blood is up. That “social justice” is just another word for punitive fascism thrills them to the bone. That if the word “justice” needs a modifier then it’s not justice at all, but revenge, is the whole point. In the end-stage lives of peoples and cultures, even nations, the suicidal impulse to destroy becomes even more powerful than the urge to create.

Such a time is now.

America has been seized—there’s really no better word for it—by a small but powerful “woke” minority of politicians (almost all Democrats), senior military officers (promoted largely under Barack Obama), and media flunkies (who parrot their talking points and foment animosity through their selective, Marxist-prismed news coverage focused almost exclusively on race, sex, and class).

They’ve been abetted by a coterie of nominally capitalist CEOs—many of them foreign-born—who have either been transported by the tech revolution from countries like Russia to Silicon Valley; come up through the human resources affirmative-action ranks; or fastened opportunistically via vulture capitalism upon the still ambulatory corpses of traditional U.S. businesses that long ago lost the vision of their founders and invited outsiders with no emotional stakes in the enterprises to run them into the ground while profiting handsomely.

Gunning for Trump

From January 2017, every one of these groups was gunning for Donald J. Trump. They immediately knocked off Michael Flynn as national security adviser, launched “the resistance,” plotted their ballot-harvesting coup in 2018 in order to take back the House and reinstall Nancy Pelosi, the scion of the hinky d’Alesandro family of Baltimore, impeached Trump twice, and pulled off a perfectly executed Tammany strategy in the 2020 elections. They won close, but they won big.

And now, they’re acting like it. The doddering figurehead president, Joe Biden, dutifully signs executive order after executive order without so much as a single judicial demurer; when Trump tried that, obscure federal judges from as far away as Hawaii immediately ordered nationwide injunctions against his action, knowing that even were they overturned, they at least had tied up the administration with Lilliputian bonds that would take years in court to unravel.

If Trump so much as opened his mouth in public, the Democrat-Media Complex immediately swung into action with “fact-checks,” social-media bans, and a new, activist journalistic vocabulary that included the words “falsely” and “baseless” in nearly every story about the former president. In a trice, decades of aspirational objectivity and balance vanished from the pages of Pravda (The New York Times), Izvestia (The Washington Post), and Tass (The Associated Press), to be replaced with the party line.

Co-Opting

When revolutionaries launch their rebellions, the first thing they generally do is execute their political foes and bring the media to heel as an adjunct to the propaganda ministry. If they’re communists, they’ll also nationalize the industrial and commercial bases. But the Woke Revolution more closely resembles the Italian fascist and the German National Socialist models: Instead of killing the capitalists, they’ve simply co-opted them.

Chilling case in point: the corporate response to the state of Georgia’s reform of its voting rules in the wake of the progressive hash that panic-fueled COVID liberalizations made of the November election.

First, Major League Baseball summarily yanked the All-Star Game from Atlanta. Then, the London-born CEO of Georgia-based Coca-Cola, James Quincey, got into the act.

“We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation,” he said, as if any U.S. citizen should care what a British subject thinks of our political system.

Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines quickly piled on, soon enough followed by a host of virtue-signaling entities, all expressing dismay at a legitimate state legislative process.

Indeed, just the other day, dozens of corporate exeucrats gathered by Zoom to discuss voting rights and increased ballot access. According to The Wall Street Journal, the meeting was chaired by Kenneth Chenault, the former CEO of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the current CEO of Merck—the epitome of Big Pharma. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to sign on to Amazon Prime video or Netflix without having social-justice films shoved at your eyeballs, and a cursory glance at this year’s Oscar nominees reveals hardly a single film anyone would actually pay to see.

Domestic Sabotage

It seems we have thus reached the point that while the government, both state and local, and even private companies can now abrogate your First Amendment right to freedom of speech, faith, and assembly; your freedom to keep and bear arms; your freedom from unlawful search and seizure; and your right to public accommodation and travel, the one thing it can’t do or even countenance is to ensure that your vote is yours alone, and lawfully cast.

It’s an unprecedented act of domestic sabotage in the guise of diversity, tolerance, and caring.

On the corporate side, there’s the redolent whiff of fiscal opportunism: CEOs desire the approval of the red-diaper-baby media, and virtue signaling is easy and cheap; as long as they keep getting paid a fortune, what do they care? Under the Trump administration, there was no price to be paid for self-enriching progressive high-mindedness. Sure, there was some muttering on the right about boycotts, but just as in fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, big corporations did very, very well, and if there was any pressure on the bottom line it was hard to tell. And if you don’t believe me, ask Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg what kind of years they had in 2020.

And then there are the true believers, corporate kamikazes who don’t care if their industries collapse, as long as their hearts and minds are in the right place. COVID-19 has all but killed Hollywood and certainly has demolished the theater chains, but the dying studios and the ascendant streaming services will continue to churn out “socially conscious” propaganda films until the last dog dies. They’ll go down swinging, heroes to their valets at last. They won’t stop.

Until they are stopped. Getting control of the election system, making sure that only the legislature can set voting rules, de-fetishizing the franchise as some kind of secular sacrament, eliminating as much as possible such accretions as early voting, whimsical absentee voting, “cured” and “harvested” ballots, and ad-hoc extended voting hours implemented on the spot by an activist judiciary would all go a long way to restoring public trust in our elections.

Trust, however, is the last thing “progressives” want. They want victory, by any means necessary. And until you do something about it, that’s exactly what they’ll get.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.