America is in the midst of one of the great moral panics in our nation’s history. If we don’t stand up for our nation’s core values, the situation could get even worse – and soon. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last three weeks, you’ve probably noticed the organized campaigns to get college and even high schoolstudents expelled or denied admission based on their political views. You’ve also seen gleeful mobs celebrating as Americans lose their jobs for running afoul of someone’s momentary political obsessions.
In every sector of American society, people are having their careers destroyed to the pitiless baying of the “woke” masses. It’s happening in business. CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman spent 20 years building the fitness brand into a multi-billion dollar company, only to be thrown out of the empire he built for declining to go along with the “racism is a public health crisis” dogma.
It’s happening in journalism. New York Times editor James Bennet, a liberal, was fired for publishing an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator advocating for a military response to nationwide rioting -- a position the majority of Americans agreed with. The same fate befell Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischowski, who was terminated for approving an article that condemned looting and arson.
It’s happening in entertainment, in academia, and pretty much anywhere someone can be found who is not sufficiently supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s even happening to people who didn’t do anything at all. An L.A. Galaxy soccer player was forced to resign because his wife tweeted that rioters should be shot. A lawyer in San Francisco was fired because his wife was rude to a man she thought was spray-painting BLM propaganda on a building that wasn’t his (it was). On Thursday, this Stasi-esque trend reached another level when a company called Equity Prime Mortgage fired the stepmother of the officer charged in the controversial shooting of drunk driver Rashad Brooks after he fought with and fired a taser at police. The stepmother was apparently fired for no reason other than family loyalty.
On Monday, the panic reached what one can only hope will be its peak when a San Diego Gas and Electric employee lost his job for “making a white supremacist hand gesture.” We’ve long since debunked the notion that the OK sign is somehow racist -- that was just a fiction perpetrated by internet trolls -- but in this case, this man lost his livelihood despite the fact he wasn’t even making an OK sign. He was apparently cracking his knuckles as he drove.
What America is going through right now is not merely another, more intense round of “cancel culture.”
We’re now in the midst of a full-force, totalitarian remolding of our society, one that seeks to place the petty resentments of an outraged minority of leftist activists above everything else in American life. Because of their willingness to riot, loot, and assault anyone they perceive to be insufficiently sympathetic to their cause, leftists are able to bully ordinary people into submission. As a result, television shows such as “Cops” and “Live PD,” classic films such as “Gone With the Wind,” and iconic brands such as Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Buttersworth, and Uncle Ben’s rice are consigned to the “dustbin of history.”
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