Tuning Out Wokeism

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Tuning Out Wokeism
The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold, until—and if—a few, a “happy few,” finally say to the mob, “no mas.”
By Victor Davis Hanson

May 9, 2021
If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

911 No Longer

As big-city prosecutors choose not to prosecute “property crimes” or “brick and mortar” arsons and thefts, or what they consider “minor” misdemeanors or “nonlethal” felonies, crime spikes. The ancient principle of human nature then reigns supreme. The criminally inclined conclude the upside of hurting the weak, killing the innocent, stealing, destroying, looting, or simply causing mayhem far outweighs the rarer downside of being arrested, convicted, incarcerated, or worse. So all deterrence is lost. A cycle of chacun pour soi prevails.

Police in response make the necessary adjustments. Consider their bleak choices. Either they:

1) Go into increasingly high crime areas and get attacked or shot in the failed effort to make an arrest or restore calm; or

2) proceed to make an arrest, but the suspect, usually with prior felony convictions, resists, bolts, or attacks, and they use force to subdue him. In some cases, they can make a decision to risk doing so lethally, if they judge, rightly or wrongly, that the arrested is a threat to their lives. As a result, they are suspended, ruined, doxxed, vilified in the media, and their families and homes are put in danger; or

3) they apprehend the suspect, make the arrest without incident, but the woke district attorneys decide the suspect was not worth the time and controversy of prosecuting or find that the police acted in a way that might be suspect or at least alienate a jury of the suspect’s peers. Therefore, the arrested is released—omnis effusus labor; or

4) they safely arrest the suspect without incident. The state successfully indicts and prosecutes the accused. And if he is found guilty, he is incarcerated to protect society and to pay for his crimes.

In these revolutionary times, I think plenty of police officers—if they still have career choices and can afford temporary financial losses—will make the necessary adjustments. So they will decide that the odds of scenarios one through three are as great or greater than number four.

Therefore they will quit, retire, or move to rural, mostly crime-free jurisdictions. Or if not, they simply will not respond promptly to 911 calls from high-crime areas, and perhaps suggest that other police, those less likely to inspire community wrath, go in their stead.

The logic of these choices results in another series of likely unfortunate consequences:

Either: Police are still dubbed racists for not responding to the cries for help of vulnerable inner-city residents and for putting greater onus on minority officers who then must take greater risks than their colleagues. I think the above is already occurring and explains in part deracinated police forces, dangerous increases in crime, and essential no-go zones of chaos in our major cities. The upscale who demanded these changes are exempt by their own security measures or ZIP codes from suffering from them.

Or: All the above become irrelevant. Our major cities revert to 1970s criminal badlands, and most people steer clear. Others cannot worry about cause and effect, because, as the trapped, they struggle to survive in the fashion of Mad Max or Robocop. In response, the government likely will propose a nationalized police force, properly trained in uniform wokeness. Or maybe some well-insulated experts will continue to insist that crime is social justice, and so hope it spreads to the suburbs in justified redistributive and compensatory fashion.

Wokeism Everywhere
The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

So how does half a nation of proverbial Winston Smiths react to this revolutionary panopticon? The targeted seek escapes. They craft a mental refuge from the progressive lynch mob outside the Western jail. And half the country is also doing that already.

Does the propaganda of NPR and PBS news and editorialization cancel out their good programming of art and culture, such as they are, that is not propagandistic? Sadly, yes. People will tune both out. They’ve had one too many sermons from one too many condescending, nasal-toned grandee.

Do they put up anymore with network news? No, half the country has no idea who is currently the NBC, ABC, or CBS evening news anchor. Do they care about the New York Times or Washington Post? Nope. For a large number of Americans, being an editor at those places is not prestigious but an embarrassment. Is the nerdy Silicon Valley billionaire their model of can-do entrepreneurism? No, again. To half the country, they appear either like Charles Manson or those peach-faced adolescents who are really 40 or 50.

Movies? Tens of millions have not gone to a theater in years. Many never will again. They find watching revived 1960s comic book heroes, dressed up as narcissistic social justice warriors, boring and pathetic—a “see Spot run” primer script, a Kindergarten experience, despite the pyrotechnics and surrealism of computer-created special effects that poorly hide the lack of ideas.

Sports? Ditto. The NBA is an ancient memory. The NFL Superbowl half-time show has become politicized soft-porn and easily tuned out. The last rampart of Major League Baseball is breached. Multimillionaires too, baseball players cannot put up with three minutes of reverence, despite their $5 million-a-year salaries (about $30,000-a-game per season), for the flag and National Anthem.

Ask anyone to distinguish a Grammy from a Tony from an Emmy from an Oscar, and you encounter, “Who gives a f–k?” about these strange runes.

Does anyone but some captive students and a few faculty read the periodic communiques of terrified university deans, provosts, or presidents?




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