One of the most popular video games in the entire world has just interjected itself into the ongoing “pride month” controversies erupting across the country — and could soon be joining the likes of Bud Light and Target on the ash heap of history.
So how did a video game synonymous with wanton violence (as most “first-person shooter”-type games like “Call of Duty” are) become entwined with allegations of being “woke”?
This sordid tale begins in, of all places, Glendale, California.
That particular West-Coast city was the place where a school board meeting devolved into utter chaos when upset parents showed up to protest the LGBT propaganda that one typically associates with California.
It was a reasonable request from parents, who would rather their children learn how to formulate grammatically correct sentences instead of formulating delusions of transgender grandeur, and yet was somehow still being presented as some sort of bigoted, anti-LGBT backlash.
Any parent can commiserate with the feeling of wanting to raise their children as they see best — not what some leftists see as “best.”
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Enter popular Twitch (the world’s biggest video game streaming platform) streamer Nickmercs. According to his YouTube profile, Nickmercs’ real name is Nick Kolcheff.
Kolcheff, who primarily streams the wildly popular game “Call of Duty” on his channel, chimed in on a comment from a fellow streamer about the Glendale ugliness:
They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue.
Well, this was too much for the Woke powers that be at Activision and they were quick to respond.
Due to recent events, we have removed the “NICKMERCS Operator” bundle from the Modern Warfare II and Warzone store. We are focused on celebrating PRIDE with our employees and our community.
Disney has a man in a dress working in the dress store for little girls at Disneyland. This is who Disney wants girls to see when they first walk in to pick out a dress. pic.twitter.com/Ta2dwyAaSa
No company was more strongly committed to patriotism and family values than the original company Walt Disney created.
How could it possibly have come to the point where Walt Disney’s legacy is in the hands of total idiots and nincompoops who enthusiastically support Sexual Perversion/Mental Disorder Pride and who would deliberately expose children to this?
The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021#PrideMonthpic.twitter.com/qgKPQAPaOY
— U.S. Embassy Kabul (@USEmbassyKabul) June 2, 2021
The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors.
But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down.
The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped.
We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts.
Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy. A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.
And gender studies programs — to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies — were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.
Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea.
Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.
The woke left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.
American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on transgender people, LGBTQ promotion, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgender ambassadors.
The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.
Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.
The White House manifesto called the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” offers a blueprint for how to massage nations abroad to accept our values that are increasingly at odds with much of the world’s.
Do Americans really believe that embracing drag-queen shows at military bases, abortion to the moment of birth, transgender men competing in women’s sports, and the promised effort to ban the internal combustion engine are effective ways to ensure good relations with the United States?
No wonder the Biden Administration’s new cultural imperialism is proving disastrous for a variety of reasons.
One, these imperialistic and chauvinistic agendas are pushed abroad at the very time the respect for the U.S. military is at an all-time low. It was humiliated in Afghanistan. It is now unable to recruit sufficient qualified soldiers. Its stocks of critical weapons are depleted.
The Pentagon leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, along with Joe Biden, do not radiate competence.
But they do exude woke pieties.
While we offend Middle East oil exporters and Central Europeans, China allies with Russia and Iran. India and Turkey triangulate away from the United States. Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.
Two, these warped standards are incoherent. Is an abortion-on-demand, totalitarian China therefore an ally? How could we damn supposedly non-woke Saudi Arabia as we begged it to pump more of its non-green oil before the 2022 midterms?
C'était l'une des 1ères photos prises à mon arrivée à Paris. 1 an plus tard, on a décidé de la refaire. Fière que l'entrée de notre ambassade reflète aujourd'hui mieux l'#IncroyableDiversité de mon pays 🇺🇸. Une valeur que je porte où que j'aille en France. pic.twitter.com/kkwdlQeWtz
— Denise Bauer, Ambassadrice des USA en France (@USAmbFrance) February 3, 2023
“This was one of the first photos taken when I arrived in Paris. 1 year later, we decided to take it again. Proudly the entrance to our embassy now better reflects the incredible diversity of my country. A value that I carry wherever I go in France.”
Is there any limit to the insanity to which representatives of today’s Community of Fashion elite will not be driven by Woke Ideology? The Daily Mail has found one more example proving that apparently absolutely no limit to their lunacy exists.
It might seem impossible to hurt the feelings of a 3,000-year-old corpse. But woke museum chiefs have stopped using the word ‘mummy’ to describe the remains of ancient Egyptians, all in the name of ‘respect’.
They say the term is dehumanising to those who died and – of course – an unwelcome throwback to Britain’s colonial past.
The phrase now deemed politically acceptable is ‘mummified person’ or ‘mummified remains’.
The British Museum says it uses the latter phrase to emphasise to visitors that they are looking at people who once lived, while the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle says that it has adopted the new terms for its mummified woman Irtyru, who dates from around 600BC, to acknowledge the history of colonial exploitation and to give her the respect she deserves.
National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh has also removed the word ‘mummy’ from labels on its human remains.
A spokeswoman said: ‘Where we know the name of an individual we use that, otherwise we use “mummified man, woman, boy, girl or person” because we are referring to people, not objects.
‘The word “mummy” is not incorrect, but it is dehumanising, whereas using the term “mummified person” encourages our visitors to think of the individual.’
Go to a bookstore these days or read Lithhub or the latest New Yorker or Paris Review and you will soon begin to think that literature consists of the life narratives, fantasies, and collected grievances of female neurotics, homosexuals, and oppressed persons of color.
As Aristophanes, at The Federalist, describes: the publishing industry has overwhelmingly gone Woke.
Even big-name authors now admit the publishing industry has gotten intolerably woke and hostile to men — it’s time for readers to fight back.
Joyce Carol Oates is a fixture in American letters — she’s won the National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, the Jerusalem Prize, and she’s been nominated for the Pulitzer five times. She taught at Princeton for 36 years, and is, of course, an outspoken Trump critic. A Google search for “Joyce Carol Oates” and “feminist” yields more than half a million results.
And even she thinks the publishing industry has become intolerably politically correct. On Twitter, she recently observed, the “category of straight white males is the only category remaining for villains & awful people in fiction & film & popular culture.” Oates isn’t alone in observing the problem — in June, ubiquitous author James Patterson, whose potboilers have sold more than 400 million copies, said white male writers now face “another form of racism” in the woke publishing industry, before he was bullied into backtracking on his comments.
Of course, if you’ve set foot in a large bookstore recently, what Patterson is saying has obvious merit. On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, a friend actually took photos and counted up the books on the six new fiction shelves displayed up front. Male authors made up less than 25 percent of the nearly 200 books displayed in the front of the store, and obviously, the percentage of men who were white and/or heterosexual was notably smaller than that.
Oates and Patterson are only now saying what many men with literary ambitions have long known. Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Alex Perez recently gave a scorched-earth interview to the Hobart Literary Journal where he discussed how male-centric literature was being deliberately shut out of publishing. During the interview, he had some choice words for the woke and disproportionately female gatekeepers of the industry:
These women, perhaps the least diverse collection of people on the planet, decide who is worthy or unworthy of literary representation. Their worldview trickles down to the small journals, too, which are mostly run by woke young women or bored middle-aged housewives. This explains why everything reads and sounds the same, from major publishing houses to vanity zines with a readership of fifteen. The progressive/woke orthodoxy is the ideology that controls the entire publishing apparatus.
Almost to prove his point, most of the editors of the Hobart Literary Journal resigned in protest over the decision to publish Perez’s interview. As for Perez, he’s mostly given up on his literary ambitions to write cultural and political commentary for publications that don’t neatly hew to center-left orthodoxies, such as Tablet.
The people running publishing have fully confused their profession with their secular religion. Perez isn’t just right that “everything reads and sounds the same,” but the greater crime is that when literature is culturally and politically homogenized, greatness becomes an outlier. The next Cormac McCarthy could be languishing because they were too busy greenlighting “Anti-Racist Baby.”
Judith Schiff 1937-2022, Chief Research Archivist, Sterling Library, Yale University.
OK.
The latest Yale Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Its key feature article this issue is a tribute to Judith Schiff who had contributed a popular “Old Yale” column to the alumni mag since 1987.
There is nothing wrong with the eulogy to the late archivist in itself. But there were all those little infuriating details that get the blood pressure of an elderly alumn seething.
In the midst of noting the admirable contribution those 219 “Old Yale” columns constituted over the long decades, Alumni Mag editor-in-chief Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 (the ever reliable source of left-wing self gratulation and cant) clocks in to gloat over persuading Ms. Schiff not to omit a pious condemnation of the Pro-Slavery views of John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804, in a column actually discussing Calhoun’s role in leading the House of Representatives in the direction of a Declaration of War against Britain in 1812.
Representatives of the Woke Left, like Ms. Lassila, never overlook any opportunity to point fingers in condemnation at, and to preen in moral superiority over, the errors of persons long dead. How can one possibly say enough about the spiritual magnificence and boundless generosity of members of today’s Community of Fashion in refraining from owning and trafficking in any slaves and their bravery in forthrightly denouncing an institution extinct for over a century and a half and absolutely lacking any current defenders?
Personal Tribute No. 1 comes from a member of the Class of 1971, a transfer who became one of the first female graduates of Yale College, and who “received the Yale Medal for projects highlighting Women and Minorities.” IMHO, there ought to be a much bigger medal for persuading whiny minority identity groups to go away and shut up for a change.
The Schiff article includes several warm personal tributes from Yale functionaries and factotums who were personally acquainted with the lady which are in themselves perfectly fine. However, the faithful reader discovers that Personal Tribute No. 2 is the product of the collaboration of one chap (M.A. 89) who is a “New Haven-based cultural organizer” (a term that inevitably tempts any right-thinking alumn to start reaching for his revolver) and another guy (’87, ’93MDiv) who is the Beinecke Library’s “director of community engagement.” What in hell is a Rare Book Library doing throwing away an annual full-time salary on paying somebody to “engage” the inner-city welfare/criminal class of New Haven? Are gang-bangers, coke dealers, hip-hoppers, and the ever-dwindling actual working class of a ruined rust-bucket small city supposed to have some sort of healthy and legitimate interest in the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, or some really cool manuscripts in Carolingian Miniscule?
Tribute No. 5 is from a member of the Class of 1979, ’84MD, and an adjunct psychiatry prof at Yale, who (inevitably) wrote a book about Yale and the Jewish Question, who tells us Ms. Schiff was a terrific help in researching one whiny identity group issue after another after another. That, of course, is what research universities and research university libraries are really for.
And it goes on and on. “When Judy Schiff went to work at Yale there were no senior women teaching at Yale College and no women undergraduates. There were no women officers in the university.” begins Tribute No. 6.
In Woke University-land and Woke-Alumni-Magazine-land, the entire universe, the entire corpus of human learning, and the whole focus of history is centered upon the amour propre, the grievances, and the glories of the triumphant elite establishment representatives of the sacred ressentiment-based Identity Groups.
It’s not that most articles are bad in themselves. It’s the fact that the rancid, worm’s-eye-view perspective of leftist grievance politics permeates everything and is accompanied by an inevitable associated tone of orthodoxy and dogmatism.
The great minds running Yale these days, and editing its publications, obviously never read John Ruskin:
Of all the insolent, all the foolish persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold your empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest,–that you have been so much the darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, and in the punctual place, when and where pure Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of the Nations; and that your papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the convenient neighbourhood of the steeple under which that Immaculate and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, child; it is not so.
Bang! All over America, you can hear the sound of one more issue of the Yale Alumni Mag flung from the hand of an older male alumn hitting the circular file.
People my age are old enough to remember the Disney hour that ran on Sunday nights on ABC starting in 1954. The weekly programs were generally introduced by the warm, avuncular Walt Disney himself. Walt Disney deliberately presented himself as a living embodiment of the totality of wholesome family values and American patriotism. Americans enjoyed his animated cartoons, movies, and television productions for most of the first half of the century, and the whole country was saddened when he was carried off by cancer at a relatively premature age.
The Disney Company, in recent years, has embraced Leftism and Wokery and turned it back decisively on the values of its founder. The New York Post reports on the public indignation over their latest outrage.
The celebration of Disneyland’s 67th anniversary turned sour over the weekend as some fans noticed that the Mouse House left out a nod to its controversial founder, Walt Disney.
Fans took to social media to call out the company for omitting Walt’s iconic opening day speech, which has featured every year since 1955 at the Anaheim, Calif., theme park.
“Why did Disneyland cut Walt Disney’s opening day speech from today’s anniversary celebration?,” asked one fan on Twitter.
Walt Disney, the man behind Mickey Mouse, has been both celebrated for his genius and condemned for alleged anti-Semitic and racist views. Although there is some debate over those claims, in recent years, the Mouse House has made sure to distance itself.
Former “Professional Wedding Vow Writer” Charanna Alexander, now editing The New York Times Weddings section.
Christine Rosen, in Commentary, reports that the flood waters of insane Wokery have swept away another cultural landmark: the Sunday New York Times Weddings section.
The New York Times Weddings section, once infamously described in an episode of Sex and the City as “the women’s sports pages,” recently announced that it is questioning whether marriage is worth saving at all. “The Weddings Section Asks What It Means to Be Committed in 2022,” the headline announcing the section’s new focus noted, but the question was clearly rhetorical. Its new editor, Charanna Alexander, has already begun to “move away from the traditional Times wedding announcement” and noted that the “evolved Weddings section” would now be “exploring what it means to be committed in 2022, whether or not that includes marriage.”
Evidently only rubes think marriage is an institution for raising families and ensuring social stability. Times readers know better. “I really came in wanting to change everyone’s perception of the types of couples we feature,” Alexander said. “I wanted to not only make it more racially diverse, but also culturally diverse. I just really wanted to look for holes in our previous coverage, so that we can start to be a section that everyone can see themselves in.”
If you are an average person who sees yourself in a traditional marriage, the Times is putting you on notice that your status has been downgraded. The traditional Vows column that runs every Sunday still features a story of a single couple, but the shorter traditional announcements that were long the meat of the marriage pages are no more. Instead, readers are invited to submit their stories for the diminutive Mini-Vows section, which might more accurately be called Struggle Love, since that is what it elevates. As Alexander puts it, “the common thread of all of our Mini-Vows is that the couples all share some moments of transition where they have to overcome something together.”
Presumably the Mini-Vows approach is meant to yield a section less apt to celebrate the predictable joining of family assets and/or Ivy League résumés. But what it has produced in its stead is a lot of emotive hyperbole and oversharing, the overall effect of which is remarkably banal. The new submissions process asks couples “to really dig deep into their love story and tell us what makes them click: how they came together; what their relationship means to them, and maybe even the people in their lives; and how they’ve changed since they’ve been together.” Alexander adds: “We’re just asking couples to go a little deeper, which gives us a better sense, once we get a submission, to say, ‘Hey, this is really inspiring.’” Merely getting married is too vanilla for the Times reader. Now, your story must be akin to a TED talk; it must “inspire” others.
