Giant corporations that demand ID for ticket sales like MLB and Delta Airlines are decrying a Georgia voter ID law that does the same thing. James Howard Kunstler explains at LewRockwell.com that this is “peak woke.” He writes (abridged):
What were the execs of these mighty companies thinking — these knights of the boardroom, these capitalist geniuses, these moral nonpareils — when they cancelled Atlanta’s turn to host the midsummer All-star Game to “protest” Georgia’s passage of a law that requires voter ID? Surely that they were striking a righteous blow against systemic racism. And then, the rest of the world realized — almost immediately — that Major League Baseball requires online ticket buyers to show ID when they pick up their tickets at any stadium… and that Delta Airlines requires passengers to show ID (duh) before being allowed to fly in one of their airplanes… and that various other corporations snookered into this latest hustle such as Nike, Coca-Cola, and Calvin Klein support forced labor in the Asian nations that manufacture their products.
They’re Woke, you see. The tentacles of Wokery have reached into every last compartment of American life now, more effectively even than the Covid-19 corona virus. Wokeness emerged on the scene in 2014 when the feckless teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson upon arrest in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement. The moral panic BLM ignited proved to be a spectacularly effective device for repelling the truth of the situation, and many more like it, which was that Michael Brown resisted arrest, fought with, and menaced officer Wilson before getting shot.
The Woke moral panic that proceeded from this effectively suppressed two truths about police relations with Black America: 1) that Blacks committed crimes against life and property at a disproportionately high rate to their percentage in the US population, and 2) that the number of unarmed black people killed by police was statistically minuscule, and in most cases involved people resisting arrest or fighting with police. As the 2016 election approached, the Democratic Party realized it was in its interest to cultivate the Woke moral panic so as to marshal the Black voting bloc so crucial to victory at the polls.
With the help of their allies in the news media and the coddled faculty ideologues on campus, the Democrats fed this moral panic until it grew into an historic mass hysteria every bit as insane as the witchcraft hysterias of the Middle Ages in Europe. Then Mr. Trump came along, inflicting a savage trauma on the Left, and after his election, the news media and the campus crusaders were joined by very potently placed officers in the federal bureaucracy — especially the Intel Community, with its weapons for disordering public opinion, and the Department of Justice, with its ability to ruin lives and reputations — to crush Mr. Trump and everyone who opposed the Left’s will-to-power.
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