I am riven with professional jealousy.
An opinion writer, if they are doing their job, should be providing chewing gum of the mind, something provocative for their readership to mentally masticate for the rest of the day. If they are doing their job exceptionally well, they might even deliver an insight of such resonance that it migrates from their readership to become a national talking point.
Two writers, one professional the other an amateur, have recently done just that.
And paid the price.
Rugby columnist Sam Casey wrote a piece arguing that women’s rugby was getting too much of the Covid-reduced NZ rugby pie. He was fired days later. An anonymous private won a defence force essay contest writing a critique of army ‘inclusivity’ and after the usual moaning from a handful of social media jerks, had his piece expunged from an army website and was told the decision to award him the prize was ‘an error’.
The trespasses that these two gentlemen committed were not moral or legal. Their crimes were religious. They had transgressed one of the solemn tenets of Wokedom.
More and more, Woke progressivism has taken on the features of a religion: irrational to those not of the faith, obsessed with purity, and eagerly looking forward to a promised land. And, like all religions, it has its commandments.
1. THE STATE IS YOUR GOD. YOU SHALL HAVE NO GODS BEFORE IT.
Government is not the necessary evil required for collective endeavours, it is the instrument by which all the injustices of human life must be righted. Never forget that all this Woke buffoonery comes with the backing of state violence. While telling bad Woke jokes gets you a gig with TVNZ, telling the wrong joke (under the proposed hate speech laws) gets you three years in prison.
That’s as many years as you get for assaulting a police officer.
2. IMAGERY, GRAVEN OR OTHERWISE, IS EVERYTHING.
It’s not what you do, it’s what you are seen doing. Rainbow flags, BLM bumper stickers, masks on buses and, God help us, Jacinda T-shirts. This is particularly true online; ‘Virtual’ signalling I call it. Changing your Facebook profile pic to George Floyd’s is more important than any attempt to understand racial issues in the USA. Tweeting out your empathy for the famine in the Sudan is more important than actually doing something concrete for the Sudanese. Like giving them money. Study after study has shown that the politically conservative give more to charity than the most progressive of progressives. They just don’t brag about it online. To do that they’d have to work out how to turn on the i-Phone X their daughter gave them for Christmas.
3. YOU SHALL NOT TAKE THE WORDS OF THE WOKE IN VAIN.
Here’s why our soldier friend came under fire. He dared to challenge ‘inclusivity’, one of the holy words of the Church of Woke. ‘Diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘social justice’ are others. All of them vague nebulous terms that can be employed by the Woke clergy to justify any mad scheme of the moment they wish. If you demur with language of your own it will be asserted that ‘words are violence’. This is of course untrue, as any man who has been both called a ‘nut sack’ and kicked in the ‘nut sack’ will know.
4. FORGET THE SABBATH. AND ALL OTHER CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS.
Christianity is the font of all evil. It’s to blame for homophobia, colonialism and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’. While I agree on the last charge, there’s also two thousand plus years of community, charity and reassurance in the face of human suffering and death to be added to the ledger.
But maybe they just want to sleep in on Sundays.
5. DISHONOUR YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER
The nuclear family is repressive and wrong. Two lesbians and a trans-man with their lab-created non-gendered multi-racial super baby is an infinitely superior family unit. Why? It’s less to do with social justice or morality than with their dad not buying them that pony for their 14th birthday.
6. YOU SHALL NOT MURDER THE EARTH.
Even if it murders you first. If Covid is a reminder of anything, it’s that Mother Nature is a mother effer. The Woke treat her like she’s a violated innocent. With climate change the chief violation. Well, a bit of coal and oil extraction ain’t nothing on cancer, senile dementia and whatever messed up thing Stephen Hawking had.
7. ADULTERY? YOU SHALL NOT EVEN GET MARRIED.
Marriage is a heteronormative patriarchal impost. I think that’s what my ex-wife yelled at me as she got in the car to leave with her personal trainer. The Woke would rather we had vague sexual alliances without commitment. Nice idea, doesn’t work. Evidence: Charlie Sheen. Some Woke folk suggest we should reject monogamy for polygamous arrangements. Terrible idea, doesn’t work. Evidence: the entire Middle East.
8. YOU SHALL STEAL FROM THE ‘RICH’.
Income inequality is a bugbear of Woke folk. It used to be poverty was the problem, not having food to eat being a major constraint on human happiness. Now it’s that your neighbour parks his Maserati so you can’t get to your Toyota.
Their original solution is to tax the rich as long as it’s not their daddy’s off-shore bank accounts. They’re still holding out for that pony.
9. YOU SHALL BEAR FALSE WITNESS ABOUT BIOLOGY.
A man is a woman if he says he is. Sorry. If they say they is. Sorry. If they say they are. What if I was referring to a group of men saying they were women? What’s the collective noun for a group of men who say they are women? Transformers? ‘Transisters’? This stuff is exhausting.
This is the commandment Sam Casey the rugby writer broke when he suggested that men’s rugby and women’s rugby were not played at exactly the same level. I look forward to the first woke mixed-gender rugby team tournament. And the lawsuits that result.
10. YOU SHALL COVET ANY ASS YOU WANT.
According to the Woke there is no love as great as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. It seems to have gotten over that recently and been speaking its name rather a lot. Which is all well and good but do the 97% of us doomed to boringly heterosexual relationships have to be reminded how much fun they are having? Stop dancing and put your shirts back on.
Please share this BFD article so others can discover The BFD.