What happens when no one is woke enough?

Sooner or later, cancellations hurt those they are supposed to help

Margaret Thatcher famously said the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

I think wokeism is approaching a similar problem. Sooner or later you run out of people, places, things to cancel.

The cancellations start hurting the people they are supposed to help.

When activists such as failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams did not like Georgia’s new voting law, they protested and called it racist.

The national media and Hollywood celebs happily piled on.

Now, the Georgia law is probably not as pristine as the Republicans claim, but it is in no way as terrible as the Democrats say.

The cynics out there will suggest the whole thing was a tactic to denounce Republicans nationally as white-hooded racists and gain support for Democrats, particularly among Black voters.

Whatever the motive, Major League Baseball decided, yes, that’s terrible; let’s move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta.

The president jumped on board and said that was a great idea.

Wait, wait, said Abrams, don’t boycott us yet, it will hurt the minority workers at the ballpark!

But Ms. Abrams, how can MLB possibly do business in a state that passed a law that is, as President Joe Biden said, “worse than Jim Crow”?

In fact, how can any business remain in such a place?

The president called Georgia’s voting law “Jim Crow on steroids,” a preposterous characterization for anyone with a shred of honesty or the slightest knowledge of the brutal terrorism — cross burnings, lynchings by the hundreds — of the segregated South in the Jim Crow era.

So, off to Denver goes the All-Star Game, to Colorado, to Coors Field.

In Denver, which is mostly white, the game will benefit the players and the TV people — they will get paid the same.

The only ones the move will hurt will be the working people in Atlanta, many of them Black.

Once you start cancelling, where do you stop? If your bar is so morally high, so demanding of utopian perfection, what happens when no one qualifies?

Denver’s stadium is named for the Coors family, makers of beer and targets of a long history of accusations of racism. Maybe Denver needs to be cancelled, too. (There is no statute of limitations on these things — just ask George Washington.)

How about Minneapolis? The Twins could host.

But wait, Minneapolis is where George Floyd was killed, under the knee of a police officer with 18 prior complaints. Minneapolis allowed him to remain on the force. No All-Star game for that city.

Could the All-Star Game be played in New York? The governor there is almost daily facing charges of sexual harassment, even assault.

The people of New York elected Andrew Cuomo, and the state Legislature has yet to remove him. Does this not run afoul of the #MeToo

Movement? If we are going to be consistent, I don’t see how we could reward New York.

Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia? They have all adopted policies to end mass incarceration. That’s a good thing, right? Except the crime rates, particularly homicide rates, are soaring through the roof and who’s suffering most? The minorities, of course.

Is Major League Baseball going to punish cities whose policies lead to the deaths of minority victims?

No.

But they’re enlightened — they punished Georgia.