08 Apr 2021 Endless (Unrest) Summer

After a year of flattening the curve, declaring that black lives matter and having a bipolar fascination with election integrity, it’s time for the “first open-world test” of the longevity of the “moral panic” that the woke, cancel, destroy (WCD) mob has created.

“The Great Awokening of 2020 was abetted in large part by the lockdowns,” notes Free Enterprise Project Deputy Director Scott Shepard in a Townhall commentary. “If people – you know, the non-woke ones whose outside activities didn’t magically cure COVID – had been free to roam about the world and to respond fully to indignity after indignity and crime after crime as they were stacking up, sanity would likely have been restored fairly quickly.”

But now that the vaccines are leading to a lessening of the lockdowns, there must be a reset of the societal equilibrium. As Scott sees it, this means there will be a lot of reckoning this summer as the center-right gears up to battle for the soul of the nation.

At the moment, leftists have a grip on the gears of the federal government. They’ve wasted no time trying to ram through their agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives and through executive White House actions. Throughout their ranks, their pointed accusations show how they’re being corrupted by their power:

It’s worth reminding leftists that not very long ago they deeply opposed the McCarthyism they now practice – though current events suggest that perhaps they only opposed its use against allies of theirs, while admiring the oppressive concept itself.

Uncertainty at this point revolves around just how much power the left can hold onto as people emerge from COVID cocoons and are able to speak up for themselves. And while the left likens conservative governance and policy ideas to “Jim Crow,” Scott suggests that it’s actually the Antifa/BLM/green/leftist political coalition that is basing its leadership style on that brand of repressive rule-making. But there’s a catch:

The old Jim Crow in the South required a whole complex of state laws and power to survive. And that was against, in most parts of the South, a minority of the population. This New “Antiracist” Jim Crow, if it is to continue after the lockdowns, will have to be instantiated into law the same way, and then applied with massive force.

Hence the uncertainty of how the uprising over the last year will settle into equilibrium. Scott explains that the WCD movement could wither away. It could ridiculously expand to where wokeness will be “wielded by all” and “everyone will have the power to cancel” in a scenario of mutually-assured destruction.

And the scariest outcome, and undoubtedly the most desired by the left, is the WCD mob “try[ing] to enforce its New Jim Crow nationwide.” Scott says “[t]here’s legitimate reason to fear this”:

Indoctrinating the military about “extremism” but only of the almost entirely mythical “white supremacy” kind, rather than the kind that has caused billions of dollars worth of damage in the last year; a bill that would make election cheating by the parties that control the cities uncontestable; a bill that would force the unwilling disarming of millions of Americans, rendering them ripe for control: it sure looks like the preliminaries to massive coercion, doesn’t it?

So the practical choices are either stopping the WCD push peaceably this summer or saving up vastly uglier prospects for not very far down the road.

To read all of Scott’s Townhall commentary – “As Lockdowns End, Either Woke Recedes or Freedom Does” – click here.