The Cleveland Haemosporidians?

 

The Cleveland Indians will always be the Cleveland Indians for me. The Indians’ mascot will always be Chief Wahoo.  But over at PJ Media, Robert Spencer explains what's really going on:

With skyrocketing crime and inflation, a steady exodus of sane people from her state, and test scores of students in the state plummeting, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-Planned Parenthood) and her henchmen have turned their attention to the most burning issue of our day: sports team mascots that offend the woke. Now New York’s remaining residents can look around at their smoking ruin of a state, as they watch the people who broke into their house drive off in their car and console themselves with the thought that nowhere in their formerly green and pleasant land is anyone being traumatized because there’s a sports team around called the “Indians.”

The Albany Times-Union reported Tuesday that “the New York Board of Regents has officially banned all uses of images and names for school mascots related to indigenous people.” At this late date in the woke-ification of America, there wasn’t even any controversy over this: “The board voted unanimously Tuesday morning, without discussion.”

This was the culmination of a process that has been going on for a good while: “The proposal was announced by the state Education Department in November, and education officials have been urging school boards to begin the process to change mascot images and names ever since.” Why is anyone on the New York Board of Regents paying attention to this matter at all? Because, you see, fans of teams called the Indians and Chiefs and Braves and even Redskins never realized it, but all the time they were rooting for their teams, they were really indulging in an act of hate.

In the Left’s view, you see, people name their sports teams after things they despise. 

. . .

The war against mascots is also completely inconsistent. There are ongoing efforts to force the Minnesota Vikings to change their name because the name “Viking” supposedly glorifies colonialism and white supremacism. But if the “Viking” name glorifies whiteness, why don’t the “Chief” or “Warrior” or “Indian” names glorify Native Americans? The war against mascots is, in other words, simply another Leftist effort to make Americans generally ashamed of their own culture and heritage. A nation that is ashamed won’t have the will to defend itself. . . .

Read the rest here. 

Exit question:  In the interest of keeping fans ashamed of themselves and their team, why did not the Tribe owners select The Cleveland Worms instead of the Cleveland Guardians?  Or, if it was important to keep “dians” in the new name, well then, how about

The Cleveland Haemosporidians?

(For utterly fascinating information about the “avian haemosporidian parasite,” click here.)

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Weekend meme

BookwormRoom ran this meme in her weekend round-up:

 

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Tal Bachman: What it Means to be “Woke”

 

For those who seek a good explanation of what it means to be “Woke,” musician Tal Bachman has some good answers (posted at Mark SteynOnline).  Here’s an extract:

. . .Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name ("social justice") drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.

Although this is often denied to outsiders, Wokist theology requires hatred of America. It teaches that America was conceived in sin and remains insufferably sinful. It therefore decrees that America deserves execution and cremation into nothingness. Into that newly-created void, Wokism itself must move. Only then will righteousness prevail. Making this happen is a sacred obligation for all cult members. Their great success shows their sincerity.

It's worth mentioning that while Wokists want to destroy the United States of America, they don't mind the name. For now anyway, they want to keep it. Retention of the name "The United States of America" works as a kind of soporific: it helps obscure what they're actually doing.

And what they're actually doing is something like an Invasive Parasite Play: While keeping the outer forms (like the country's name, like "elections", etc.) intact, they move in to co-opt and control the structures and institutions which really run the country (which is to say, the structures and institutions which control us). As a result, millions remain oblivious that Wokists are destroying and replacing everything that ever constituted the country—that is, that they are changing what 'The United States of America' actually is.

Among many other things, that means first targeting public order, buildings, cities, fair trials, public trust, careers, police forces, education, laws, educations, freedom of speech and religion and assembly and press, codes of ethics, corporate practices, borders, political boundaries, the military, the economy, demography, religious beliefs, customs, music, books, myths, movies, family dynamics, sexuality, heroes, villains, history, aspirations, everything, and then, wherever possible, either destroying them or replacing them with Wokist substitutes.

I mentioned above the analogy of an invasive parasite, but this play is really something even more ambitious. It's a metamorphosis play, where infiltration, destruction, and replacement is followed by transforming the United States into some completely different entity altogether. That different entity is on track to resemble the former East Germany—a totalitarian puppet-state run by a lawless secret police, subservient to a greater foreign power—far more than any iteration of America throughout its history.

How did we get here? How have so many people—especially Millennials—fallen for a cheap, Marx-inspired, totalitarian deception?

The full column is here.

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