Those weary of political correctness on steroids may be wondering when the woke dam will break. For years now, anyone who does not hew to every jot and tittle of progressive leftist ideology has been slammed, fired, socially canceled, and often rendered unemployable.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) writes that more than 1,000 cancellation campaigns have targeted college professors who step out of line in recent years. FIRE claims that modern “cancel culture” has a destructive power that “dwarfs anything we’ve seen over the last half-century.”
Last fall, the New York Times asked if America had reached “peak woke.” Of course, the “paper of record” is one of the largest purveyors of woke culture and cancellations itself.
But if woke has peaked and crested, it is not obvious. The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris opened with a theatrical piece full of half-naked people, drag queens, and people in what only be described as wearing “space villain” costumes making a mockery of the imagery in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
The games keep on giving. Dwayne Wade, a former NBA star, is now in the crosshairs because of a joke he made about pronouns as he commentated on the basketball competition on July 28.
As he was calling the game between Serbia and the USA, Wade referred to player Lebron James and said, “Y’all know his pronouns—he/him!” Wade followed up with another line making fun of the current obsession with personal pronouns. Later on in the game, he said that Americans know who LeBron James is, and that Wade knows him personally. “His pronouns are he/him,” Wade joked.
Social media lit up with angry users who react in the extreme to even the most mild and lighthearted criticism of transgender ideology. One user, who appears somewhat confused, castigated Wade for the “dumbest instance” of using pronouns, while also saying that all special pronoun use is “stupid as hell.”
Others noted that it was odd that Wade made a joke about anything to do with transgenderism, since he has been a vocal supporter of his son’s “gender transition.”
