Commentary: Put the Woke Corporations to Sleep

by Dov Fischer

Georgia finally enacted some laws to protect ethical voting. My American Spectator colleague, David Catron, refers to these laws as “election integrity laws” — and that is what they are.

“Jim Crow”? What on G-d’s Earth are the leftist Crazies talking about? What are the Leftists saying?

… that Blacks and Hispanics do not want election integrity?

… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, do not have access to a photo ID?

… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, cannot figure out how to vote honestly and need vote harvesters?

… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, do not want integrity at the voting booth?

Before the COVID pandemic, when I flew, I always saw Black and Hispanic people at the airport standing on TSA lines just as I was standing. I needed a photo ID to get past the security checkpoints. How did Black and Hispanic passengers do it? Were they given unilateral exemption from having photo ID at the airport in order to overcome “Jim Crow”? Were their baggages and luggages not X-rayed? While TSA was forcing 100-year-old wheelchair-bound nuns in habits to take their shoes off, were Blacks and Hispanics exempted to overcome “Jim Crow”?

I don’t think so.

I am sick of this. I am so very darned sick of this, the Big Lie that this kindest and most tolerant country in the history of humanity is plagued with “systemic racism.” Slavery ended 158 years ago. More White men — the Privileged White Males — are buried in cemeteries throughout the United States because they gave their lives fighting to end slavery than died for any other reason or cause in all of American history. Today’s society of Privileged White Men have acquiesced to a half-century of affirmative action for college and graduate school admissions and special government advantages given to “minority-owned businesses.” We elected a Black man to be president of the United States despite his being an utterly unqualified candidate, a community organizer who affiliated with a racist church and a rabidly hateful racist pastor, a one-term senator whose main claim to qualify seems to have been that Joe Biden called him “clean…. That’s a storybook, man!” Imagine that — a clean Black man! That was the racist Joe Biden’s certification for that impostor to become an American president.

If Blacks in America 2021 cannot figure out how to vote within an election integrity framework, Americans deserve to know why — because the Blacks and Hispanics I know all are honest enough, smart enough, and ethical enough to want election integrity as much as White people do. If Blacks cannot acquire a photo ID in this country in the year 2021, Americans deserve to know why. Who is holding them back? The White Privileged Male class? Prove it.

When I go for my driver license renewal at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the palace for photo ID dissemination, there are plenty of Black and Hispanic people working there. They are nice to me, friendly, and I don’t blame them for taking the worst imaginable photographs of me. Those DMV photographs are so bad that we columnists at The American Spectator need to use an artist’s drawing of what we might look like if the DMV could have taken decent photos. But there they are at the government offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles — “People of Color.” (Oh, how I despise that expression! As if White people are not even more colorful: red with rage, green with envy, yellow with fear, blue with depression, and now even Trump Orange.) So who exactly is denying Blacks and Hispanics their photo ID cards? And how do they get through those TSA lines without them?

No one is introducing a poll tax aimed at making voting a matter of financial ability. And, by the way, if they did add a poll tax — which would be evil, and I would oppose with all my might and passion, but just saying if they did — do Blacks and Hispanics not have any money? I see kids of all colors from White to Red to Brown to Black wearing $200 LeBron James sneakers. Even $300 sneakers. Where do they get the money for $200–$300 sneakers? I see kids with iPhones and Galaxy smartphones. Where do they get the money for smartphones and for the monthly digital plans? And they have cable TV, which costs a fortune so that Fox News viewers will subscribe and thereby literally subsidize CNN and MSNBC. Or they “cut the cable” and subscribe monthly to Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu, and they get Fire TV Sticks and Apple TV. Not bad for the persecuted victims of “systemic racism.” Only in America.

I am so very sick of this.

All four of my grandparents came here to America from Poland and Russia long after slavery ended. They had nothing, not even the proverbial “pot to urinate in.” There was no indoor plumbing. There were no food stamps, no welfare, no unemployment coverage or workers comp, no affordable health-care acts. If they were sick, either they worked all day in the garment sweat shop while sneezing and coughing with a sore throat — or they stayed home and starved because no one was paying them a red cent for sick days. So they worked every day amid others who could not afford to stay home when sick, and everyone in the sweat shop coughed on each other, and they lived in tenements in Manhattan’s Lower East Side that were rife with tuberculosis. It was the same for Irish immigrants, Polish immigrants, Germans, Italians. There were no sick days. There was no “family leave.” One street block in the Italian section of the Lower East Side had so many tuberculosis cases that it was known as the “Lung Block.”

There was no bilingual education. Julia Richman, who served as New York Schools Superintendent for the Lower East Side school district where the Jewish immigrants from 1881–1914 Russia and Poland sent their kids to public school, handed down a district-wide order: Any teacher in the public schools who overhears a Jewish child speaking Yiddish in the hallways is to take that child to the nearest bathroom — if a boy to a boy’s bathroom, if a girl to a girl’s bathroom … because there are only two genders — and literally is to wash that child’s mouth out with soap. Yiddish? Vahshin di moyl oyss mit zeyf. Wash the mouth out with soap. No bilingual education, not in math and not in spelling and not in history.

No tolerance for Yinglish either. Any Jewish kid who inadvertently mixed his or her English, takeh, with Yiddish — back to the bathroom, back to washing out the mouth with soap. If G-d forbid a kid raised his or her hand nicely and politely asked the teacher, “Mrs. Johnson, can I please go to the bathroom?” the answer the teacher always would give was, “You can go, but the question is whether you may go.” And as the poor immigrant kid innocently would stand up to proceed to the lavatory, the kid would be told to sit right back down until he or she asks it right. You can go — but the question is whether you may go. And if the kid could not figure it out, either the kid would be sent out of class and into the hallway or to detention for him or her to “figure it out” — or the teacher would compel the plotzing kid to shame himself or herself in the classroom by bursting ultimately into his or her underwear with urine or feces.

There would be no compromise on forcing those immigrants to speak English correctly. And no one was going to get anywhere by suing the teacher, the principal, or the school district. No one even dared contemplate litigation. They were lucky to have the right to a no-nonsense public school education. Their textbooks did not give a hoot about their ethnic backgrounds — Italy, Poland, Germany, Ireland, Russia. They now were in America, and they instead had to learn about this country’s Founding Fathers, Virginia plantation owners with foreign-sounding names like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Lincoln. So they did, and they excelled.

Those darned anti-Semites forced my mom and dad to speak perfect English, whether they liked it or not. And their kid, me — oops, make that “I,” the nominative case — ended up speaking and writing so well that I was admitted into Columbia University and later in life was named Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review. If that is systemic anti-Semitism, thank you, America, for hating us so much that you expected us to learn the country’s language and history, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the rules of civic duty, real math and honest science, and the implications of equal opportunity for those willing to work hard. So I am sick of hearing about how I — a Jew, which also means by definition a Zionist, the son of immigrants from Poland and Russia — owe anything to anyone else. I don’t owe a darned thing except to the kind and generous non-Jewish Christian population of this greatest country in the world, which allowed my grandparents to come in when they applied legally to live here and gave them something approximating an equal opportunity to succeed, give or take a few mouth-cleanings with soap and an occasional anti-Semitic incident perpetrated sometimes by the societal underclass and sometimes by the exquisitely elegant proprietors of restricted hotels, country clubs, and universities.

Somehow we all grew to figure out how to get photo IDs. The Irish, the Polish, the Germans, the Italians, the Cubans, the Jews. We all grew to figure out how to cast ballots without our votes being harvested. We all figured out how to vote on Election Day — not weeks and even a month or more earlier, before the ads begin running and before the debates even attempt to clarify the issues dividing the candidates.

If Georgia and the many other states had enacted voting integrity laws months ago, then the November 3 election would have resulted in a reasonably tallied election. Instead, we all know — even fair-minded Democrats — that there was a whole world of irregularities in November. That is not to say that Biden did not win anyway. But the reality is that we never will know. CNN and MSNBC and CBS and NBC and ABC and PBS and the New York Times and Washington Post can keep calling us names for wondering — not necessarily denying, but intensely wondering — what would have resulted if election integrity laws had been in place last November. Yet we do wonder. And all of that could have been avoided if only election integrity laws had been in place.

Georgia now finally has done what it and the other states should have done a year ago. Suddenly, woke companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, fearing leftist boycotts, have rushed in to berate Georgia legislators. Why do these corporations fear “progressives” but not the other half of America? Do we 75–80 million who voted for Biden’s Republican opponent not drink soft drinks, too? Do we not fly airlines? What if 75–80 million of us were to stop drinking soft drinks made by the Coca-Cola company and were to stop flying Delta? I know I am done with them for now.

And Hollywood suddenly threatens not to make movies in Georgia? So let us ask: If you are called “Hollywood,” and your state of California is so woke that Democrats control all your state offices, what are you doing making movies in Georgia in the first place? Why isn’t “Hollywood” making films in Hollywood anyway? Oh yeah, we know: Because you are so woke that you pushed the Democrats to make California the highest-taxed state in the nation, and then you decided, “Hey, taxes are for the rubes. Not us. So we gotta make our movies elsewhere now, where the tax incentives allow us to flee California’s confiscatory tax structure.”

We conservatives need to be strong. We have beaten back the Left every single time the woke have tried to boycott Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and — most infamously and most often — Rush, may G-d rest his soul. We need to put the woke corporations to sleep. When they try to capitulate, like the wimps and weasels they are, to the threat of boycotts by “progressives,” we have to make clear that we conservatives not only may boycott, too — but we can … and will.

Photo “Amazon Gay Pride Parade Float” by William Murphy. CC BY-SA 2.0.