Woke Musical Chairs: The Same Old Song

People playing Musical Chairs can take comfort at the start of the game. There are many chairs and only one person drops out at a time. As the game goes on, however, the options for finding a chair grow fewer and fewer. Ultimately the final two contestants stand eye to eye over a single chair.

There is no escape, no alternative. Only one winner.

We are currently in a game of political Musical Chairs. One by one, as conservatives have been eliminated, radicals fix the game for themselves using cancel culture, censoring their opponents’ opinions. The problem is that, having eliminated those to their right, Woke radicals need someone to eliminate to keep the game going.

This part of the game is called is Eyes Right! With Biden’s health crumbling and Kamala as popular as scrofula, the Bernie Bros see a chance to seize power before the midterms send them back to Devil’s Island. Since the Trump and FOX whipping posts are mostly inert to the public now new definitions of those to their right must be constructed. 

People in on the game at the start— liberals, camp followers, media shills—  now find themselves the targets. Smug appeasers who thought they had immunity for scolding the right suddenly find themselves the hunted.

People such as Andrew Cuomo. The disgraced governor of New York State was once a darling of progressives. He reportedly “saved” tens of thousands from Covid-19. His book brought him millions. But now, with targets scarce, the aging white privileged son must relinquish the millions of dollars he made on his memoir, a state ethics watchdog ordered. He’s lost the governorship over sexual assaults.  on.wsj.com/3oWMfFb

His brother Chris, the CNN heart-throb, has similarly been dumped by people he strenuously defended. He’s lost his TV gig, his reputation and his naïvté. He joins comedian/ Senator Al Franken, a victim of convenience to buttress the sexual-assault fury against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  

They thought making soothing sounds or attacking Trump would buy them time. They thought they didn’t need to walk the walk if they simply genuflected deeply enough. He and his bro realize that the crocodile has come to collect.

Who is to their left asking for their heads? Radical extremists such as @njaved “A reality check to end the year: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. As long as white men run this country, nothing will change for the rest of us.”

How about @ShreeParadkar in @Torstar? “Colonized lands face a perpetual puzzle: What to name “the other”? As with "person of colour," "BIPOC" got swallowed up, quickly lost nuance and got spat out at a racial identifier to say “not white. Bye, bye “BIPOC.”

Or Kristen Clarke, the U.S. assistant attorney general for Civil Rights. When now-convicted race fabulist Jussie Smollett refused to surrender his cell phone for evidence, she declared, “This is NOT how you treat survivors of a hate crime. Stop demonizing survivors and casting doubt on their claims if you want communities to trust that you will take #HateCrime seriously. @StopHateProj 

Or, Canadian RINO David Frum who’s shown how to move leftward, doing the work of ten liberals, with suggestions in The Atlantic that, “Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last”. 

Frum’s hoping that his appeasing buys him sufficient time till the music stops and the chairs disappear beneath his pasty posterior. Will it work? Or are they just carrying water for AOC and her Squad? As we wrote in June, former left heroes such as Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are sensing their time is up.

“Could it be that, with Trump muzzled and Biden/ Kamala floundering, aging liberals now realize they’ve lost control of their fellow travellers in the Democratic Party? Have they become useful idiots to the radicals? Having allowed the incursion of CRT, BLM, antifa, deranged Hollywood, the Squad, climate fanatics and others too numerous to mention so long as they wounded #OrangeManBad is there suddenly a realization that they can no longer assert Boomer privilege? 

That the civil liberties crushed in the Covid-19 panic created by their health bureaucrats might not be coming back?  For sure, this is not the Bill Clinton Democratic alliance— even if his poisonous wife Hillary pretends otherwise. If AOC and the nightly rioters in Portland now call the shots, where is the room for hipsters who grew up watching Johnny Carson?

Stewart and Maher are well-read enough to remember that, when the liberals who had devotedly served the 1917 Russian Revolution were of no use to him, Stalin had them all shot. Ditto Mao in the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot in Cambodia etc. with their supposed comrades. The landscape the MSNBC/ CNN loyalists are seeing is rapidly less about Pete Seeger politics and simply about the uses of power, something Stalin exploited too well for 35 years… If Jon Stewart and like-minded libs  don’t see it as a threat they should. It’s no joke.”

This media cancel culture maelstrom is sucking everyone leftward on the scale. The recent recantation of San Francisco mayor London Breed over street violence brought on by her hyper-liberal policies suggests that she, too, is doing the political Musical Chairs.   Will there be enough on the Left like her to halt this cult? 

We’ll know when the music stops. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper and for Money Players in 2003. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx