by Jeff Minick
Every day I read online about systemic racism, transgender issues, President Joe Biden’s latest faux pas, and other American social ills.
All well and good. I’ve written about some of these same issues as well. But are we elevating the trivial at the expense of the significant? Many of our citizens are focused on the ongoing cultural battle over subjects such as racism and transgender athletes.
Meanwhile, matters vital to our nation’s health and security are overlooked. Are the “woke” paying any attention at all to China? Perhaps not, but the Chinese Communist Party is paying a great deal of attention to the United States. “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that means to destroy us,” Claremont Institute senior fellow Brian T. Kennedy wrote last September. “If we do not wake up to the danger soon, we will find ourselves helpless.”
Kennedy describes how the CCP is undermining our country through espionage, and other infiltrations, perhaps even via the Wuhan virus. Furthermore, it suppresses and regularly persecutes its own citizens.
Kennedy’s article appeared nine months ago. Are we paying attention?
Despite these human rights violations, major U.S. corporations continue doing business in and with China. These companies like the low wages—some might call it slave labor—allowed in China. The National Basketball Association looks to this dictatorship as a means of lining its pockets, some of our politicians seem to either cozy up to the Chinese or else remain oblivious to their sinister tactics, and the U.S. debt to China now exceeds $1 trillion dollars.
Are the “woke” aware of this ongoing assault on America? If so, why aren’t they speaking out?
Meanwhile, our own government continues to hammer away at ordinary Americans, the very people it’s supposed to serve. Phil Kerpen at The American Spectator offers an excellent summary of these economic and regulatory attacks on our free enterprise system: Regulations driving a rise in fuel prices, attempts to abolish right-to-work laws, the push to expand the power of the Internal Revenue Service, the “eye-popping, unprecedented spending under the pretext of COVID relief,” and election reforms that will ban voter ID. This barrage of punches is staggering, and if successful, these measures will affect most of the “woke” along with the rest of us.
Why are they silent?
These policies, particularly the massive government spending, are now bringing us another nasty gift: inflation. Anyone who has bought a house, fuel, or groceries in the last four months is well aware of increased prices, and with the apparent exception of those who designed federal policy, any of us could have predicted this surge in prices. Print out trillions of dollars, and common sense tells us the value of the dollar will sag.
Inflation will be a hidden tax on the “woke” just like it will be for the rest of us. Do they not care?
Here’s the good news. More and more Americans are waking up to the games being played by some of those in power. They’re seeing, for instance, the alleged social justice warriors as the radicals and phonies they really are. Moreover, and in part because of writers like those I mentioned above, we’re becoming more aware of the more serious threats our country is facing, both those from abroad, especially in the case of the CCP, and those caused by enemies here at home.
Writer John Green tells of pulling into a gas station and finding a sticky note on the pump that read “Prices Compliments of Joe Biden.” When he mentioned this to a friend, the man told Green that such notes had begun appearing on gas pumps all over town.
It is but a small hope that the new wokeness is pushing back. But it’s a start.
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Jeff Minick lives in Front Royal, Virginia, and may be found online at jeffminick.com. He is the author of two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust on Their Wings, and two works of non-fiction, Learning as I Go and Movies Make the Man.
Photo “Xi Jinping” by Narendra Modi. CC BY 2.0.
