ROGER SIMON: Virtue Signaling Replaces Baseball as America’s National Pastime.

Forget the actual details of the Georgia voting law they claim to be protesting.  Facts are immaterial.  The national pastime has joined the ranks of the “woke” virtue signalers.

Yes, that national pastime has scarcely been what it was for some time, but then what is?  Basketball and football are also in decline. No sports are left, really, at least spectator sports.

Virtue signaling itself has become our national pastime.

Everyone, at least that percentage of the country who voted for the current president, practice it on a daily or even hourly basis, like a catechism.

The president himself we could call the Virtue Signaler-in-Chief.  He began his “virtuous” journey in law school where he was almost ejected for plagiarism, begged to stay in, and then later told us he graduated at the top of his class. (He actually graduated at the bottom, as would any plagiarist, if they graduated at all.)

And then there were numerous other “virtuous” cases of plagiarism, including from the British politician Neil Kinnock, but no matter.  Our great legal scholar president knows the Georgia election law is wrong.  Not only is it wrong, it’s racist.

So he led the charge in moving the game out of Atlanta and essentially gave permission to the league executives to make their reactionary move.

The result, baseball is virtually dead from virtual signaling.  Call it murder by idiotic ideology.

But baseball is just a game and America is no such thing.  It was once the beacon of all humanity when it came to democracy and freedom but that is no more.

Like any good moral narcissist (i. e. he or she who virtue signals) we are no longer liberty and freedom lovers. We are now “woke.”

“Woke,” however, is not an American idea.  Neither were, completely, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  To some extent they came from Europe, influenced, as many readers know, by John Locke, among others, but they were developed and enhanced in a uniquely American way by Jefferson, Madison, et al.  The Federalist Papers were a flower of the Enlightenment.

Not so “woke.” Its antecedents are entirely European and have little to do with democracy and freedom and everything to do with a kind of neo-Marxist, top-down power game of a fascistic nature.

The American idea and ”woke” are, in essence, opposites.

Perhaps I’m being a bit snobbish, but I’d wager the Major League executives who just exercised their supposedly anti-racist druthers have never heard of the man many believe is the godfather of “woke,” its John Locke, so to speak— the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

I’m skeptical our Virtue Signaler-in-Chief has ever heard of him either, or perhaps only vaguely, although I imagine some of his more educated cabinet members, those who made it through law school without plagiarizing, like Anthony Blinken, are familiar. And Chuck Schumer may have pretended to have read the Frenchman way back in some Harvard bull session.

But just who is this godfather of “woke”?

Well, there’s a lot of convoluted graduate school rhetoric, but it turns out the reality of the man may not be very flattering. Rumors of a certain amount of perversion have surrounded Foucault for some time but now testimony has surfaced that is distinctly “unwoke.”

I have never done this before. In fact, I despise the idea of trigger warnings in general, but if you are easily nauseated, I would suggest you move on before reading the following:

“French-American professor Guy Sorman accused French philosopher Michel Foucault of being a ‘pedophile rapist’ in an interview with The Sunday Times. Sorman, a friend of Foucault, said that the philosopher sexually abused Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.

“Stating that he learned of the situation when he visited Foucault, Sorman said: ‘The young children were running after Foucault to say, what about me? Take me, take me. They were 8, 9, 10 years old. Foucault was throwing money at them and would say, ‘let’s meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.’ He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.’”

Speaking of Foucault’s postmodernism, and its massively corrosive effect on society, Michael Walsh has a review of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, at the National Association of Scholars: Down from Liberalism.