The phrase ‘Get woke and go broke’ has become a bit of a cliché in recent years. Although this phrase is still somewhat relevant as woke filmakers, politicians, charities and sports bodies continue to lose millions of pounds or dollars on stuff the Left hanker for, but doesn’t really sell outside of that small market.
To give two examples of this phenomenon in action, both the various ‘woke’ movies and women’s football are both fields in which money has been lost on stuff that the vast majority of people don’t want to buy. Punters are staying away from certain movies that have too much PC content in them and despite massive financial investment by broadcasters, women’s football is still not earning the sort of money from customers as the men’s game does.
This PC woke culture is, as many will already know, highly censorious. The Liberal Left believes that they have all the answers and that other points of view are at best ‘not helpful’ and at worst constitute ‘harm’. This censoriousness has damaged the free speech culture of the West and has all but destroyed it in places like the United Kingdom, but occasionally there is a glimmer of hope for freedom and especially freedom of speech.
I was both interested and delighted to find out that the Australian Rugby player Israel Folau has won his legal battle against the Australian rugby authorities who censured him over comments that Folau made on his own social media page where he backed traditional marriage and homosexuality. Now you may or may not agree with Folau’s opinion on this issue, I tend not to, but where many have agreed is that to try to silence Folau for voicing his opinion was wrong.
Folau has won an apology from the Australian rugby authorities and an undisclosed sum in damages because of the way that he was treated by the Australian rugby establishment and this organisation’s sponsors. This sports establishment tried to impose a one size fits all progressive cloak over Australian rugby where everyone tipped their hat to the Mrs Grundy of ‘diversity and inclusion’ and hid their true views out of fear for the consequences. The Israel Folau affair and the subsequent legal case has not only resulted in a win for the person genuinely harmed by this progressive culture, but it has also exposed this pernicious and censorious culture to the general public.
As Sky News Australia said in a recent piece, what is remarkable about this case is its ‘David and Goliath’ aspect. The Australian rugby authorities, steeped in a bullying PC culture and backed by corporate money versus one man, Israel Folau backed by thousands of small donors via crowdfunding. This time the people in the form of the small scale donors who stumped up for freedom of speech have won, but there are many more battles to go to put the censorious PC culture back in the box where it belongs.
