#The intolerant ‘Church of Wokeness’ and other commentary

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik,Pool,File

Those who “kneel, hands raised in secular prayer, repeating political creeds on the TV news” are participating in the “neo-Marxist appropriation” of Christianity, fumes The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass. In this neo-religion, “whites must atone for the sins of white racism, even if they’re not racist” — a belief antithetical to Christianity. The zealots can’t “allow room for reasoned discourse,” instead proclaiming that “anyone who is silent is guilty” and ­devouring even those who do “beg forgiveness” for their so-called sins. Watch out: “Coerced fearful kneeling in fealty,” as the new “high priests of the left” demand, is neither democratic and nor virtuous.

Urban beat: Defund the Police Unions

We don’t need to defund the police, “we need to purge our police departments of bad cops,” argues The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen. But “that will require doing something Democrats have long opposed — reform collective bargaining.” One study found “a substantial number” of union contracts “unreasonably interfere with or otherwise limit the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to hold police officers accountable for their actions. Another showed “collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct.” And “just as teachers’ unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers, police ­unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops.” But the left finds it “much easier to go after the police as an institution” than “the local Democratic political leaders and union officials who enter into collective-bargaining agreements that shelter bad cops.”

Iconoclast: No One Will Accept 2020’s Result

During the 2016 campaign, recalls The Week’s Matthew Walther, “hysterical prognosticators,” including Hillary Clinton, said Donald Trump would sooner “destroy democracy” than concede defeat if he lost. Instead, “after months of haranguing from his opponent and the media about the existential importance of resigning himself to an assured defeat, Trump won, and Democrats spent the next four years very publicly doing most of the things they had predicted would ensue if things had gone the opposite way.” Now, few of us are truly “prepared to accept the results of the upcoming election, at least not unequivocally.” It’s why Democrats called George W. Bush illegitimate, and more fevered Republicans claimed President Barack Obama was foreign-born and illegitimate. It’s a sad result of a deeply polarized political culture, where “every presidential election is an all-or-nothing contest between good and evil.”

Tom Cotton: Cancel Cancel Culture — Now

In a recent speech republished at The American Mind, Sen. Tom Cotton fulminates against “the idea that we all need safe spaces from mean words — trigger warnings on op-eds or TV shows — that might constitute a micro aggression.” That, he says, “is the language of the campus social-justice seminar, but increasingly it’s the language of our workplace and our culture.” His own brush with cancel culture came this month, when activist journalists demanded that The New York Times retract one of the senator’s op-eds “in what can only be called a struggle session from the Cultural Revolution in the greatest traditions of Mao.” The underlying worldview holds “that America at its core is fundamentally irredeemable and wicked.” We must ­ “reject that claim fully, wholeheartedly.”

From the right: Let’s Be Prudent on Renaming

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, largely agrees with Gen. David Petraeus’ call for renaming bases and removing statues honoring Confederate officers, but has to ask: Is the “middle of a national frenzy” really “the proper time” to do so? Without a “systematically and carefully” thought-out standard to “weigh good against bad,” after all, monuments to “the slave-owning Washington and Jefferson” may fall next. And even if we do develop a standard, we should extend it to all such landmarks — including those honoring “progressive icon” and unabashed racist Woodrow Wilson. Either way, we should “wait until the fires in the streets, the occupations, the defacements, the looting and the violence have dissipated” — and let the Americans through their “elected or representative bodies,” not rioters, decide.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board