Now grown men who have spent their lives training for battle meekly embrace ever-changing Marxist planks before millions of spectators, who likewise are allowed to watch only if they implicitly accept the State’s woke dogma.  Will players and fans be forced to kneel during the National Anthem this week?  To reject their religious faith as an expression of “hate”?

To applaud child-grooming and predation?  To cheer the World Health Organization’s dictatorial control over their lives?  Stay tuned.  The sports leagues will let you know what to believe just as soon as the Marxist brigades lay down new marching orders.  Even men with a surplus of testosterone will be expected to comply.

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.  By yielding to those who have always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining in the Marxists’ good graces.  Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible quantity.

It is not that politically conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to mind their own business.  Their first reaction to a company’s success is not envy.  They do not immediately turn their sights on how best to confiscate another’s good fortune.

People who work hard for what they own do not worry about what somebody else owns.  They simply seek to be left alone.  Free markets that empower consumers to choose products and ideas for themselves naturally incubate personal liberty.  For these reasons, freedom-minded Americans have rarely turned their ire toward corporate entities.

That’s all changed.  No longer is the customer always right.  In the Woke Wars, corporations have decided that they will choose what products the customer must buy and which customers will be condemned for refusing.  The same Americans who never asked for anything are now told what to believe, how to act, how to pray, which sins to celebrate, and which virtues to ignore.

Corporations, once market-oriented organisms intent on reflecting cultural sentiment, now force-feed cultural slop to the unwilling.  And because this foul-smelling corporate fascism drenched in Marxist malice revolts freethinking Americans, corporations are increasingly becoming their enemies.

When the day comes that the Marxists are throwing Molotov cocktails through corporate windows or confiscating company assets as their own, there will not be a lot of sympathy from the millions of Americans who have long wished just to be left alone.  When the same corporate officers who harangued normal Americans as bigots are rounded up by the real bigots who tolerate no diversity of thought, their Marxist jailers will lack the compassion and forgiveness that Christians embrace.  When woke companies discover that they allied with untrustworthy partners, they will have already sealed their fate.

Of course, this phenomenon extends far beyond the relationship between corporations and ordinary Americans.  Everywhere you look, once robust American institutions have become brittle because they have made normal Americans their enemies.  Hardworking, athletic, intelligent warriors do not want to fight for a U.S. military that promotes men in skirts.

Law-abiding Americans do not trust an FBI or DOJ that targets half the population as potential “domestic enemies.”  Voters do not trust elections that are neither transparent nor verifiable.  Citizens do not trust prosecutors or courts that are politically partisan.  They do not trust a news industry that incessantly lies to them.  They do not trust federal agencies that embrace censorship.  They do not trust security forces that cannot protect America’s borders.  They do not trust banks that manipulate the value of their personal savings.  They do not trust federal authorities that hand over national sovereignty to international governing boards and insular cabals of billionaire “elites.”

Americans who once largely trusted in their system of self-governance now deeply distrust the system of woke oligarchy that has usurped it.  The woke oligarchy, having noticed this deepening distrust, has decided that the appropriate remedy is more State-sanctioned propaganda, censorship, and force-feeding of unpopular beliefs.  In this way, brittle institutions become only more brittle in a dreary doom loop leading to total Marxist tyranny or its eventual repudiation.

Jim Quinn wrote a compelling essay over at The Burning Platform entitled “Fall of American Empire and Descent into a New Dark Ages.”  In it he traces the many similarities between Edward Gibbon’s observations and analysis in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and our own present circumstances.  As in the years leading to Rome’s demise, moral depravity is rampant, while civic virtue has evaporated.

An overextended military gallops from one area of operations to the next, fighting costly wars with few long-term strategies.  A vast and profligate bureaucracy that has spent lavishly on buying votes and bribing various constituencies is forced to devalue its currency in order to pay the interest on its unsustainable debts.  An entrenched Deep State dedicates itself to plots, coups, and personal enrichment.  A land rich in resources produces nothing.  A regime dedicated to conquest abroad ignores domestic suffering.  Debased currency and crumbling infrastructure ensure future economic calamity.

Traitorous officials cover up their treason, while persecuting those who notice.  As Quinn sardonically concludes of our tragic circumstances, “I find nothing more appropriate to visually represent our clownworld empire falling than a picture of a dwarf clown, smoking a cigarette while holding a bouquet of wilted flowers in the pouring rain in front of a defunct circus tent.  If the clown shoe fits, wear it.”

The Woke Wars will certainly bring further pain and destruction.  As Quinn notes, it took roughly a thousand years for the Roman Empire to fall, three hundred for the British Empire, but only seventy-seven for the American Empire.  If technology and widespread communication have sped up the fall of empires, though, perhaps they will also quicken any Dark Age.

Something we possess today that did not exist fifteen hundred years ago is a growing, collective self-awareness about what is causing our society’s collapse.  During Rome’s centuries-long demise, a few prescient writers understood how rotten the empire had become, yet the average human enduring those turbulent years experienced poverty, famine, and social upheaval largely in the dark.  Those of us watching the woke corporate titans, central bankers, and unscrupulous politicians destroy the West today know exactly who should be blamed for what comes next.  Perhaps that is why they work so hard to divide and distract us.