The Age of Woke is beyond a joke

MYStIC Rich strikes again. During last year’s Summer Of Stupidity, sparked by the Black Lives Matter madness, I wondered how long it would be before the woke brigade got round to banning Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones.

that was in this column, on July 31, 2020, about exeter Chiefs rugby club being forced to scrap their Red Indian mascot to appease anti-racism campaigners. this week it came back to haunt me as the Stones dropped Brown Sugar from their setlist and Wasps rugby club told exeter fans not to wear traditional Native American head-dresses when the sides meet in Coventry tomorrow.

I’ll get to Brown Sugar after the commercial break, but first let’s address the arrogance of a rugby club telling people what they can wear.

It’s not as if they’re sporting Ku Klux Klan bedsheets, or Nazi uniforms, complete with swastikas, as modelled by Prince harry in his preMarkle incarnation.

I don’t do fancy dress on principle, but surely wearing a Red Indian head-dress to a rugby match is nothing more than a bit of harmless fun. Not in the eyes of the stuffed blazers who run Wasps. ‘We believe that cultural appropriation and, therefore, the wearing of faux Native American head-dresses has the potential to cause offence and doesn’t align with our values.’

HAVe you ever read such a pompous, self-serving parcel of tosh? Who on earth could be offended, other than the usual demented bunch of self-appointed ‘social justice’ censors currently running riot everywhere? Or has the Navaho nation relocated to Warwickshire while we weren’t looking?

Like the statue-toppling BLM nonsense, the clamour to stamp out so-called ‘cultural appropriation’ started in the United States.

It first reared its ugly head here when student unions started objecting to students wearing sombreros on the grounds that it was offensive to Mexicans. Since then it has mutated faster than Covid and is now used as an excuse for everything from stopping British chefs cooking curry to attacking white women for plaiting their hair into Afro-style braids.

We’ve come to expect this kind of deranged, divisive drivel from soppy university students and the lunatic fringes of the Far Left. But not from a venerable rugby club dating back to 1867.

Sadly, though, it is just another example of how this pernicious doctrine has not only infiltrated but has been embraced enthusiastically by our institutions, ever anxious to get down wid da kidz and flaunt their bogus right-on credentials.

the assault on exeter Chiefs began after the Washington Redskins American football team caved in to demands to scrap the ‘Redskins’ bit.

At the same time the all-girl group the Dixie Chicks dropped the ‘Dixie’ because of its association with the Southern slavery

states during the civil war. At this rate they’ll soon have to abandon ‘Chicks’ too since it is bound to offend militant feminists somewhere.

I wondered then how long it would take the wokerati to get round to Siouxsie Sioux, formerly of the Banshees. And I added: ‘has anyone listened to the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar lately’? In particular, the lines: Skydog slaver knows he’s doing’

all right, Hear him whip the women just around midnight . . .

they have now, and as a result the Glimmer twins have decided to pull their second most popular composition from their current U.S. tour, rather than risk the wrath of the anti-racists.

So if the Stones have capitulated, it can only be a matter of time until the ferociously intolerant trans lobby comes for Lola, by the Kinks. And if the exeter

Chiefs are in the firing line, Cool For Cats by Squeeze must be on the list, too. The squaw is with the corporal, She is tied against a tree, She doesn’t mind the language, It’s the beating she don’t need.

Somehow I can’t see Wasps playing that at half-time on Saturday. But they needn’t think that they are safe from the revisionists.

What if a group of militant entomologists take umbrage at a rugby club appropriating the name of a vulnerable species which has seen a 50 per decline in numbers over the past two decades? Will Wasps agree to drop the name they have been using for more than 150 years?

there’s no end to this insanity. the potential to cause offence is infinite, if you look hard enough.

how long, for instance, will Newcastle United’s new Saudi owners be allowed to use the club’s nickname ‘Magpies’ once the provisional wing of the RSPCA gets wind of it?

And if not upsetting Red Indians is the order of the day, restaurants like that new £650-a-pop, moremoney-than-taste place in Knightsbridge are going to have to stop selling tomahawk steaks.

think I’m joking? Not any more. the Age of Woke is beyond a joke.