[The Weekly Standard] While everyone else was concentrating on Indiana and Iran last week, a much smaller piece of news broke that was of little interest to the wider world. It was so microscopic that I would have missed it entirely, if not for Sonny Bunch's indispensible blog, Everything's A Problem.But fortunately, Sonny noticed the sudden death of Anthony Stokes that was, in addition to being a minor tragedy, also a telling story about where we are as a culture.
You probably don't remember Anthony Stokes, but back in 2013, he was briefly famous. Stokes as a 15-year-old Georgia kid with a bad heart condition: Born with an enlarged heart, doctors gave him roughly six months to live if he didn't get a transplant. The problem for Stokes--besides his terrible medical condition--was that the medical authorities wouldn't put him on the transplant list because they deemed him to be a high-risk for non-compliance. You see, Stokes had not just a history of bad grades, but a criminal record, too. "We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind," a flack from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta said at the time. "They said they don't have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups," said Stokes' mother.
But this is America, so you can already guess how this story went. Stokes' family went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They cried racism. Then social media and "#BlackTwitter" (their term, not mine) kicked in. And the doctors at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta freaked out because there are few things as unsettling as being called racist by hordes of people on the internet. So the doctors reversed course and put Stokes on the transplant list. And, by the grace of God, Stokes got a heart. (Which means that someone else, by necessity, did not.)
And then the left--from the Huffington Post to Think Progress to Gawker to Ebony--did a victory lap. To their mind, they had won another victory in the culture war, exposing racism, shaming the power structure, and making the world a more perfect place.
Last Tuesday, a little less than two years after Stokes was gifted a heart, he--allegedy--broke into an 81-year-old woman's home and, upon being discovered, fired gunshot at her. He--allegedly--fled the scene of the break-in in a car that police later determined had been stolen. Police pursued Stokes in a high-speed chase. After a few miles Stokes--allegedly!--hit a pedestrian, whereupon he crashed the stolen car and died. (We don't have to cover ourselves on this last bit; he is indisputably dead.)
There's a great parable wrapped up in this story. And yet in the public consciousness, the death of Anthony Stokes barely registers. He's not even a footnote. But he should be. Because he got a heart that could have gone to someone else if not for the online mob and charges of racism.
As the case of Anthony Stokes should make clear, a great deal of the culture war is taking place under the radar these days. For the last year, for instance, the videogame world has been embroiled in a fight known colloquially as #GamerGate. I don't have the patience (and you don't have the time) to fully explain the story, but if you want to get a flavor for it, you can read this and this. The micro-version is: The elite videogame press is dominated by a small clique of writers and game-makers with radical leftist politics. These folks have made a long practice of foisting their views on an audience--videogame players--which is not interested in radical leftist politics.
#GamerGate is basically an apolitical revolt against leftism in a context where politics shouldn't exist, but does--because leftism necessitates that politics be ubiquitous.
Over the weekend we saw another revolt of the masses against leftist elites in a sphere where you wouldn't expect: science-fiction writing.