By: Daniel Henniger – wsj.com – February 9, 2022

Boycotting TV sports seems to have become a habit with me. Mostly these invisible protests have been efforts to be free of association with professional sports’ insistent political correctness. Last April, (“Yes, Boycott Baseball”) I deserted the diamond after Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred ostentatiously pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, joining the corporate pile-on of the Georgia Legislature’s voting-rules bill. It was an easy call, insofar as Mr. Manfred months earlier had forced my hometown Cleveland Indians to scrap their century-old team name.

Professional sports’ success depends largely on its ability to give fans a respite from the worries of daily life. But of late pro sports has decided it must take “stands” on some of the most fraught and wearying political issues of our time.

An oft-asked question is, where will the moralism end? The answer might be in the very capital of PC—Washington, where the favorite sport, after politics, is professional football. At a low ebb for years, pro football in the capital just got lower.

Since the 1930s, Washington’s National Football League franchise was known as the Redskins. Having the bad luck to exist in a major media center, the team buckled beneath pressure to abandon its team name and magnificent logo.

One might have thought it difficult for a politicized rebranding to exceed the ineffectuality of Cleveland, which renamed its team the Guardians, after sculptures on a bridge across the Cuyahoga River. But Washington got the job done. They’re now the Commanders.

The name invites derision. Couldn’t they have imagined something relevant to the hometown culture? Such as the Lawsuits or the Gerrymanders.

The hapless transition from proud Redskins to anonymous Commanders has me thinking that the PC project may be finally running out of steam.

Proposition: If your team is named after nothing, it will perform like nothing. Why would anyone root for a team—or, more important, play hard for a team—called the Commanders or Guardians?

Compare the Commanders with the names of the teams in two recent weekends of thrilling NFL playoff games: the Bengals, Buccaneers, Chiefs, 49ers, Rams. Coincidence? I think not. As to the Buffalo Bills, their namesake, Buffalo Bill Cody of the once-Wild West, is surely as cancelable as Teddy Roosevelt, whose statue was recently carted out of NFL doormat New York City. Buffalo is made of sterner stuff.

Prediction: The Commanders, Guardians and all the no-offense-name teams that come after them will lose forever. It’s a formula for permanent self-relegation to namby-pambyism.

Time to elevate from game playing to high-stakes politics.

For years it has seemed that political correctness was able to clear anything in its path. A movement that originated in arguments about diversity and inclusion has since mutated into more powerful variations such as cancel culture, white supremacy and identity politics, attempting to engulf the whole of American history and even the rules of grammar. But one wonders if indeed PC hasn’t become a lot like the SARS virus, an invading toxin that eventually forces its target hosts to develop a protective political vaccine.

When the coerced revision is the renaming of a sports team, people grumble and endure one more affront. But for the better part of a year, we’ve watched parents of K-12 students discover that school boards and teachers had been making substantive PC changes to curriculums. Covid, if nothing else, has been a great focuser of minds, and here parents organized to stop such significant, undiscussed revisions. Their opposition now looks like an expanding political movement.

A smaller but symbolically important development is the letter 16 women on the University of Pennsylvania’s swimming team sent the school’s administrators and the Ivy League, asserting that the criterion for competing in women’s swim meets should be the biology of sex rather than the gender identity of transgender athletes.

Political correctness has been the unearned assertion by proponents that what was believed previously should henceforth be regarded as all wrong, and that its replacement will now and always be right. In a still-free country, such unfettered absolutism was never sustainable.

When the Winter Olympics end, Mr. Xi will reimpose business as usual in China. In the U.S., political and cultural conformity looks to be slipping out of favor.

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Source: Let’s Turn Off the Olympics – WSJ