Bubba Wallace, the controversial NASCAR driver best known for a “noose” that wasn’t a noose, does not care what racing fans think about a leftward drift in the traditionally blue-collar sport.
Wallace, NASCAR’s only prominent black driver, gained national attention in 2020 by promoting Black Lives Matter and pushing to have the Confederate flag banned at races.
Then, Wallace made headlines as a “hate-crime” victim by claiming that someone had left a “noose” in the garage that had been assigned to him for a race at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.
An investigation later showed that the “noose” was actually a pull-down rope used for closing the garage door, and had been there for months before Wallace was assigned the garage.
Apparently, this Jussie Smollett-level fraud did not humble the outspoken driver.
Wallace visited Chicago over the weekend for a series of racing-related events.
On Thursday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Wallace spoke to media members about NASCAR’s efforts to promote DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
“I’ve always said there’s three types of people: the ones that will accept change, the ones that are on the fence about change and the ones that will never change,” Wallace said.
Assuming that these “three types of people” share the same basic rights and command equal respect in a free society, surely they all have perspectives worth considering, correct?
Not according to Wallace.
“You can never get to the minds of the people that will never change, so we don’t really focus our energy on those people,” he said.
Presumably, “those people” constitute an expendable segment of the NASCAR fan base.
Still, in this particular interview, Wallace had not yet explained what sort of “change” requires the casual sacrifice of so many hitherto loyal fans.
Then he did.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t like changes that we’re doing as a sport to tap into different demographics and make the sport more welcoming and inclusive, and that’s on them. They have to live with that. For us, we continue to march forward,” he said.
And there it is: “welcoming and inclusive” — the preening woke moralist’s code phrase for “I’m better than you.”
On Breitbart, writer Dylan Gwinn noted that the abrasive Wallace is merely “combining the two roles he plays: Social justice warrior and heel.”
Steve Straub of The Federalist Papers, a news and opinion website devoted to constitutionalism and limited government, suggested that Wallace “may be fanning the flames of a race-based controversy, further straining an already polarized fan base.”
In fairness to Wallace, many non-woke Americans also find the Confederate flag a repellent symbol of tyrannical regime and an unworthy cause, though one suspects that many modern Americans who fly that flag do so as a general showcase of Southern culture, rebelliousness or, at worst, an emblem of lost values they mistakenly associate with the Confederacy.
Still, without speculating about Wallace’s character or motives, it is difficult not to find his antics exhausting, if not pigheaded.
Wallace does not seem to understand that it is impossible to be “welcoming and inclusive” while at the same time wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts and putting the Black Lives Matter insignia on his race car.
Many Americans — including, one suspects, most NASCAR fans — regard Black Lives Matter as little more than a front for revolutionary Marxism, and with good reason.
Longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, as sinister a figure as ever prowled the hallways of a federal agency, spent years in paranoid pursuit of imaginary Communists in Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement.
That was then, and King was no Communist.
Black Lives Matter activists are not the descendants of the demonstrators who peacefully marched against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, enduring official repression but managing to inspire huge laws promoting civil rights for minorities and ensuring voting rights.
Black Lives Matter activists called out “white privilege” while toppling and defacing statues. They promised to destroy the family. They made war on Western civilization.
These are the actions not of warriors for justice but of Maoists eager to replicate China’s cataclysmic Cultural Revolution in America.
If Wallace thinks he is being “welcoming and inclusive” while supporting Black Lives Matter, he might want to think again.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
