In my 2015 book Scarlet Letters, I wrote of Harvard president Larry Summers, "Summers made the same mistake that virtually all newly branded letter bearers do.  He apologized."  If a Harvard president can make a mistake of this magnitude, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Anthony Bass deserves not our scorn, but our sympathy.  A hard-liner from the woke mob will always be, in baseball terms, a "difficult chance." 

A former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, in January 2005, Summers had been asked to address a National Bureau of Economic Research conference on the underrepresentation of women in STEM programs.  Among the possible explanations Summers cited was the "different availability of aptitude at the high end" hypothesis.  Saying the obvious sent at least one female "scholar" fleeing the room in tears.

Summers, now branded with a Scarlet S for sexism, initially refused to back down.  Under pressure, he relented.  The apology took the form so many such apologies have before and since.  "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women," he wrote in an open letter to the Harvard community.  Smelling weakness, the woke kept the pressure on Summers for a year before he resigned.  In the age of social media, that year would have been cut to a week.

Bass can attest to the media-driven swiftness of the mob's fury.  On May 29, he shared an Instagram post headlined "The Biblical Reason Christians should Boycott Target" from @dudewithgoodnews, Ryan Miller.  By May 30, the Blue Jays had coerced Bass into an apology.  "I recognize yesterday I made a post that was hurtful to the Pride community, which includes friends of mine and close family members of mine.  I am truly sorry for that," said Bass.

In 2015, when Scarlet Letters was published, I thought 17th-century Puritans made for a useful point of comparison with today's witch-hunters.  At the time, I thought our Neo-Puritans had gone about as far as they could go.  I also thought the "trans" movement too absurd to gain transaction.  I was wrong on every count

The prideful woke have gone well beyond Cotton Mather and his God-fearing crew.  Waving their rainbow flags — with, now, a pink modification — the woke proudly follow the Mao model on their long march through our institutions.  In a godless world without mercy or redemption, they promise only vengeance, and vengeance has no end point.

As in the Summers case, and in most such cases, an apology is not enough.  If anything, it is a further provocation.  Canadian LGBT activists wanted more.  To help them ring in Pride Month, a big deal in Toronto, they wanted groveling.  To that end, Bass had met with Pride Toronto executive director Sherwin Modeste on Tuesday and was scheduled to catch the opening pitch on Friday to launch Pride weekend festivities.  That should have been humiliation enough.

But Bass threw them all a curve.  When asked by the media on Thursday if the video he shared was "hateful," he refused to oblige them.  "I do not.  That's why I posted it originally," he said.  "When I look back at it, I can see how people would view it that way, and that's why I was apologetic."

This failure to capitulate only infuriated the Canadian Maoists.  They had expected Bass to reject his Christian beliefs or at least renounce them out of expedience, but Bass's faithfulness rescued him from any further degradation. 

As Nick Ashbourne of Yahoo News reported, "GM Ross Atkins ... might've been surprised by the degree to which Bass stuck to his guns."  Ashbourne adds without even a hint of self-awareness, "The team appeared to be attempting to rehabilitate the pitcher's image."

"Rehabilitate," right.  Next stop, re-education camp!  On Friday, Atkins, the Pontius Pilate of the story, chose to wash his hands of the affair by designating the 35-year-old Bass for assignment, a euphemism for cutting him from the roster.  "Performance was a large part of this decision," he lied.  "Distraction was a small part, but it factored in."

Maoism American-style makes liars and/or toadies out of everyone involved.  Yahoo's Ashbourne falls into the latter category.  He congratulated Atkins for "purging from their roster an individual clearly holding hateful views" with the caveat that Atkins "kept him for days" after he shared the video in question.  Ashbourne's take on the matter was the media norm.  In survival mode, journalists will insult their audience before antagonizing the newsroom's political commissars.

As to Anthony Bass, his career is over.  He can return to his pregnant wife and two little daughters and thank God he escaped the People's Republic of Canada with his soul intact.

Jack Cashill's Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities will be published on July 4.  Pre-order today.

Image: AlainAudet via Pixabay, Pixabay License.