By William H. Perkins Jr.
Editor
China’s communist rulers are on the verge of fully implementing their Social Credit System nationwide. It’s like a financial credit score in this country — with one big difference. In addition to a Chinese person’s financial credit being tracked and evaluated, this new system tracks actions and behaviors of citizens and calculates a score that is used to essentially determine the course of an individual’s life.
Attend an anti-government rally, and the score could go down sufficiently to prevent a person from traveling around the country for work, visitation, and overseas. Get reported by a neighbor monitoring the comings and goings at a person’s residence, and that person may not be able to attend a top university or get a coveted job.
Get caught at a church service not approved by the government… Well, you get the idea.
Combine the latest facial recognition technology, a far-reaching collection of surveillance cameras around the country, and some of the most sophisticated computer networks in the world, and it’s going to be possible to keep the entire population under control when completed.
To a freedom-loving citizen of the western democracies, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? Americans wouldn’t stand for that, would we?
Think again. This country is moving toward a social score system right now that threatens to ruin the lives of people who in some way haven’t conformed to the will of the ruling elite, or just the loudest anarchists. It’s called the cancel culture, and was commonly known in the past as blacklisting. Mimi Groves is a case in point.
Mimi is a high-achieving high school graduate in every way, and had already been accepted to the University of Tennessee and the school’s cheer team this fall. That’s certainly a positive way to begin her adult life, undoubtedly with many more honors and recognitions to come.
That is, until a racial slur came to light that she uttered in a video when she was 15 years old. As the video went viral and became a rallying cry for groups that wanted to punish her, she was expelled from the UT cheer team and invited by the university to withdraw before she attended her first class.
“Mimi was a kid when she did this,” her attorney, Shan Wu, told Fox News, as reported by the New York Post. “She’s appalled, and having said that, she’s not trying to excuse [her actions] in any way. What she lost was her dream. Like many athletes, she had worked most of her young adult life for a shot at going to a great school and being on their team. That was taken away from her in what can only be described as a rush to judgement.”
As Wu described, Mimi admits that her inappropriate conduct, borne of mid-teen immaturity, was wrong. We all do. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” Groves told the New York Times.
She also pointed out that the racial slur she used is part and parcel of many popular rap tunes, then and now. “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth. How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”
There’s a lesson for parents in this tale about educating young children on the timelessness and viciousness of modern social media. For Mimi, she will never hear the last of it. She will carry this three-second burden for the rest of her life.
In another obscene example of how far down this road we’ve gone, Forbes magazine has solemnly promised to hound for a lifetime anyone connected to the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists… and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie,” threatens the magazine’s chief content officer and editor, Randall Lane.
“We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet,” he said. “Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.”
The moral of this story for Christians is obvious: It’s a short trip from destroying a young woman’s life plans or ruining someone’s future employment prospects for political reasons, to calling out and stigmatizing Christians in the same ways for our beliefs. When that happens, will we be ready to stand firm no matter the cost? We’d best start preparing now – and most importantly, praying.
Editor’s Note: Opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, The Baptist Record, nor the publication’s Advisory Committee. The author may be contacted at wperkins@mbcb.org.
