The Australian Open recently lost its number one seed, top tennis player Novak Djokovic, after Australian authorities revoked his visa to enter the country. Djokovic, who remains unvaccinated against COVID, had received an exemption from Australia’s insane COVID regulations in order to enter the country and play in the Open. But once he arrived in Australia, authorities revoked his visa.
After an initial victory overturning the government’s decision and allowing him to train, the government once again decided unilaterally to revoke his visa and expel him from the country. And its reasoning was about as mindless as you could imagine.
One of the reasons the government decided to boot Djokovic was because if it didn’t, he might become an icon for freedom of choice. In a country that has had one of the most jackbooted and tyrannical responses to COVID, the existence of someone prominent who wasn’t vaccinated just couldn’t be tolerated.
But almost worse than the Australian government’s actions were the responses of sports writers and pundits, who are among the worst bootlickers around today. Some writers even blamed Djokovic, claiming that he brought all of this upon himself by not being vaccinated. I wonder if that same writer would make the same claims about rape victims bringing rapes upon themselves by being out late at night, or about robbery victims being at fault for wandering into the wrong neighborhood.
The amount of victim blaming and virtue signaling from people who should have known better was nauseating in its hypocrisy, but most of those people blaming Djokovic probably lack the intellectual ability to see just how hypocritical they are. Unfortunately, we may have to come back to this issue later this year, as France has now mandated that all athletes be vaccinated against COVID, putting Djokovic’s participation at the French Open in jeopardy.
It’s all so tiresome, as most of us realize by now that the COVID hysteria was much ado about nothing. Yet still we’re seeing the unvaccinated being treated as modern-day lepers, even as the vaccinated and boosted come down with COVID and spread it. We can only hope that sanity will prevail once again in the near future, and that the oppressive treatment of people like Djokovic will help wake more people up to the insanity perpetrated by the COVIDiots who remain in power in places like Australia.
Image: Francois Goglins