If you thought that Disney and Bud Light had cornered the market on offending conservative consumers, I regret to inform you that Marriott has now kicked down the door and told Mickey Mouse to hold its beer in an incredible act of left wing censorship.
On Friday, journalist Andy Ngo was slated to appear in Virginia at the Richmond Commonwealth Club, but after left wing Antifa thugs posted about the event, demanding that followers call and complain at the venue until they caved. The venue canceled it, citing safety concerns, leaving the Common Sense Society, which was hosting Ngo, scrambling.
They found a room at the inn, the Richmond Westin, owned by Marriott to be exact, but no sooner did Antifa goons resume their online smears and calling campaign than the hotel folded like a beach chair to the cackling demands to silence Ngo.
Let’s be completely clear, what Marriott has done here is orders of magnitude worse than anything that Disney or Bud Light have done. The latter corporations may be pushing a dangerous ideology, but Marriott is the modern equivalent of the Woolworth lunch counter refusing to serve black people.
The entire raison d’etre of a hotel is to provide accommodation—including for meetings and conferences. Marriott has now decided that an entire class of Americans, namely those who criticize Antifa, will be denied service.
Maybe those who criticize Antifa, in their millions, should deny Marriott their business.
Before getting to the parade of horribles that Antifa and its allies on the progressive left have inflicted on the country, a word about Andy Ngo, and his work to expose this very real threat.
Ngo is by any measure a regular, respected, working journalist and author who regularly appears on cable news and has even testified before Congress, but Marriott thinks his ideas are too dangerous to be given a platform?
Put simply, if this can happen to Ngo, then no journalist who crosses the ridiculous lines drawn in the sand by censorious progressives is safe from this kind of persecution.
And who exactly were the cowards at Marriott caving to here? An organization, and yes it is very much an organization, hell-bent on destroying the government of the United States.
This is the same Antifa that set fire to federal buildings in Portland, that traded gunfire with police at a proposed training facility in Atlanta, that poured gasoline on the George Floyd riots causing billions of dollars in damage, and the same Antifa that regularly threatens the lives of Ngo and others who dare question and cover them.
And how do we know about these horrible actions of Antifa? How do we know so much about their shadowy operations? In large part we know about it precisely because of Andy Ngo, whose reporting on the group is stellar and unmatched.
No doubt Marriott thought it's illiberal refusal of Ngo’s right to rent a room was good corporate citizenship, but frankly that's the problem, we need far less “citizenship,” from corporations and far more services offered without regard to ideology.
In its current iteration “good corporate citizenship,” equates promoting the gender transition of kids, or bowing to Antifa along with things like the universally accepted breast cancer awareness.
The difference, of course, is that nobody is in favor of breast cancer, but plenty of people are in favor of protecting kids from trans ideology and exposing the criminal activity of Antifa.
If the policy of Marriott is that it will not host conservative viewpoints at its properties then conservatives have a right to know that so they can make their hotel decisions accordingly.
If this is not the position of Marriott then the company must clearly and loudly make clear what a horrible and dangerous mistake canceling Ngo’s appearance was and make assurances nothing like it will happen again.
Recent successful efforts to punish companies like Disney, Bud Light, and Target have shown that conservatives have power in this area if they choose to wield it. Now is the time to do so, the message to Marriott must be loud and clear.
This is about more than free speech or freedom of assembly, this is also about an attempt by the radical left to dehumanize those who will not worship at their perverse altar and intone their sinister shibboleths.
The message to Ngo and the millions of us who share his perfectly normal views is that we are not fit to be in a room with good, decent people, that we must be shunned, made to gather in shadowy secret.
The road from that kind of treatment to getting rounded up and thrown in a camp somewhere is far, far shorter than those who would ignore Marriott’s sin against freedom care to recognize.
Marriott needs to apologize to Andy Ngo, and to all of us, and if it won’t? Then that is something we ought to be thinking about the next time we book a hotel room.
