ROME — The travel industry is the latest sector to join the trend of politicizing absolutely everything, with Fodor’s now pushing travel to countries with “strong progressive values.”
We have “rounded up a list of the countries with fantastic political and social perspectives, where your traveling dollars go to helping citizens on the ground through education or environmental efforts,” Fodor’s announces.
“Because sometimes dropping cash can be a political act,” it instructs in an article titled “Feel Good About Traveling to These 9 Countries with Strong Progressive Values.”
The creators of food and travel guides do not bother appealing to deplorables, assuming that every serious traveler is a card-carrying Democrat or political liberal.
“Just remember, people often don’t reflect the politics of their national governments, and if everyone avoided countries with bad regimes, the U.S. wouldn’t have any tourists right now,” Fodor’s says with a wink and a nudge.
The ideological travel promoted by Fodor’s places a premium on eco-friendly, “sustainable” destinations, where governments have fully bought into the climate-change craze.
Costa Rica, for instance, a country that dismantled its military in 1986, “is, not surprisingly, a place where your morning coffees and coastal glamping adventures are aiming toward going fossil fuel-free by 2021,” Fodor’s gushes.
Bhutan, on the other hand, does not have any residual Christian unpleasantness to mess up travel fun, making it an ideal vacation spot for the morally unencumbered. “This mountainous Buddhist country has a holistic approach to everything, including prosperity and community,” Fodor’s announces.
Among its progressive merits, Finland “is a totally innovative and socially responsible society,” Fodor’s declares, with its celebrated “Universal Basic Income,” which makes the country “a feel-good for spending your hard-earned cash.”
The politicizing of travel is just one more example of the unhealthy fashion of politicizing everything.
Topping the list of those swapping expertise for ideology is the once-prestigious Lancet medical journal, which now engages in unapologetic political propaganda.
Earlier this month, the Lancet trashed Italy’s democratically elected populist government for allegedly abetting “racism” and “xenophobia” in an article titled “Immigration in Italy: the medical community’s role in human rights.”
“Italy has been witnessing a rapid escalation towards racism and xenophobia since the new government came into power in June, 2018,” the article begins, without of course adducing any examples of this supposed decline into bigotry.
In late May, the Lancet ran an article denouncing a conservative “backlash” against the global LGBTQ movement, while praising the “progressive agenda that demands gender equality for girls and women and gender norms that promote health and wellbeing for all, including gender minorities,” describing that agenda as including “advocating against toxic masculinities” and “promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) justice.”
Apparently, no one in the Brave New World wants to merely be a travel expert or a medical authority.
Everyone wants to be a political player and we are all worse off for it.
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