Whodunit It? The Wokes Did!

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog

Agatha Christie, an elderly lady from Devon, had plenty of blood on her hands, all of it fictional. But none of the killers in her many books and short stories are nearly as monstrous or obsessed as the censorious wokes who have been coming after the deceased author for decades.

The latest episode in the long-running saga takes place not on a luxurious train speeding through Yugoslavia or on the Nile, but at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) which had performed Christie’s play, “And Then There Were None.”

“And Then There Were None” is a natural fit for a high school setting. With lots of different balanced roles and one-note characters who reveal a hidden side, it’s a training wheels production for students learning the basics of performing a character and acting on stage.

It’s also fun. Ten people. One island. And a killer.

There’s a reason why “And Then There Were None” has remained popular and Hollywood keeps ripping it off for movies like 2022’s ‘The Menu’ which added food to the premise.

Over February, a mutlti-racial cast of Philly teens had taken on the roles of murderers and murder victims on an island off Christie’s native Devon, England, with the enthusiasm and polish to be expected of teenage actors, and had fun with it, smoking cigars, rocking in rocking chairs, dressing up and trying to deliver lines in shocked voices, until they were told it was all wrong.

And the play, based on one of the best-selling novels ever written, was really a hate crime.

While there’s nothing objectionable about the play (unless you object to people being murdered, which wokes do not), it’s based on a Christie novel whose title once had the “N-word” in it after a minstrel song. It was then charged to “Ten Little Soldiers” or “Ten Little Indians” in various versions and eventually became known as “And Then There Were None.” The novel never appeared under its original offensive name in America and it’s been that way since 1940.

As a British author, Christie didn’t understand the offensiveness of the “N-word” and American culture the way that the Yanks did. By the end of the forties, Christie had cleaned up her own books long before the modern woke publishers began rewriting them for offensive content.

There’s nothing actually racist about “And Then There Were None.” None of the characters are black, but one of the white characters is actually punished for his abuses toward African people.

Philip Lombard, one of the more clearly evil characters, describes stealing the food of his African mercenaries. “Natives don’t mind dying, you know. They don’t feel about it as Europeans do,” he villainously claims. That original crime is the reason why he deserves to die.

But still the staff at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts are fielding outrage because the school allowed “And Then There Were None” to be performed despite the fact that over eighty years ago, before anyone involved was born, it used to have a racist title.

And, worse still, the performance had happened during Black History Month.

Some wokes figured it out and became professionally outraged, claiming that the play contained “racist, xenophobic, and violent content”. Violent content in a murder mystery? Well, I never!

Outraged leftists claimed that the play about ten bad people being killed off by an unknown murderer “lacked historical context and did not provide any cautionary preface or follow-up discussion”. Wokes love nothing more than adding mandatory trigger warnings to everything..

The mother of a student complained, “there was a scene in the play where a noose swings out on stage and a white student is holding the noose.The whole crowd gasped. We were not sure if somebody was going to get lynched or what would happen next. I was kind of aghast and shocked.”

Spoiler alert: no one got ‘lynched’ on an island off the English coast in the 1930s. The noose serves to enable the climactic suicide. It has nothing whatsoever to do with lynching. That didn’t stop an NPR affiliate from writing multiple paragraphs describing the history of lynching in America, which has as much to do with the play as Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan.

Molefi Asante, an African American studies prof, insisted the school should have lectured on “the history of racism in Britain and America” and “why this play is significant now. The director of the play missed an opportunity to really educate the students about the meaning of the play.”

The meaning of the play is that it’s entertaining. That is a concept wokes are incapable of understanding. It is not about the history of racism. It has no significance “now” or ever. It is refreshingly free of George Floyd, Trans Visibility or any of the things wokes insist plays must be about. It’s fun and there’s nothing that wokes hate more than fun. Except maybe white people.

Since the squeaky wokes get the grease, CAPA’s principal has already apologized “for the offense that this has caused” and vowed that while she “cannot undo the harm caused, please know that as a school community we are taking active and intentional steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.” That means all future plays will be about transgenders and lynching.

CAPA is holding a ‘Town Hall’ at which outraged wokes will scream about their pain until there are none left to listen. No amount of apologies will sate their bloodlust, only embolden them.

Throughout all of the subsequent outrage, none of them has managed to coherently explain what’s wrong with the play aside from the novel’s original title. Multiple people interviewed by the local NPR arm still could not explain what they were offended by except the original title.

And until they were told about the title, they had no idea that anything was wrong.

That’s because there was nothing wrong. And had someone not checked Wikipedia, it would have stayed that way. Wokes are not genuinely offended, they’re seeking to take offense. The more offended they are, the more power they get. And the more power they get, the more offended they are. The vicious cycle of violence is what “And There Were None” is About.

Whodunit? The wokes did.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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