“Peak Woke”

The End of Woke (And the Man Who Killed It)

They almost had it. They were so close.

It began with the gay marriage debate in 2012. Barack Obama was reelected president partially as a result of his stance on the issue, despite opposing same-sex marriage in years past. Most of… pic.twitter.com/9vYhReuFtK

— Jason James (@jasonjamesbnn) November 24, 2023

Worth a look.

Not every young person is joining the campus radicals. In the West, some are rebelling by turning against progressivism.

Like Hunter Biden, I did a lot of foolish things when I was young, only I stopped before middle age. I had a good time. Sometimes I think my generation was the last that could go to a party without having to worry about pronouns or tell politically incorrect jokes in college without having a secret file opened on you.

Even students in Oregon who aren’t required to learn much of anything to graduate can spot BS when they see it. And now, what these students in a Portland area suburb did to a tampon dispenser in their school bathroom has become the stuff of local — meme-able — legend.

Academia’s narrative about “land appropriation” and “cultural genocide” is not only dubious factually—it also offers a justification for revenge against certain groups.

The newest chapter in grievance politics is being written in American schools. This emerging narrative of “land appropriation” and “cultural genocide” is one-sided, divisive, and contrary both to history and to widely accepted ethical and constitutional principles of individual accountability and due process.

On our campus, the University of Chicago Civic Knowledge Project (UCCKP), together with the American Indian Center, has proposed a land acknowledgment to “demonstrate[] a commitment to beginning the process of dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and genocide.” UCCKP recognizes that this and other “social justice” processes “will probably take nothing less than the democratic socialist transformation of the U.S.”

“Western Civilization is being ideologically colonized.” The culprit is the virus of woke ideology, which has spread across the organizational systems of liberal Western societies to infect established institutions. The aim is a purified utopia based on the comprehensive enforcement of ‘equity,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘inclusion.’ This is the starting point of the short book, Counter Wokecraft, written by engineering professor Charles Pincourt and the founding president of New Discourses, James Lindsay; their main ambition is to supply an antidote to the cultural infestation.

I’m a Marxist. Though I’m a fairly unorthodox one at this point, I would still love to see a Marxist revolution. You know, an international movement of workers rising up and taking control of political and economic systems, and distributing resources and labor based on need, while organized under the principle of shared ownership of the productive apparatus of society.

But with American progressivism focused on identity politics, not class interests, forever wandering from the righteous to the ridiculous, this appears to be an unrealistic dream. So I’m left to settle for a set of lefty policy preferences that I can live with—a child tax credit, far more muscular laws protecting labor organizing, single-payer health insurance, reparations for slavery, and so on.

During an appearance on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast on Monday, famed Democrat strategist James Carville described the “identity left” as “goofy” and blamed “overeducated, cultural, white liberals” for ruining everything.

“I find the left to be just annoying,” Carville said before describing the “Western far left” as “habitually the most stupid, naive people you can imagine. They come up with these goofy constructs.”

Psychological dysfunction is now valorized and embedded in our institutions. We need to understand what we’re dealing with.

There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside-down. Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence; violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as “toxic,” while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square. It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown.

Progressive ideology has turned UK law enforcement into a woke farce

A few weeks ago, a story made headlines that outraged civil liberties advocates and critics of state over-reach. It revealed how much the British police have sunk into farce. A teenage girl with autism had been dragged from her home and arrested by a group of police officers after she said a female police officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. Well, the same force involved in this shocking display of state power – West Yorkshire Police – has done it again.

They’re indicative of society’s and individuals’ flight from reason into fantasy and self-destruction.

The “disease” of “hysteria” was the scourge of the front parlors and hospitals of the European elite in the 19th century. Even Sigmund Freud had a conflicted diagnostic go at hysteria. It was in the medical textbooks, in the meetings of surgeons and head shrinks, in the broadsheets, and in the minds and conversations of many a concerned lady. Fees for services flowed into the purses of medical practitioners — and doubtless also some quacks who worked to seek a cure for the overwrought ladies, inside and out, and rid them of the terrible hysteria menace.

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless.

On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call ‘woke’ is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done.

“They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,’ cried the actress, Kathy Burke. ‘If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.’

The extent to which radical gender and race ideology is imposed on the Civil Service has been laid bare by a dossier of internal communications leaked to The Telegraph.

Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.