“Peak Woke”

The new James Bond may be progressive, but the army certainly isn’t

Charlie Higson’s new Bond novel On His Majesty’s Secret Service provoked incredulity and scorn last week, for depicting Bond as a kimchi-eating Centrist Dad and the villain as the Ukipper-on-steroids “Aethelstan”. This in turn prompted a flurry of debate about whether a woke Bond is plausible. Meanwhile, reports this week of a PTSD camp for veterans seemingly operated by the real-world “Aethelstan” offer a tantalising counterargument. 

The near-universal loathing for Charlie Higson’s new Bond novel has restored my faith in humanity.

Last week on X (formerly known as Twitter), Ed West, journalist and eternal Eeyore of the British right, shared a few pages from the latest James Bond novel. He included no prompts to indicate how we should feel about it, or indeed why he had thought it worth bringing to our attention. But the derision it drew was immediate. The consensus was overwhelming: it was tripe.

A 73-year-old woman has been questioned at her home by English police because she took a picture of a sticker. This was months after the Conservative government said it was “deeply concerned about reports of the police wrongly getting involved in lawful debate in this country”—a message that has been clearly ignored.

The pensioner, who worked as a social worker before retiring, took a picture of a sticker reading “Keep males out of women-only spaces,” according to The Daily Telegraph. The sticker had been affixed to a pro-transgender poster branding the slogan: “Stand by your trans.”

Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company is the latest major performing arts institution to report plummeting ticket sales and layoffs, with more than ten percent of employees set to lose their jobs. Leaders are blaming soaring operating costs due to inflation and a slower-than-expected “post-pandemic” economy.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, has promised to cut wokeness out of policing. Speaking to the Telegraph earlier this week, he said there are ‘very few causes policing should be attached to’ and that officers should not express or act upon their political convictions while on duty.

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‘The accidental misgendering, the time off work to get your mastectomy, the recovery time from it, the sort of constant name changes’ are taxing, a Bay Area restaurant owner says.

Are employers hesitant to hire people who identify as transgender or nonbinary? As transgender rights issues dominate the headlines, that is a question being hotly debated on social media.

Several large right wing and gender-critical left wing accounts on X posted screenshots this week of answers to a Quora post asking, “Why won’t anybody hire me because I’m a transgender?” In internet fashion, many of the posts to X were intentionally provocative, calling pronouns “the biggest red flag” or saying that they would “never hire” people with pronouns on their resumes.

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‘Wokeness’ was created in the United States, then swiftly exported to the rest of the Western world. In Ireland, a country with close ancestral ties to the U.S., ‘wokeness’ now reigns supreme. In fact, it’s safe to say that Ireland is the official ‘woke’ capital of Europe.

If you doubt this, let me point you in the direction of the country’s new draft curriculum for 15- to 18-year-olds. As first reported by Gript, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), the Irish education ministry’s advisory council, has recommended the introduction of classes that center around white privilege, male privilege, gender identity, and sexual diversity.