“Peak Woke”

A report from Business.com finds that there is discrimination against “non-binary” people. At least, non-binary people believe there is discrimination. “Over 80% of nonbinary people believe that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search,” the report finds. Also, 51% believe their gender identity has “affected their workplace experience.”

Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions are high, suspicions running wild. And suddenly, onto the town green, strides a middle-aged woman in a long cloak and tall, tapered hat. She scratches a pentagram into the dirt. She mutters incantations. She sacrifices a goat and eats its heart and declares eternal fealty to the Devil himself. And when someone points and shrieks, “Witch!”, she cheerfully replies, “Heck yes, I am!”

The English major of a decade or two ago or today is very different. Within a fairly short span of time the traditional way of studying and analyzing texts has mostly been sidelined at universities in favor of identity politics readings. Look at the UCLA English courses and you’ll see a once respected department where half the courses are about race, sexuality, and assorted wokeness ‘lenses’ filtering out the actual books.

This bastardization is a form of cultural appropriation.

James Bond books edited to remove racist references

James Bond novels have been rewritten to remove a number of racial references from Ian Fleming’s work, The Telegraph can reveal.

All of the author’s thrillers featuring 007 are set to be reissued in April to mark 70 years since Casino Royale, the first book in the series, was published.

A major Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit rejects beauty and cultivates racial resentment

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.