“Peak Woke”

Woke began the day, 20 years ago, when Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard for saying there are innate differences between men and women, argues Helen Andrews in Compact. His cancellation was feminine, because all cancellations are feminine – and the rise of wokery is synonymous with the Great Feminisation as women become majorities in Western workplaces. Here’s an excerpt.

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone”, argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire ‘woke’ era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

If any institution in the world provides evidence of Freud’s concept of the death instinct, it is the Church of England. With unfailing aim, it does whatever will hasten its demise, already quite advanced. Shortly after it appointed Sarah Mullally as Arch Social Worker (formerly Archbishop) of Canterbury, it proceeded to vandalize its mother church, Canterbury Cathedral, not by forbidding but by actually commissioning graffiti on its ancient columns, incensing almost everyone but a small coterie of evangelical Wokeists.

Last month, leftists erupted when it was announced that former gaming titan Electronic Arts (EA) had been sold to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a firm owned by Jared Kushner. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund joined Kushner’s Affinity Partners to acquire the studio behind the “Madden,” “Battlefield,” and “Sims” franchises in a $55 billion deal.

EA had long been gamers’ preferred corporate villain. A pivot to live-service models in contrast to well-crafted single-player narratives alienated core fans, ballooning budgets meant that the company had to squeeze every penny out of consumers through predatory practices like loot boxes, and activist influencers within the company began poisoning content with their woke ideology. By the time the Saudis and Kushner appeared, shareholders were desperate to ditch a dying company.

Quebec is banning the use of gender-neutral inclusive language in all official communications.

French-language Minister Jean-François Roberge will present legislation at the National Assembly to this effect Wednesday.

He said newly emerging gender-neutral words, which are often used by transgender and non-binary people, create “incoherence” in Quebec’s official language.

Because nouns are gendered, Roberge’s rules also prohibit writing in a way that neutralizes them. Newer neutral pronouns like “iel” – which is used similarly to “they” in English – won’t be allowed either.

John Cleese has accused BBC bosses of being “stupid” and “clowns” after an unsuccessful meeting to discuss comedy ideas.

The 85-year-old actor, whose Fawlty Towers sitcom was first broadcast five decades ago, shared the withering assessment after a conversation with two executives from the broadcaster held several weeks ago.

The wokest and most delusional of U.S. citizens are fleeing to Europe, convinced that Trump has turned America into a transphobic, misogynistic dictatorship.

Finally, Europe has found a group of refugees who aren’t welcome—Americans.

As reported by Reuters this week, there is a small but growing number of U.S. citizens attempting to claim asylum in Europe, on the grounds that they are transgender. One such individual is Veronica Clifford-Carlos, a 28-year-old artist from San Francisco, who left the U.S. in June this year, hoping to be granted refugee status in the Netherlands. Clifford-Carlos claimed that the U.S. is no longer safe for trans people, and that “I have people screaming ‘faggot’ at me in the street … I have people threatening my life, threatening to assault me, threatening to follow me home and kill my family.” 

Eighty-eight percent of students admitted they ‘have pretended to hold more progressive views… to succeed socially or academically’

If, as Shakespeare observed, “all the world is a stage, and all its men and women merely players,” no place is that truer than the modern American university.

In the first study of its kind, 88 percent of Northwestern and University of Michigan students admitted they “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” While the phenomenon of college students pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier for them as they attend these hotbeds of radicalism is not surprising, the true scale of it is.