Woke Won’t Win Wars
If you had the good fortune to stay away from the news this past week then you missed the sad spectacle of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff going all in on critical race theory (CRT) like some fey, woke academic.
Documentarians avoid tackling Cancel Culture for understandable reasons.
Say the wrong thing on screen, or have the wrong social media message in your digital past, and suddenly you’re the next Cancel Culture victim.
Even the 2019 docudrama “No Safe Spaces,” a brilliant expose of how woke thinking conquered the college landscape, is partially out of date thanks to Cancel Culture’s exponential rise.
Director Travis D. Brown isn’t afraid to cover Cancel Culture. He’s the driving force behind “The Woke Reformation,” a new YouTube (and Locals.com) based series examining this cultural blowtorch.
Tyler Cowen devotes his latest Bloomberg column to Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, which states that “Any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
There are certainly many examples of organisations veering off to the Left. Only this week, we’ve had the spectacle of the Royal Academy of Arts cancelling an artist because of her entirely reasonable views about sex and gender.
A high school valedictorian in New Jersey had his microphone cut after he went off-script to talk about his queer identity and battle with anorexia during his graduation speech.
Bryce Dershem, 18, took to the podium in a rainbow flag robe to deliver his address at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees last week.
Dersham and high school administrators had purportedly agreed upon a set speech prior to the event, but the valedictorian decided to go off-message after making his way onto the stage.
The Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center (PARC) website at Brandeis University reads like a parody.
PARC compiled a list of words it deemed too offensive to utter, which includes “rule of thumb,” “killing it,” “freshman” and, somewhat ironically, “trigger warning.” The list is making the rounds on social media, eliciting general mockery from the political Right. And these social justice warriors deserve to be mocked: Their list is ridiculous.
“Mayor Ted Wheeler was joined by Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chief Chuck Lovell for an afternoon video conference to announce that officers will no longer be asked to respond to traffic stops that are ‘not immediately related to safety threats.’ PPB officers have also been ordered under the city’s new consent search procedure to “clearly inform the person of their right to refuse or revoke their consent,” and must also record their request when asking the person for consent to search, said Wheeler, a Democrat,” reports Fox News.
Sports reporter and commentator Jason Whitlock said statues recently erected to memorialize George Floyd are “offensive” to black people and should be torn down.
Whitlock ripped into the “satanic cabal of cultural elites” promoting Floyd as a hero of social justice in a column published Tuesday at The Blaze. The narrative and meaning attached to Floyd’s life and death are part of a “Marxist overhaul” of American culture, Whitlock says.
“What is the end-game of the woke revolution?” is the premise of a new book entitled “Multiculturalism In Canada” by Hugh Donald Forbes, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
To understand the end-game of the woke revolution, look north: “The woke regime is most advanced in Canada, where officials call it multiculturalism.”
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau added multiculturalism to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the year 1982. The multicultural ideal would, in Trudeau’s words, “separate once and for all the concepts of state and of nation.”
Some of the core tenets of the “woke” ideology spreading around the country mimic ideas used to justify many of the most horrendous atrocities of the past century, according to several experts.
A recently released documentary exploring the topic, called “Better Left Unsaid,” concludes that the self-identified “radical left” endorses four fundamental “truths” that they “hold to be self-evident,” noting that these tenets have also been used to justify and incite many of the worst massacres of the 20th century.
The first of the four claims is that “the world is best viewed through a group oppression narrative lens.”
Oxford’s oldest student newspaper could be vetted by “sensitivity readers” to stop it publishing “problematic” articles under new plans.
Officials at the Oxford Student Union (Oxford SU) are planning to set up a ‘Student Consultancy of Sensitivity Readers’ who would be elected and paid to check articles across various student newspapers for signs of insensitivity.
There is a “need for better editing” to review journalism from Oxford’s esteemed campus newspaper Cherwell because of “high incidences of insensitive material being published”, students say.
Over the past year, Portland, Oregon, has descended into violent anarchy and madness. It chose this destructive path.
Its hapless trust-fund baby mayor, Ted Wheeler, let antifa thugs chase him from his posh home. (Voter tip: Don’t elect dopey trust fund kids to power. They lack even the basic life experiences the rest of us have to enable them to do much more than walk and chew gum at the same time. Seriously. Both parties. Keep them as far away from power as possible.)
Official anti-racist materials being deployed by Global Affairs Canada contain some mighty provocative statements:
“One of the documents on which the Global Affairs material is based informs recipients that “all European immigrants did not and do not become white at the same time (Irish, Italians, Jews).”
“Becoming white involves giving up parts of your original culture in order to get the advantages and privileges of belonging to the white group.”
Teachers should oppose the toppling of the statue commemorating the founder of public education in Ontario.
The memory of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, is not thriving these days in the country he brought into being. In 2018, his image was removed from the Canadian $10 bill, which it had decorated since 1971. His name has been quietly scrubbed from the Ottawa airport named in his honor in 1993. In August 2020, vandals toppled statues of Macdonald in Montreal and in Kingston, Ontario. (The city of Kingston legally removed that statue on June 18—a special blow to Macdonald’s memory in the city he represented in Parliament throughout most of his career.) This summer, the province of Prince Edward Island removed a modern statue of Macdonald from its capital, Charlottetown. Even the small town of Picton, Ontario, where Macdonald argued his first law cases, will soon remove a statue erected with donations from local residents, my wife’s family among them. Macdonald’s name has been erased from university and school buildings, and even book prizes.
The Law Society has faced a storm of online mockery and criticism after it showcased its guide for the use of pronouns in the workplace. While some found the initiative ridiculous, others blasted it for not being inclusive enough.
The law association, which represents and governs solicitors in the jurisdiction of England and Wales, has been actively participating in the virtual celebration of Pride Month, sharing its latest contribution on social media late on Saturday.
