Sam Kahn, an editor at Persuasion, has written a piece taking issue with the claim that wokeness is on the way out—that we’ve passed “peak woke”. I though we had, given the increasing frequency of stories in the MSM that questioned the “received wisdom” of progressive authoritarianism, like this 2022 piece from the NYT (it did, by the way, encounter strong pushback from the paper’s staff).
And we all know that DEI programs are being dismantled in both the academic and corporate world. So I was hopeful that “wokeness”—by which I mean “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”—was on its way out. This was buttressed by an article in The Economist which used graphs (see below) to show a decline in wokeness.
Click below to read Kahn’s piece (Michelle Goldberg of the NYT also made this claim about “peak wokeness” going away):
Kahn takes issue with the “wokeness-is-declining” conclusion on two grounds. First, he argues that wokeness is so deeply entrenched in mainstream institutions that we barely notice it any more. Second, he argues that the statistics presented in The Economist article are misleading: they may show a small decline in indices of wokeness in the past couple of years, but no long-term trend. I find his argument pretty convincing, especially the main example he uses to demonstrate his thesis. Click below to read:
Kahn’s example of his thesis is the infamous interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil. Coates has just published a book containing three essays, one of which is a 100-page anti-Israel screed based on a mere ten days that Coates spent in “Palestine,” by which he means both Israel and the West Bank. I will be reading that, but the book hasn’t arrived at the library yet. However, Dokoupil’s questions, the scathing review of the book by Coleman Hughes, along with other reports, are indicate a one-sided accusation of Israel. The fact that Coates doesn’t even mention Hamas or the terrorism inflicted on Israel is a telling sign that his essay is misleading, as is the praise for it.
The sign for Kahn that we haven’t reached peak woke is the fact that Dokoupil was called on the carpet by CBS officials simply for asking civil but hard questions of Coates (see the video here). The problem, as everyone knows but only a few will admit, is that Dokoupil challenged some dubious conclusions and observations of a black American icon. That is simply beyond today’s journalistic pale, and that’s why Kahn sees wokeness as deeply embedded in the media. Had Coates been white rather than black, the pushback on Dokoupil would have been far less intense. Race mattered.
Kahn:
My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever.
. . . What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”
All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”
The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.
Regardless of what Coates said in his book, and I will be checking it, you don’t treat a journalist like this for asking hard questions. That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues. The fact that CBS would give Dokoupil a verbal spanking (and later refuse to admit that Jerusalem is in Israel), shows that they have “structural wokeism.”
As for the Economist‘s statistics, it is true that they shows rise in indices of wokeness until 2020, but then a tiny decline in the subsequent three years. It may mean something, but it may not. Here are three graphs given by Persuasion and taken from The Economist:
As The Economist notes:
. . ., . we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since.
Yes, but it’s not much of a fall: a small drop in one year and a tiny rise in 2023:
A plot of those who think that inequities are due to discrimination, again showing just a slight drop after 2021. No statistics are given so we don’t know if the figures are significantly different, but at any rate the drop is tiny.
And woke terms in social-science papers. Again, a smallish dip between 2022 and 2023.
None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing. You’d need a longer-term analysis to show that. The Economist article also gives data on the censuring of academics, mentioning DEI on earnings calls, and DEI jobs in big companies, all showing declines between 2021 or 2022 and 2023. And the first two declines look significant, but again we’d like long-term data. It may be that DEI as an institution is on the way out, but is still embedded in academia in non-obvious ways (I think this is the case for my university). I have no idea what to make of the “earnings calls” mentions.
Perhaps Kahn is right: wokeness has so thoroughly imbued America that we no longer notice it. Teachers are inhibited from saying certain things in the classroom; the NYT and Washington Post are still biased in their news coverage towards progressive issues, and identiarianism—a sure sign of wokeness—is still with us. Perhaps wokeness has just become hidden so much that we no longer see it as wokeness. But I’ll give Kahn the last word (feel free to tendewr your opinion below):
A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.
It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.
I can’t help adding that the wokeness evinced by asserting that Israel is a demonic, apartheid-ridden, and settler-colonialist state—a “progressive” view evinced by Ta-Nehisi Coates—has certainly not declined over the last year. It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.
h/t: Ginger K.
PCC(E): “None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing.”
Agreed.
The process behind it being sort of hidden / not so obvious (as suggested above) is well-covered here on WEIT :
subversion
Subversion relies on dialectic. This is the problem – to recognize a transformation of thought – rather than gripping distractions such as pronouns, blue hair, drag queens as educators in pre-K-12 public school, etc.
Following the dialectic will turn up Environmental, Social, Governance scoring in industries such as Meta and Boeing – “ESG” – the subversion to shrink the free market for absorption into Dengism – a dialectical synthesis of communism and fascism.
We don’t know if the peaks in the graphs are global maxima or local maxima. What we need more of—to assess whether there really is a long-term trend—is, well, time. It’ll take more time before we can really know.
My guess is that there is sort of a ratchet effect with wokeness. At least some of its traits have clicked into place to become permanent. From now on, we will all be very careful to identify the pronouns with which people identify. We will listen attentively to the words that a new acquaintance uses, searching for the clues that will reveal the right pronoun to use. That’s permanent.
Whether we continue to regard every difference in level of accomplishment or status as being a manifestation of institutional racism—rather than of merit and luck—is not clear. Knowing will take time.
But do we do this – figure out the preferred pronouns etc – or just refuse to play along and use the old method (go by how things appear), playing the role of curmudgeon until we die? It would seem reasonable, although probably ineffective since everyone else will think “he’ll be dead soon (and so will his obnoxious behavior).” How does one best rebel, in daily life, against wokeness?
I plan to take the curmudgeon path.
More or less. But the pronoun hill is the one I die on. A decade ago I’d have complied out of politeness alone. No more.
Ditto “ciss” – I object to it. I’m not a sissy nor a cyst and the only people using that term are gender activists or those afraid of them (Kathleen Stock I think said that).
I note older gay friends in my mainly gay building in Cheslea, NYC, think it is stupid.
D.A.
NYC
“That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues.” That’s what we USED to expect journalists to do. In Canada at least that isn’t the case anymore at all.
Woke skirmishes will continue to be fought; however, the war has already been lost. The same goes for the binary nature of sex, identity over merit, alternative ways of knowing over science, etc. etc. The long march through the institutions is complete.
Here are just two examples that support my conclusion.
In its first iteration, the California Community College System defined merit in this way:
Merit: A concept that at face value appears to be a neutral measure of academic achievement and qualifications; however, merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality. Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards (i.e., the use of standardized tests that are biased against racial minorities) and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces. Merit implies that White people are deemed better qualified and more worthy but are denied opportunities due to race-conscious policies. However, this understanding of merit and worthiness fails to recognize systemic oppression, racism, and generational privilege afforded to Whites.
https://www.thefire.org/libraries/pdf.js/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefire.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2F2023%2F08%2FDEIA%2520Glossary%2520of%2520Terms.pdf
That definition revealed too much about the people within the CCCCO system, so now the definition reads:
Merit: Merit refers generally to a person’s virtues, achievements, or praiseworthiness. In the academic context, concepts of merit historically focus on forms of achievement that are biased toward members of the dominant culture, and tend not to account for the effects of systemic inequalities-particularly those related to family wealth and race
https://www.asccc.org/sites/default/files/Agendas/deia-glossary-27FEB2024%20%281%29.pdf
Does anyone think that change occurred because there was a turnover in CCCCO personnel or philosophy?
The same can be said about the National Museum of African American History and Culture. You no longer see the following graphic on their Whiteness webpage, but that’s not because the staff who created left the organization.
https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness
Unfortunately I agree. At my university, the senior vice president (a black woman who is not a scholar but has a PhD in Human Organizational Systems) sees her remit as the advancement of black flourishing. We’re hiring black and indigenous faculty members just for their racial identities. But first we developed a policy for deciding who is indigenous (because so many people in Canada are pretendians). There is lots of help to do this: many administrative offices have an indigenous person on the staff whose job is just to be an indigenous person on staff.
Recently, as Jerry generously highlighted, the president of my university announced with a heavy heart that she would no longer make pronouncements like this one
http://www.sfu.ca/president/statements/community-messages/2021/message-from-the-president–residential-school-findings-.html
in which the CEO of the institution told her employees that it’s your professional responsibility to adopt a specific stance on a contentious social issue: “It is not enough to express our sadness and grief at this news [false reports of the remains of dead children in a mass grave at the former site of an Indian residential school] it is our responsibility to take action and commit to reconciliation personally and professionally.”
So some superficial things have changed since 2021. But no policies have changed. And no one has left these jobs. As the old joke goes, the jobs are useless, and the pay is not too good, but it’s steady work.
images.shulcloud.com/5638/uploads/Torah-Thoughts/Torah-Thoughts-Tzav.pdf
In general, I agree – see my comment (# 9) below. But in sports there will be no substitution of gender identity for sex. The travesty we saw with the female Olympic boxing competition in Paris, where two males won gold medals, will not be repeated. Sports depends on public support for viewers and financial support. The public is strongly against allowing athletes to chose the sex class they compete in.
Similarly, affirmative action was ruled unconstitutional. Now colleges are looking for ways to circumvent that legal ruling. But those who brought the cases that lead to the ruling are watching colleges too. Again, affirmative action is broadly unpopular. And colleges too need the support of the public. This creates limits as to what woke people can do (even those who are ensconced in various institutions).
The other day Jerry had a post about the NSF (National Science Foundation) funding various woke “research” projects wth taxpayer dollars. If Trump wins the presidency, expect pushback against this.
🤢🤮
“Attempts to censure academics for their opinions” may be down, but that is meaningless: academics have by now learned to keep their mouths shut. A very sad state of affairs.
Ask the owner of a newly-built suburban home why he planted grass seed in his yard. He will likely assume that you are asking why he went with seed rather than sod and will answer accordingly. Outside of those few communities that embrace xeriscaping, he would seldom assume that you were questioning the practice of planting lawns across America.
That is culture. When a practice becomes so widespread, so taken for granted, that one needn’t advocate for it, one needn’t defend it. I don’t know whether wokeness has embedded itself in “our” cultural practices; the “our” of our asking rarely includes the auto repair shop, the plumbers’ union, or the Esteemed Society of Trash Collectors. But if it does, indeed, become embedded in professional and over-credentialed America, then it could prove misguided to look for evidence of its decline in word counts of articles, speeches, and news stories. Instead, compare the news room to the working-class workplace or bar. Where and with whom are the young journalists uncomfortable? Who do they view as retrograde? Why? That type of analysis might get us somewhere. There are reasons why the greatest political divide in America is between white working-class men and college-educated women. And the answer ain’t all about abortion. Nor is it misogyny.
🎯
Well put!
I agree with Kahn. The Economist et al metricizing mentions of woke is not a good indicator. It is like fish measuring the height of water in a pond of water/wokeness.
It is everywhere, burnt into an entire generation. ALL is now evil oppressor/victim via racial/sex category.
Whether oldies like us notice its slight wax and wain doesn’t matter at all, it is the only thing the young people know – they’ve not experienced any education, peers, media and now workplaces that aren’t soaked in it.
(metaphors approximate – apologies. I hope you get my point).
BTW – T. Coates was one of the main reasons (along with Kendi and Xolottle Gonzalez) why I unsubscribed to the Atlantic two years ago.
He is an idiot savant, a sacred mar-gin-al-ized minority who can do no wrong, even in the face of his obvious terrorist sympathies and know-nothing, ignorant antisemitic hate.
D.A.
NYC
David I half agree with you on Coates as an idiot savant – he is in no way a savant.
A timely (ha ha) example of how embedded woke ideas have become: today at the Chicago Marathon the Kenyan runner Ruth Chepngetich broke the world record by 2 minutes or 1.5%.
http://www.espn.com/olympics/trackandfield/story/_/id/41771776/ruth-chepngetich-smashes-world-record-chicago-marathon
Seems small but it’s a gigantic single increase in speed relative to previous world records. So huge that commentators wonder aloud whether Chepngetich is actually a trans woman (a male).
x.com/Scienceofsport/status/1845476064610386335
That speculation has become normalized after the Castor Semenya saga (and that of other trans athletes), despite it being unfair to Chepnegetich who is not trans and is probably just training hard and wearing the right shoes (one presumes not Sneex).
Caster S. is not trans. However, he is a man. Lots of data points support this claim. Males (typically) have XY chromosomes, Caster S. has XY chromosome. Males have high (male-normal) Testosterone levels. Caster S. has high (male-normal) Testosterone levels. Males don’t have ovaries. Caster S. does not have ovaries. Males have testis. Caster S. has testis. Males don’t have Fallopian tubes. Caster S. does not have Fallopian tubes. Males don’t have a uterus. Caster S. does not have a uterus. Males don’t menstruate. Caster S. does not menstruate. Bottom line is easy. Caster S. is male. Believe it or not, almost all of these data points come from his Wikipedia page.
I’ll suggest the very dim possibility of a lighter spot growing on the horizon: there’s anecdotal evidence out there that the younger kids and teens are starting to rebel.
On social media — where Wokeism got its major boost — there are a rash of reports of teenage eye rolling and heavy sighing over the constant harping on identity, race, Safetyism, oppressor/oppressed, and other progressive stances validated on media and in education.The social justice activists among them, once celebrated and looked up to by their peers, are pretty annoying — and no longer trendy or edgy. How can they be when parents and corporations are clapping their hearty and performative approval? Oh, come on.
The steady diet of social justice fundamentalism being fed to the youngest generation is wrapped up in the idea that it’s good to rebel from the status quo. If “Wokeism” has become the status quo, that may not be the best position for it to be in, long term. It’s not that hard to debunk a lot of the bunkum — and as we know, that can be cool and edgy, too.
Sastra’s comments fit some of what I’m hearing too.
Eg, the younger kids are calling the woke older kids “the they/thems”, then shrugging and walking away.
It is hard to know the ratios. Happily there is a contingent of young people who oppose the nonsense. Like ex-Muslims these are people to be treasured and amplified.
Coleman Hughes is one valuable person in this.
D.A.
NYC
Heh, the youngsters see the millennials as being old and un-hip.
Maybe this is how it will really end.
As others have observed, sooner or later the avant-garde becomes garde.
This makes sense. Expecting Wokeism to fade out so soon is not realistic. But things go in cycles and every generation rebels and separates itself from the parent generation. The aspects of Wokeism that are illogical and ultimately destructive (i.e., most of them) will get flushed by the generations that follow. It will just take some time.
Those of us who are “boomers” may not live to see the end game, and a lot of damage will be done along the way, but I am strangely confident that a large measure of sanity eventually will be restored.
On the other hand, the advent of toxic social media is hurdle we’ve never faced before. So maybe humanity is doomed after all…
The upward trend in wokeness has gone as far as it can, and we have seen a small decrease. Having reached peak wokeness does not mean that wokeness is in decline. It just means that it has reached a plateau (the upward trend has been stopped).
When I say that wokeness has gone as far as it can, I’m thinking of the fact that we live in a democracy and that woke voters are a small share of the electorate only (no more than 10%).
Also the opposition to wokeness needed some time to get organized. It is now pretty organized.
But when you look at DEI in universities, yes some private universities have pulled back a bit (reinstatement of the SAT, scrapping diversity statements in faculty hiring and promotion) but as far as public universities are concerned, it’s the political pressure in red states only that accounts for changes in the policies of public universities (in red states only).
I wonder if dumping DEI in the south east (mostly red states) correlates with that region surpassing the north east (mostly blue states) in contribution to national GDP in recent years?
I’ve been reading Jerry so long that I remember when he was collecting all the instances of “cancel culture” and also collecting all the feverish denials that such a thing was occurring—it was a Fox News figment, it was just basic etiquette, it was just the privileged losing power, or if a few writers and profs lost their livelihoods over ideological infractions it was a small price to pay for progress etc.
I’ve been reading Jerry so long that I remember when he was collecting all the instances of liberals opposing free speech and thought and also collecting all the feverish denials that such a thing was occurring—it was really the bigots in Florida who were banning books, it was just a new age of sensitivity that old white people were uncomfortable with, or only bigots could oppose censoring offensive words or signing a Diversity Statement etc.
And now we’ve reached the next stage of denial: that this thing called “Woke” was just an unpleasant thunderstorm that seems to be fading and passing, when the truth is obviously the opposite: the Social Justice Cultural Revolution is only winding down in the same way a war winds down when all the capitals have been conquered and the army only engages in a few clean-up operations now and then. And for proof I’d say just go to the website of any institution in the Anglosphere, from universities to museums to militaries to corporations and read the exact same words about how DEI is their first priority and main concern in every decision.
I won’t speculate as to why so many people have tried to keep their eyes, ears and mouths shut tight as the Cultural Revolution marched from victory to victory—my feeling is that liberals seem to have no ability or vocabulary to oppose Leftists—but regardless, everyone should face reality: Social Justice rules the West and is the official belief system of our ruling and thinking classes and is nowhere close to being dislodged.
Sad indeed, but all too true! Highly recommended to all is The Third Awokening, the latest scholarly book from Eric Kaufmann, the Canadian professor who was driven from his academic post in the UK by fanatical zealots.
Thanks, I love Kaufmann he has given me much clarity about our demented zeitgeist.
Will def grab his new book.
Another good how-to-guide in the spirit of Kaufman’s “The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism” is “The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice―at Work, in Schools, and Beyond” by Pluckrose.
I’ve wondered what I would do if I am in a meeting and we are to introduce ourselves and state our pronouns. This is apparently a common ritual in some circles, with all the pressure to play along. But I have not been in that situation, fortunately.
So what should I say? I don’t want to seem rude (despite the rude thoughts I’d be having).
If you don’t want to be confrontational by eye-rolling or politely declining — yes, that would be regarded as confrontational or at least “being difficult” — just say with a straight face, “I and me.” Make it sound like the most natural thing in the world, no drama. Rare is the person who will call you on it, since you have the right to use whatever pronouns you want, right?, and the only pronouns you can use about yourself are the first person.
In most normal workplaces this would be just passed over without any objection or even a remark. Everyone know bullshit when they see it and let’s get this meeting over so we can get back to work. If the chair tries to educate you that, actually Mark, we want you to tell us what you want to be referred to as*, you can say you don’t honestly care, really, and have never given it any thought. You are the personification of good will and will go with whatever the speaker chooses to use. If that doesn’t silence her, and she demands that you indicate a preference, then you are probably not working in a place I would want to work. This will be only the first sally in a long struggle.
————————
* Management may want everyone to declare their pronoun demands in advance so as to make it easier to adjudicate later complaints that someone misgendered them. Also, the firm may believe it puts itself at risk of human rights complaints to government agencies about it for not fostering an inclusive workplace if it doesn’t police pronouns. I would try to see management’s survival interests in this and show forbearance.
I might say that my pronouns are “it” and “that” and if it didn’t satisfy them I’d ask why they felt they had a right to know something as personal as my sex – why they were bringing sex into the workplace?
One of my friends was telling me that her therapist has her preferred pronouns on her business card. She was wondering if the therapist was woke. I replied she was either woke or the clinic required it.
LinkedIn has had a space for preferred pronouns for years.
It is optional at my company to add pronouns to your email signature and / or you business card. I’d say about 20% do it, primarily the younger and non-technical people. It signals that you’re a member of the in-group for either those lifestyles or allyship.
Our HR team is now pushing to add “neurodiverse” as one of the special diverse groups; however, since I work a a company of engineers and data scientists who may fit the description but do not want this type of recognition, it has been very confrontational.
Regarding therapists using pronouns – there’s a huge chance that the therapist is woke, and is likely using this worldview to inform their practice.
I, me, my, mine, myself
(and editorial we, us, our, ours, ourself, ourselves).
I’ve never been asked; when I am I’ll report on the reaction.
Personally, I value the opportunities to be rude to bullies
(one of the reasons I worked much better as a contractor than as an employee/servant).
“You,” the preferred pronoun is “you” if you are talking with me. Otherwise, Doug is just fine. On the other hand, if you are talking about me with someone else, then call me whatever damned thing you would like to call me. I really don’t mind.
Exact. Great answer.
Helen Pluckrose suggests a few alternatives in her book, “The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice―at Work, in Schools, and Beyond.”
And then there’s Colin Wright who has a few suggestions of his own…
When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/when-asked-what-are-your-pronouns
… While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society.
… The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t “identify with” the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man. … So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female.
… Coercing people into publicly stating their pronouns in the name of “inclusion” is a Trojan horse that empowers gender ideology and expands its reach. It is the thin end of the gender activists’ wedge designed to normalize their worldview. Participating in pronoun rituals makes you complicit in gender ideology’s regressive belief system, thereby legitimizing it. Far from an innocuous act signaling support for inclusion, it serves as an implicit endorsement of gender ideology and all of its radical tenets.
I’m noticing intense opposition to men in women’s sports. The woke line is still “trans women are women” but there are now cases of teams refusing to play if there’s a biological male on the other team.
We need more of this. No woke idea was stupider than this one.
Mumsnet, in the UK, has brought out some of the still very significant problems of the woke treatment of transwomen as women, where this has meant allowing them in many single-sex spaces meant for women. If transwomen are allowed in women’s bathrooms in public spaces like universities, Muslim women are excluded. Not all Muslim women treat these issues in the same way, but most Muslim women cannot even adjust their headscarfs in a public bathroom if transwomen can use that bathroom. So the insistence that transwomen should be able to access any single sex space for women means excluding women from universities.
I should add that the woke issues involving women’s single sex spaces affect orthodox Jewish women and other women as well as Muslim women.
“It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.” – J. Coyne
Actually, it began much earlier, because the New Left of the 1960s/70s was already contaminated by anti-Israelism & anti-Semitism. It’s important to be aware of this historical fact in the light of the current behavior of the contemporary Woke Left (qua successor of the New Left).
“During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state. This was a period, bounded by two wars that threatened Israel with destruction, in which the far left devoted particular attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Leading far left publications joined the Arab guerillas in charging that Israel was aggressively racist and expansionist.
To support these claims, the far left often invoked long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, both economic and theological. It attributed to Jews enormous financial power and an arrogance and sense of superiority that drove them to exploit and dominate other peoples. In a three-part series published in 1969 on what it called the “History of Middle East Liberation Struggle,” New Left Notes, the newspaper of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), declared that the Jews’ chosen people concept gives Israel “the right to expand and expand.” Like Nazi Germany, the Jewish state would “not contain itself within any set borders.” It explained that the “architects of Zionism were mainly bourgeois Jewish intellectuals” and that the movement’s early sponsors were “leaders in . . . world imperialism” like wealthy Jewish banker Edmond de Rothschild, who wanted to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine to promote “his own financial interests.”” (p. 1)
“Drawing a parallel between Israel and Nazi Germany was the most dramatic way to make the Jewish state appear demonic. In 1970 Mike Klonsky, leader of SDS’s Revolutionary Movement II faction, equated what he called Israel’s “continuous attacks on the Arab people” with the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews. During the Yom Kippur War, the Maoist Progressive Labor Party published a lengthy statement in the UCLA student newspaper calling Israel “a Nazi state” and denouncing Zionism as a “racist atrocity.” The Weatherman newspaper Fire even claimed that Nazi antisemitic propaganda was directly modeled on “Zionist writings.” Far left groups repeatedly referred to Israel’s campaign to defend itself against fourteen Arab nations during the Six-Day War as a “blitzkrieg,” suggesting a parallel with the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Poland in 1939 and its Western offensive in the spring of 1940. The Black Panther Party called Israeli soldiers “fascist storm troopers” and charged that Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War resulted in Arab refugees being forced into “modern concentration camps.”” (pp. 5-6)
“Portraying Israel as a racist, genocidal settler-state similar to Nazi Germany led far left groups to justify or excuse the most brutal acts of terrorism against its population. At its 1971 convention, the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] declared, “We unconditionally support the struggles of the Arab peoples against the state of Israel.” A 1973 column in the Militant called “By Any Means Necessary” implied that any act of violence the Palestinian terrorists committed in the effort to destroy Israel was excusable. The SWP might label certain terrorist acts counterproductive, but it invariably claimed that Israeli policies had driven the Arabs to commit them. Weatherman leader Eric Mann declared in 1970 that “Israeli embassies, tourist offices, airlines and Zionist fund-raising and social affairs are important targets for whatever action is decided to be appropriate.”
Such was the reasoning that shaped the far left’s reaction to the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Militant expressed concern that the public outcry against the kidnapping and murder of the Olympic athletes made “the criminal [Israel] look like the victim.” The SWP’s candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in the California district that included Berkeley, Ken Miliner, a national Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) leader, denounced what he called “the anti-Arab campaign over the Munich killings.” Showing no sympathy for the slaughtered Israelis, Miliner condemned both President Nixon and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern for labeling the Palestinian terrorists “international outlaws.” He accused the American press of deliberately inciting prejudice against Arabs by using headlines that referred to “murder” or “terror” at the Olympics. Miliner’s only objections to the murders were tactical. He worried that targeting Israeli civilians for killing or kidnapping generated sympathy for the “Zionist state,” allowing it to “pose as the innocent victim.” The only effective strategy for eradicating the Jewish state, Miliner argued, was the revolutionary mobilization of “the Arab masses.”
The Black Panther Party justified the Palestinian murder of the Israeli athletes, comparing it to the prison uprising at the Attica penitentiary in New York State: “The same events unfolded: desperate, disenfranchised men take other men as hostages in order to command the attention of the world to their plight.” It absolved the Palestinian terrorists of responsibility for the murders at Munich, blaming the authorities instead: “In Munich, asn in Attica . . . heads of state did not hesitate to condemn the athletes to death. . . to hide from the world the unbearable suffering of the Palestinians.” Many on the far left openly endorsed the hijacking of airplanes, which risked large numbers of civilian lives, as a legitimate way for the Palestinians to publicize their cause. In 1970, the Black Panther reprinted an article entitled “The Sky’s the Limit,” which glorified the hijacking by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of a TWA passenger plane flying from Rome to Athens. The hijackers took hand grenades into the cockpit and ordered the pilots to fly to Damascus, Syria. The article was accompanied by a photograph of hijacker Leila Khaled, identified as a “Revolutionary Sister.” SDS’s New Left Notes also supported Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli airliners as one of the “requirements of total war, of resistance to the [Israeli] occupier.”” (pp. 8-9)
(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)
Wow thanks for this, I’m gonna find that book.
I’d also be interested in some kind of psychological study on how people who claim to be fighting for Justice become so filled with race hate it makes them cheer for eliminationist terror.
The Left and its Who/Whom morality always seems to spin the wheel and choose the Jews as the enemies to be destroyed so their Utopia can arrive.
Something tells me all these speeches about Justice and Equality are fig leaves hiding a deep-seated rage and desire to destroy to feel some sense of power and fulfillment.
Thanks again
These books might interest you as well:
* Hirsh, David. Contemporary Left Antisemitism. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018.
Here’s a special one published in 1971, when the New Left was still alive and kicking:
* Chertoff, Mordecai S., ed. The New Left and the Jews. New York: Pitman, 1971.
“Has the New Left begun to make formidable enemies in Jewish intellectual circles? Was this confrontation inevitable? Sixteen noted authorities describe and analyze the facets of a controversy that may have the profoundest implications both for contemporary radicalism and for the Jewish community.
Highlights include: the development of anti-Zionism within the New Left…anti-Semitism among black and white radicals…traditional Jewish liberalism versus New Left Jewish radicalism…New Left views on Israel and possible solutions to the Middle East crisis.
The contributors represent all parties to the current debate—the splintered factions of the New Left (Noam Chomsky, Tom Kahn, Tom Milstein); the leftist press in the United States (Irving Howe); the Israeli left (Amos Kenan, Menachem S. Arnoni, Saadia Gelb); international Jewish scholarship (Nathan Rotenstreich, Robert Alter, Marie Syrkin); and academic experts in the fields of sociology, contemporary history, and international politics (Robert Nisbet, Seymour M. Lipset, Walter Laqueur, Nathan Glazer, and Leonard Fein).”
More on the McArthur genius T. Coates on 9/11
A study in deranged politics and spectacular narcissism.
https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1844912051812172127
No comment as a NYer or as a person.
D.A.
NYC
Jerry, you defined wokeness as “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”. Did you come up with that yourself? I don’t ask that to be condescending, but you put quotation marks around it which makes me wonder. If you did, you should copyright it. It’s perfect. I’ve struggled to define woke to the uninitiated. That definition really nails it.
I agree with Kahn. I think it’s entrenched. I’m too sleep deprived to elaborate at the moment.
I prefer the term used by Kim Holmes and Eric Kaufmann—“progressive illiberalism”—, which I think is more adequate, because “authoritarianism” sounds too strong to me as a general characterization of the Woke Left.
This is not to say that their mostly “softer” illiberalism is harmless and never has hard consequences; but there is a relevant difference between cancel culture and gulag culture.
“There are hard (sometimes very hard) and soft forms of illiberalism that exist regardless of their ideological (left-right) variations. The hard forms are totalitarian or authoritarian. They rely on the threat of force in some measure to maintain power, and they are invariably antidemocratic and anti-liberal. Think of communism, fascism, and all the various hybrids of authoritarian regimes, from Putin’s Russia to Islamist states that support terrorism. Soft forms of illiberalism, on the other hand, are not totalitarian or violent.
…
Hard forms of illiberalism certainly exist in America today. On the right they are manifest in the form of hard-core racists and nativists, and on the left as communists, anarchists, or any radical who openly threatens violence. But soft illiberalism is present as well, and in America today it is pervasive. Much of its growth and energy is a left-wing phenomenon.”
(Holmes, Kim R. The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. New York: Encounter Books, 2016. pp. viii-ix)
The sad thing to me about DEI is it comes off as starting from how in the past there were social barriers that prevented certain groups from going far in certain fields and DEI in at least the notion was to insure there were no barriers and educational resources were there for all.
Instead, it created other barriers.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and when you fail to recognize (or merely connive at) that people of ill will will hijack the carriage for their own pernicious agenda, Hell is where you get to.
For my part, as soon as I understood that equity was nothing more than an attempt to rig equality of outcome at the expense of both merit and the fair treatment of people not classed as “equity-deserving”, it lost credibility. This takes some thinking because the proponents of DEI claim that merit will not suffer, that perfectly qualified equity-seekers are being denied opportunity and enforcing quotas will fix this without loss of quality. They don’t care that they lie. Welcome to the dark side.
You have spoken here of having a disability. I agree that there should be, and is, a mechanism for reasonable accommodation that doesn’t go as far as compelling the employer to hire someone who can’t do the job to the employer’s standard. The reasonable disability accommodation is not the same as instituting a quota system for racial minorities just because someone thinks his ancestors were held back in the past.
Maybe. Yeah, I’ve had issues with disabilities and mental health much of my life. I’m mature enough to know they hold me back in certain things I’ve dreamed off.
My dad was a 50s kid and while no snowflake has no issue saying that at the time there were intentional barriers preventing undesirable people from doing certain things despite their merit.
Also has no issue saying the idealized illusions of the time as one of morality and tranquility are total BS.
To me it started off that way and after a few SOBs did what they’re best at (being SOBs) it went from one thing to another. Being a jerk begets other jerks.
Whether or not we’ve seen peak woke/DEI, the Department of Justice is choosing identity over competence. There’s no reason to expect that there won’t be more of this with a Harris administration.
“The Justice Department filed a lawsuit today against the City of South Bend, Indiana,…the department alleges that South Bend uses a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants…Title VII prohibits not only intentional discrimination but also employment practices that result in a disparate impact on a protected group, unless such practices are job related and consistent with business necessity…The division recently proposed consent decrees to resolve lawsuits challenging similarly discriminatory hiring processes at the Maryland Department of State Police and the Durham Fire Department.”
Source:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-south-bend-indiana-discriminating-against-black-and-female-police
It’s worthwhile to look at samples of the tests, as well as a description of the physical test in question. Credit to this guy:
https://nitter.poast.org/cremieuxrecueil/status/1844856866192363630#m
Tony Dokoupil committed a unforgivable sin. To SJWs, Coates is a god. One does not ask questions of a god. You get down on your knees and worship a god. Tony Dokoupil failed to workship Coates.
Was thinking that if we are expected to declare our pronouns (sex identity), we should probably be upfront about everything – hi, my name is Curt and I’m an “it/that” metrosexual with TDS, and a complete ass.
This entire trend of deciding your gender according to individual wishes is predicated on the assumption that your identity is defined by yourself. But i would think there is some societal component too. We live in societies, it is not just that I decide to identify as whatever. It is also what the rest of my community thinks I am. It is the three realities (Yuval Harari) that count: the objective biological (chromosomes, hormones, anatomy), the subjective (how do I feel) and the *transubjective* (how others see me). Today, only one counts.