This is a very good talk (it’s 25 minutes long), and I highly recommend you listen to it, as it’s a powerful justification for Leftists mocking the excesses of the Left—one of the themes of this site. Further, it’s an incisive analysis and indictment of “the Woke movement.” Finally, it’s sporadically hilarious.
We all know now that the über-woke Titania McGrath is the creation of British comedian Andrew Doyle, who also used to write for the character of Jonathan Pie. Below he discusses “Satire in the Digital Age” at the National Liberal Club in London (the talk was October 13). As the video’s description notes, “This event was part of the ‘Speaking Truth to Social Justice’ conference organised by Sovereign Nations.” The theme is the value of hoaxes in an age when people regularly comment on social media. Doyle sees them, as he sees Titania, as a way to improve the Left, to “challenge the dominant orthodoxy that generates so much resentment among normal people who are sick of being hectored by paternalistic moralists who claim the power to divine their secret thoughts.” Doyle himself claims a place on the Left, and I have no reason to doubt him.
After recounting some history of satirical hoaxes, Doyle details the rising censorship and puritanism of the Left. He mentions the “grievance studies” hoax of Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose, approving of it (despite strong attacks by Leftist academics on the endeavor) since it “was essentially a satirical project because it sought to expose the fraudulence that still exists within the powerful institution of academia.” As Doyle notes, “If you care about something, you want it improved.”
He then discusses the invention of Titania McGrath (who apparently has a fancy house in Kensington and another in a location I couldn’t make out) and shows some of her tweets. Doyle adds, “The most vicious remarks you will ever see on social media come from either the racist far right or woke intersectionalist: they are really two heads of the same chimera. . . One of the most tragic things, I think, about the social justice movement is that it is largely well intentioned. . . . It makes sense, then, to think of the social justice movement as a kind of cult.”
He then indicts the British government for its unwarranted authoritarianism, as well as the Wokes for giving unwarranted attention to white supremacists and neo-Nazis by using the term loosely to apply to any of the Wokes’ opponents.
Doyle winds up claiming (as I have) that “a major publication is happy to publish any old nonsense so long as it is sufficiently Woke, the social justice ideology having infected our major media and irreparably degraded its standards.” He gives several examples, one of which I discussed this week. (He won’t admit writing it, but he surely did.) Are you listening, New York Times, New York Magazine, the Independent and The Guardian?
h/t: Greg