Gareth Roberts offers an excellent and nuanced take on the potential impending death of wokeness in the Spectator. Here’s an excerpt:
If you don’t live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise.
A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to ‘transphobe’ J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out and was instantly a phenomenal success – the most popular game ever on the streaming platform Twitch, physical sales of 12 million in its first two weeks of release, earning its makers $850 million (£709 million) in revenue. These cold, hard, commercial facts are like a glass of cold water in the face. The balance sheet shows that we have a very skewed understanding of the popularity and reach of ‘woke’.
Elsewhere, we see the smash West End success of Steven Moffat’s play The Unfriend, despite its star turn by notorious ‘Terf’ (‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’) Frances Barber. A friend showed me a hilarious social media post from a true swivel-eyed woke believer who apologised to his followers for attending, and said that, though he’d loved the show, he’d made a point not to applaud Barber at her curtain call. Outside the worlds of showbiz and entertainment, we have recently witnessed the spectacle of Nicola Sturgeon self-destructing after her gender reform bill smashed into reality.
One dares to hope: is woke dead? We keep waiting for a tipping point that never tips. There have been so many false dawns, hefty straws that you think will surely break the camel’s back then don’t.
A global pandemic, it was believed, would make people appreciate that gender pronouns are not humanity’s most pressing concern. But COVID-19 quickly established its own culture wars, as keyboard warriors began arguing about which marginalised groups were suffering most. A major land war in Europe should have been serious enough to bind the progressivist fist for a month or two. But the conflict in Ukraine has barely touched the sides. Even the recent possibility of an alien invasion doesn’t seem to be having much effect on concentrating the crazed human hive mind.
Roberts hopes we may see a gradual erosion of wokeness, while acknowledging it won’t be easy, due to the way woke ideology has embedded itself in so many public and private organisations:
Lots of us would like to reclaim our culture from the insane progressivists who have hijacked it over the past two decades. But there remain big obstacles. The biggest is that almost every western institution, public or private, big or small, has a cell of woke activists in it, enabled by their elders.
Our increasingly ageing population is, bizarrely, characterised by this deference to youth. Older people seek out the political validation of teenagers and young adults, even children, when it really ought to be the other way around. Think of middle-aged people wearing ‘ally’ badges, burly policemen shying away from upper-middle class Extinction Rebellion protestors, or the publishing execs who tell authors: “We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.”
Interestingly, he believes a Labour government may actually reduce wokeness in the culture.
In the U.K., an incoming Labour government might be a factor in the dying of woke. You may think this unlikely, given the party’s love of taking the knee and diversity ‘training’, but let me explain. The defenestration of Margaret Thatcher and the coming of Tony Blair led to our pop culture, populated as it is by middle-class bien pensants, unclenching its socially concerned muscles and expressing itself. Look at the joy of daft Reeves and Mortimer after the grim Ben Eltony political shoutiness of 1980s comedy. And not for nothing were the scabrously incorrect League of Gentlemen and Catherine Tate Show the products of a time when the Tories had been ‘seen off’. That’s a silly way of looking at the world, yes, but it’s how TV commissioners think.
Right now we stand at a crossroads. Let’s consider two futures. In Future A, people look back on the 2010s and early 2020s with bemusement. ‘How mad that time was!’ celebrity talking heads will tell the nostalgia shows of 2043. ‘What were we thinking!’
Or we might get future B: the gradual degradation and collapse of western civilisation as this cultural awfulness snowballs through it, as personal liberties taken for granted for centuries evaporate, as crazier and crazier grievances are indulged, as the pillars of the institutions rot, as the state becomes nothing but a gigantic simultaneously totalitarian and crumbling HR department.
Worth reading in full.
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“progressivists”……should be destructionists more like. They really need to get real and grow up.
“Progressive” was the bland term the Soviets used for those who would do their work to underine the west. From George Kennan’s Long Telegram ;
(f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be “objectively” favorable to interests of USSR These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.
Indeed, the word “progressive” has been ruined just as much if not more than the word “liberal”. Though to be fair, the word always had a checkered history, having been unfortunately associated with eugenics, alcohol prohibition, and even the KKK 100 or so years ago.
Is Woke dead? Nope, it is alive and kicking. Ok so we can all come to a site like this and get to speak our mind but try doing that on Mailonline eg and you will find your comment will almost certainly not appear on many controversial issues of race, gender, and other assorted agenda’s that the PC establishment try to force down throats. You might see an article on Mailonline and you go into it and attempt to pass comment but quickly you realise you are wasting your time because the Mail have shut the comment section down and you see thousands of red and green arrows against only a small amount of readers comments. —-WHY? What are they scared of? ———–No I am afraid woke is NOT dead. Look at your TV adverts and see that almost everyone has to have a minority person in it. If the husband is white the wife will be black and vice versa. Woke Capitalism is rife, but if woke isn’t dead it may have a little bit of a fever and it is up to people who visit sites like this to keep up the pressure that might eventually eliminate this insidious social. development.
Re the ads, the ‘husband’ is usually the one that is black, for some reason.
Thanks for your reply and it may well be as you point out. But sitting here right now I can think of at least 2 ads where the husband is white. But that is not really the point. It is all still wokery. The ad that particularly gets on nerves at the moment is for Dove products where black women in business suits stare at the viewers in utter contempt.
IMO it is worth reviewing this video by Matt Walsh.
https://rumble.com/v2ailsq-matt-walsh-responds-to-critics.html
This follows backlash from other “right wing“ podcasters/tubers to a video in which he harshly criticises Dylan Mulvaney a recently transitioned woke Trans Activist who has been videoblogging his transition. Like those on the right who criticised Walsh, after seeing the original video in which Walsh personally attacks Mulvaney, I thought he had gone too far. However I have to say his defence of why he thinks it is so important to be harsh is spot on. And he has me convinced his approach is right. The arguments are relevant to all who are fighting against woke culture. See the linked video.
I’ve actually watched that – something I only rarely do – and found it a cogent argument well worthy of being listened to, even despite that’s an American addressing an American audience which are both quite remote from me.
So, a fantasy game sells 12 million copies in two weeks.
Yet there are dozens of historically based games which could be used for education – but they sell only a few hundred copies a year. A missed opportunity in education.
See for instance the games published a small UK company called Matrix games:
https://www.matrixgames.com/store
Some historical games such as Europa Universalis are a bit more successful and are published by a Swedish company called Paradox:
https://www.pcgamer.com/europa-universalis-iv-review/
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Incidentally, you didn’t win in history by being woke. Those who turned their swords into ploughshares ended up ploughing for those who didn’t.
Not even close. Pushback is starting but much ground has been conceded already and most institutions thoroughly captured by the left. Try speaking your mind as a race realist and see how long you keep your job, friends etc.
I find that self-employment and better friends work wonders in that regard.
Changing your friends is doable but can be painful and takes time. Self employment is probably not a realistic option for a lot of people and even then you may find you lose all your customers especially if they are corporates.
Lie to customers …. it’s easy.
I’ve got no ethical concerns but wouldn’t fancy having to parrot crap to demonstrate that I am a goodthinking person. Also I guess you need to be careful what you post on social media and who you say what to.
Far from it, unfortunatly – we need to keep up the pressure and continue to totally ridicule of these people at every possible opportunity.
It boils down to whether the current excesses are a doomed philosophy lashing out in its violent death throes or an arrogant, self-confident philosophy launching its most brutal strike yet. I have a horrible feeling it’s actually the latter. The youngsters brainwashed in woke since the Blair era began will soon be bosses in the workplace, senior lawyers, judges, police officers, newspaper editors and doctors. I’m a 70s-born 80s child who grew up in an era where everything in the media tried to be as offensive as possible. I look at this fascist left wing ‘puritan’ era in horror. I’m so glad I’m a work-from-home freelancer: I’d never survive a modern workplace!
I do actually have an elegant solution to the rewriting of books: the copyright laws should be tweaked so that if a publisher chooses to rewrite a dead author’s work that is still within the 70 year post mortem period, the 70 year grace period is forfeit and the original text has to enter the public domain immediately. The rewritten versions also have to state clearly on the front cover that that are rewritten and only ‘based on’ a work by the original author – it should be a violation of trades descriptions to sell a book as the work of an author when it’s been rewritten without his consent. And Roald Dahl made it very clear what he’d do from beyond the grave if publishers altered a single word of his text.
Thus, the original texts of the James Bond books and Roald Dahl’s books should immediately be made available for anyone to publish electronically and in book format.
Very quickly, that will shake up the rewriting situation as the likes of Wordsworth books could publish the original text and, for the Dahl books, even commission new illustrations from Quentin Blake!
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Peak woke will be when we return to pre-industrial energy and food production. In other words, when there isn’t enough food and there is no reliable cheep energy. The ‘Woke’ are pushing hard to stop the two key foundations to the modern world and they are succeeding. Covid 19 did not bring people to their senses because it was not as deadly as asserted. There were no bodies piled up or people randomly and spontaneously falling down dead. The majority of people have only ever known abundance: turn on a light, the boiler, running water, super markets with ample food all year round and the ability to travel where-ever one chooses. That means many have no experience of hunger or poverty or the Marxist equivalent which includes the complementary severe restrictions on what you say, think, write and can do.
Considering how George Monbiot has a significant following and Greta has a statue, and just about every western government is pursuing Net-Zero, peak woke may not be that far away.
Oh dear. Gareth Roberts thinks it makes a difference whether Team A or Team B is in charge.
For an extremely strong rebuttal to all hope of Woke’s demise as a cultural force, please read NS Lyons’ substack article “No, the Revolution is Not Over” from January 2022. Woke capitalism and ESG investing may be a bit in retreat in some areas but that’s about all there is to it.