David Rozado has become something of a household name here at the Daily Sceptic, thanks to his pioneering studies on wokeness. You know those charts showing sharp upticks in the usage of terms like ‘sexism’, ‘racism’ and ‘transphobia’? He’s the guy who made them.
Until recently, he’d confined himself to studying the Anglosphere and his native Spain. Rozado has now extended his analysis to dozens of other countries, and what he finds is pretty remarkable: The Great Awokening is a global phenomenon.
In almost every country Rozado looked at, there was increase in the frequency of what he calls “prejudice-denoting terms” beginning around 2012. As the left-hand chart below indicates, this was true even in countries like Kenya and Nigeria – where you’d assume people would be more concerned about things like poverty.
The chart uses a standardised scale, which makes the trend in each country visible while masking average differences across countries. So what do those average differences show? When Rozado plotted them separately for each type of prejudice, the results were quite interesting (see right-hand chart above).
As you’d expect, mentions of ‘Islamophobia’ were most common in Muslim countries, while mentions of ‘anti-semitisim’ were by far the most common in Israel. And mentions of ‘sexism’ (and related terms) were most common in Spain. For the other three types of prejudice, the pattern was less clear, though the UK came close to the top on all three.
Perhaps the most interesting finding to emerge from Rozado’s analysis is that the big increase – the “woke hockey stick”, as I’ve named it – appears to be more or less simultaneous in all countries. This is somewhat surprising. Most of us had been assuming that it occurred first in the US, then in other Western countries, and then (if at all) in the rest of the world.
Among Western countries, the US does appear to be a front-runner on mentions of ‘racism’, as you’d predict, though the margin isn’t huge. (Russia has also seen a big increase, though Rozado believes this mainly reflects commentary mocking the Western media’s preoccupations.)
So did the Great Awokening originate in America, as most of us had been assuming? I believe it did. Though I also believe it was amplified in many countries at the same time through social media.
As to why the phenomenon probably did originate in the US, you have to remember that non-Americans read American media far more than Americans read non-American media. What’s more, many influential journalists and activists in countries outside America go to study at America’s elite colleges, where they imbibe the tenets and language of woke ideology.
So you’ve got many influential journalists and activists all around the world reading American media and regurgitating what they learned at US colleges. Then social media hits. And because that’s where influential people congregate, articles couched in the latest woke jargon frequently go viral, causing less-influential people to adopt the same jargon in their own articles.
Soon everyone in the media of a particular country is using terms like ‘patriarchy’, ‘transphobic’, and ‘people of colour’.
My argument is admittedly somewhat speculative. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be tested. You’d have to go back and see which articles went viral first, and who wrote them. I suspect that English-speaking journalists, especially those who studied in America, would be overrepresented among the authors.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It’s significant and frightening how little UK politicians care about free speech and the culture war in general. They’re quite happy to see an unpoliced left wing lynch mob terrorise ordinary people.
We need an absolute free speech Act of Parliament that overrides all ‘hate speech’ laws. There are already plenty of anti-incitement laws. We’re at the point where you can be arrested for speaking at Hyde Park Corner, which proves how far we’ve fallen.
Conservative MPs are now mostly liberal leftists, Conservative in name only. We need a populist party to emerge and kill the Tories off.
Yes, I’m in total agreement. This ‘uniparty’ bullcrap has gone on for too long. At this stage the name ‘Conservative Party’ ought to be had up on trade descriptions!
Yes but Free Speech is dangerous to totalitarians. They need always to control the language to keep themselves in control of the argument. What free people must say is this ———-“I have an education and I own a dictionary and I will choose my own words and sentences, and no government will choose them for me”.
This is Matt Taibbi’s opening statement – worth watching in full, very rousing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY
What was even more fascinating was a Democrat “questioning” Taibbi by spending his entire tine making a polemic about anti-semitic posts increasing since Elon Musk took over Twitter, without asking a single significant question.
His unstated conclusion would seem to be that because some people express racist ideas on a public platform every intelligence agency in the country needs to have a hotline to censor everything that they deem goes against government policy.
Apart from anything else, I find myself wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occurred because bigots among the public expressed their prejudice, or rather because authorities fostered hatred through Jim Crow laws and Goebbels propaganda.
The Democrats have fallen a long way
“Wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occured” ? You absolute disgusting twerp. Did you read nothing? See nothing? Listen to nothing? Manage to not hear every testimony?
Do you wonder about the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? The Killing Fields?
Piss off and spew your vomit somewhere else.
It does help to read before you shout.
As Einstein said “There is a difference between intelligence and stupidity, intelligence is limited”
I have often found that the stupidest shout loudest.
I watched the videos of both their testimonies. It does make me wonder about extent of censorship going on in the EU and the UK.
The UK has long had a problem linked to its EU membership. Our system historically has few laws, rigorously enforced, whereas most EU countries have so many regulations, it’s impossible to police them all, so they don’t.
Consequently, the UK has been flooded with EU regulations and is trying to enforce them all rigorously, the way we always have. That’s led us to police state territory and people getting reported on spurious grounds.
I’m often attacked for saying we need to shrink the state, but we do: its tentacles are reaching into every aspect of our lives entirely unnecessarily.
Recently a street preacher was arrested, charged and prosecuted for mis-gendering someone, WTAF!
Ironically, the biggest threat to the first amendment in the US comes from the EU and their own censorship agenda.
Some of us have known for sometime that there is “Science” and then there is “Official Science”. You can certainly fool a lot of the people some of the time but maybe not all of them all of the time. But it seems that enough of the people are being fooled and that is all the is important to the propaganda machine which makes Goebbels look like a total novice.
In Canada the Liberal Trudeau govt is trying to bring the internet under govt control so that the govt, with the social media giants, will control what people can read and what they can upload.
For example, do a Google search and, if passed, these bills will allow the govt to control what you see first..