The Wokus Dei Cathedral is Finally Collapsing

The Wokus Dei Cathedral is finally collapsing, says Toby in his Spectator column this week. Almost overnight, MSNBC’s primetime audience fell by a staggering 53%, while CNN’s fell by 47%. Suddenly, the West’s prestige faith has lost its sheen. Here’s an excerpt:

Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the Right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But we can enlarge the definition to include nearly all the West’s high-status institutions and professions. One of the mysteries of the Cathedral, he says, is that the people in these power centres seem to be members of the same cult-like religious movement – the Great Awokening, Wokus Dei – even though there’s no Holy See responsible for its official doctrine. Indeed, there doesn’t appear to be any central organising body at all. Yet the members of the Cathedral all march in lockstep as if they can hear some drummer that’s inaudible to the rest of us. …

In the past few months, large cracks have begun to appear in the Cathedral walls. … The catalyst was Donald Trump’s unexpectedly large victory, which seemed to sap the woke citadels of their aura of invincibility. Almost overnight, MSNBC’s primetime audience fell by a staggering 53%, while CNN’s fell by 47%. Suddenly, more people were tuning in to watch shows on the Food Network than they were to watch the stars of the liberal-Left media like Joy Reid, who described Kamala Harris’s campaign on election night as “flawless”. Reid was fired last week. …

These setbacks have contributed to a wider impression that the zeitgeist has moved on. Regurgitating the orthodoxies of the woke church used to be a way of signalling you were a member of the Brahmin elite, but since November they’re no longer high-status opinions. It was the social status automatically conferred on members of the Cathedral that played the role of the coordinating ‘invisible hand’. Its members’ almost supernatural ability to know which opinions would signal their superiority meant they didn’t need to be told what line to toe. It was communicated via osmosis.

Now, the illusion that their most passionately held beliefs are based on pure logic or ‘the Science’ is being shattered. The cross and the altar have become visible; they can finally see the walls of the Cathedral just as they’re beginning to fall down. In my more charitable moments, I hope they escape before they’re buried beneath the rubble. But at other times…

Worth reading in full.