Have we finally reached peak woke? Have we developed a vaccine to the woke mind virus? Like a dying religion, it’s certainly in retreat, says Toby in the Standard. But some disciples of Wokus Dei are still clinging on. Here’s an excerpt.
I thought this ideological pandemic had peaked in 2020 when I set up the Free Speech Union (FSU), a non-partisan organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely.
At the launch party, I confidently announced that the radical progressive ideology that had spread like wildfire in the second decade of the 21st century — sometimes referred to as Wokus Dei — was in retreat and the days when people were cancelled for daring to question it were coming to an end.
Then, in May of that year, George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, transforming what had been a fringe political movement into a global crusade. I remember being shocked to see protesters in the Isle of Man confronting a bewildered group of bobbies with a chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Black Lives Matter became so fashionable that the presenters on Sky Sports wore little badges proclaiming their allegiance to the cause.
But it couldn’t last, could it? BLM was an organisation with self-proclaimed Marxists devoted to the overthrow of capitalism. This felt like a strange aberration due to the fact that people were spending far too much time online during the lockdowns.
At the FSU’s third anniversary party in 2023, I made another speech in which I confessed to getting it wrong before, but predicted that now, at last, this quasi-religious cult was beginning to subside.
After all, Nicola Sturgeon had been forced from office by a scandal in which a male sex offender had transferred to a women’s prison, Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and Top Gun: Maverick was smashing box office records.
There was also growing evidence that the public was fed up with virtue-signalling corporations shoving their progressive values down customers’ throats. After Bud Light hired trans activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador, sales of America’s best-selling beer went into freefall, declining by between 11 and 26%.
The message from consumers was clear: Wokus Dei had had its day.
Then, a year later, Labour won a thunderous majority at the General Election, reducing the Conservatives to a rump. Among other things, its manifesto promised to bring in a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy and turbocharge the Equality Act.
So, you can understand my reluctance to proclaim that we’ve finally reached peak woke. I feel a bit like a man falling through a burning building: every time my feet touch what I think is the bottom, the floor gives way and I carry on plunging downwards.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to think the religious fire may have gone out. Exhibit A is the Republican Party’s comprehensive victory last November, winning not just the Presidency, but also the House and the Senate. Part of the explanation for that rout is that the Democratic Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was perceived as being too ideologically extreme. The Democrats had got woke and gone broke.
True, Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 didn’t do anything to stop the momentum of the Great Awokening. On the contrary, it gave it a boost, enabling members of the cult to point to the nasty orange man in The White House and say, “Look! I told you America was a cishet, patriarchal, white supremacist, fascist state.”
But it feels different this time. Taking their cue from the success of the MAGA movement, major American companies like McDonald’s, Google, Boeing, Amazon and IBM have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, has instructed its employees to stop putting pronouns in their bios.
The great liberal citadels of the American media have struggled to retain their audiences since November, with CNN and MSNBC seeing a decline in viewing numbers of 27% and 38% respectively. Fox News, by contrast, saw its viewers jump by 40% in the weeks following the election.
After the 2016 election result, the Washington Post doubled down on its opposition to Trump, adopting the strapline: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Two weeks ago, by contrast, the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper would be taking a sharp, Rightward turn.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he said, prompting the resignation of David Shipley, the opinion page editor.
Mark Zuckerberg, too, is scrambling to adapt to the new political climate. Nick Clegg has been given his marching orders as President of Global Affairs at Meta, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who was once Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W, Bush. At the same time, Zuckerberg said he would be dismantling Facebook’s fact checking programme.
“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said.
So is this finally peak woke? “I’m still not ready to commit,” says Toby, “having been proved wrong so many times before. But for free speech champions like me, things are certainly looking up.”
Worth reading in full.
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So according to environmentalists it would seem that coastal erosion didn’t exist until atmospheric CO2 reached a certain level. That would have come as a surprise to the former inhabitants of Dunwich (now somewhere off the Suffolk coast).
A little further north the BBC used Happisburgh as an example of sea level rise a few monthes ago .Again very soft cliffs and the odd storm take large chunks out of East Anglia every winter.Been going on for centuries .No link to CO2 ever ..More BBC bollocks !!
Those submerged Welsh counties in Cardigan Bay…
They do not teach basic arithmetic in politics, journalism and sociology courses just as the amount of economics on a PPE is small and only Keynsian.
Ah. I had wondered how all those PPE MPs could come out with such rubbish. I know economics has been called the dismal science, but that’s ridiculous.
Isn’t the other key missing piece “Which coastal castles are affected”. I don’t know all the castles in the UK but are any actually by the side of the sea ie within 1 metre of current sea level- if anyone knows….
Caernarfon
https://cadw.gov.wales/visit/places-to-visit/caernarfon-castle
I have paddled past Caernarfon Castle in a sea kayak, splendid site but it appeared quite safe and sound and under no great threat from the sea.
Hundreds of years old too. Like those irrigation channels to make gardens in the desert. Better uses of money than inevitably futile attempts to engineer a more profitable climate (which in reality are attempts to produce a greater role for the United Nations).
I have read David Craig’s book and highly recommend it. From my own observations (and I am sure many others make similar observations) the amount of sea rise level where I live is negligible. For 30 years I have been watching the tides in the Severn Estuary, and there has been no change in the height of the highest tides, which one would expect if alarmist predictions were correct. As is usual, some years the tides are good (exciting and high) some years indifferent – important if you are one of these hardy souls who likes surfing the Severn Bore!
Exactly.
Currently in Campania, Italy, specifically the towns of Amalfi, Atrani, Praiano, Positano. Sea levels are obviously quite unchanged for at least hundreds of years.
I seem to remember a report about subduction in (I think) Tuvalu leading to a perception of sea level rise. Anyhow, I have long felt that putting money into flood defences, irrigation and reversing desertification would be a better use of resources than any net zero carbon nonsense and related rubbish such as importing American wood to Drax instead of using locally available coal.
The BBC is a left-wing political campaign organisation pretending to be a broadcaster.
Always have been apparently. I know they were taking a partisan view on issues back in the 1960s.
Which is exactly why they shouldn’t be funded by a tax on TV users.
Not sure it’s even so much the left they pander to any more. They’re as much stooges for the establishment as they’ve always been, which is neither right nor left but entirely self-serving.
In this respect, nothing much has changed bar the fact this establishment enjoy total control of and protection from the media, who also act in feedback to enhance the reality distortion field in which they exist. Free of scrutiny, it is entirely lacking in honesty or integrity.
Towards the end of the UK’s summer of 1976, BBC2’s Horizon – a reasonably serious science-based series – caved in to the lunatic doom-monger fringe and broadcast a silly episode warning us of an imminent threat of the UK turning to desert. I sensed then that a milestone had been reached and soon lost interest in watching what had turned into a junk entertainment programme. Even the recent summer, 46 years later, was a mere shadow of the 100 day Mediterranean one of 76.
I remember the late, great Christopher Booker reporting on how Owen Paterson MP endeavoured to find the real causes of the flooding on the Somerset levels some years back and took effective action to do something about it. It seems they came for him alright. I rather suspect that the BBC (who have decided that it’s alright for them to be biased on the climate scare) told a different story to Mr. Booker.
Can we stop confusing coastal erosion with inundation.
Gravity sort of ensures that a dense liquid like water maintains the same relative level around the planet (or across the flatness if you are a Green). Unless the same relative rise is noted around the world, local variations are obviously due to the land moving, not the water.
President Obama on crisis of rising sea levels. 2013
https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/362595604385370113?lang=en
President Obama purchases multi million dollar Martha’s Vinyard island home 2021
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a30169311/barack-michelle-obama-buy-marthas-vineyard-house/