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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Have We Finally Reached Peak Woke?
I hope so, but I doubt it. For the past decade I’ve assumed at regular intervals that we’ve reached peak madness, only to find, when we’ve reached the apex, that ahead of us lies another, even higher mountain of lunacy.
Wokism is too deeply ingrained to be easily bypassed or destroyed. This is because wokism is an ideology that serves the class interest of the state bourgeoisie – the class that has risen to social dominance on the back of the vast interest in state interference in society since the War. This class interest arises because the state bourgeoisie is not an independent class like the entrepreneurial middle class, it is a dependent class – dependent for its income, that is, on the taxpayers. To that end the state bourgeoisie tries endlessly to increase its control of society, because that gives it control of its source of income – the taxpayers. This is achieved by ever-increasing social controls on society, i.e. the impulse towards the total-control state. This is a social condition where the state bourgeoisie micro-manages the lives of everyone. This impulse is so strong that it overrules reality – increasingly so, hence the increasing insanity of the wokusts.
This is why, in my opinion, the state bourgeoisie cannot ever give up wokism. Our only hope is to decrease the size and influence of the state bourgeoisie, and this can only be achieved by decreasing the state’s interference in society.
Sorry, I’ve made a mistake I can’t edit: “vast interest in state interference in society” should be “vast increase in state interference in society”.
I can remember the political correctness lunacy of the late 1980s using language intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. It went through a phase of painfully earnest speech ‘chair person’ for ‘chairman’ and so on but rapidly became bogged down by ridicule – ‘person holes’ for ‘manholes’ and ‘Peoplechester’ for ‘Manchester’. Some of the better bits of usage have remained but the overblown bits were rejected.
Now if you read the Wikipedia article on Political Correctness you will see that there has been more than one period of history when PC has tried to influence how societies behave through control of speech.
I expect that Woke is just another period of PC, possibly turbocharged by social media. And yes ridicule is reducing the stupidities, but some worthwhile bits will endure,
No.
Wokism peaked in the USA until the moment Trump took office.
It will continue to metastasise until Labour are dragged, kicking and screaming, from office.
Even then, the deep state agents will fight tooth and nail. BoE, CoE, Civil Service, Quangos, Police, Judges will all resist.
We can win, but must be steadfast, organised, unyielding in the battle for Christian Britain.
I welcome the return of that picture. The leader of one of the greatest nations in the history of the world is pictured kneeling like the sap he is, because some criminal died while being restrained by a police officer in another country. This is how far we have fallen. Almost 10 million people voted for that man.
Like all Peaks, you can only see it in the rear view mirror.
What a field day satirists of the past like Swift and Defoe would have had with woke.
Defoe: Let’s take a poke at woke, shall we, Jonathan?
Swift: Yeah, let’s play the Wokey-Pokey, Dan.
Defoe: You put your Left pronoun in
Swift: Your Left pronoun out
Defoe & Swift: In, out, in, out, you shake it all about
You do the Wokey-Pokey and you turn around
That’s what it’s all about.
Swift: You put your Right mis-pronoun in
Defoe: Your Right mis-pronoun out
Defoe & Swift: In, out, in, out, you shake it all about
You do the Wokey-Pokey and you turn around
That’s what it’s all about.
Defoe: You put your Left gender in
Swift: Your Left gender out
Defoe & Swift: In, out, in, out, you shake it all about
You do the Wokey-Pokey and you turn around
That’s what it’s all about.
Swift: You put your Right mis-gender in
Defoe: Your Right mis-gender out
Defoe & Swift: In, out, in, out, you shake it all about
You do the Wokey-Pokey and you turn around
That’s what it’s all about…
…Plenty more to feast thy wit on, Good Sires.
I’ve noticed a definite correlation with blue hair and women talking complete sh*te;
https://x.com/JebraFaushay/status/1900308685940822205
People don’t just stop believing in something, it gets replaced by a new and supposedly better hope. Wokesim is PC come of age, a pretended majority democratic peer pressure for morality and what is right, but now with the force of law underpinning it. Previously left and right politics sat in the context of modernism based on Christian thinking and morality. Wokesim is post modern. Farage Trump and Brexit although a last stand against Wokesim do not as yet constitute a replacement ideology, there is also a lot of chaos there. Modernism came with Christian foundations, I doubt you can go back to it without such. In this country the established church is just about the wokest thing there is. Predicting peek woke without a clear replacement ideology is foolish.
“The more a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it”. George Orwell.
When feelings are more important than facts…
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1900249804589973860
My guess is that woke will undergo some form of metastasis and turn into some new type of insanity.
Ultimately, as far as I can see, there is a sequence here from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, through various forms of political correctness to woke.
It won’t stop. It comes from us. From a sick, deranged society, with intellectually stunted, morally corrupt individuals who don’t have any faith left, so we latch on to all sorts of stupid ideas. Ultimately it is also diabolical in origin but since we no longer believe in the devil, we are too blind to realize it.
Yes, to a greater or lesser extent that includes me because I have to ask myself to what extent I allowed this to happen? How many times was I too cowardly to say no? How many times did I repeat a falsehood or agree with a lie? What is my personal contribution to the current state of affairs?
But there is hope. If a sufficient number of people resist, we can turn around and stop the corruption. It is doomed anyway because nothing can survive in the long run unless it’s based on the truth.
Can humans live without religion?
Many can’t I think. I’m not religious but I guess my substitute is my family (wife and kids) which is enough for me. I have no objection to people worshipping “woke”, but I object to them wanting it imposed on me. There seem to be two visions of religion – one that sees it as a personal choice and one that wants to burn non believers at the stake.
George Floyd was killed by a white police officer
George Floyd died in Police custody. He was not murdered, or killed, by a white police officer.
Correct. A fact glossed over was that he had more than enough Fentanyl in him to kill a horse. The officer concerned has been hung out to dry to appease these morons. He is not alone.
I think we have seen a change in people ‘just going along with it’. There is more scepticism round the edges and a growing realisation that this is not the way to go.
The hardcore, however are as bad as they ever were, convinced by their own arguments, reassured by their groupthink and determined to press on with their righteous crusade.
The odious brainwashed spreaders of woke, DIE, climate change hysteria etc have for decades,filled our public sector and been their virus. Worse still is that our judiciary is on their side. They aren’t going anywhere.
Thank heavens! It does now seem as if speech, which everywhere has been in chains, is now getting free. Not only has Top Gun: Maverick been making a lot of money and Bud Light got a new advertising campaign but major American companies like McDonald’s, Google, Boeing, Amazon, IBM and Deloittes have stopped doing this and are now doing that; fewer people are now watching those news channels and more watching this one; Jeff Bezos has announced something and Mark Zuckerberg is scrambling after him; in place of that one as President of Global Such-and-Such at World-wide So-and-So, we’ve now got this one. Hurrah! Everything has changed. Oceania is saved!
Well yes but why, Toby, do you think the last general election was a setback? Labour didn’t win that election. People were voting against the ghastly Tories who had literally presided over the whole of that “second decade of the 21st century”.
It is arguable that the Tories, far from being centre-right, are actually positioned to the left of Labour. They should never again be allowed anywhere near power.
Probably not as the main underlying issue in Britain is the declining level of free speech. This has been weaponised to suppress any proper debate about so many areas of woke. It only requires some woke warrior to claim that they are offended in some way. This is the primary difference between the USA and the UK and it is all of the difference. Due to this difference, the USA will survive and thrive but, with no change to it, the UK is finished.
I see first hand, that it’s in full swing in the UK, in schools, work places, government departments, hospitals etc, with no sign of slowing down.
How on earth we come back from this is another question.