Wokeness

Wednesday

Dave Seminara

Behind the ludicrous travel advisories deeming Florida ‘hostile’ to minorities

Three prominent civil rights organizations in America have launched what appear to be coordinated attacks designed to hobble both Florida’s critical tourism industry and Governor Ron DeSantis’s impending campaign for president.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, and Equality Florida, an LGBT advocacy group, issued advisories warning travelers of the dangers of visiting Florida, a state one Democratic strategist says is becoming a “terrorist state.” The attacks will likely fail, but they illustrate how these groups now function solely as advocates for the narrow interests of the Democratic Party, rather than the interest of the groups they purport to champion.

travel advisories

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is Taylor Swift the problem?

Pop superstar Taylor Swift is in the middle of a PR crisis as her fans overwhelmingly disapprove of her new beau, Matty Healy, the lead singer of English rock band the 1975. Healy has been attending Swift's concerts and the pair have been spotted several times kissing and holding hands in public. Taylor Swift and Matty Healy seen leaving the Electric Lady studio in Manhattan on May 16, 2023 in New York City (Robert Kamau/GC Images) Cockburn's niece tells him that Swift's online fan forums are blowing up with debate over the Midnights singer's decision to date the irreverent rock star.

taylor swift

Friday

Kara Kennedy

How VICE lost its cool

Last week I was at a writers' party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied. To me, VICE when it was good is the girl’s bum on the fiction issue from 2008. It’s Michael Moynihan’s raspy voice reporting from South Korea. It’s the floppy hair of the one super-hot reporter I knew that smoked filterless roll-ups. VICE was where the cool kids at the back of the bus would grow up to write, the place that you would daydream about working for as a young reporter.

vice

Thursday

Matthew Foldi

Funding frozen for conservative student groups at Northwestern after James Lindsay event

Northwestern University’s student government is retaliating against its College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation chapter for hosting James Lindsay, a conservative speaker, by freezing their funding and demanding the university open an investigation that may or may not already be ongoing. In an emergency meeting, the school’s Associated Student Government, or ASG, scrambled to pass a resolution that condemned the two groups for their event flyers, which mimicked the design of one of the guest speaker’s books, by adding a skull and crossbones cartoon onto sunglasses with the Pride flag.

northwestern

Wednesday

Cockburn

Is the US Navy the new Bud Light?

Cockburn spotted a news story this morning that had him spitting out his breakfast cocktail of bourbon and vicodin (difficult to do these days). He read that the US Navy has appointed a nonbinary drag queen, "Harpy Daniels" as a “digital ambassador” charged with recruiting new members to the military. Cockburn's brief time in Navy Yard means that he knows sailors have unorthodox tastes, but come on. Surely, this must be the handiwork of some rogue underling with access to the Navy’s TikTok password — although isn’t TikTok banned on official military devices? In the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney backlash, which has seen Bud Light stock plummet 17 percent since partnering with the trans activist, could this really have been an edict from the Navy’s top brass?

us navy harpy daniels

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Coca-Cola shareholders snub ‘woke’ suggestions

Coca-Cola’s shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a series of left-wing proposals that demanded an audit on Coke’s impact on non-white stakeholders, “a report on risks from state policies restricting reproductive rights” and more. During its annual meeting of shareholders, the Coca-Cola board’s voting recommendations carried the day over every single shareholder proposal — and none of the votes were particularly close; most lost by several billion votes.  The Coca-Cola votes come during a time when American companies are seeing a widespread rejection of woke capitalism, fueled by the Bud Light backlash.

coca-cola

Monday

Michael Lind

Why bad jobs are the root of America’s problems

Low wages are bad for everyone in the United States — not just for the working poor. Every major social crisis Americans face today — falling fertility, the loneliness epidemic, bitter conflicts over racial and gender identity, and growing partisan polarization in politics — is worsened if not caused by the proliferation of low wage jobs caused by the collapse of worker power. For centuries, children in the English-speaking countries have learned a proverb that has equivalents in other European languages (“want of” in this context means “lack of”): For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.

west
therapy sessions therapist
Amber Duke

Scoop: how Critical Race Theory is taking over your therapy sessions

Leaked Facebook messages provided exclusively to The Spectator reveal how therapists are using counseling sessions with their patients to push left-wing ideas of race and gender. Approximately half a dozen licensed mental health professionals in a Facebook group in Indiana had in-depth discussions about how to inject systemic racism into sessions with patients who problems or goals were seemingly unrelated to that topic. The therapists also strategized on how to work with patients who were resistant to the idea that the real source of their issues was societal bigotry or that they might be bigoted themselves.

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

Why ‘woke’ doesn’t have the moral high ground

The much-overused word “woke” — basically meaning to be at all moments of the day and night conscious of racial and sexual discrimination — has been remarkably resistant to criticism, reason and even ridicule. Ever since the initial exposure and denunciation of Harvey Weinstein in 2017 — a long-drawn-out prosecution and sentencing only recently concluded — the “wokes” have paraded their righteousness in every corner of society with very little pushback. Occasionally, a super baddie such as Bill Cosby gets released from prison on constitutional grounds, but super-wokes in the United States never let such minor reversals slow them down, since the public momentum and the arguments are overwhelmingly in their favor.

woke
culture war
Cosmo Landesman

Make love, not culture war

I think I know how to end the culture wars at a stroke. My solution can be summed up in a simple slogan: make love, not culture war. Or, to put it another way — poke the woke. Let me explain. I have a new woman in my life and not just any woman. I have a Woke Woman. That’s right: a full-on, vegetarian, eco-activist, kill-the-rich, bisexual, transgender-defender and social justice warrior. She’s also a shrink. And not just any kind of shrink, but a Lacanian shrink! They’re the followers of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In the UK we have a soccer team called Millwall that all the other fans hate. Millwall fans have a song that goes, “No one likes us, we don’t care!” Lacan therapists are the Millwall of therapy — nobody in the therapeutic community likes them.

Tuesday

J. Scott Turner

The National Audubon Society considers canceling itself

How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After a year-long review, the Society’s Board of Directors recently announced its decision: Audubon’s name will stay. The Society’s CEO, Elizabeth Gray, defended the decision on the sensible grounds that, for whatever his faults, Audubon remains a pivotal figure in the history of science in our once young republic. His legacy includes establishing ornithology as the burgeoning field that it is today, which draws both on professional experts and passionate amateurs.

audubon

Thursday

Amber Duke

The Wall Street Journal’s curious DEI hire

The Wall Street Journal made an interesting hire last year that went mostly unnoticed, aside from minor trade publications. The NewsCorp-owned media outlet announced in May 2022 that they were bringing on Robin Turner to be the vice president of training, culture and community. Turner's charge was to work with Dow Jones newsrooms, including WSJ, to "drive DE&I strategy into all aspects of our global business." DE&I of course refers to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, those corporate and academic cultural programs that insist that historically marginalized groups require special treatment in order to overcome systemic oppression. DEI has become baked into the WSJ's news operation while simultaneously being excoriated by the paper's editorial board.

Pedestrians walk past a newspaper stand with copies of The Wall Street Journal (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Tuesday

Teresa Mull

If Americans don’t believe in God, country or hard work, what do they believe in?

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? It’s all pretty bad, but let’s get it over with: the share of Americans who say patriotism and religion are “very important” to them has fallen sharply, as has the number of Americans who value involvement in their community, hard work and having children. These revelations come courtesy of a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, complete with a graph depicting our nation’s nosedive. Some nitty-gritty: in 1998, 70 percent of respondents deemed patriotism to be very important; now, that number is 38 percent. Twenty-five years ago, 62 percent said religion was very important; now only 39 percent do.   If Americans don’t believe in God or country, what do they believe in? Money, for one thing.

american values

Friday

Amber Duke

How mediocre employees are forcing companies to be woke

Why are so many American corporations espousing progressive social views? It doesn’t seem to make much sense on its face. Companies that publicly endorse left-wing politics and internally subject employees to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, or DEI, initiatives risk alienating a huge portion of their customer base and excising talented staff to appease a vocal minority of progressive keyboard warriors. As I write in my upcoming book, The Snowflakes’ Revolt, one major reason is that the woke left "create[s] a culture of fear in which everyone — including the adults who are supposed to be in charge — is terrified of stepping out of line and becoming a target of the bullies.

esg woke

Monday

Ben Kew

The growing bipartisan backlash against ‘Latinx’

Since its emergence, the term “Latinx” has been unpopular with Hispanics. Yet despite this opposition, progressive activists and organizations continue to use it as a means of identifying people of Latin American heritage in a supposedly more sensitive way. The term's origins remain a subject of debate, although its users argue that the word "Latino" reinforces the patriarchy while the "x" recognizes nonbinary people. According to the Wall Street Journal, it made its debut in academic literature a decade ago in Puerto Rican psychology periodicals as part of an effort to "escape the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language." Since then it has been adopted by many progressives as part of their ever-expanding twenty-first-century lexicon.

latinx

Friday

Matt McDonald

Vivek Ramaswamy’s ‘anti-woke’ campaign caper

New Hampshire Vivek Ramaswamy accepts it: running for president is “a weird thing to do as a thirty-seven-year-old.” The biotech multimillionaire and anti-woke capitalism crusader is a surprise entry into the 2024 Republican primary after announcing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday. He went straight from Carlson’s Florida studio to early-voting New Hampshire. I arrived in the snow-dusted city of Rochester at 9 a.m. on Wednesday to watch him kick off his first full day of campaigning — and to work out what the author of Woke, Inc. hoped to bring to the race. Around thirty or so were gathered in Potter’s House bakery watching Vivek gear up for his third Fox hit in fourteen hours.

vivek ramaswamy

Monday

Peter Wood

The university fighting back against the diversocrats

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.

Wednesday

Madeline Fry Schultz

Art history is now ‘Islamophobic’

At a private liberal arts college in Minnesota, art history is now Islamophobic. In October, an art history professor at Hamline University was teaching Islamic art, a segment that included two depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in fourteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings with significant historical value. The professor alerted her students beforehand, careful to ensure that observant Muslims who object to the depiction of their prophet would not have to see him on screen. It seems that the professor had done everything right: providing images of famous paintings for her students’ edification but allowing students to opt out of viewing them if doing so ran contrary to their religious beliefs. But who are we kidding? This is a liberal arts college in the twenty-first century.

Quaran

Sunday

Casey Chalk

The DEI industrial complex

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies. American companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to firms for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, according to Princeton professor Betsy Levy Paluck in an op-ed at the Washington Post. And yet, moans Paluck, there is practically no research evaluating the results of these DEI initiatives.

dei

Friday

Roger Kimball

Harvard’s new president is the next chapter of its racial spoils system

Peter Salovey must be fretting. The longtime president of Yale University has done everything in his power to pander to the forces of woke identity politics. He changed the name of Calhoun College at Yale because students didn’t like that it was named after John C. Calhoun, a supporter of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Salovey covered over or ripped out artwork across the university that a specially appointed committee deemed insensitive or offensive. He shoveled tens of millions of dollars into “diversity” initiatives in an effort to appease student crybullies. But Salovey has one insuperable handicap. He is white. In the great racial sweepstakes of the day, that is (if I may so put it) an insuperable black mark. Harvard understands this.

claudine gay harvard