Wokeness

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Woke is truly going broke

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.) Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.

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Teresa Mull

Puppy privilege

On a recent visit to Nashville, I took my purebred Norwich Terrier, Pitkin, for a stroll. A twentysomething girl toting a yoga mat and an iced coffee squatted on the sidewalk to oblige Pitkin’s pleas for pets. “Oh my gosh, he’s soooo cute!” the girl said between babbles of baby talk. “Where did you get him?” “From a breeder in Oklahoma.” “Oh,” the girl scoffed. “I would never buy a dog.” She took her protein-deprived, sustainably clothed self away. Pitkin and I were left to face facts: we had just been dog-shamed. Buy a dog. Her glare made me feel as if I’d come by my beloved furry friend through the Middle Passage. Pitkin looked up to me and cocked his head. He seemed satisfied, but I was not. Was not even my dog immune from the self-righteous?

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covid
Karol Markowicz

Canceled for Covid

No one is getting canceled, we’re told. There’s no such thing as “cancel culture.” It’s just consequence culture. People say racist, sexist, mean things and so they deserve to be fired from their jobs, stripped of their standing in society, shunned by their friends. Should Hitler have been able to keep his job after publishing Mein Kampf, huh? If only life were that simple. But mob rule is, by definition, imprecise. The people who get canceled aren’t really Hitler, of course. And somehow, actual criminals find themselves forgiven far sooner than regular folk who say something out of step with the narrow set of guidelines proffered by the worst, wokest people in society. Still, there’s something different about the people canceled for their Covid views.

chesa boudin
Gilbert T. Sewall

Chesa Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies will doom him

California’s ballots went out early this month, and the drawn-out mail-in primary election ends on June 7. Turnout looks to be low, as there are no competitive statewide races, and November elections are a lock for the Democratic incumbents. Governor Gavin Newsom has one eye on the camera and the other on the White House. Senator Alex Padilla — appointed last year by Newsom to fill Kamala Harris’s seat — is a reliable placeman for the ruling Democratic junta. The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly.

techwokery
Doug Stokes

America’s ‘techwokery’ is infecting its allies

America’s racial angst is transforming the politics of the West. The world is watching as Biden’s ambitious “whole-of-government equity agenda” actively repudiates key elements of the American creed. The “equity” agenda conflates equal outcomes with equal opportunities. “Justice” is thus imposed by technocratic elites who, like the apparatchiks of the empire the US defeated in the Cold War, are a class with special privileges. As Vice President Kamala Harris explains, under the new “equity” regime, all Americans will “end up in the same place.” An unholy alliance of technocratic management and the woke sacralization of historically oppressed groups is creating a new form of American governance: call it “techwokery.

Monday

Peter Wood

Stop reading

Like you, I enjoy reading. I know, of course, because you are reading this. But perhaps you also share my interest in preventing others from reading. In case you are not yet enlisted in the Restricted Literacy Movement, allow me to point out our three basic claims. (Call it RLM, why don’t we: acronyms don’t have to be read, after all.) First, literacy beyond the rudimentary has become unnecessary. Most people can do their jobs and find fulfilling leisure without it. Second, attempting to produce literacy in the unwilling is an expensive, typically futile undertaking. Third, literacy is simply harmful to many who have acquired it. It engenders discontent, self-doubt and destructive impulses.

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good
Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Ain’t that good news

A few Fridays ago, I met Tablet magazine’s incomparable Liel Leibovitz for breakfast. Over inedible gluten-free banana bread, we caught up on everything from Covid to religion, politics and pop culture. The conversation took a depressing turn, as so many seem to these days. I asked Liel if he had seen some recent ridiculous news — now too distant and unremarkable to even remember — but which highlighted the extreme hypocrisy and self-defeating brokenness of our society. He said that he had, and added: “Isn’t it great?” “Great?” I asked. “Great,” he said. “Just terrific. Things like this make me giddily optimistic.” Liel shared his philosophy with me while we walked to the Upper East Side’s premier kosher butcher — Park East.

Saturday

Heather Mac Donald

When ‘white’ becomes an epithet

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large. Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly. Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!

conservatives whiteness

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Just whistle while you woke

It’s the dream of every little girl: Prince Charming rides in on a white horse and asks her to come with him. They gallop off to his castle where he takes her hand, gets down on one knee, and says... “BIPOCs and other marginalized groups face cultural genocide thanks to a patriarchy that encourages heteronormativity and ableism.” To which she sings, “When you microaggress upon a starrrrrrr...” Yes, from out of the “too tone deaf to function” file this week comes the Disney corporation, that peddler of fairytale escapism, which has now gone full woke. Its new business model appears to be as follows: Disney hikes its ticket and merchandise costs, making its theme parks increasingly unaffordable to poor and middle-class families.

Paul du Quenoy

New York City’s desperate attempt to lure Floridians

In his latest desperate attempt to prove that New York is “back,” the city’s hapless mayor Eric Adams has taken a hysterical potshot at Florida — a much happier jurisdiction to where many of his constituents have had the good sense to move. Adams announced that private funds made available to his cash-strapped city would be used to place billboard and digital ads in five booming Florida markets: Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. These ads invite Floridians to “come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want.” The jibe is directed at Florida’s recently approved Parental Rights in Education bill, which prohibits instruction in sexuality and gender identity for children from kindergarten through third grade.

Monday

Peter Wood

How ‘questioning authority’ gave us wokeness

When I was in high school in the late 1960s, a bumper sticker, “Question Authority,” became a common sight, as did a button saying the same thing, usually worn on a tie-dye T-shirt or denim jacket. I was among those contrary teenagers who wanted to know, “On whose authority am I commanded to question authority?” The answer wasn’t hard to find. The man who most visibly pushed the slogan was former Harvard clinical psychologist and ardent LSD proponent Timothy Leary. He was known for his counsel “Drop out, turn on, tune in,” which was adopted by his League of Spiritual Discovery, which turned LSD into a sacrament. Whether Dr. Leary originated “Question Authority” or just promoted it is unclear, but that seems apposite.

Wednesday

Gilbert T. Sewall

We are all still prisoners of the Sixties

In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” author Joan Didion recalled a Berkeley autumn weekend seventeen years earlier when she was reading Lionel Trilling in a fraternity house instead of going to the football game, a collegiate occasion fixed in the memory of an earlier era, “so exotic as to be almost czarist.” It suggested “the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies,” Didion observed in her crisp, distinctive tone. Before the Sixties, youthful elites were close enough to their patrimony to respect its intellect, energy, values and travail. Liberal guilt, such as it was, rarely went further left than Rockefeller Republican.

Monday

Teresa Mull

Cancel culture gets its comeuppance

Cancel culture has struck again, but this time its would-be victims aren’t apologizing. The Daily Mail — a publication notorious for being “free” with its own speech — is leading the anti-cancel culture charge this month with a series of stories that point to an encouraging trend. A handful of prominent creatives are standing up to woke bullies and noting the dangers (and impracticalities) of their demands, which essentially amount to writers and entertainers forsaking their imaginative talents by only addressing things they’ve personally experienced. Except they aren’t supposed to be candid about those things, either, as they might offend someone if they’re too honest.

Thursday

Peter Wood

When Harvard canceled a black professor

Roland G. Fryer is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard — an anointed member of the elite by most definitions. He is also black, widely published and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school. Fryer was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker and a close associate of other economists who focus on rigorous analysis of empirical data. That's led him to observations that were a bit unsettling to higher education orthodoxies. For example, Fryer found that the academic achievement gap accelerates between kindergarten and eighth grade. He also found that controlling for a few variables, the initial disparity disappeared.

Joan Collins
Joan Collins and Taki

Hollywood, fist-fights and getting canceled

Introductions Scene: a drawing room in London. When the recording starts, Taki is already mid-anecdote... Taki: I was sent out to Monte Carlo to speak to Roger Moore. The Spectator offered to pay all my expenses. I said thank you, I’ll pay my own. I went and had a terrific drunken dinner with Roger who really spilled the beans, cos we were buddies. I came back. The tape was empty because I’d never turned the recorder on. Joan: I’d known Roger since I was fifteen, because my father was a big agent in London and I came back from school — oh, fourteen actually, because I left school at fifteen — and there’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen standing there. He came over and said, “How do you do? You must be Joan, my name is Roger Moore.

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

Twitter suspends the Babylon Bee for telling the truth

Admiral Rachel Levine, who currently serves as assistant secretary for health in the Biden administration, is not a woman. This is simply a statement of fact. Rachel Levine is also not a powerless, marginalized individual. Yet Twitter as a company seems to believe that pointing out both of these truths is worth suspending accounts over. The conservative satire website Babylon Bee recently found their account locked over a tweet they recently sent naming Rachel Levine their “Man of the Year.” The joke was in response to USA Today naming Levine its Woman of the Year despite Levine not being a woman. By writing this piece and tweeting it out, I and perhaps the Spectator could also find their Twitter accounts suspended.

Friday

Cockburn

President Stacey Abrams gives Star Trek its far-left final frontier

Star Trek: Discovery took one giant leap for the leftist ideology that defines it in its fourth season finale this week. Enter President Stacey Abrams, leader of the thirty-second century’s United Earth. Perhaps deliberately, the sci-fi show’s writers left viewers ignorant as to whether President Abrams was democratically elected to her fictional role. Star Trek’s democratic ideals, after all, seem poorly matched to a politician who lost an election and then claimed that it had been “stolen from the voters of Georgia.” No worries, however: Abrams’s future is bright. Concluding her cameo, Abrams asks Discovery’s star Sonequa Martin-Green, “there's a lot of work to do, are you ready for that?

stacey abrams star trek

Sunday

J. Scott Turner

Biden’s science advisor falls to the woke

Last month, President Biden tapped Dr. Eric Lander to be his science advisor and lead a new "war on cancer" initiative. Just five days later, he was unceremoniously dumped. Nominees come and go all the time, of course, yet there was no doubt over Lander's scientific and managerial qualifications. He is a professor of biology at MIT and Harvard University. He was instrumental in steering the Human Genome Project to a point of actual utility, providing detailed genetic maps of heritable diseases, and proceeding from those clues to novel treatments. He is a skilled political operative, hobnobbing with the wealthy and powerful on his way to becoming the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

eric lander science

Wednesday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Putin understands America’s moral decay

Last October, Vladimir Putin aired a speech to the Russian nation chiding the United States for its moral decay. He observed an America “blotting out whole pages” of its history, pursuing “reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities,” and renouncing time-honored values in an effort at “public renewal.” “It’s their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home,” he warned. “We have a different viewpoint.” This iteration of family values and conservative critique went barely noticed by the American press at the time.

Putin

Sunday

Alex Perez

I’m a Latinx person of letters

A development has reshaped the world of letters. The literary universe is no longer a boys’ club but the playground of woke Brooklyn ladies who’ve swallowed up editorships and literary-agent gigs. The results continue to be predictable: a constant bombardment of books from elite white women about the travails of neurotic Brooklyn ladies, and victim narratives about brown suffering. The fetishization of people of color has come to define the woke relationship with so-called marginalized communities. Virtually every literary book — except for those based in Brooklyn — details the struggles of a victimized minority. The Booker Prize longlist or the National Book Award finalists will annually bombard you with weepy tales of generational POC suffering.

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