Wokeness

Monday

Nate Hochman

Loudoun County’s vicious mediocrities

For months, widespread parent-led uprisings against school boards have pitted everyday mothers and fathers against powerful political bureaucracies. Skirmishes across the country have revealed the radicalism — and ruthlessness — of the educators and administrators who run the American education system. But none have been as gruesome as that of Scott Smith, the Loudoun County father who became a target of the managerial class that presides over the wealthy northern Virginia suburb.

loudoun

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Rotten Tomatoes and the cultural gap between critics and audiences

Comedian Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, The Closer, has drawn praise from audiences and social media, while eliciting scorn from reviewers and professional critics over its jokes about the LGBTQ and trans communities. Members of the press have even gone so far as to label the stand-up special 'a betrayal' on Chappelle’s part. But how far does this divide extend between what appears to be mass audience approval and universal critic disapproval? Rotten Tomatoes, the film critic aggregation site that averages reviews of visual media in film, television and streaming, has become the latest tool to measure this. Rotten Tomatoes has a user review system, which it measures against the media critics.

dave
california
Gilbert T. Sewall

Woke California bans boys and girls toy sections

Last week, signing a batch of pet bills to end the legislative session, Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state in the nation to require gender-neutral retailing. The law, which will take effect in three years, is limited to toys and 'childcare products' sold by big companies. It will never be enforced, since in essence it's already happening. Target dropped boys and girls toy sections in 2015, and for years retailers have been moving away from gender-specific labels. But the law’s emptiness is immaterial. The point is not to weed out a bias or fix a pressing wrong. The act is a victory for LGBT advocates who claim that sellers pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes and stigmatize non-conformers.

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

Man of Sssssssteel

So — Superman has come out. He’s gay. I know, stop the presses, another figure of the comic book universe is being stripped of his straight, white, maleness and tossed into the volcano of intersectionality. It’s about as edgy and groundbreaking as a consumer-product survey. I was less surprised to learn Superman was getting pinkwashed than I was to find out Superman isn’t Superman anymore. There’s a new Superman, apparently, and it’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s son, Jonathan Kent. According to DC Comics sometime this month he’s going to kiss a dude and, poof, be gay, or bisexual, or whatever. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a pillow-biter! What it isn’t is believable. I mean, have you met any of us gay men?

superman

Friday

Teresa Mull

Diners: the least woke places in America

I just read a headline on the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I get what I deserve): '[Singer] Demi Lovato says they are no longer sure they want children — admitting life in their 30s without kids is "pretty nice" — as they open up about coming out as nonbinary and pansexual.' I rubbed my eyes and put in my monocle. Surely someone for whom English is a second language wrote this article? I squinted. 'Demi Lovato is no longer sure that parenthood lies in their future.' As intrigued as I was to learn more about Demi’s reproductive longings, neither my grammatical standards nor my sanity could take any more. Off I sped as fast as I could to the American Diner to recover my faith in humanity.

Monday

Kat Rosenfield

The woke are abolishing women

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

vaginas

Monday

Victor Davis Hanson

Does America still work?

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit.

mark milley work woke

Thursday

Cockburn

Did ‘gender studies’ lose Afghanistan?

Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different? On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking. Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities.

gender

Monday

Roger Kimball

Will Tripp keeps it short

Have you met Will Tripp? He’s the pugnacious dwarf lawyer who starred in Harry Stein’s Will Tripp: Pissed Off Attorney at Law. That was probably the funniest book of 2014, certainly the most amusing novel I read that year. Will, whose credo is ‘Shut up, and get on with it’, was busy paying his way through law school by means of his athletic prowess, sort of. He specialized in being tossed back and forth by the inebriated patrons of a local bar until some do-gooding crusader took time away from battling against secondhand smoke and carbon emissions to intervene to Save the Dwarfs and got the sport of dwarf tossing declared illegal. Will had to find new employment, inspecting sewers.

will tripp

Wednesday

They/Them

Happy corporate wokewash month!

It’s June and the biggest corporations on the planet want you to know that they are celebrating gay Pride — unless you live somewhere like Saudi Arabia in which case they couldn’t care less. On their main Twitter page, Procter & Gamble have put a Pride flag in their banner and in their pinned Tweet they proudly proclaim: 'We strive to be a champion of #LGBTQVisibility year-round, using our voice to drive acceptance, inclusion and a love for humanity.' I guess there are no gay people in Saudi Arabia to champion, which must be why P&G’s Saudi Twitter handle has not a single rainbow flag in sight and a pinned tweet simply wishing people a blessed Ramadan. But that is the beauty of corporate wokewashing.

pride wokewashing corporate

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Paying the price of free speech

Last month in this space, I wrote a few words about what had happened to the practice of art in the West over the last century or so. That of course is a gigantic topic, and in a thousand words I was able to touch upon but a tiny part of the story — or, to tell the truth, only a tiny part of a tiny part of the story. Mostly, I described and lamented the eclipse of beauty in the metabolism of art, which is another way of lamenting the eclipse of aesthetic pleasure. In the 18th century, the world was awash in commentary that talked about the beautiful and the sublime as central categories in the appreciation of art.

free

Friday

Tom Slater

Racism has become a kind of theory of everything

‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden.’ So said writer and academic Yascha Mounk in the Atlantic in the run-up to last November’s elections. It was a sentiment that echoed across what we might call the respectable anti-woke world: that Trump is to identity politics what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, so a win for the moderate Joe Biden would calm everyone down. As predictions go, it’s right up there with Trump saying the pandemic would be over with by Easter 2020: it’s been proven spectacularly wrong, remarkably quickly. Trump may well have been the perfect foil for the identitarian movement, but the even older, whiter guy who beat him makes an unlikely tribune. Biden’s presidency has done nothing to abate racial paranoia.

Racism

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

France wakes up to Woke

One crisis can conceal another. While France has been distracted by COVID, a new menace is lurking. The specter haunting the republic is le Wokisme, the mutating ideology of race and identity that has found unexpectedly fertile ground here. French elites are unsettled. Those who assumed the French possessed herd immunity against such barbaric American ideas are having their complacency tested. Superficially a modern country, with iPhones, Amazon and electric cars, France is still often introspective and late to understand what’s happening in the wider — especially Anglophone — world, which is how wokeness has somewhat taken it by surprise. Woke had been happening in America for many years before the French noticed.

woke

Friday

They/Them

Introducing Wokeyleaks

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within heart of the Social Justice Movement that is the entertainment industry. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks will also function as a confidential news leak organization for any other sources who wish to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. My disillusionment with the Social Justice ‘left’ was less a road to Damascus moment and more death by a thousand cucks. It was when a friend told me that ‘people are concerned about your use of POC hand emojis on Instagram’. Apparently, it’s ‘the equivalent of blackface’ (it’s really not).

wokeyleaks

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Is Black Lives Matter a religion for woke white people?

The most memorable footage of the Black Lives Matter protests, and perhaps the creepiest, doesn’t capture any acts of violence, any looting, any chanting of slogans or — so far as I can make out — any black faces.Instead, we see hundreds of mostly young people sitting in the parking lot of a public library in Bethesda, Maryland, raising both pasty-white arms in a gesture that suggests both surrender and worship.An invisible speaker is reciting a list of promises that the crowd repeats. This is what we hear: Speaker: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.' Crowd: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.

black lives matter religion

Wednesday

Tyler Grant

How to write 2020’s Great American Novel

So I sat down to write the Great American Novel. And like with all improbable tasks, it’s helpful to map out potential issues to spare yourself from a career-ending catastrophe (and to provide excuses to wax poetic to your friends when you ultimately leave a manuscript incomplete). First, it’s helpful to take a cursory survey of the current literary landscape: writing about my time in China, Thailand, or Taiwan will launch the entire Berkeley creative writing class into chants of 'exoticism' and cause a Slate writer to prematurely return from a gulag LARPing weekend to pen a 1,200-word thinkpiece on literature as colonialism. Reading the room, I’m going to stay close to home.

great american novel

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Nobody is woke

The word ‘woke’ has quickly degenerated into a meaningless term of abuse. Nobody says ‘I am woke’ these days, at least not seriously.  It‘s like claiming to be a keen nanny-statist or ‘bien-pensant’. At one level, then, wokeness exists only so that journalists like me and social media warriors on the center or right can fight it. It’s not just the word that has become hackneyed. The whole idea of being woke – suddenly alert – to racial or social injustice is not real, and never was, and therefore the movement against it is similarly fake. Right-wingers have the same concept and call it 'redpilling’; in both cases, it means a sort of lobotomized enlightenment for people who enjoy feeling aggrieved.

woke
laurence fox
Jarvis Dupont

Laurence Fox made me go into hiding

Last night I posted an incredibly innocuous tweet about Laurence Fox and the outrage it caused was predictably excessive. Now, for those of you not in the know, Laurence Fox is a privileged white British male actor who last week publicly said some of the most toxic and hateful things this country has heard in centuries. On the BBC’s political forum debate show, Question Time, Laurence was asked about his thoughts on the hateful racism Meghan Markle has been regularly subjected to from the British tabloids and his heartless response shocked the nation. I can hardly bear to type this, but he DENIED that any criticisms directed towards her were motivated by racism and called the UK...oh God...this is killing me...he called the UK a ‘lovely and tolerant country’. Jesus.

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

GQ is a holy text of woke capital

In general, there is no point in reading articles you know are bound to make you mad. Life is too short. Read a good book. Enjoy a walk with your loved ones. Learn how to fashion something out of wood. Sometimes, though, an article crosses our path and we are gripped with the despair and anger one might feel watching a drunk driver veer across a crowded street.One such article is GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch's introduction to the magazine’s ‘New Masculinity’ issue. ‘When I found out that I would be the editor-in-chief of GQ,’ Welch writes:‘...most people said stuff like “Amazing!” and “Congrats!” But one particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I'll never forget. “Yikes,” she said.

gq

Wednesday

P.J. O’Rourke

Puritanism is back…and welcome to it

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Cole Porter sang: ‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / But now, God knows, / Anything goes.’ Everything went, and with it: humor. World War One was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism, with the collapse of religious convictions, ethical norms, societal conventions and plain good manners. Nothing was sacrosanct and this turned laughter into hard work. Like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on the river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

wokeness puritanism