Woke
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How the War on Woke Was Won—for Now March 10, 2025
California Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The presumptive 2028 presidential candidate knows that it’s blowing against wokeness. As recently as November, Newsom called a special session of the state l...
Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? March 05, 2025
Tom Wolfe’s books are being reissued, in homage, by Picador. But he would never put the news so blandly.WHOOSH! Off the press they come, slicked bright and hot, ready to be grabbed by woke undergrads in Lululemon who’ve never heard of him but have a ...
The New Woke Right Wants Its Own Safe Space March 04, 2025
In the 2010s, a certain kind of social justice activist took a hard turn against the mainstream media. The rancor was of a different flavor than the Chomskyian critiques of corporate media and the consent it allegedly manufactured. It wasn’t so much ...
Is Woke Losing? December 18, 2024
There is much evidence to suggest that modern democracy, and with it modern political consciousness more broadly, is inclined to endless self-radicalization. Wokeness is only the latest manifestation of what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without re...
The Anti-Woke King of Hollywood Lets Loose December 13, 2024
It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously ...
How Ricky Gervais Took on the ‘Woke Brigade’ December 10, 2024
Andy and Tracey stand in the cold night outside the Brighton Centre with the slightly furtive look of recently escaped convicts. They don’t want their children to know where they have sneaked off to: Ricky Gervais’s new show, Mortality.“Loads of peop...
Inside the Mind of Luigi Mangione December 10, 2024
The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is ...
Trump Can Fight Wokeness in Sports December 06, 2024
For years, the Left has recognized the cultural significance of sports and has used sports to promote cultural transformations that would serve their objectives, such as advancing the sexual revolution and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The ...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Is The Woke Era Really Over? November 25, 2024
Depending on what kind of echo chamber you hang out in, the victory cries of the anti-woke crowd have been reverberating at increasing volume. And why not? The trouncing of Democrats on November 5 and the decisive resurrection of Donald Trump has bee...
Have We Never Been Woke? November 25, 2024
We Have Never Been Woke is a work of, by, and for the American professional class. According to its author, Musa al-Gharbi, this is a social class defined by its manipulations of symbols and its distinctive symbolic culture. During the Great Awokenin...
Anthropology in Retreat November 25, 2024
Many anthropologists place social-justice ideology over verifiable facts, from denying the sex binary to spinning false narratives of mass child graves in Indian schools to recasting “indigenous knowledge” as a source of scientific evidence. To this ...
The Ethics of Self-Interpretation November 21, 2024
The polemical intensity that made a set of radical ideas about race and gender seem, for a time, to be the new moral consensus of media, academia, and corporate management, is over—maybe. Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign was muted in its i...
Jordan Peterson’s Prophecies November 20, 2024
At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages w...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series November 12, 2024
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Ba...
Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? November 01, 2024
It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural ch...
Was Marx Woke? September 20, 2024
A specter is haunting America—the specter of, yes, communism. Nearly four decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of markets, conservative influencers have revived the rhetoric of their old Cold War crusade. Donald Trump ha...
Amazon Saved Bookstores September 17, 2024
Top Gun: Maverick was released on May 27, 2022. The view here is that the movie was boring, trite, and even quite “woke” despite a popular perception that it trampled on the overused notion. But that’s not the point of this opinion piece.Good or bad,...
‘Race Realism’ Won’t Save America September 16, 2024
Many who have lately come to grasp the ever-clearer tyrannical implications of social justice leftism, also known as wokeness, have been drawn to so-called “race realism.” Race realism, also known as human biodiversity, argues that race is not, as we...
The Esoteric Wokeness of ‘Ancient Aliens’ September 02, 2024
The History Channel series Ancient Aliens, which will soon conclude its 20th season, pioneered an increasingly influential brand of pseudo-history, also on display in the recent Netflix production Ancient Apocalypse. Both shows gain their appeal simu...
