Wokeness
Story Stream
Welcome to the Bizarro Awokening February 24, 2025
A week ago, conservative influencer and children’s book author Ashley St. Clair sent shockwaves across X by announcing that she was the proud mother of a five-month old baby fathered by none other than that same platform’s owner. She didn’t detail th...
David Rieff Foretells the Fate of Woke February 24, 2025
Donald Trump’s relentless attempt to erase the slightest trace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – it used to be called “woke” – from American institutions has pushed DEI to the margins of a political conflict that is growing more intense by t...
How to Free the Universities February 21, 2025
In more good news for British universities, “woke waste” is now gaining traction in the UK media, and firmly in the firing line are mad-sounding research projects at the taxpayers’ expense. According to a joint investigation by The Sun and the Taxpay...
How Did Law Schools Become Lawless? February 21, 2025
Legal academia has been long overdue for a book-length critique, and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites delivers—released just as Trump’s election victory appears to signal a turning of the tide on wokeness....
The Age of the Prude Is Over February 20, 2025
It was just last spring when a viral video of a bouncing, scantily clad Sydney Sweeney was heralded by the Right-wing internet as an early harbinger of the coming vibe shift. “Wokeness is dead,” declared commentator Richard Hanania, in an X post that...
Bow Down to Doechii February 20, 2025
Doechii is tired, but she doesn’t have time to relax. We’re standing in the lobby of the Civilian hotel in midtown on a freezing December afternoon, and after a brief introduction, we’re already on the move. The rapper doesn’t walk; she strides, her ...
The Rebel Campus Boosters Rising Up Against Wokeness February 20, 2025
In the plummy world of alumni relations, where distinguished graduates are awarded honorary degrees and major donors are fêted at the president’s mansion, it is virtually unheard of for former students to set up shop as a political counterweight to t...
The Online Right Is Building a Monster February 20, 2025
Yesterday morning, like I do every morning, I woke up and immediately opened Twitter (a.k.a. X), where the first thing I saw was Elon Musk reacting positively to a post alleging that actor Tom Hanks is a pedophile. Then I saw that Lord Miles—a conser...
What Was Woke Art: Elite Interiority February 19, 2025
Part one of who knows.The whole of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was twisted around. “I’m With Her.” Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Isn’t a politician supposed to be with us?And when she lost, a lot of women took it personally. This ...
The Rise of the Woke Right February 18, 2025
One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed wit...
MAGA is Failing Because It's Succeeding February 13, 2025
I’ve had a horrible cold for the past week, which has made processing recent events in DC even more disorienting and surreal than it was already bound to be.I went to bed congested and woke up to the US feuding with Canada. Just kidding, we’ve actual...
A Western About Cowboys, Indians … and Mormons February 13, 2025
Overall, American Primeval, the new Western on Netflix which takes place in the early days of Utah’s settlement, is a good show—in a directional sense. That is, it is enjoyable because it represents a step in the right direction. On the one hand it a...
The Rise of ‘Dark Woke’ February 07, 2025
If you spend too much time on the internet, you might have become fleetingly aware of a new trend called “Dark Woke.” “What’s that?” you might ask. “Will the woke stop pussyfooting about and go full-on blood and soil? Maybe advocating RETVRNing Ameri...
How Bob Dylan Fought the Proto-Woke January 14, 2025
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry? January 07, 2025
In September 2023, the richest man in the world was daydreaming about the Trojan War. “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he had bought and swiftly renamed. His thought...
Wokeness Was Never a Religion January 07, 2025
At the height of “wokeness” (or “social justice” if you like), writers like Helen Lewis and John McWhorter speculated that it might be “our new religion,” supplanting Christianity at a time when society was becoming increasingly secular....
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...
