As a cultural revolution, Trumpism has unquestionably succeeded.
And, by the same token, its cultural enemy – wokeness – has failed. In fact, it is arguably due to wokeness’ manifest failures that Trumpism was able to exist at all; a nation without wokeness would have regarded Donald Trump’s populist nationalism as an extremist curiosity to be laughed at from the sidelines, as so many pundits in 2015 did. Yet by the same token, wokeness without Donald Trump never would have been able to assume the commanding heights of culture to which it ascended after his first election, and in which it became oppressively, monolithically dominant during the height of COVID. Both Trumpism and wokeness achieved unprecedented power thanks to each other’s existence, but only one was able to finish the fight. We are lucky beyond measure that it was Trumpism.
Because now that Americans have tasted wokeness, they have recoiled as perhaps no people have since the fall of the Berlin Wall liberated the imprisoned peoples of East Berlin. But that took decades, whereas wokeness alienated those it ruled in just a few short years. Yet the story of how they managed that is one in which Trumpism is an almost ancillary presence; merely the big tent into which all of wokeness’ freshly made enemies poured. In short, the story of wokeness’ fall is less the tale of a Goliath slain by a David than the tale of a movement which had to be allowed to fly very high, if only so that it could get too close to the sun. Like all such movements, the American people saw its wings of wax melt in real time.
Many on the Right will no doubt gloat about this. They will put the raging, tearful election night TikToks of the woke on a loop and fall asleep to the sound of liberal tears. Relief and amusement will be all they can manage after the past eight years fighting. I don’t grudge them their relief, or their amusement; it’s hard not to marinate in both, even for me. But while wokeness has ended with nothing but web-based wailing and gnashing of teeth, make no mistake: just because it looks pathetic now does not mean it was never a threat. It was; possibly the worst domestic threat to basic American ideas since the communist infiltration of America’s institutions in the early 20th century. Moreover, the Right’s failure to take the rise of political correctness seriously in the early 90’s made the later rise of wokeness all-but-inevitable, for the simple reason that two key questions were never asked:
- How did this movement gain power?
- What made it lose it?
These are vital questions to be asked now that wokeness is in the dustbin of history, and for a very simple reason: because the (if you’ll allow me to coin a phrase) Melanic Panic of the past ten years must never happen again. This is a deadly serious necessity. In the past, I have described wokeness as a juvenile, teenage fantasy born on Tumblr among people who fantasize about restoring the social dynamics of high school, with themselves installed on top as the modishly “oppressed” Queen Bees. And…well, come on, look at Kamala Harris’ “brat” campaign, or at the fact that the New York Times and The Guardian are now printing the lamentations of literal teenage girls as anti-Trump op eds if you doubt that.
However, I also suggested in my first essay on wokeness’ origins that its petty, laughable smallness as a system of thought is a symptom of the fact that its purpose is not to articulate an actual political theory, but rather to rationalize cruelty, both against the self and others, in the service of wholly unwarranted moral and artistic vanity. These are not urges which can be cured by laughing at TikToks. These are deep, primal, indelible elements of the human psyche, which wokeness was able to speak to and cultivate in its rise to cultural power. If we want to prevent its rising again, we must look at just how it rationalized and cultivated these dark urges, and how Americans eventually caught wise to the fact that it was, in retrospect, the Netflix version of Nazi ideology.
I have often protested that wokeness is not really a left-wing movement and indeed, it is not, except in the sense that it existed in that rarefied space where horseshoe theory makes Left and Right indistinguishable. Nonetheless, it diverges from left-wing ideology at the most fundamental level: namely, that from the moment the term “left-wing” had meaning, it was about the destruction of hierarchy. Wokeness, on the other hand, could not function without hierarchy and unlike the “dictatorship of the proletariat” imagined by Marxists, did not trouble to imagine even a theoretical end state for its tyranny because for all its posturing about “social justice,” in the woke parlance, “justice” was clearly code for “identity-motivated payback.” This alone does not make it Nazi ideology, but by the standards of woke people, it unquestionably was. After all, one of their fundamental moral precepts was that you should judge an idea not by its intentions, but by its impact. And if we look at the impact of wokeness, then it was so similar to Nazi ideology as to be almost identical (though, thank God, it never reached the heights of committing a genocide, thanks in large part to the overwhelming legal and political obstacles to such a thing). Let us count the ways:
- It produced a return to the racially stratified society of pre-Jim Crow America, but with the dominant group race-flipped from white to “BIPOC.”
- It was so utterly enamored of traditional gender norms that it sought to inflict surgery which amounted to de facto sterilization on any boy or girl who did not conform to those norms, many of whom were neurodivergent — a practice straight out of the Nuremberg courts.
- It dismissed the class politics of Marxism out of hand and embraced the national socialist idea of volksgeist in its place with such dogmatic certainty that it sought to pretend that empathy between different races was impossible for the sake of intellectual protectionism.
- Despite its hysterical invocation of “Handmaid’s Tale” iconography, its sexual politics were prudish and Puritanical to the point that it sought to label all displays of sexuality as essentially degenerate.
- It put innocent people on trial, and let guilty people go free for the sake of promoting its preferred political narrative.
- Its violent paramilitary force of street soldiers were literal blackshirts.
- It censored, financially repressed, and even used the intelligence services to surveil and entrap political enemies.
- Its state-sponsored ideology provably made people agree with Nazi rhetoric.
- Its adherents openly endorsed genocide and/or ethnic cleansing and treated objectors as untouchable dissidents.
- It transformed private enterprise into an instrument of state control, and transformed journalists into informants, while seeking to use legal and reputational attacks to silence any dissident voices who refused to follow the party line (which it also sought unsuccessfully to enforce in an official government capacity).
- Its political rhetoric hearkened not to an imagined liberatory future, but rather to an imagined, idyllic, “pure” past which had been supposedly “ruined” by its racial scapegoats. Wakanda is the woke version of Hyperborea.
- It sought to pre-emptively associate any and all methods by which official state ideology could be questioned with the racially scapegoated “other” in order to discredit them.
- Its preferred form of artistic expression was inherently uncritical, childlike, and compromised by state interests. It even rewrote previous great works to conform to this vision.
- Both online and off, it followed cult models of social control.
- It was (and is) militantly antisemitic and is, in fact, largely funded and endorsed by the same sorts of people who claimed that Hitler was “making effort[s] toward social justice.” Yes, really.
Looking at this list of similarities, you may be surprised that wokeness could ever have deceived Leftists – let alone Americans — into embracing it. Unfortunately, this happened because of several blind spots surrounding Americans’ understanding of what national socialism could look like, and who would be drawn to it. After all, Hitler’s example makes national socialism look like a hypermasculine, aesthetically reactionary phenomenon, neither of which was true of wokeness, whose aesthetic was hyperfeminine and more like an outtake from the 2018 version of “A Wrinkle In Time” than like neoclassical or Italian Futurist visions. However, all this proves is that anyone who tries to pretend that national socialism is solely attractive to young men, or solely compatible with retro aesthetics, is either a fool or willfully dishonest. We now know how short the road is from the Longhouse to the Night of the Long Knives. We must never forget how easily the showers in the girls’ locker room can be repurposed to pump Zyklon B. Therefore, we must study why Americans ever inhaled the woke poison, and why they stopped, in order to prevent them ever doing so again.
I. From “thinspo” to the Final Solution
Firstly, let me contest, or at least qualify, a few popularly wielded arguments about wokeness as a phenomenon. For instance, I am taking my life in my hands by disagreeing with Chris Rufo, but I disagree that the thinkers he points to in his book on wokeness – namely, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire, and Derrick Bell – were actual formative influences on the ideology. This is because, as I stated in my first essay on the subject, it seems to me that – like the users of 4chan’s /pol/ board – those who would eventually become woke figured out what they believed first and then reverse engineered it by finding philosophers who said the same thing. The one possible exception here is Davis, who no doubt pioneered the HR-friendly, feminized version of black nationalism which became unofficial racial dogma among woke people, but in my view, even this was simply aesthetic window dressing for the actual psychological forces driving the worldview.
I do not say this because of simple instinct; one of the originators of the woke craze on Tumblr, the creator of the “Your Fave is Problematic” blog, admitted the real driving force behind her activism in an editorial for (who else) the New York Times (emphasis mine): “In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.” In other words, this person went looking for an ideology that could let her vengefully and mercilessly criticize celebrities, without regard for nuance, and found (by her own admission) feminism and social justice discourse. This is certainly an indictment of those ideologies, but it does not prove they are the origins of these sentiments; merely that they enabled anger that was already there, looking for an outlet.
I also differ with thinkers like Richard Hanania and Musa al-Gharbi, who pinpoint the beginnings of wokeness in systemic failures such as overzealous civil rights law and elite overproduction in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While I agree that both of these factors almost certainly exacerbated the spread of the ideology (and must be reformed to prevent its being able to spread so effectively in the future, as I will argue later), I do not think that we should regard wokeness as primarily a byproduct of legal or economic factors. I think we must understand it, instead, as something else entirely: a failed moral revolution. To the extent that any external factor explains its rise, moreover, I would argue that elite overproduction and civil rights law are far less important than a particular species of abnormal psychology which predominates among teenage girls (and especially misfits) of the type who would have been drawn to Tumblr – the first incubator of wokeness – in the mid-2010’s. With apologies to James Carville, the problem is not “the economy, stupid” or “the legal system, stupid,” but rather “how we raise our girls, stupid.”
I bring this up because the moral arguments of wokeness, such as they are, are inseparable from – indeed synonymous with – abnormal psychology. So we must ask the question: what is the moral foundation of wokeness? About this, I think there is only one answer, and it is pathological altruism. The engineering professor Barbara Oakley defines pathological altruism as “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.”
Again, this is not mere instinct on my part. One of the most viral Leftist essays to emerge after President Trump’s first election literally carried the headline, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” The very first example of the author’s “care” was this: “Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food (sic) burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.” In other words, the passive aggressive smallness of the example aside, the real meaning of this headline was, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people at your own expense.” This is quite literally the textbook definition of pathological altruism.
Nor is it any surprise that some of the best examples of “pathologically altruistic” policy are affirmative action policies, which tried to elevate underqualified students into elite schools, only to see them drop out at alarming rates. However, what is more interesting for my purposes is examining what non-political behavior can be explained by it. Oakley lists several examples of pathologically altruistic behavior in an article at Publisher’s Weekly, two of which jump out immediately: 1) anorexia, and 2) ethnic cleansing.
First, anorexia. As Oakley argues in an article for the American Psychological Association, eating disorders are defined by “a poorly defined sense of self and the resulting adaptation to external expectations and devotion to others’ needs.” Naturally, there is nothing wrong with wanting to meet others’ needs within reason, but orienting one’s entire psyche around the standards of other people is not that; it is the definition of codependency, another pathologically altruistic behavioral mode.
What does this have to do with wokeness? Well, as it happens, it answers one of the most important and as-yet unanswered questions about wokeness: why was it almost exclusively teenage girls who fell for it, at first?
I have suggested one answer already in a previous essay: that the culture of the teenage girl-dominated online communities (the microblogging site Tumblr in particular) where wokeness flourished actively encouraged behavior which was highly predictive of self-harm. But this, too, raises a question: why were so many girls predisposed to self-harm in the first place? Well, once more taking Tumblr as our example, one of the early unsavory elements of the site was its cultivation of a massive “pro-ana” (meaning pro-anorexia) community, so much so that Tumblr itself was forced to crack down on content promoting anorexia in 2012. And, as not only I, but also perhaps Tumblr’s greatest expositor Katherine Dee points out, Tumblr was the fons et origo of wokeness. Pro-ana content, however, predates even Tumblr, with articles as far back as 2006 pointing out its rise. There was an Oprah Winfrey show on it in 2001, according to Dee herself. It is still going strong today. This alone makes it one of the oldest communities on the internet, and its main promoters are mostly (though not exclusively) women, to the point that journal articles about it speak of it as an intrinsically gendered movement.
And speaking of those journal articles, one such 2010 article from the Canadian Journal of Sociology asserts that one of the tactics of pro-ana communities is “using fandom as a method of attracting and maintaining members.” It then quotes one anonymous user as having posted, “My idol is NICOLE RICHIE because she has such willpower. I also idolize MK OLSON and KATE MOSS. VICTORIA BECKHAM also because her waist is super small.” This is not uncommon, as desire to look like particular celebrities is what gave the pro-ana world one of its most enduring memetic concepts – the concept of someone being a “thinspiration,” or “thinspo” for short. Ominously, the journal bemoans the community’s “absence of mobilizing for social change.” Again, this was written in 2010; the mobilization was coming.
So let’s put this all together. We have an entire generation of girls who were primed to engage in pathologically altruistic behavior to make their own bodies beautiful, who were already motivated by their desire to engage in fandom (like the Glee fandom, which I previously fingered as the “Patient Zero” of wokeness), and who then started becoming politically aware because of complaints about storytelling within their fandoms. What would you expect their moral code to be? Probably, you’d expect it to be a mix of pathologically altruistic thinking about morality (to parallel how they conceptualized their own bodies), and blind rage due to ill physical and psychological health. In other words, it would be the kind of moral code that would absolutely be more at home with the Angela Davises of the world. It would be a moral code that specialized in shrill, angry self-denial (just like with anorexia) and shaming of anyone who refuses to self-deny in the same way, particularly if they come off as people who actually should be self-denying. The kind of moral code that might even pay huge amounts of money to women who embodied what they couldn’t possess to berate them for their failings.
This should be merely pitiable, or possibly (for the less empathetic) funny. And in its original form, no doubt, it was. But unfortunately, this kind of thinking can have very real, very dangerous consequences. Oakley, again:
“Pathological altruism is associated with disorders and conditions such as anorexia, the amorphous traits of codependency, animal hoarding, depression, excessive and misplaced guilt, and self-righteousness. It is also seen in suicide bombing—the one common trait of suicide bombers is their sense of altruism for those who share their ideology. Pathologies of altruism can even underlie genocide. A Rwandan Hutu, for example, didn’t wake up in the morning and think ‘Gee, I’m feeling totally evil today—I’m going to go out and kill Tutsis.’ No—instead, he thought—’I’ve got to protect my family and people against those cockroaches, the Tutsis.’ In other words, it was feelings of altruism, as well as hatred, that impelled many Hutus to kill.”
Animal hoarding, suicide bombing, and genocide, huh? An uncharitable reader could be forgiven for inferring there’s a cat lady to SS officer pipeline.
I joke, but not much, because the sad reality is that as we’ll see, if you applied anorexia to politics, you would get something very much like national socialist totalitarianism. However, for now, I want to anticipate at least one conservative objection to my using specifically anorexia as a parallel phenomenon for wokeness. That is, many conservatives might justifiably point out that the opposite extreme – body positivity, which also gained traction on Tumblr perhaps as a failed attempt at recovery (or perhaps, like much of rapid onset gender dysphoria, as yet another form of self-mutilation) – is just as destructive.
“Does the Right not stand for beauty?” they might ask. “This sounds like an attempt to pursue that!” And if that is your response – that pro-ana people were pushing beauty — then I want you to keep that thought in your head, because it inadvertently shows why anorexia’s ideological equivalent – wokeness – was able to rise. Because like anorexia, which promises its sufferers that they can be Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham, only to inflict the constant terror of fatness on them even after they’ve become a healthy, attractive weight, wokeness also grounded its pitch in the human desire to be virtuous. The Right mocks “virtue signaling,” and is correct to do so, but even at our most cynical, we must be prepared to admit that people do at least want to be seen to be virtuous, and wokeness offered what seemed like a shortcut to that. It was like a con artist’s crash diet – purge your life and your mind of all “oppressive” ideas and people, and you, too, can be like the civil rights heroes of the past. That is to say, you can be not merely virtuous, but saintly, to the point that no one can question your goodness. Just as, if you follow the dictates of anorexia, no one can possibly accuse you of being fat, or at least, so the serpentine logic of the disorder goes.
However, there is at least one obvious problem with this, just as there is with both anorexia and sainthood: it doesn’t stop when you’re healthy. Anorexia is called an eating disorder and not simply a demanding dietary program for a reason. It drives you to delude yourself that you are still fat when you are not. What’s more, in pro-anorexia communities, this effect is only magnified, because no matter if you look incredible, there will always be someone thinner than you, more self-denying than you, more virtuous than you. And sainthood? Well, it wouldn’t be so rare if it didn’t require deeply dangerous choices in the name of the faith. There is a reason, after all, that many saints are martyrs. What this meant in practice is that wokeness, as I’ve outlined in the past, and as we’ll see as we continue, had both a practical and ideological incentive to constantly go too far and get over its skis.
Which brings us to the other obvious problem with anorexia, which it shares with national socialism: it is not something which most people will feel attracted to under normal circumstances, precisely because its methods are so extreme. To be blunt, neither starvation nor Nazi purges are fun, and neither do they appear necessary except in extreme circumstances. Which means that, just as anorexia repulses people with healthy self-images, wokeness repulses people with healthy internal moral compasses. In order to make either approach attractive, therefore, you must first destroy and discredit people’s idea that the circumstances are normal. For anorexics, this means convincing people that they are morbidly obese. For woke people and Nazis alike, this means convincing them that society is infected by irredeemable evil that must be rooted out all costs.
This brings us back to why totalitarianism and mass anorexia would look very, very similar. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted subject all of society to compulsory mass starvation. To make this possible, you would have to do several things:
- As already indicated, you would have to ruthlessly gaslight society that they are all grotesquely out of shape and prevent any objection about actual healthy body weight.
- You would also need to ban any food more tasteful than gruel, and portions larger than scraps.
- You would have to terrify people with the specter of fat (and being too heavy) constantly, in order to produce the kind of collective self-mortifying guilty conscience necessary to keep the regime going.
- You would have to ensure those enforcing these rules have no doubts; after all, they are only doing this so everyone can be beautiful! So they can be like Kate Moss! And…
- If, by some unhappy accident, Kate Moss becomes “fat” compared to the average citizen, or God forbid, says that you are taking this too far, well, you must make sure no one ever hears her words or sees a picture of her again. In fact, no one can ever know anyone aspired to look like her. F*ck her. She’s a fatty now. She was always a fatty. Just as we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Sound familiar? I would think so, considering that the burlesque of reason above sounds like what we’ve experienced over the past ten years, except with various forms of “hate” as the collective national scapegoat instead of “fat.” Moreover, if one were to substitute “fatness” with “Jews” and “Kate Moss” with “Adolf Hitler,” then the similarity would be even more uncanny.
Absurd as all these ideas may be, the main obstacle to not merely constraining them, but actively undoing them, is obvious; just as no one wants to give up the attempt to be beautiful (in the case of anorexia), no one wants to give up the attempt to be empathetic (wokeness) or a great nation (Nazism). Which means that with wokeness, Nazism, and the national starvation diet described above, the only way to kill the idea for good is to discredit its methods of achieving its goal without attacking the goal itself. With a hypothetical nationwide anorexia craze, you could only do this by:
- Seizing control of the means by which the “normal” body type is understood and broadcasting a healthier version.
- Demonstrating in a high-profile way that genuinely powerful people of healthy body weight can’t be bullied into starving themselves, minimizing the feeling that starvation is mandatory.
- Showing that the most perfectly “thin” anorexic person is not merely not beautiful, but just as ugly, if not moreso, than the “fat” people they hate.
- Pushing actual, morbidly obese people in your own coalition to take their side, raising the question of whether they have ever really been anti-fat, or simply anti-health, and…
- After all of the above, showing the human cost of the anorexics’ extreme ideas in graphic detail, repeatedly, to those who were seduced by them, setting off a race to denounce and disavow those ideas.
All of these things were accomplished, in a different form, in defeating and discrediting various form of totalitarianism, Nazism included. And with wokeness? Well, you’ll see.
II. Building the Motte
To begin with, let’s acknowledge an uncomfortable fact: wokeness rose as successfully as it did almost entirely due to genuine excesses and failures on the Right. Just as an obesity epidemic understandably magnifies the attractiveness of anorexia to many people, so, too, does an epidemic of bigotry play into the woke’s hands. The proto-woke understood this and they tried desperately to find some great explosion of evil by which to justify their extreme attempts to create a totalitarian cultural revolution. These efforts either backfired or remained contained to very specific corners of the internet. Though to be fair, sometimes, these localized revolutions still had downstream effects. As but one example, “RaceFail” in 2009, a moral panic over the state of minority representation in science fiction and fantasy literature which you would not have heard of because it took place almost entirely on the now defunct platform Livejournal, is quite arguably responsible for some of the worst trends in mainstream publishing, and self-confessedly a major influence on the “geek feminism” that was wokeness’ ideological predecessor.
And speaking of “geek feminism,” there is a reason that ten years after it happened, the people who believed in that species of “feminism” (which was really a toxic cocktail of misandry and ableism hiding behind an ironic “UwU” aesthetic) is still trying to make #Gamergate into the moral equivalent of the founding of a new Ku Klux Klan. Because unlike “Racefail,” #Gamergate ended up penetrating the “normie internet,” where the “geek feminist” position experienced not merely a defeat, but a temporary retrenchment of their power, as they finally found the one group – formerly liberal gamers – who wouldn’t roll over in the face of specious accusations of bigotry and who, moreover, actively fought back with superior tactics to them.
And no, contrary to what you’ve heard, #Gamergate was not a sexist attack on social justice; movements like that don’t attract support from scholars at the American Enterprise Institute. Quite the contrary, #Gamergate was a – perhaps naively — classically liberal counter-revolution against the early stages of woke Puritanism. Which is precisely why so many woke people desperately want to smear it in retrospect; because it was the first time anyone saw that it was possible to stand athwart the self-appointed arbiters of the “moral arc of the universe” and yell “STOP.”
However, I must admit, it was not only the woke who saw #Gamergate as a predictor of incipient fascism; actual fascists thought so, too, due to #Gamergate’s origination on sites like 4chan and 8chan, where a neo-Nazi rearguard had long existed. And, when Donald Trump began dominating the Republican primary as the first “meme” candidate (to the point that the now-infamous #NeverTrumper Rick Wilson derided Trump voters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime”), they saw their chance to prove their point. When Trump unexpectedly won, they understandably thought they had done just that. They were wrong. It took only until December of 2016, and Richard Spencer’s infamous “heilgate” speech, to prove that Trump had won in spite of the whiff of online Nazidom around his campaign, not because of it.
In retrospect, the reason for this is subtler than it might look. When Hillary Clinton first denounced the so-called “alt right,” she did so in an environment where even many media people understood the term “alt right” to mean what the infamous Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said it was – that is, a catch-all term for every conservative dissatisfied with the Bush-era consensus. In fact, Yiannopoulos’ original explainer on the movement took great pains to downplay and even condemn the white nationalist elements within the movement. However, once Trump was elected, the hardcore white nationalist and white supremacist elements moved to reclaim the term “alt right” to mean exclusively them. The woke Left was all too happy to help them in this; after all, being able to brand the movement that had just taken over the GOP as synonymous with Nazism, perhaps the most toxic brand in political history, was exactly the metaphorical “obesity epidemic” these ideological anorexics were looking for.
Against this imagined enemy of a Nazi president, the Left entered what I can only describe as the golden age of the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy. They were assisted in this by a social media regime which began, with frog-boiling patience, to remove pro-Trump and dissident voices from their platforms. These bans – which, at first, targeted almost exclusively trolls with ugly reputations for cyberbullying and extremism — were invariably hard to argue with, except on absolute free speech grounds, which the Left dismissed with airy appeals to private property and corporate autonomy. Perhaps the best example here was the literally unprecedented decision by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince to ban the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer from its services on ideological grounds. Because only a moral and political idiot would defend the Stormer’s substance, the fact that this decision basically meant that an unelected corporate entity had taken it upon itself to decide who was allowed to exist on the internet without being hacked was airbrushed over. This further benefitted the woke Motte-and-Bailey approach, which – far from the Manichean moral frenzy that wokeness would become – was focused almost entirely on what were framed as easy choices; just like removing the likes of the Daily Stormer was an easy choice.
“Just don’t be racist.”
“Just don’t be sexist.”
“Just don’t be transphobic.”
“Just stop hating people.”
“Be kind.”
“Do better.”
In fact, one of the main reasons the Left pooh-poohed free speech was, essentially, that it was still perfectly possible to believe in conservative positions on taxes and regulation, implying that the only people who complained about censorship and social disapprobation were just angry because they couldn’t be openly bigoted without facing social consequences. Ironically, this was essentially the argument that William F. Buckley Jr used for why the Chicago police were right to rough up antiwar protesters all the way back in 1968.
I bring this up to illustrate an important point: even under the best of circumstances, it would have been hard for the Right to push back on these arguments because they were literally conservative arguments. “Corporations can do what they like with their property,” and “people shouldn’t be able to violate social norms without consequence,” are the sorts of arguments that prevailed on the Right going back to the Nixon era. To expect people who had been intellectually trained to use these arguments (and to follow them as “principles” with suicide pact-level zeal) to start making exceptions or admit their insufficiency when it came to Leftist corporations facing conservative protest is simply too optimistic by half. It would have been far too optimistic even if those people had been universally pro-Trump, and even if the so-called “alt right” had been willing to behave themselves in order to win sympathy for their opposition to censorship.
Neither of these things were true. To begin with, practically the entire conservative intellectual ecosystem in 2016 was cool to Trump and outright hostile toward his most online supporters, who they regarded as broke, racist, indecorous losers (and to be fair, some of them were). One contributor to this magazine even endorsed CNN doxxing one anonymous sh*tposter over a WWE meme due to the fact that the sh*tposter in question engaged in distasteful internet speech about other subjects. To be clear, my point in saying this is not to attack a fellow contributor, but to make an observation: if even Republican writers weren’t ready to stick up for Trump’s memelord armies online, the “just don’t be racist” motte was working, and therefore, the woke strategy had one less obstacle to overcome.
And to be fair, if you look back at what the online Right was saying at the time, and take it literally (rather than as an exercise in gleeful transgression), it’s hard – if not impossible – to defend. Even under the most generous assumptions about the intent involved, there was no way that conservative intellectuals – most of whom had spent their careers railing against the use of shock as a way to destroy social norms (never anticipating that one day it would need to be used against Left-wing social norms) – would approve of it. The hyper-earnest style of pre-Trump conservatism (of which David French is a sadly representative figure) simply couldn’t fathom meme culture, and probably even had grudges against it, seeing as conservatives had been on the wrong side of the memesters where video games were concerned, and given also that 4chan (where most of it originated) was something most conservatives were only aware of as the pack of delinquent punks who had hacked Sarah Palin’s email in 2008. This is hardly the stuff of which alliances are made.
To make matters even worse, many of the supposedly ironic and transgressive acts on the far Right clearly, in retrospect, were actually sincere and only using irony as a get-out-of-jail-free card. The stylebook for The Daily Stormer itself out and out admitted this. As the site’s editor, Andrew Anglin, wrote in that very guide: “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.[…]This is obviously a ploy and I do actually want to gas k*kes. But that’s neither here nor there.”
In other words, when it came to the online humor employed by the Trump trolls, it was often the case that, in the words of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, their posts were like pie, in that sometimes there was a deeper layer of irony beneath the hate, and “sometimes there’s a third, even deeper layer, and that one is the same as the top surface one.” If we want a good idea of how hate groups operate when trying to achieve political power, this deliberate disingenuousness is as good an example as any. And before long, as we’ll see, this was a model which the woke themselves would adopt.
However, what’s truly notable about this tactic is what a dismal failure it was: it simply doesn’t work from a purely political perspective for a party in power to have its supporters constantly creating PR headaches by sounding extreme on purpose. Especially not when that party is just trying on a new identity for the first time. It’s the kind of thing that easily poisons a brand and, in the case of the first Trump administration, it did. Which, in turn, gave yet more ammunition for the woke movement to turn once ironclad norms around free speech and due process into more malleable ideas due to the supposed urgency of the situation. They were shockingly honest about this, too. One of the rallying cries from Trump critics during his first four years was quite literally, “This is not normal.” Implicit in that was a comparison to themselves: “This is not normal, and we are.” Moreover, there was a promise involved: “We will hold the people who made this level of freakish, abnormal immorality possible accountable.”
This “accountability,” as with the censorship, started out by only going after unsympathetic targets. The most obvious example being the earth-shaking article by Ronan Farrow in October of 2017 accusing then-iconic producer Harvey Weinstein of being a serial sexual abuser. And while the Weinstein case remains a matter of controversy, with at least one of his trials now thrown out, the fact remains that he did not (and does not) cut a sympathetic figure to most people, particularly compared with his accusers. The mental image of Weinstein pawing the likes of Jennifer Lawrence or Gwyneth Paltrow in exchange for Oscars and stardom is the stuff of which antisemitic cartoons are made.
That such things – consensual or not — were treated as normal and transactional behavior in Hollywood understandably shocked the aesthetic conscience of many Americans. Moreover, the fact that the Left was cleaning out Weinstein – one of their most fervent supporters and donors – must’ve looked like moral seriousness to most Americans who feared the abnormality and immorality of Trump, and who wanted to believe the Left’s promises of accountability. It is no surprise that the year after, in 2018, Democrats cruised to a thumping victory in the House, propelled by huge numbers of female candidates (and, indeed, by women voters), whose mission was clear: Make America Normal Again.
Now, again, if we view wokeness like anorexia, then the defrocking of Weinstein and the subsequent triumph by the Left in 2018 must be understood as analogous (for them) to the moment when a formerly overweight girl steps on the scale to find that she’s already lost ten pounds. The moral, aesthetic, and personal relief that came with it must’ve been exhilarating. However, if we look at wokeness as a proto-Nazi movement, then Weinstein’s fate takes on a very different character, one best (and most courageously) described by the writer Matthew Schmitz in 2021:
“The prosecution set up the case in simple and visceral terms, like a pulpy screenplay. It told an old story, one already adapted in the most successful German film of 1940. In that production, the wealthy Jud Süß leaves the ghetto, dons the finest clothes, and wins the confidence of the prince. But he cannot conceal his moral and physical repulsiveness. He is ‘clever but dreadful,’ an ‘exploiter of people,’ so foul-smelling that decent folk open the windows when he leaves a room.
“At first, Süß’s powerful backer protects him, but there are limits to the peoples’ patience. His financial sharpness is one thing; his ill-treatment of women another. ‘The Jew has organized a meat market, and our daughters are good enough to be the merchandise!’ an outraged townsman cries. The movie culminates with Süß’s violation of a naive Christian maiden, and it ends when he is hanged.”
If the Left still believed times were normal, they might have noticed this more-than-coincidental whiff of ethnic scapegoating to the whole thing. However, because they’d had their sense of normalcy destroyed, and felt powerless in the face of the true malefactor they sought to expose and destroy (Donald Trump), this vicarious triumph against a man who was similar enough to count blinded them. As such, even despite even more troubling elements already starting to appear with the woke worldview, there was absolutely no reason for the Left (or for Democrats in general) to question or step back from it. Indeed, the opposite must’ve seemed called-for; if wokeness could deliver them relief like this, then surely they must lean into even more of it.
And make no mistake, there were problems which a less convincing victory (or a loss) in 2018 might’ve forced the party to look at. To use the most worrying example, in mid-2018, a miniature media firestorm exploded when the New York Times elevated the writer Sarah Jeong to its editorial board, despite her openly endorsing the idea of ethnically cleansing white people. This prompted a debate between the woke and the non-woke parts of the Left which would prove prophetic, with Vox’s Zach Beauchamp offering a highly ironic woke defense of Jeong:
“The problem here, though, is assuming that Jeong’s words were meant literally: that when Jeong wrote ‘#cancelwhitepeople,’ for example, she was literally calling for white genocide. Or when she said ‘white men are bullshit,’ she meant each and every white man is the human equivalent of bull feces.[…]To anyone who’s even passingly familiar with the way the social justice left talks, this is just clearly untrue.”
Does that logic sound familiar? Might we perhaps be able to imagine Jeong snickering something like, “This is obviously a ploy and I do actually want to gas whitey. But that’s neither here nor there?” Of course we can; it’s literally the exact same defense that the Daily Stormer used for their bad behavior. Again, this was no accident, because wokeness and the Sturmer’s neo-Nazism were and are the same ideology, just with different protagonists.
However, probably the best take on l’affaire Jeong came from Claire Lehmann of Quillette, who marveled that this was a rare case where the Left abandoned its disingenuous motte-and-bailey approach to argumentation and just admitted what it actually believed:
And she later added, “the social justice left’s entire modus operandi is to implement extreme positions using the language of moderate positions. But when the façade drops, it’s game over.”
This tweet has aged well in the same sense that Nostradamus has aged well. And had liberals listened and cracked the whip on their own party’s ideological accesses, Trumpism rather than wokeness might well have gone down as the bizarre, destructive ideological overreaction. If there is an earliest moment when wokeness could have been stopped, it is after incidents like this. The Democratic party was (and is) still dominated by a liberal establishment; if they had only stood up for even Obama-era liberalism against this malignant form of national socialism in a liberal skin suit and imposed real professional consequences on those responsible for it, the whole thing might have been avoided.
The problem was, they were simply too afraid. And honestly, it’s hard to blame them. In retrospect, the Weinstein case, while it might have looked like a party willing to face its own demons to the average voter, was something else entirely. It was a warning to older liberals from the woke millennials who increasingly staffed and ran their institutions: You are not safe from our moral reckoning. If you resist, your entire legacy will be tarnished and/or destroyed. If even Harvey Weinstein isn’t safe, you sure as hell aren’t. Get in line or get canceled, boomer.
To be fair, many of those saying this probably had good reason for grievances against their elders. To say that the boomers did not treat younger generations kindly when they entered the workforce after the great recession is a gross understatement; many were just as cruel, self-important, and exclusionary as the woke. However, it must be said, that exclusion had no ideological component. It was not framed as a moral reckoning. Moreover, as we know from watching Joe Biden’s presidency, forcing older people to retire when they don’t want to can be achieved with any number of ideologically neutral arguments. One can speak to enduring capacity for success, or mental fortitude, or any of a number of age-based disadvantages that might make even a once formidable figure no longer capable of discharging duties that were once easy.
But the woke revolution, while many careerists no doubt leapt on it for the sake of self-advancement, was not actually about self-advancement for ambitious young people. Like all totalitarian cultural revolutions, it was about purging people on ideological grounds, regardless of age. The aftermath of the Weinstein case shows this very clearly, because what actually happened in the Weinstein case quickly became eclipsed in the public eye by what the woke millennial staffer class inferred from the Weinstein case. We will come back to this when it comes time to discuss the causes of the woke fall, but for now, let it pass to note that what started as a wholly defensible desire to hold predators accountable morphed into a grotesque form of sexual McCarthyism which treated the sexuality of straight men much the same way previous generations had treated homosexuality – that is, as inherently predatory, disgusting, and unmentionable. Because, being a form of ideological anorexia, wokeness was determined to suppress any and all appetites; especially healthy ones.
In any case, the Left’s attempt to hide their own woke extremism behind a supposedly moderate desire for normalcy continued to gain them converts and success, even despite immoderate incidents like the hiring of Sarah Jeong. In fact, though they did not know it, their greatest ally in this regard was the man who would become president two years later – Joe Biden. Biden’s campaign started as frankly the perfect picture of hiding extreme goals behind moderate rhetoric and (allegedly) moderate policies. That his preferred policies were, in fact, extreme by American historical standards went entirely unacknowledged because…well, come on, it’s Joe Biden. Do you really think the Democratic party’s oldest of old white guys could be a radical? Don’t be ridiculous. He just wants things to be normal again like the rest of us. Wink wink wink wink.
And the woke might have gone on boiling the frog this way, had 2020 not arrived bringing two events which prompted them to go full – as the kids would say – “mask off.”
The first was obviously the COVID lockdowns. And say what you like about those, but I, at least, believe that if Donald Trump had leaned into them at first rather than trying to pull away, the Left’s entire pathologically altruistic attitude would’ve been exposed much sooner. In the early days of COVID, you can even see an aborted narrative forming that fears of COVID were about xenophobia rather than genuine danger. Had this been the argument adopted by the Left in the face of a forceful, decisive attempt to contain the disease by the Trump administration, many would have seen the Left as willing to let Americans die for the sake for not looking racist to their Twitter followers; a perception which would have devastated them before they ever had the chance to hold power. A ruthless early response also would have lent credibility to Trump’s attempts to ease up later; it would’ve been much easier to claim we really had spent “14 days to slow the spread” if tanks were showing up to silence anyone who tried to protest during those 14 days. If the lockdowns weren’t working after moves like that, everyone would’ve been forced to accept they didn’t work; that a different strategy was required.
As it was, it was too easy for the Left to paint the Trump administration as cavalier with Americans’ lives because of its dismissal of COVID, and also for the lockdowns to be extended indefinitely because the “experts” could always claim the previous lockdowns weren’t enforced with enough dedication, and therefore the spread hadn’t really been slowed. Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but anyone on the internet at the time should’ve been able to tell that it was a bad idea for the administration’s political fortunes to keep people locked up indefinitely, with only social media for company. It was, essentially, like locking people in a room controlled by the most partisan Democrats. For months. This all could have been avoided and, indeed, would have it much easier for the Trump administration to respond decisively and appropriately when the real explosion of wokeness arrived later that year.
That explosion, which I doubt I have to explain to anyone reading this, was the wave of Black Lives Matter protests known as the “summer of love,” an event which (in retrospect) followed the very same playbook as #MeToo. That is to say, start with what looks like an inarguable case of bad behavior (Harvey Weinstein for #MeToo, the death of George Floyd for Black Lives Matter), censor anyone who disputes the facts, and then demand that society be remade from the ground up because of this one single bad act. Yet while, in retrospect, everyone very clearly decided the woke Left was insane at this time, that actually worked against the Right, because many people believed that such protests were simply a reaction against Donald Trump. “Just wait,” they thought, “once a normal politician like Joe Biden is in power, all of this will go away. They’ll quiet down and let us get on with our lives.”
They couldn’t imagine what was coming. Which, as we’ll see, was both a blessing and a curse.
III. Burning the Bailey
By now, you will have probably noticed a curious asymmetry between the Right and the Left during the first Trump administration: namely, the Right’s bad behavior was easy to magnify, while the Left’s went mostly unremarked-upon.
This was, indeed, a real problem. In fact, one of the main reasons I started writing these articles was to draw attention to just how insane the Left could get on sites like Tumblr when they thought no one was reading. It wasn’t just that the media wouldn’t cover the Left’s bad behavior honestly (though they wouldn’t), it was that where the Left began to obsessively lurk dissident right hotspots like 4chan or r/The_Donald looking for outrage bait, the Right seemed totally incurious about the Left’s own digital fever swamps. Which, in turn, rendered the Right totally helpless to display what really lurked behind the disingenuous woke desire for “normalcy,” yet another factor which might well have stopped America from having to suffer through four years of woke government.
And here, I have to address a question which surely has been attending this piece from the beginning: why do I specifically call this species of governance “national socialist?” Why not socialist, or communist, or even “gay race communism,” as Jack Posobiec calls it? And to answer that, I once more take my life in my hands, because I think one great commonality between woke government and the Nazi regime is that both were explicitly designed to avoid communism. In fact, I would argue, this was the key reason why Biden could still be thought a “moderate” despite the extreme focus on identitarian authoritarianism which his administration embraced: because he was the candidate specifically of woke capitalism.
I am not alone in making this observation. Yascha Mounk recently pointed out that while there are those in the Democratic party who embrace literal gay race communism, ie a fusion of wokeness and socialist command economics (the “Squad” is his example), there are just as many in the moderate wing of the party who embrace only the woke part. Indeed, he points to Vice President Kamala Harris as the key example of this type of figure. Which suggests yet one more reason why it is incorrect to call wokeness “left-wing”: because it was often ideological cover for moderates.
This also explains why it was so readily embraced by the neoconservatives who made up #NeverTrump; because they were used to pretending to believe in whatever religious faith they had to in order to justify their obsession with going to war. To them (and to many establishment Democrats), the woke movement – which many aside from me have correctly described as a religious movement – was the parallel to the old eighties era Religious Right in the Republican party: that is, its issues swiftly got coopted by establishment figures who wanted an easy, symbolic way of assuming a radical rhetorical pose without having to do anything that would substantially upset their donors (see: Mike Pence’s embrace of strident social conservatism to cover the fact that he was a pro-war swamp creature at heart). The wokeness of the Biden era, which essentially amounted to a four year long experiment in rearranging the board chairs at corporations in line with DEI ideology and calling it “historic” was much the same species of cynicism. In essence, it bet that making a big show of gerrymandering the elite along ideologically preferred racial lines would be enough of a sop to the party’s radical base that they would forget all about their actual economic interests: essentially, “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” but for Starbucks baristas with nose rings.
To some extent, this gambit worked, in that it turned the Leftist cancel mobs into frantic apologists for, say, Disney and Amazon. The problem, however, aside from its requiring huge amounts of unconstitutional and immoral racial discrimination to maintain this constant elevation of politically correct mascots to positions of power, is that when you give a bunch of tokens power and they don’t know they’re tokens, sooner or later they’ll try to exercise it despite having no qualification to hold it, and indeed, no idea what they’re doing. Which will then require that they silence anyone who points out that these people don’t know what they’re doing, which will both prevent you from seeing discontent growing while also implicitly feeding every form of identity-based resentment that makes people vote for the opposition. This is practically the whole story of the Biden administration, and of American culture for the past four years.
What’s more, rather like the worst of the Religious Right, the woke were something far worse than just incompetent: they were actively anti-fun. No, literally, during #Gamergate, their antecedents literally called for “games which aren’t fun,” an approach which was evident in the fact that the starting point for all their analysis was not, “is [insert thing here] racist or sexist,” but rather “how is [insert thing here] racist or sexist?” This is not a constructive way to approach the formation of a new regime; indeed, this makes the creation of positive aesthetics impossible because you’re constantly trying to anticipate complaints about the oppressive nature of whatever aesthetic you come up with. Which is a good thing for the Right, because this neurotic, threat modeling approach would later infect every inch of the woke approach to culture and politics, transforming all of their attempts at persuasion into being either boring or actively alienating.
In the mainstream world, this started with #MeToo and the Weinstein case, which might well have been the first example of a woke crusade going way too far, way too fast. I’ve already hinted that Weinstein’s own guilt was far from a sure thing, and certainly, his New York trial didn’t prove it (as the appellate courts themselves agreed). However, even if we grant that Weinstein was guilty of everything, all that proves is the existence of one psychopathic producer. It does not justify an indictment of all of Hollywood, or of the art of filmmaking itself, for the crime of being accessories to sexual assault.
Yet that is exactly what the woke alleged in the aftermath of the Weinstein case. And this, as it turned out, was a prelude to what would go wrong for wokeness in general, so let’s go in a little more depth. Basically, after the Weinstein scandal, the woke overread the entire episode as an excuse to justify a war on straight male sexuality in which anything – even a bad date – could be grounds to label someone a sexual predator. Or, as Dave Chappelle would aptly call it, “celebrity hunting season.” But this extended beyond celebrities; who knows how many young men became terrified to approach women or even look at them because of, for example, the surge in women trying to out “creeps” on social media?
The justification for this authoritarian stance was offered with perhaps the greatest clarity by the feminist author Jessica Valenti, who wrote, “part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes hurtful.” Left unstated in Valenti’s argument is the fact that no sexual encounter can work for her school of feminism, precisely because it takes it as written that masculinity is inherently violent. Which is precisely what #MeToo was trying to imply: even its hashtag was essentially a call for informants. The goal was to make sexual assault look ubiquitous, and thus to make rapists look ubiquitous. However, when men who had no desire to rape and, in fact, wanted to avoid seeming that way, asked what they should do instead? Well, the answers were…not persuasive. Essentially, the responses boiled down to the idea that women had to be treated either like children or, in one of the more stunningly honest moments of the whole nonsensical episode, like The Rock, i.e. with active fear.
That telling men to treat women like potential threats would increase misogyny is obvious; that treating women who’ve been sexually assaulted as forever wronged and broken – and thus incapable of living up to society’s standards for normal adult behavior — plays into a classic sexist trope that sexual intercourse leaves women “ruined” even moreso. Which is not even touching on the quite literally infantilizing “age gap” discourse, which treated young women as functionally incapable of being on equal psychological footing with older men.
Again, it’s impossible to call this a Left-wing view. It’s not. It’s reactionary down to its bones, because it is determined to return its “protected class” to the moral status of children, with all the attendant special treatment and unearned praise that entails. However, as if trying to rewrite all of human sexual relations because Harvey Weinstein (and, implicitly, Donald Trump) existed wasn’t enough, this war on male sexuality extended beyond simply what happened behind the camera to even what was on it. Despite any marketing executive with a brain being able to tell you that “sex sells,” the woke #MeToo brigades somehow convinced every entertainment executive (likely with threats of more specious accusations) that conventional female attractiveness could not be displayed onscreen, and that when it was, it had to be muted. This extended even to making characters who had once been depicted as attractive – like Harley Quinn and Lara Croft – into frumpy shadows of their former selves on the basis of obscure (and frankly not persuasive) feminist theory. No business would have said yes to this, unless it was the only way to avoid scrutiny by politicians who needed to appear woke in order to placate their base, and by journalists in thrall to the woke culture of pre-Musk Twitter.
Which is why, after Biden took office, this Puritanical, stifling approach to sexuality soon became a Puritanical, stifling approach to everything, to the point that if there was no escape from wokeness in real life, then there was even less escape from it in media that was supposed to offer literal escapism. Not since the Hays Code has the content of what can and cannot be depicted, talked about, described, and by whom been so ruthlessly circumscribed. The vile, anti-human, and utterly anti-artistic idea that certain groups “owned” the right not just to play characters of the same race on film, but also the exclusive right to define how they were depicted, and that any attempt by a “dominant” group to write characters of a “marginalized” identity was violent intellectual theft (unless cleared with a “sensitivity reader,” ie a woke commissar), reigned supreme. In this respect, Amazon Studios’ “Inclusion Playbook” was representative, as were the Oscars’ ludicrous anti-artistic “Representation and Inclusion standards.” The goal of these transparently political documents clearly had nothing to do with art, and everything with offering participation trophies to the Good, Sacred Groups while marginalizing and persecuting any and all “oppressors” who had the gall to succeed in spite of the new regime’s slander against their identity.
And if they refused to be so slandered, or even had the audacity to demand the old standards for excellence? They were blacklisted from entertainment forever, charged with abusing their staff (and possibly sexual harassment), and (once again) were given little to no opportunity to respond because to listen to them was to platform abusers and implicitly disbelieve the “marginalized.” Yet, as the critic Dean Kissick pondered recently in Harper’s Magazine, “When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?” Answer: No, they are not. They are simply the new boss, but worse than the old boss because at least the old boss didn’t think the only problem with McCarthyism was that it was on the wrong side.
Now, I have reproached traditional liberals for not fighting back harder against wokeness before this, but at this point, I have to offer some qualified praise. Openly fighting back against a movement with this advanced a mechanism for exerting power from within would’ve been a fool’s errand and would have only resulted in more effective ideological purges. Instead, the traditional liberals did something far cleverer: they let the woke do everything they wanted, and let America see the results. Which was right about the time when Americans learned that there was one very big, very merciful difference between wokeness and Nazism: wokeness could not make the trains run on time.
Indeed, they could not even figure out how to turn the trains on. Their PhD dissertations were all about deconstructing the train, and indeed, the clock, as artifacts of whiteness. Besides, who needs trains? They pollute the atmosphere. They’re icky. And by the way, STOP YELLING AT ME TO START THE TRAINS! IT TRIGGERS MY ANXIETY!
I exaggerate, but not by much. The fact is that, especially in the arts, wokeness failed because it was given the rope with which to hang itself. The result in Hollywood was what Quentin Tarantino aptly described as one of the “worst eras” in film history. In publishing, it led to millions of dollars being blown on projects that ranged from dubious to downright absurd, even as the same people wasting this money – “ideological fanatics,” as their colleagues called them – shunned works by white males, regardless of quality. The Nazis had succeeded, in part, due to the artistic skills of people like Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer, who sold their unwitting dupes on a beautiful future. In contrast, the woke millennial aesthetic vision, which combined the didactic crudeness of low-rent children’s programming with the self-indulgent tone deafness of fanfiction, sold everyone on what came before it, warts and all. In the realm of music, in particular, this resulted in extremely funny headlines such as one from the Atlantic, which pondered, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” I understand their confusion. Why would anyone prefer the likes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald to Ice Spice’s masterful composition “Think U the Shit (Fart)?” Again, Dean Kissick puts this well: “There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting.”
Outside the arts and in the realm of politics, meanwhile, wokeness was doing even worse, largely thanks to one of its greatest and most enduring excesses: the fact that Twitter had removed Donald Trump, then the sitting president of the United States, from its platform. Alarming though this abuse of power was, it actually ended up being the definition of a Pyrrhic victory, because suddenly, the absence of Trump from social media starved the woke class of anyone to contrast against their own supposed virtue.
This, in turn, meant that Americans, who saw their complaints about spiking prices, crime, and educational malpractice either denounced as bigotry or dismissed with Reddit tier “um akshually the economy is great according to data compiled exclusively by the people who vote for us” logic, started to slowly realize that these people cared a lot more about looking virtuous to each other than they did about actually helping anyone. Then, in what might be the most hamfisted and blatant attempt at speech control attempted by a presidential administration since Woodrow Wilson, the Biden administration tried to create a Disinformation Governance Board, only to once more be undone by the optics of their own supporters.
About this, it can only be observed that if Nina Jankowicz didn’t exist, conservatives would have had to invent her. And ironically, her fall can be laid at least as much at the feet of the Summer of Love’s panic over entitled white “Karens” snitching on harmless black people as it can be attributed to conservative discontent. Training people to distrust white women snitching on their neighbors, only to then turn around and elevate a singing, dancing, cringe-defying queen of white woman snitches to the post of deciding what was true and what wasn’t might have been the greatest example of a movement being hoist on its own petard in recent memory. Not to mention, by that point, the era of snitching cancel culture was already starting to wind down, as it began to look like the bigger the target wokeness set for itself, the more likely it was to fail, as evidenced by the cases of too-big-to-fail dissident liberals like Joe Rogan and J.K. Rowling. At the same time, accounts like Libs of TikTok began to suddenly gain notoriety for exactly the kind of extremism-hunting that the Left used to conduct against the Trump-era right, and platforms like YouTube started to grudgingly liberalize their stance on which topics could and couldn’t be debated.
Then, of course, the old totalitarianism resurfaced and with one fateful death twitch, ended up ensuring the death of its entire ideological edifice. That is to say, Twitter banned the Babylon Bee – one of the most successful anti-woke comedy sites of the Biden era – which eventually led to Elon Musk buying Twitter. And just like that, practically overnight, wokeness’ suffocating control over the culture began to collapse. It took longer than it should have, as people clung to the old Twitter norms and advertisers in thrall to their still woke staff tried desperately to weaken the site right up until President Trump won reelection. This, too, became harder to sustain, though, as conservatives began to weaponize exactly the kind of ideological cancellation campaigns that liberals once specialized in on Musk’s Twitter, leading to public relations debacles like the Bud Lite Dylan Mulvaney ad. Which, in turn, meant that as corporate leaders began to realize that the “problematic” influencers who had been targeted by woke cancel campaigns were actually more influential than traditional (woke) journalism, they also began to step away from their role as ideological enforcers.
However, impressive and liberating as this all was, it might have been for nothing if wokeness’ mantle of moral superiority had been allowed to remain intact. Fascism, after all, was not merely discredited by its failure, but by the humanitarian catastrophe that was the Holocaust. In order for everyone to see wokeness for what it was, in other words, it had to shed any last pretense to being anything but a hate movement. Which, in practice, meant it had to target a minority which everyone recognized as being particularly victimized by such movements.
And that, dear reader, happened on October 7, 2023, when a merciless and bloody massacre in Israel not only touched off a regional war (which is still burning), but also became a mask-off moment for the global identitarian Left, stripping away their HR Department-friendly language about empathy, diversity, equity, inclusion, centering marginalized voices, etc, and revealed that what lay underneath was nothing other than seething hatred, resentment, and envy, not to mention a hefty helping of grift.
And why not? By the time October 7 came along, most ordinary Americans – like Russians under the Soviet system in the 1980s – had already figured out the mandated rhetoric was the opposite of reality. They knew “empathy” meant “empathy only for people who wokeness deems deserving.” They knew “diversity” meant hiring and admitting people who had literally nothing else to offer besides fending off civil rights lawsuits simply by existing. They knew “equity” meant tying down anyone who had the audacity to overachieve while praising everyone who could barely achieve at all. They knew “inclusion” meant excluding members of any group which could succeed under meritocratic conditions. They knew that if woke voices were, indeed, representative of the “marginalized voices” which they were being asked to “center” (they weren’t), then those voices belonged at the margins, assuming (and even this was generous) that they deserved to be heard at all.
Yet none of this could be voiced in polite society…until all those tropes came up against the reality of actual race hatred against Jews, and their exponents promptly sided with the “oppressed” murderers. At that moment, when woke tropes and rhetoric suddenly started being used in defense of Jew haters, the entire West stirred and seemed to say, as one, “Hey, wait a second, this is just a racebent Netflix remake of the Third Reich.” And as for traditional liberals? Well, for them, the realization was far, far ruder: that when it came to incipient fascism in America, the call was coming from inside the house.
And look, not to brag, but I totally saw this coming. On October 12, 2023, in this very magazine, I predicted that October 7 was the moment when wokeness would face extinction for the simple reason that the woke movement was necessarily incapable of rhetorical self-restraint, not to mention already weakened by a series of defeats born from the same problem. With the moral authority that they had been (baselessly) accorded for claiming to stand against race hatred forever stained by their defense of a modern atrocity, I argued, this pathological incapacity for discipline would lead to them losing any ground they had taken in the culture war.
Sure enough, for months after that piece was published, America was rocked by disgusting pro-Hamas protests on college campuses – protests which ultimately forced the resignation of multiple Ivy League presidents, including the first black female president of Harvard. Imagine what it would mean for Catholicism if the Vatican were sacked by followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and you have a rough idea of how much of a defeat that was for woke people and their semi-religious ideology.
And that was just in the first few months! In the year since, wokeness has been systematically bled out of many institutions which it polluted over the past ten years. To be fair, this wasn’t entirely the result of October 7; that just happened to make the unsayable sayable, particularly in industries where wokeness had been ravaging the bottom line, unchecked, for years. In the entertainment world, the worm has turned so completely that suddenly, it is wokeness that is being censored out of movies, games, TV shows, and so on, due to the correct assessment that it is box office poison. DEI Departments are being shuttered en masse, layoffs have rocked the strongholds of Woke Capital, and even Blackrock seems utterly disenchanted with ESG, despite arguably creating it.
But most importantly of all, and no pun intended, Americans finally woke up to something in the aftermath of October 7 which had been inconceivable before: that where Trump’s supporters might have talked like Nazis to get a rise out of people, his administration had governed as a thoroughly normal, and quite successful American presidency. Whereas the woke had spent years making bad faith attempts to sound like moderates and centrists who just wanted the old world back, only to impose a totalitarian new order of identity-based hatred on Americans as soon as they had power again. In one fell swoop, everyone realized that the majority of Trump trolls had only ever been muscular liberal nationalists with a love of transgressive wit, while the woke were deadly serious about their anti-American, racebent form of Nazi fanaticism; so serious, in fact, that some of their adherents would actively try to murder their political opponents. As if to confirm this, at least one open Nazi imitator endorsed Kamala Harris this year, having seemingly realized who the serious totalitarian antisemites actually were. And so, on November 5, 2024, America finally did what the woke had been (ironically) telling it to do for years, and chose democracy over fascism.
- IV. Wither the woke?
Which brings me to the ultimate question I posed at the start of this article: how can a movement like wokeness be defeated in the future? Or perhaps, now that it has been defeated in this way once, will it even have to? About this, I think, there is some room for debate, considering what wokeness was used to accomplish in the first place. After this election, the Democratic establishment now knows that as concessions to their base go, embracing wokeness is simply too pricey. The James Carvilles and Bill Mahers of the world have known this for a while, and the rest of the party establishment, which has lived in fear of Weinsteinesque intraparty witch hunts for four years now, seems very likely to heed their warnings. Kamala Harris herself abandoned the woke message practically the instant she started campaigning, and though she mercifully forgot to replace it with anything, the fact remains that her decision speaks volumes. No, this worldview is not going to be used as a shield for moderate Democrats in the future. That much is certain. They will not not want their campaigns held hostage to overly online, humorless neurotics, especially not in a media environment where a serious candidate will have to go on Joe Rogan to be competitive.
However, where wokeness can still do damage is within the progressive wing of the Left. Because, even though the Squad is down several members thanks to aggressive primaries, the fact remains that AOC is still standing. So are the NGO-inflected activist class who treat wokeness as not just a moral code but practically as an eschatology. Moreover, among moderate Democrats, tarring progressives as “woke” (or using candidates pushing woke ideas to split the progressive vote, as they did with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) seems to be in no danger of stopping.
For conservatives, this is good news because it guarantees future Democratic infighting. However, for the sake of America’s political health, it would be better if woke ideology died altogether, just as it was safer for the world when fascism died altogether. Yet if wokeness becomes wedded to economic progressivism in the public imagination, there may be those who are willing to accept its excesses in the name of making it easier to put food on the table. But it will be a poison pill if they do, because wokeness eats whatever community it becomes a part of. Occupy Wall Street learned that, to its woe, and so will economic progressives if they gain power after capitulation to wokeness: this will ensure that all economic progressivism does is try to recreate the old woke system of ethnic spoils, while remaining powerless to do things which help everyone but which get labeled “problematic” by establishment concern trolls precisely for being universal.
So I close with this warning to America’s economic Left, from one populist to another: you have been used. Not only was wokeness utterly corrosive to America’s social fabric, but it was always a distraction to keep you from demanding actual concessions on things that will help the genuinely dispossessed. You were offered ideological anorexia because your wealthy, pampered elders couldn’t be bothered to give people like you anything to eat, and resented you for asking. Stop letting them get away with it. It is not a victory for your cause if Amazon’s CEO is a black queer paraplegic woman who goes by the pronouns “God/queen” if she keeps paying workers the kind of wages that can only buy dog food. It is not a success if Disney puts a same-sex kiss in their movies, if the two characters kissing are played by AI actors, thus pulling up the ladder for all aspiring actors and actresses of the future. Instead of policing “microaggressions” in workplaces, try to make sure people are actually paid enough that it’s worth it. “Every man a king” always sounded better than “yasss kween.” It’s easy for the powerful to claim to be nonbinary; it’s hard for them to be bipartisan. Moderation in the pursuit of progress is no vice, and extremism in the defense of “equity” is no virtue. And as for your obsessive focus on being “moral,” well, in the words of an actual communist, Bertolt Brecht: “Erst kommt das Essen, dann kommt die Moral.” Or, in English, first comes food, then comes morality.
And for those conservatives reading this, perhaps the best advice I can give you when it comes to deprogramming the woke people in your lives is this: because wokeness is in some sense indistinguishable from anorexia, always remember this that no one wants to be woke. They do it because they think it’s the only way to be better people. However, they will always be drawn to what they deny themselves, particularly when they subconsciously know that self-denial has ceased to be healthy. All you need do is give them permission to taste the forbidden fruit of common sense. Many, many millions of people have already, and if these articles have drawn even a handful of those, or given someone the tools with which to draw them, then I consider my purpose fulfilled. I hope for the sake of America and for my own peace of mind that there will not need to be a sequel to this last piece, because – Wicked notwithstanding – the witch is dead. It is probably too much to hope that the epitaph for this era will be “we just wanted to play video games,” as an old #Gamergater might lament, but I think we can all live with the fact that when it came to wokeness, it failed because deep down, in the bottom of every human heart, we just want to be free.
In short, the woke era is over and, to coin a phrase, we are not going back.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com