Hello guys, this is a bit of a low effort post. I’m going to be reposting some of my Notes responses to
’s article ‘The Beginnings of an Anti-Anti-Woke Backlash’, and my response to her Note in response to a comment on her article. If you haven’t read that article, go read it where she makes her case.
I will be quoting parts of her article to respond, and a few of her responding Notes. Some of these I’d already written on Notes, though I have edited them.
From ‘The Beginning of an Anti-Anti-Woke Backlash’
They inform me that the rise of unhinged extremists with abhorrent views they express in the name of “anti-wokeness” make them feel that they can no longer ally with the “anti-woke.” Some add that perhaps the woke had a point and that the illiberal right are evidence of this.
Okay, let me put this to you.
Was the political left persuaded by these critiques? Did they, on their own terms, through rational persuasion, decide to listen to voices like you, FAIR, and FIRE, and end the cancellation and Big Tech censorship?
No. Establishment liberal Keir Starmer is locking people up for social media comments.
The only reason why any progress is being made, is because people like Chris Rufo, Robby Starbuck, the gender-critical feminist activists (who, unlike you who told them to ‘hold the line’, actually have courage in their convictions that transgenderism is false and should not be institutionally favoured)… the list goes on, actually fought to have the state and elite institutions adopt an actively anti-Woke stance, instead of chasing an impossible goal of ‘neutrality’.
Your strategy was basically to get the ‘centre-left’ to distance itself from the cultural extremists.
But they didn’t, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to. Even if they pretended to in order to get elected, the NGOs and culturally left-wing activists that exert extreme influence on policy will mean that once they get into power they’ll immediately start pushing it again, just look at ‘moderate’ centre-left governments like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, and Anthony Albanese.
Joe Biden absolutely doubled down on Wokeism in every possible way when he had an enormous opportunity to lower the temperature in 2020. Keir Starmer has not ‘put the Woke away’, as the events of last year show. If ‘moderate’ Democrat Kamala Harris had won, Elon Musk’s X would have been subject to severe punitive measures.
So no. Your ‘rational appeal to fellow liberals’ fell mostly on deaf ears, and anybody who listened was quickly and zealously cast out.
For many of these people, though unfortunately not all, after being shunned by those they thought were there closest friends, feel that whilst you, and people like you, may have been a useful ‘gateway drug’, they have realised your ‘winning by argument and debate’ is useless when these NGOs can pressure ad companies to boycott social media platforms that don’t censor their enemies, and control virtually all political, cultural, and economic institutions.
When FIRE, and people like you, opposed Chris Rufo‘s educational reforms in Florida to defund Woke brainwashing, you lost all credibility. You were content to criticise Woke from the sidelines, but when it came to the ‘moment of decision’, whose values should be promoted in the public space, you got squeamish and retreated to your ivory tower, criticising those actually making a difference.
The failure of the pendulum to swing through engaging in debate, and it only swinging (though we’re very far from undoing 80 years of culturally left-wing hegemony and Trump will only be making a slight start) because people like Rufo refused to listen to your ‘bothsidesism’ ‘don’t retaliate’ cultural pacifism, makes you not remotely credible.
And at the smallest, most beginning of institutional pushbacks, you’re now saying the Woke was the lesser evil? Exactly. You are containment.
Reply to Comment on Her Article:
Yeah, and at the same time a huge anti-woke backlash emerged. I think wokeness is a good example of how a society of people who value freedom WON’T just lie down under a dominant moral orthodoxy’s authoritarianism and take it. You might want to have a look at the US where Donald Trump has just been elected largely on a platform of ‘anti-…
“It just won’t stand in countries where people have known freedom of belief and speech. They won’t tolerate it.”
I don’t know if that’s true. One of the things that surprised me about the Woke movement was how quickly friends and colleagues – pretty intelligent people – just capitulated to it, hook, line, and sinker. Some had the fervour …
I have been trying to get this across too, but a lot of people on the illiberal right who can describe precisely how the illiberal left became extreme, authoritarian and unhinged and exactly why this alienated & pissed everybody off & inevitably resulted in a massive backlash from the right seem convinced that replicating the extreme, unhinged, alienating process will make everything better & definitely not get the right backlashed out of existence & reignite the woke.
And only because the anti-Woke movement stopped listening to your milquetoast centrism.
The Woke ideologues were not persuaded by your appeals to reason. You are to Wokeism what Father Gapon was to the Tsarist Autocracy, a final plea for common sense using the dominant logic of the system, met by ‘Bloody Sunday’, which in our case was Big Tech Censorship post-2017.
Funny that Father Gapon himself later became a spy for the Tsarist regime, like the Intellectual Dark Web is doing right now, crying about ‘Woke Right’.
I hope the Woke elites regret not listening to people like you. But they’ll only regret it, if they are actually made to pay, and lose every shred of cultural prestige and power they have usurped away since the 1960s.
The figure of Father Gapon is only so powerful when seen in hindsight after the Bolshevik massacre of the Romanov children.
I’d never advocate anything as extreme as that, but you get the idea. We must ensure Woke beliefs are totally shunned from society, do to them as they did to us, the ‘law of exact retribution’.
You ensure your own perpetual marginalisation. You’re unwilling to use any kind of force, with just endless circlejerks about ‘free speech’.
The fact Wokeism got as far as it did, and there, by and large, was no public backlash in terms of social attitudes, despite the initial hope of Gamergate and the anti-SJW movement, proves your idea of the inherently moderating force of liberal democracy wrong. The people are not inherently wise, they cannot be trusted to self-regulate and guard common sense against zealotry.
We would have expected a mass youth rebellion against Wokeism if the 60s paradigm held… after all, didn’t youth in the Eastern Bloc revolt against communism, in Spain against Francoism, in Iran against Islamism?
This is what Gamergate and the anti-SJW movement was supposed to be. This is when, by your logic, the pendulum should have swung.
But yet it didn’t.
As Eric Kaufmann’s nightmare confirming polls continue to show, the indoctrination did not produce a youth backlash, the indoctrination worked.
And you’re then forced to recognise those other ‘youth backlashes’ against authoritarian regimes were all promoted by the US state department and there was nothing natural, spontaneous, or ‘bottom-up’ about them at all.
There is still a part of me that wants to believe your idea of a ‘great moderation’ is true. But the population of Western countries, and disproportionately my Zoomer generation, the generation that was supposed to be the ‘Fourth Turning’, let me down.
This supposed ‘Great Backlash’ you talk about happening right now is what SHOULD be happening, but it is not what is happening.
Is Trump even considering repealing the postmodern absurdity of gay marriage, making him only as socially liberal as Barack Obama in 2008? No, he’s too cosy with the Log Cabin Republican fifth column, which, like all Neocons, only serve to drive conservatism to the cultural left.
What this really is, is the typical ‘one step back’ after the cultural left has moved ‘three steps forward’, a Ronald Reagan 1980s Redux, that feels to people like you like a backlash, but to the smug Woke left, just a temporary setback which solidifies their previous victories, proving that the direction of travel is still firmly in their court.
I wish we were actually approaching anywhere close to what you say is happening. Instead, it’s only the very beginning of a fightback… a once in a generation chance to course correct our civilisation from the abyss, which if we fail to utilise, could have Donald Trump ending up being remembered like ‘Julian the Apostate’ is, a last stand of the old order which failed to turn back the clock. And it is people like you who are doing their utmost to make us squander this final opportunity by your pleas for tolerance that only ever work one way.
As Eric Kaufmann proves in his social attitude surveys, the Woke have proved that indoctrination works, that swings of the pendulum are not natural, that free speech is impossible beyond a strictly legal sense, and that authoritarianism pays off.
These social attitude surveys are what justify an extreme, yet defensive, authoritarian response, to save our civilisation from the Woke cancer that will never stop until it is forcibly exorcised from the body politic.
Until given a scarring example to the contrary, the cultural left will never stop believing they are on the ‘right side of history’, and looking at the past 80 years, why would they? Every single time there has been, what they call, a ‘civil rights issue’, those who had the furthest culturally left-wing position, 20 years down the line, have ‘conservatives’ grovelling and snivelling, saying they were right.
It needs to be in the United States of course, as all of these ‘backlashes’ and ‘youth rebellion’ throughout the 20th century in certain countries were simply flexes of US cultural power. Wokeism spread worldwide from the United States, and it will be buried there, or it will not be buried at all.
The US basically needs its own Fransisco Franco, of which, because it IS the United States, it will not subvert itself, and this time institutions are built to outlast the leader’s death.
