“Peak Woke”

Have you ever stopped mid hike to listen to an ominous lumbering sound populating the deep brush and, in that moment of terror before a cheeky squirrel is revealed, thought, “Would I rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” This hypothetical, popularized recently on TikTok, has made its way to downstream social media, with women answering in forums and videos that they’d rather be alone in a forest with a bear than a man. As one might expect, more than a few men (and women) find this knee-jerk preference for sharing a bit of arboreal real estate with wild Ursus rather than Frank from Lac du Flambeau incredibly dense and downright offensive.

The insanity of the elites is colliding with the common sense of the people.

If you – like me – loathe authoritarian, faux-progressive scolds, it’s actually been a good few years. I know it might not seem like it, with the ‘Queers for Palestine’ contingent currently running riot on American university campuses, but hear me out. Across the Anglosphere, one politician after another, beloved by the media but increasingly disliked by the public, have exited the stage, often jumping before they were pushed.

Last week, an old video of Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR, resurfaced online. It was filmed just after she stepped down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which raises funds for Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia.

All things considered, National Public Radio represents the left wing of American journalism. Conservatives, of course, have known that for years. It took a veteran NPR editor with an ax to grind and some resurfaced tweets to drive home the point that the “Fresh Air” of public radio stinks with leftist bias.

So the question is: Why is the American taxpayer paying for this Pravda?

Some lawmakers are saying enough is enough.

Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.

For a large portion of my adult life, I was a regular, even devout, listener to America’s National Public Radio. Funded by taxpayers and donors large and small, NPR has been a cornerstone of US liberal culture since it was founded in 1970. The NPR tote bag, given out to listeners who make a donation, has long been a staple in every bien pensant neighbourhood from Boston to Brooklyn to Berkeley.

The “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

SOUTHWEST FLORIDA — Kali Fontanilla repeated the lesson title to herself one last time — “‘A Com-plete History of Slavery in America’” — sipped her peppermint tea and hit record.

“Hello, Exodus students,” she said, addressing the group of 90 fifth- through 12th-graders who would eventually watch the video as part of their lessons from the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K-12 school Kali and her husband founded in 2021 with the motto “Exit Public Education.” The video, which Kali was recording in her guest bedroom-turned-office, was the latest in a special enrichment program dubbed the “Young Patriots Academy,” which aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools,” per the Exodus website.

Kali, who is half Black and half White, had a particular target that Friday: what she calls the left’s unquestioning advocacy of reparations, the theory that the government should pay restitution to descendants of enslaved Americans.

The cops now care more about offensive tweets than burglaries.

Are the police interested in actually policing anymore? Last week, it was revealed that it now takes officers across the UK up to 28 hours to respond to a burglary. The waiting time for the police to respond to break-ins has reportedly doubled in two years. And all this is after the police declared in 2022 that they would start treating burglaries as a priority crime and attend all domestic burglaries.

Is it sexual harassment to say a man looks ‘fit’ in his speedos? Apparently so.

This, at least, was the ruling of an employment tribunal in the UK this week. Nikoloz Papashvili, a male teaching assistant, successfully won a sexual-harassment claim against his female headteacher, Shelagh O’Shea. Papashvili has been awarded £9,309 in damages for the horror of enduring lewd ‘remarks and innuendos’ from the older and more senior O’Shea.

Britons struggling through the ongoing cost-of-living crisis might struggle to understand why more than £750,000 (€880,000) of taxpayers’ money has been handed to an academic research paper on “Comics and Race in Latin America.” But this is simply the tip of the iceberg.

A story is beginning to unfold in the British media about how “tens of millions of pounds” is being given to what GB News’ Patrick Christys described as “pointless woke academic research.” One project on “the Europe that gay porn built” has received particular criticism, although only after it was awarded £841,830 (€981,000)—again, from the taxpayers’ purse.