“Peak Woke”

Police are to be barred from recording non-crime hate incidents just because someone is offended, under plans announced on Monday by Suella Braverman.

The Home Secretary has endorsed new guidance that requires officers to prioritise freedom of expression over offensive, controversial or derogatory language that upsets people.

Officers will be restricted to recording only incidents that are motivated by intentional hostility and pose a real risk of escalating into significant harm.

You can’t nuke China unless you have diversity at a base in North Dakota.

Every July, Minot Air Force Base, the only one to contain two ‘legs’ of the nuclear triad, celebrates ‘Diversity Day’. Held at the Jimmy Doolittle Center, named after the hard-charging Air Force pioneer who led the first air raid into Japan after Pearl Harbor, Diversity Day showcases “many different cultures along with other diversities such as religion and disabilities” representing the various cultures at Minot Air Force Base.” Jimmy would not approve.

A culture notably absent from the Diversity Day festivities at Minot is a culture of competence.

In studying history predictions that didn’t happen are often as interesting as those that became real events.

Remember the “clash of civilization” that was to pitch one part of mankind to another in a multilayered cultural, religious, economic and, yes, even racial war? Decades later we see that at least part of the predicted clash is taking place within the same “civilization”. It is in the United States and Western Europe that we witness such phenomena as wokeism and cancel culture while many “emerging nations” are breaking some taboos to open a wider space for discussion and dissent.

It is also in Western democracies that bowdlerization even of classical texts is making a comeback.

One of the US’s oldest and most esteemed military colleges is entangled in a culture war with alumni over its push to make the institution more welcoming to women and ethnic minorities.

The Virginia Military Institute (VMI), whose most famous graduates include Gen George Marshall and Gen George Patton, has been under scrutiny since an independent 2021 report found it failed to address institutional racism and sexism.

Cedric Wins, a retired army general, was later appointed as the VMI’s superintendent, the institution’s first black leader in its 183-year history.

A report from Business.com finds that there is discrimination against “non-binary” people. At least, non-binary people believe there is discrimination. “Over 80% of nonbinary people believe that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search,” the report finds. Also, 51% believe their gender identity has “affected their workplace experience.”

Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions are high, suspicions running wild. And suddenly, onto the town green, strides a middle-aged woman in a long cloak and tall, tapered hat. She scratches a pentagram into the dirt. She mutters incantations. She sacrifices a goat and eats its heart and declares eternal fealty to the Devil himself. And when someone points and shrieks, “Witch!”, she cheerfully replies, “Heck yes, I am!”

The English major of a decade or two ago or today is very different. Within a fairly short span of time the traditional way of studying and analyzing texts has mostly been sidelined at universities in favor of identity politics readings. Look at the UCLA English courses and you’ll see a once respected department where half the courses are about race, sexuality, and assorted wokeness ‘lenses’ filtering out the actual books.

This bastardization is a form of cultural appropriation.