“Peak Woke”

“Who controls the past controls the future,” writes George Orwell in 1984. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Were he with us today, Orwell would be getting tired of being right all the time, but he has just been proven right again: Thomas Jefferson’s famed mansion Monticello has been turned into a fount of woke propaganda that denigrates Jefferson and treats unsuspecting visitors to an over-the-top orgy of victimhood and white guilt regarding slavery. The Left hates America and wants very much for you to hate it, too.

The ultra-progressive mindset maintains its grip on institutional power, but in terms of what people actually believe, it’s on the downswing.

About a decade ago, something began building steam in America’s elite cultural and intellectual institutions—universities, national newspapers and magazines, museum boards, award committees. Callout culture, cancel culture, identity politics, social justice, critical race theory, postmodern neo-Marxism, wokeness: whatever you want to call it, it was happening. Wokeness developed new and previously extreme ideas around race and gender, and especially around how people ought to conduct themselves in their everyday interactions when race and gender were considered (and race and gender were always to be considered).

America’s Great Awokening produced cottage industries and small fortunes.

I’ve been called the most vile, hateful things, accused of inciting violence and spreading hate myself, all for sharing videos freely posted to TikTok by progressive leftists who are proud of their words and actions.

It’s a simple concept: Use their own words and actions to expose them. It works because this is the first time these people, who are living out their fantasies in their intolerant, liberal bubbles, have had to face reality. Under the account Libs of TikTok, I just repost what they’ve already posted themselves. It’s like holding up a mirror. And it infuriates them.

Mina’s World, a cafe in Philadelphia that prided itself in being “Queer-owned,” has officially closed its doors after a woke employee revolt. The cafe was owned by Kate Egghart and Sonam Parikh, two queer activists who started Mina’s in an effort to create an inclusive coffee shop. However, their employees have claimed Egghart and Parikh are anti-black and “gentrifiers.” Gentrifier is a woke term used to describe those who purposely contribute to the displacement of low-income families. Mina’s World was located just around the corner from Malcolm X Park in Philadelphia and employed mostly minority workers.

A woke Universal Music Group worker claims he was fired for “speaking up” about abortion rights — after he admitted he refused to work because he was in “mourning” over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Michael Lopez, a production coordinator at Universal Music Enterprises, blasted the company as “anti-gay” for terminating a “queer brown person” during Pride Month for “speaking up in defense of abortion rights,” according to a lengthy note on LinkedIn that went viral last week.

Legacy institutions have lost the campus wars

What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no longer enough. Activism is demanded. Yale and Harvard have come to resemble the mythical Ouroboros, eating their own tails to satisfy an insatiable appetite for conformity.

Attacks on free speech are on the rise. A British college recently expelled a student for expressing support for the government’s official policy of deporting illegal immigrants. A Wisconsin school district charged three middle-schoolers with sexual harassment last month for refusing to use the plural pronoun “they” when referring to a single classmate. US President Joe Biden’s National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy recently encouraged social media companies to censor from their online platforms any opinions that contradict Biden’s climate change narrative.