“Peak Woke”

Being a ‘fat activist’ is a thing now

Americans are fat and getting fatter. “More than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or have obesity,” reports Heathline.com. The CDC (I actually trust them on this one) says that between 1999 and 2020, “obesity prevalence increased from 30.5 percent to 41.9 percent,” and severe obesity “increased from 4.7 percent to 9.2 percent.”

And so, in the wake of woke, Old Navy and other clothing companies are (trying to) cash-in on our widening waistlines by disguising their latest capitalistic campaign as “inclusive sizing.”

Those Hungarian schoolkids were right to boo this paternalistic Western gesture.

It’s only June and already we’ve had the funniest news story of the year. Following some iffy behaviour by Hungarian football fans during Euro 2020, UEFA instructed Hungary to play its next few games behind closed doors. No crowds, no fans, no noise – this was to be Hungary’s punishment. But Hungary, in its clash with England in Budapest on Saturday, exploited a UEFA loophole to allow 30,000 schoolkids to attend the game. After all, what kind of trouble could a few thousand fresh-faced under-14s cause? Well, a lot, it turns out. As soon as the England players took the knee – as they’re still robotically doing, more than two years after George Floyd was murdered 4,000 miles away from England – a chorus of boos filled the stadium. It was an extraordinary noise: an army of children registering their disdain for the puffed-up performative virtue of 11 adults from overseas.

Well-educated progressives wield institutional power to impose a new political and social order.

It can be easy to forget how new our political and culture-war conflicts are. Ten years ago, critical race theory was something you’d encounter only online or in academic settings, Democratic politicians were still talking about civil unions for homosexual couples, and the media and federal government were busy pointing out how far America had come in repairing the broken race relations of the past. Today, little remains of that old order. Just how fast has this transformation unfolded? Consider a simple measure of how frequently the word “racism” appears in the nation’s four largest newspapers: after staying basically constant from the 1970s to 2010, its usage explodes around 2012, with the Washington Post and the New York Times leading the charge.

Woke was made for grifters.

A congressionally established commission is likely to recommend the removal, sources say.

For 70 years, the slave-owning Confederate general Robert E. Lee has stared down at West Point cadets from a massive portrait in the academy’s library, a slave guiding his horse in the background.

But that portrait could be coming down.

Is it possible that the puerility of the so-called woke movement is finally meeting the dismissive rejection and scorn it deserves?

Up to now it has had a pretty free flow, with the exception of a few brave souls on university campuses or in our schools taking lonely stands, and in most cases being harassed, called ugly names, or even pushed out of their professions.

The trans ideology cannot survive mockery or scrutiny.

In his new Netflix stand-up special, Ricky Gervais tells jokes about trans people, AIDS and Hitler. You can probably guess which he is in trouble for.

In SuperNature, released last night, Gervais jokes that he is fed up with ‘old-fashioned women’ – that is, ‘the ones with wombs’. You know, those ‘fucking dinosaurs’ and ‘fucking TERF whores’ who worry about women’s spaces, their privacy and their safety. He says he now much prefers the ‘new women’, with their beards and penises, who he says are ‘as good as gold’.

Our elite college graduates know how to imitate, but they don’t know how to be independent.

I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students—people who went on to write novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few years. But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”

These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.

But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.