“Peak Woke”

Spies and soldiers should not be promoting identity politics.

We live in an increasingly volatile and unpredictable world. There are many hostile foreign-state actors, eager to infiltrate British public institutions and undermine our democratic structures. And there are myriad terror-related threats, too, especially from Islamic extremists.

Yet while the threats to our national security grow, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ chiefs are reportedly encouraging spies to focus on checking their ‘white privilege’. According to media reports this week, back in December staff were issued with a dossier entitled ‘Mission Critical’, and told to avoid using words such as ‘manpower’, ‘strong’ and ‘grip’ because these words can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’.

… As time goes on it becomes clear that Trudeau really is the worst leader in the democratic world. His principal qualifications for the role were that he had been a primary school teacher and that his father had been prime minister before him.

Other than that, he simply promised to do things differently, to be more empathetic, to emote more, to be more feminine and more understanding. Before lockdown, this manifested itself in international trips during which Justin did more costume changes than the cast of any West End show. But as the Covid era came, Trudeau, like Ardern, seemed to come into his own. He talked about the importance of caring, looking out for each other and other fundamental Canadian values.

A town in upstate New York is standing up to the bullies of the cultural establishment.

Recent events in Cambridge, a small town in Washington County in upstate New York, show that the colonising ambitions of the woke elites can be resisted.

Cambridge has drawn the ire of the woke establishment in recent years because its school district uses the nickname ‘Indians’. Worse, many of its logos use the face of a Native American and a Native American serves as the mascot for its sports teams.

As my son’s school continues with in-person instruction, the federal government, at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), is using the latest Covid scare as an excuse to waste even more taxpayer funds and remains largely remote. The Department of Defense and the Pentagon dutifully comply with this nonsense. Once upon a time, decreased mask-wearing was held out as a reward for increased vaccination, but vaccination rates have increased while masks remain mandatory virtually everywhere within the Department. And now, on top of this, the DoD and the Pentagon have gone to what is called Health Protection Condition level Charlie (HPCON C). These protocols severely restrict the number of in-office personnel, as well as facility use. A fuller examination of these new policies shows that we have completely lost any sense of risk assessment; our nation and national security are suffering for it.

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.