“Peak Woke”

When editors in 2020 weren’t being fired in bunches, they were taking aim at everything from Beethoven to mermaids to skyscrapers

The year 2020 will be remembered in the real world for a terrifying pandemic, mass unemployment, a nationwide protest movement, and a historically uninspiring presidential race. The year in media, meanwhile, was marked by grotesque factual scandals, journalist-cheered censorship, and an accelerating newsroom mania for political groupthink that was equal parts frightening and ridiculous.

Some UK viewers who caught the BBC’s airing of the classic hit 1970s musical Grease over Christmas were aghast at its content, slamming the John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John-starring musical as an affront to their sensibilities.

Forty-two years after its cinema release, the movie was met with damning critiques from some calling it “misogynistic,” “rapey,” and encouraging “slut-shaming” amongst a host of other putdowns.

As I noted in discussing Hilaria Baldwin yesterday, to be white today is to be evil, as far as the Western intelligentsia is concerned. And so it was not a big surprise when, a week before Christmas, the BBC World Service radio show Heart and Soul aired a segment called “Black Jesus,” and has since then rerun it more than once. It’s more “realistic,” the BBC assures us, to see Jesus as a “darker skinned Palestinian.” Realistic or no, it’s certainly in line with the mythology of the age, in which only those who are darker skinned could possibly be righteous. In such a context, how could the one whom Christians worship as the Savior of the world have anything but the darkest possible skin?

Identity politics has become the new secular religion. We need more heretics.

The number of professional organizations that are going full woke seem to be increasing exponentially as off late. Perhaps one of the most frightening examples is an organization that represents the professionals in whose hands we place our very lives and the lives of our loved ones, namely doctors: The American Medical Association (AMA).

A San Francisco district is planning to rename a school named after Abraham Lincoln because the former president did not demonstrate that ‘black lives mattered to him’.

The president, who is often held up as an American hero for abolishing slavery, is just one of 44 historical figures soon to have their names scratched off schools within the San Francisco Unified School District.

Other names include George Washington, Herbert Hoover and Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose name will be stripped from the Dianne Feinstein Elementary School for allowing the Confederate flag to fly outside City Hall back in 1984 when she was mayor.

The Python has always been an anarchist rather than a liberal, like the artform itself

You have to wonder whether the people who are mad at John Cleese are actually aware of who John Cleese is. It started, as these things apparently must, with J. K. Rowling. In September, Cleese signed an open letter protesting the death threats she was getting. In November, he replied to some tweets written in the typically measured and cool tone of trans activism. They accused him of “standing in solidarity with transphobia and discrimination,” or demanded: “Why the fuck can’t you just let people be who they want to be?”