'Woke' is Dead. The Spin Doctoring has Begun.
The Guardian once again spits in the face of the woke witch hunters' victims, minimizing us as collateral damage in the service of a noble cause.
PREFER AUDIO? You can listen to me read this piece, plus you can read a supplemental companion piece, here.
“‘Woke’ isn’t dead — it’s entered the mainstream” says Gaby Hinsliff, a columnist at (where else) The Guardian. To which I ask, what’s the difference? Any music nerd will tell you: a countercultural movement is dead the minute it goes mainstream.
Take the early ‘90s grunge phenomenon. It lost its edgy appeal once the look was subsumed into the suburban retail fashion supply chain, and the fad quickly passed after that. “Alternative music” was a misnomer by the mid-’90s: in what way was it alternative when it dominated the Billboard charts? By 1997, the corporatized counterculture that had come to define the era was lampooned on (where else) The Simpsons, when they introduced Poochie the surfin’, rappin’ dog “with an attitude,” a crass attempt to remain “hip with the kids” in the satirically self-described “worst episode ever.”
Wokeness is certainly a countercultural phenomenon. Like “alternative,” the term “woke” only makes sense relative to the mainstream: to describe people who position themselves politically far to the left of whatever ideas have already been embraced by the establishment. So it’s more of an intensifying adjective to other causes and issues rather than a coherent political worldview in its own right. Being against racism or homophobia by itself isn’t woke; being way more against racism than everyone else, and against all the possible queerphobias — even the ones you normies haven’t even heard of is. Being in favour of making the criminal justice system more fair isn’t woke because it isn’t distinct enough from the common sense view. To make it woke, you have to be in favour of doing away entirely with the prisons and the police. You get the idea.
“Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.
This is a point that Hinsliff struggles to grasp. In her column she tries to define “woke” as, variously:
“the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice”
“the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed”
“saving the planet”
“uncovering forgotten histories”
“inclusivity at work”
“ ‘be kind’ ”
“getting more used to acknowledging conflicting views based on different life experiences”
To which Ophelia Benson (who else) keenly observes that, for starters, Hinsliff is mixing up “radically different things”:
Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it.
Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything.
This is the inevitable path of a movement that exists solely to be more activist-y than everyone else: the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown of “wokeness” is a singularity: a state of mind which, to those inside, is a realm of infinite, utopian virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.
That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.
Here’s a little anecdote, an example of wokeness subsuming everything ostensibly progressive until it ends up meaningless and useless. About 20 years ago, the city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village put up a mural which loomed over the neighbourhood. It depicted, along with a lesbian in a wheelchair, a middle-aged leatherman clad in fetish gear, and a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities would now be central parts of the community’s activism.
And sure enough, that’s exactly what the community centre focused on in the ensuing years, as the activists shifted over to “queer theory,” with its emphasis on sexual permissiveness and hostility to biological sex distinctions.
(To be clear, I have no beef with the gay leather scene. I just don’t think it’s in need of publicly funded support, and I don’t think leather daddies are in any way marginalized. Binders, on the other hand, I have all kinds of beef with.)
Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. The next shift among “queer” activists was to embrace all-encompassing, universal, woke ideals. That’s been reflected in the community centre’s new mural, which recently replaced the one with the lesbian, the leatherman, and the trans “boy.” Just as the first mural presciently captured the shifting cultural mood inside the building, so too does the second: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneous patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything conceivably virtuous into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.
I’ll bet that the people who work inside the community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue now, and that their noble mission has naturally expanded from when it served gays and lesbians in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at long last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended all individual causes. Woke nirvana.
But I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore, because it’s strayed so far from the community it was founded to support. I am one such person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. My own “community centre” has nothing to offer my community now but insults and condescension. In its lurch to woke extremism, it’s become not just useless to us, but hostile to us, and in so doing it’s set itself up for its own undoing.
That’s a sentiment we’re seeing across society: people are fed up with the extremists.
To go back to Hinsliff’s Guardian article, does this mean that wokeness is being embraced by the mainstream, or killed off by it? In the aftermath of the Cass review, Hinsliff can’t dispute that there are “tough lessons to be learned” about moral absolutism “that can be fatal to progressive causes.”
But Gaby, I shout at the screen, it’s the moral absolutism that’s being rejected, not the causes themselves. People cared about the environment and gay rights and gender nonconforming people and women’s rights and all the rest before “woke” came along, and they’ll continue to care about all of it long after “woke” is gone.
The moral absolutism is the wokeness.
Hinsliff panders to the Guardian readership by offering a self-flattering alternative view, which says that the woke movement is moving along just as it always intended, having more-or-less already achieved its true goal, which was only ever to gently nudge the Overton window, to take the establishment a baby step to the left, rather than smash the whole system and burn as many witches as it could find:
Woke is no longer wildly anti-establishment; increasingly it’s becoming the boring old establishment, to the point where teenagers will doubtless soon be ripping it apart on TikTok, since turning into baby conservatives is the only thing really guaranteed now to confound their parents.
It is radicalism that initially breaks down doors. But what usually ends up walking through them is a version with the sharp edges smoothed off that most people find they can live with, and that’s where woke is heading now. It’s not dead. But it is evolving, and that’s how living things ultimately survive.
Now, you might argue that this is a difference which makes no difference, the distinction between “wokeness is dying because the mainstream are fed up with woke people’s extremism” and “wokeness is actually secretly winning by merging itself into the mainstream and changing it a bit for the better.”
But that’s wrong. There’s a big distinction, and it’s an important one. When we look back, one of these views will put the people behind wokeness in their rightful place in history alongside the McCarthyites and the lunatics of the Salem witch trials: villains at the heart of some of our darkest, most terrible chapters in history. The other view, which Hinsliff is pushing, will paint the people behind wokeness as heroes, whose acts of extremism were merely noble sacrifices “to break down doors” for the greater good of progress.
To which, and I absolutely hope that someone manages to get this in front of Gaby Hinsliff so that you, Gaby, can read these words yourself:
Fuck you.
The woke activists who sent death threats to
, to JK Rowling, and to countless other women for simply speaking their minds and telling the truth? They are not heroes, Gaby. They do not deserve praise for “breaking down doors.” Some of these activists literally wanted to kill women.The countless vulnerable young people — often gay, autistic or both — who were coaxed by woke people to undergo unnecessary, experimental, irreversible body modification surgeries? They’re victims, Gaby. Their victimhoods, their stories, are what need to take historical precedence above all else.
You blithely dismiss the victims’ plight, the ongoing pain that they will suffer for the rest of their lives, as collateral damage.
And there are so many more victims — too many to list them all, but here are some: women residing in prisons and shelters; women who just want to use public washrooms and changing rooms in peace, dignity and safety. Lesbians and gay men who just want to socialize as a community and maintain their sexual boundaries. Academics who dare to raise questions. Employees in all kinds of workplaces, afraid to say the “wrong” thing, or fired for having done so.
, for fearlessly saying what needs to be said, when almost no other celebrity or media figure has had the guts to.And me. I’m a victim, too. I won’t be getting my friends back, the ones who threw me out of their lives in my most difficult time of need, after I spoke up for gay rights. And I won’t be returning to work in the gay community or the arts community, both of which I was a part of for so long.
You spit in all of our faces when you characterize our woke tormentors as the real heroes.
This is surely just the beginning of a widespread attempt to put a positive spin on the woke cult’s dying legacy by those who were complicit in its ugly doings.
The Guardian always turned a blind eye to the savagery routinely deployed by the woke against perfectly decent people — the paper still employs the profoundly detestable Owen Jones, for example. The cruelties doled out by men and women like Jones never served the noble causes they purported to; they were always mere ploys to put themselves in a more advantageous position on the woke playing field.
I think everyone’s starting to see that now. I don’t think the spin doctoring ploy is going to fly. No one’s going to look back at “woke” with any fondness or gratitude.
If anything, people will want to move on and forget it ever happened. I can understand that.
But me, I have a different plans. I don’t intend to let people ever forget the victims or the culprits of this mass psychosis.
To the woke assholes who were so cruel in their performative commitment to “social justice”: you’re going to have to face some social justice of your own, some day soon.
You can listen to me read this piece, plus you can read a supplemental companion piece, here.
WHY ARE ALL THESE COMMENTS SO GOOD? Oh my god, you people. You're blowing my mind!
The Guardian columnist as a class entity will ALWAYS assume the highest moral position, because they cannot conceive of a world in which they aren’t the most moral. In fact they conceive of themselves as the arbiters of moral truth itself. They don’t make mistakes, because in hindsight they can always flip the script. For example, when you or I, mere bumbling humans, make a mistake they would say our intentions don’t matter, only effects matter. But when a woman is raped by a “trans” identified man on a “single-sex” hospital ward Owen Jones will say the intent, to pander to the feefees of poor little marginalised “trans” folx, is more important and noble than the real life consequences. They cannot even see they are doing it. One rule for thee, another for me. They accord themselves a rampant moral privilege, and they never examine it.