Professor David Rozado has been demonstrating that you can quantitatively measure how obsessed Establishment elites are with a particular topic by counting how often, say, the New York Times or academic papers use a particular tendentious term.
Sort of (more or less) ties in with Gato's recent column that wokeness is a self-perpetuating refuge for the incompetent to avoid being judged on merit.
After tyreek hill was detained by White-supremacist latino cops just for driving 60 in a 40, disobeying lawful commands, and being black, we need Woke more than ever
As someone who has spent the better part of the last decade on campuses, I don't believe there will be an ideological shift for a long time. The specific jargon used in academia might change over time, but the underlying dogmas of that ideology have been deeply ingrained within a generation of college students.
Sure but the important thing is how much it works on regular people. If a grifter goes to corporate HQ and says if you don't fire this wrong thinker we are going to make a stink, and corporate HQ says "ok you do that huckleberry (chuckles)" instead of "no no please anything but that! We'll hire more whatever you are complaining about" then woke is fading
Corporations are only one front in the culture war. You are correct that they are a bellwether because they are singularly profit-motivated and will adapt to changes in public opinion. I think the academy is really where woke ideology will either thrive or die because regular people (impressionable college students) will retain the essential elements of that worldview. More importantly, they will remember and pass on stigmas around ideas and out-groups labeled taboo and beyond the pale by that worldview.
Corporations are the most important front. Without their support you can say all the non-woke stuff and not fear for your job. This prevents the woke from creating the illusion that most people support them and those who oppose them are evil. Without that, they will have little success lobbying the government.
Perhaps. However, academia, business, and government are in the same pipeline. The next generation of elites spend their summers off from prestigious colleges interning at prestigious firms. They then trickle out of prestigious universities to become law clerks, administrative assistants, congressional aides, business analysts, junior associates, etc. I assume on some level that the ideology of the people staffing these corporations will alter the institution's direction in one way or another. It also depends on the corporations in question. Maybe at Disney and Blackrock, the little Eichmanns of the left have seized control indefinitely. I think this is less the case for companies with thinner profit margins that deal directly with consumers and/or build and distribute physical products.
The overwhelming majority of those who come out of those environments will be in the middle of the bell curve. They might be further left on average than you prefer, but deep down they don't buy the extreme stuff and are just saying what they think they have to say to get along in corporate America. I don't mind mildly woke people; the extremes, the mental cases, cause the problem
> "Rozado finds some evidence for the idea that the Great Awokening is fading slightly"
Most likely they just backed off a bit because it's an election year and they don't want their ballot-stuffers to be too burdened by what has been come November.
The Great Awokening will never materially diminish in our lifetimes and when people like Rozado discuss it like this, it betrays a fundamental misapprehension of what ‘Woke’ actually is.
It’s not vibes nor white girls wearing a keffiyeh nor the barista having a they/them nametag. Those are just symptoms of the underlying issue, which is enforced-outcome egalitarianism. Some rather irreverent types have called it Gay Race Communism - one’s appreciation of that terminology likely varies with age - but it’s a correct description in substance.
And one thing I can predict with very high confidence: the polity’s tolerance for Gay Race Communism will not diminish as the electorate becomes both gayer and substantially less white.
Disagree. It's a fad. Like the trans stuff. While the fact that it's been pushed by people on the same side as most of the media has protected it for a while, it's time limited because those people pushing it tend to be awful, basically maniacs on the borderline of psychosis.
The euphemism treadmill can be run, but new, nice words applied to disturbing people turn to universal insults in max 15-20 years.
What happened in the late 40s with "Islamophobia"--its creation? Was that a reaction to the partition of India? When did the first "refugees" arrive in Britain?
There are going to be a lot of angry, flat-chested, barren, neurotic women in a few years. Who will they turn against? Matricides, suicides, or more school shootings?
Woke is definitely not over. Pushback is increasing, eg DEI at companies (because it’s not cost effective). But it’s firmly entrenched in government and academia (where cost is no object).
According to VDH, Silicon Valley employers have told him they are actively avoiding hiring grads from Stanford and other California universities due to the relaxation of academic standards and requirements in admissions, coursework, and examinations. Surely this recent and dire development will cause reactive change in the right direction simply due to market forces.
Most companies are repackaging it under different names and trying to keep at least parts of DEI as well. It is like selling a product that failed under a different name and hoping people won't notice.
On this thread I don't even see agreement on what woke is. Is it some set of current policies or is it the instinct that makes people latch on to them, and the techniques they use to push their agenda? If it's the former, certainly these people will move on to different obsessions over time. If it's the latter, those will be around forever.
The fading in that case would be all about how seriously society takes them and I think that has been declining. Think of woke as a virus and the receptor that allows it to gain entry is our desire not to give offense. Oh, you find 'negro' offensive and would prefer to be called 'black'? of course I had no idea; I didn't mean to offend. Oh, with more women in the workforce you find dirty jokes offensive? I'm sorry, of course I will stop telling them and I will even shut down that one loud funny guy everyone but you likes.
Once a certain kind of person learned this trick, and enjoyed the only feeling of power they ever had, they kept pushing it, and it kept working, and their complaints became more extreme. Everyone has a different reaction, a different point at which they say 'enough! I see this game never ends, you people will never be satisfied until everyone is as miserable as you, so I am not playing any more!' This is immunity to the woke virus.
At some point (now?) the wokesters push it so far that we achieve herd immunity.
Everyone knows what "woke" is. It's victim politics, oppressor vs oppressed, as in Marxism. Under Wokism, the most dysfunctional groups are absolved of responsibility for their problems, as they're considered "oppressed." This gives them the highest moral status. The most high-functioning groups are not given credit for their success as they're "oppressors"--their success comes not from their virtues but at the expense of those they oppress. They have the lowest moral status. Wokism is a revolutionary program intended to destroy functioning societies.
Normal, average, healthy people generally just want to be reasonable. They're slowly figuring out that being reasonable means saying "no" to wokester demands rather than "yes".
The Great Awokening is far from over. Kamal Harris has said, "everyone needs to be more woke." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnppSFggY80) With her adequate performance at last night's debate, we may soon be in for wokeness being written into law and enforced at every level of society. It will be iimpossible for a Republican to ever again be elected at the national level, and the principles of wokeness will be granted Constitutional legitimacy. Superficial manifestations of wokeness like "choose your own pronouns" may fade like fads whose time has passed, as those are not priorities for the Powers that Be. Their priorities are a completely controlled press, with failing State Media provided with government subsidies. There will be no more free speech and any internet platforms that allow it now will be crushed, as we see happening in France, the UK, and Brazil, no doubt with our government's approval. Whites will continue to be reviled and discriminated against. The LGBT agenda will continue to be exalted. The mission statement of our Justice Department will continue to be "For our friends, everything; for our enemies, the law." Our intelligence agencies will continue to manipulate domestic politics. We have only to look at any environment that the Left controls to see what it has in mind. At first it was only college campuses where the Left's program was fully instituted. Now we see it in almost all Western nations, with holdouts like Hungary being ostracized. All our major institutions, from the Democrat and large parts of the Republican Party, the intelligence services and State Department, the news media, social media, Google, Big Tech, Hollywood, academia, and major corporations, are united in this plan. About half the American population is fine with it as well--to them, it will represent progress. Even if Trump were to win, he will be hamstrung, harassed, and subverted at every turn, as before, and whatever he may have accomplished will be undone as soon as he is replaced, as happened in 2021. If there is a bright spot, it may be that the Powers that Be will decide that there is no further need to continue to bring in new citizens from the most corrupt, violent, and backward nations on earth. They can announce Mission Accomplished for the Great Replacement.
Wokeism excites the same neural pathways and propagates socially like all religions, so strap in for at least your lifetime. It will collapse in 40 years, maybe sooner, when all the children that current generations should have been having don't show up.
Steve - I think the global TFR map might edge out your linear population graph in importance. It is hard to believe but the human future has already been born and it will be definitively more Central African, Yemeni and Afghan. Now we know how the Great Filter works.
Still going strong in many respects - there are true believers throughout academia, government, and non-profit sectors. Spouse was on a call with an administrator at a major university yesterday and from the other room I could hear this person talking about how too much of the subject matter was the product of dead/living white males and they were actively looking to change that.
The more I learn about the bolsheviks and other instances of communism, the more parallels I see with the left agenda. It’s very difficult to have conversations with people who have not yet started to think about things from a different POV
The Cambridge 5 and Alger Hiss were only the tip of the iceberg for infiltration. When openly communist John Brennan became head of the CIA it was a groundshift but a natural culmination of decades of infiltration of the Deep State and careful seeding of the ground in the culture.
That the Deep State is now openly targeting U.S. citizens for subversion is not unsurprising, given communism's success at corruption of it.
Steve, is there any way you can make these substack emails go out at sometime other than 3:17 AM PST?
That's when I write them.
Why does it matter? All the news organizations send stuff over night.
That's when Steve gets home from his job as a security guard at the pork-and-beans cannery
Sort of (more or less) ties in with Gato's recent column that wokeness is a self-perpetuating refuge for the incompetent to avoid being judged on merit.
After tyreek hill was detained by White-supremacist latino cops just for driving 60 in a 40, disobeying lawful commands, and being black, we need Woke more than ever
As someone who has spent the better part of the last decade on campuses, I don't believe there will be an ideological shift for a long time. The specific jargon used in academia might change over time, but the underlying dogmas of that ideology have been deeply ingrained within a generation of college students.
Sure but the important thing is how much it works on regular people. If a grifter goes to corporate HQ and says if you don't fire this wrong thinker we are going to make a stink, and corporate HQ says "ok you do that huckleberry (chuckles)" instead of "no no please anything but that! We'll hire more whatever you are complaining about" then woke is fading
Corporations are only one front in the culture war. You are correct that they are a bellwether because they are singularly profit-motivated and will adapt to changes in public opinion. I think the academy is really where woke ideology will either thrive or die because regular people (impressionable college students) will retain the essential elements of that worldview. More importantly, they will remember and pass on stigmas around ideas and out-groups labeled taboo and beyond the pale by that worldview.
Corporations are the most important front. Without their support you can say all the non-woke stuff and not fear for your job. This prevents the woke from creating the illusion that most people support them and those who oppose them are evil. Without that, they will have little success lobbying the government.
Perhaps. However, academia, business, and government are in the same pipeline. The next generation of elites spend their summers off from prestigious colleges interning at prestigious firms. They then trickle out of prestigious universities to become law clerks, administrative assistants, congressional aides, business analysts, junior associates, etc. I assume on some level that the ideology of the people staffing these corporations will alter the institution's direction in one way or another. It also depends on the corporations in question. Maybe at Disney and Blackrock, the little Eichmanns of the left have seized control indefinitely. I think this is less the case for companies with thinner profit margins that deal directly with consumers and/or build and distribute physical products.
The overwhelming majority of those who come out of those environments will be in the middle of the bell curve. They might be further left on average than you prefer, but deep down they don't buy the extreme stuff and are just saying what they think they have to say to get along in corporate America. I don't mind mildly woke people; the extremes, the mental cases, cause the problem
> "Rozado finds some evidence for the idea that the Great Awokening is fading slightly"
Most likely they just backed off a bit because it's an election year and they don't want their ballot-stuffers to be too burdened by what has been come November.
The Great Awokening will never materially diminish in our lifetimes and when people like Rozado discuss it like this, it betrays a fundamental misapprehension of what ‘Woke’ actually is.
It’s not vibes nor white girls wearing a keffiyeh nor the barista having a they/them nametag. Those are just symptoms of the underlying issue, which is enforced-outcome egalitarianism. Some rather irreverent types have called it Gay Race Communism - one’s appreciation of that terminology likely varies with age - but it’s a correct description in substance.
And one thing I can predict with very high confidence: the polity’s tolerance for Gay Race Communism will not diminish as the electorate becomes both gayer and substantially less white.
Disagree. It's a fad. Like the trans stuff. While the fact that it's been pushed by people on the same side as most of the media has protected it for a while, it's time limited because those people pushing it tend to be awful, basically maniacs on the borderline of psychosis.
The euphemism treadmill can be run, but new, nice words applied to disturbing people turn to universal insults in max 15-20 years.
Woke = bitter, envious, egomaniac, small-minded, crazy, vindictive, stupid.
Germany closed its borders. Things CAN change.
What happened in the late 40s with "Islamophobia"--its creation? Was that a reaction to the partition of India? When did the first "refugees" arrive in Britain?
There are going to be a lot of angry, flat-chested, barren, neurotic women in a few years. Who will they turn against? Matricides, suicides, or more school shootings?
Woke is definitely not over. Pushback is increasing, eg DEI at companies (because it’s not cost effective). But it’s firmly entrenched in government and academia (where cost is no object).
According to VDH, Silicon Valley employers have told him they are actively avoiding hiring grads from Stanford and other California universities due to the relaxation of academic standards and requirements in admissions, coursework, and examinations. Surely this recent and dire development will cause reactive change in the right direction simply due to market forces.
Most companies are repackaging it under different names and trying to keep at least parts of DEI as well. It is like selling a product that failed under a different name and hoping people won't notice.
On this thread I don't even see agreement on what woke is. Is it some set of current policies or is it the instinct that makes people latch on to them, and the techniques they use to push their agenda? If it's the former, certainly these people will move on to different obsessions over time. If it's the latter, those will be around forever.
The fading in that case would be all about how seriously society takes them and I think that has been declining. Think of woke as a virus and the receptor that allows it to gain entry is our desire not to give offense. Oh, you find 'negro' offensive and would prefer to be called 'black'? of course I had no idea; I didn't mean to offend. Oh, with more women in the workforce you find dirty jokes offensive? I'm sorry, of course I will stop telling them and I will even shut down that one loud funny guy everyone but you likes.
Once a certain kind of person learned this trick, and enjoyed the only feeling of power they ever had, they kept pushing it, and it kept working, and their complaints became more extreme. Everyone has a different reaction, a different point at which they say 'enough! I see this game never ends, you people will never be satisfied until everyone is as miserable as you, so I am not playing any more!' This is immunity to the woke virus.
At some point (now?) the wokesters push it so far that we achieve herd immunity.
Everyone knows what "woke" is. It's victim politics, oppressor vs oppressed, as in Marxism. Under Wokism, the most dysfunctional groups are absolved of responsibility for their problems, as they're considered "oppressed." This gives them the highest moral status. The most high-functioning groups are not given credit for their success as they're "oppressors"--their success comes not from their virtues but at the expense of those they oppress. They have the lowest moral status. Wokism is a revolutionary program intended to destroy functioning societies.
Normal, average, healthy people generally just want to be reasonable. They're slowly figuring out that being reasonable means saying "no" to wokester demands rather than "yes".
The Great Awokening is far from over. Kamal Harris has said, "everyone needs to be more woke." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnppSFggY80) With her adequate performance at last night's debate, we may soon be in for wokeness being written into law and enforced at every level of society. It will be iimpossible for a Republican to ever again be elected at the national level, and the principles of wokeness will be granted Constitutional legitimacy. Superficial manifestations of wokeness like "choose your own pronouns" may fade like fads whose time has passed, as those are not priorities for the Powers that Be. Their priorities are a completely controlled press, with failing State Media provided with government subsidies. There will be no more free speech and any internet platforms that allow it now will be crushed, as we see happening in France, the UK, and Brazil, no doubt with our government's approval. Whites will continue to be reviled and discriminated against. The LGBT agenda will continue to be exalted. The mission statement of our Justice Department will continue to be "For our friends, everything; for our enemies, the law." Our intelligence agencies will continue to manipulate domestic politics. We have only to look at any environment that the Left controls to see what it has in mind. At first it was only college campuses where the Left's program was fully instituted. Now we see it in almost all Western nations, with holdouts like Hungary being ostracized. All our major institutions, from the Democrat and large parts of the Republican Party, the intelligence services and State Department, the news media, social media, Google, Big Tech, Hollywood, academia, and major corporations, are united in this plan. About half the American population is fine with it as well--to them, it will represent progress. Even if Trump were to win, he will be hamstrung, harassed, and subverted at every turn, as before, and whatever he may have accomplished will be undone as soon as he is replaced, as happened in 2021. If there is a bright spot, it may be that the Powers that Be will decide that there is no further need to continue to bring in new citizens from the most corrupt, violent, and backward nations on earth. They can announce Mission Accomplished for the Great Replacement.
Wokeism excites the same neural pathways and propagates socially like all religions, so strap in for at least your lifetime. It will collapse in 40 years, maybe sooner, when all the children that current generations should have been having don't show up.
Steve - I think the global TFR map might edge out your linear population graph in importance. It is hard to believe but the human future has already been born and it will be definitively more Central African, Yemeni and Afghan. Now we know how the Great Filter works.
Still going strong in many respects - there are true believers throughout academia, government, and non-profit sectors. Spouse was on a call with an administrator at a major university yesterday and from the other room I could hear this person talking about how too much of the subject matter was the product of dead/living white males and they were actively looking to change that.
This is extremely dystopian
Just remember who you are dealing with and what they will do to you given the opportunity.
It ain't over. The communists are just retrenching.
Harvard announced that despite affirmative action now being illegal, it didn't change the demographics of their incoming freshmen class.
Peak Woke!
The more I learn about the bolsheviks and other instances of communism, the more parallels I see with the left agenda. It’s very difficult to have conversations with people who have not yet started to think about things from a different POV
Communism never died, it just went underground.
The Cambridge 5 and Alger Hiss were only the tip of the iceberg for infiltration. When openly communist John Brennan became head of the CIA it was a groundshift but a natural culmination of decades of infiltration of the Deep State and careful seeding of the ground in the culture.
That the Deep State is now openly targeting U.S. citizens for subversion is not unsurprising, given communism's success at corruption of it.
Looks more like it’s plateauing