Latest news with #wokeness
Irish Times
3 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
Wokeness is on the wane almost everywhere
Some say there's no such thing as wokeness. Others accept there might be such a thing but it's just an abusive right-wing jibe at those who have a sincere commitment to social justice. Others again say wokeness does exist and that it's a rigidly moralising form of left-wing identity politics. And there are those who believe that the word accurately describes everything irritating in modern life, from cycle lanes to health warnings on wine bottles. Lately there have been signs that, whatever your stand on wokeness, it's on the wane. Centre-left parties in different countries are wondering why they've lost the support of the working class, with many blaming an undue deference to a set of esoteric ideas about gender and race that those voters often find alienating or irrelevant. Even in Ireland, a place in thrall to extreme wokeness if you believe the right-wing UK and US media, last year's defeat of the family and care referendums suggested the alleged fever might indeed be breaking. Most critics define wokeness as a postmodern form of left-wing politics that rejects traditional Enlightenment values as being imperialist, patriarchal and Eurocentric. Now, though, a new phenomenon has emerged: the 'woke right' mimics many of the tactics of the 'woke left' that it claims to oppose. Its emergence offers a new perspective on the original idea of wokeness: if its methods and mindset can be so easily mirrored by those with opposite political aims, then perhaps the approach itself is fundamentally flawed. READ MORE [ 'Woke' keeps coming up in elections but it is a meaningless insult Opens in new window ] Like its progressive alter ego, the woke right claims that words are dangerous, and that vulnerable groups must be protected from them. Like its opponents, it deploys the language of psychotherapy to justify itself. In Florida, under a 2022 law written using terminology that uncannily recalls words previously used to justify 'safe spaces' on college campuses, schools are now banned from teaching anything about historical racism in the US that could make students 'feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress'. This in a former slave state where legal segregation continued until the late 1960s. Meanwhile, since coming to power, the Trump administration has shown more enthusiasm for enforcing language codes than the most radical cultural-studies theorist, running word searches through every official document and excising blasphemies such as 'diversity' and 'inclusion' wherever they occur, often with ludicrous results. And mobilisation tactics usually associated with left-wing activism such as boycotts and cancellations have been enthusiastically taken up by protesters objecting to LGBT-friendly messaging by brands such as Bud Light and Target. The woke right defines itself as an oppressed minority, subjugated and silenced by an elite liberal consensus. But its supposed commitment to free speech is skin-deep and its hypocrisy knows no bounds. JD Vance lectures Europeans about US tech companies' right to free speech in their countries, while his own government runs ideologically driven checks on the social-media accounts of US visa applicants. Unlike their left-wing counterparts, woke right-wingers don't have the intellectual ballast of decades of unreadable doctoral theses to bolster their claims. Some of their actions, such as bringing Afrikaner farmers as refugees to the US – are simply provocations designed to troll the libs. But others take the successful activist playbook of the past 10 years and put it to their own use. And both movements share a postmodern antipathy to the idea that there can be any such a thing as empirical truth. Rather than embracing free inquiry and institutional neutrality, both sides now use institutional power as a weapon in culture war battles. In doing so they validate the idea that might makes right, rejecting liberal democratic ideals. [ The Irish Times view on Trump's war on woke: an unwarranted interference Opens in new window ] Some on the left will argue that drawing such parallels is unfair or downright false because progressives are motivated by admirable humanitarian goals while the reactionary right clearly is not. As a letter writer to The Irish Times put it recently , 'progressive values are not censorship,' seemingly oblivious to the fact that they can be and it just depends on how they're applied. The idea that if your ends are justified (which in itself should be open to debate) then your means will be too does not have a happy history. One reason the ideological extreme right is in a position to instrumentalise these tactics so effectively is because the institutions it attacks had already ceded the high ground. Consider the disastrous performances of the heads of some of America's most prestigious universities when brought before a hostile congressional committee last year to defend themselves against accusations of tolerating anti-Semitism on their campuses. Their wan attempts to defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were fatally undermined by their colleges' long records of failing to do the same for perspectives that had been deemed unacceptably heterodox by students and faculty alike. An early casualty of the emergence of the woke right is likely to be the marriage of convenience that had developed in recent years between some anti-woke conservatives and anti-woke liberals concerned about the rise of intolerant groupthink in universities, the media and the wider culture. Australian journalist Claire Lehman, for example, whose magazine Quillete was a flagship of this uneasy coalition for its dissections of the excesses of the progressive establishment, now finds herself disowned by part of it for her criticism of Trumpism. Both critiques are grounded in exactly the same principles. At its worst, woke leftism demands conformity to an ever-evolving set of progressive values. Those who question or fall short of these values, even inadvertently, are often publicly shamed or ostracised as racists or bigots. The woke right has adopted a nearly identical posture: conservatives who do not conform to its own orthodoxies on gender and race are dismissed as traitors, RINOs (Republicans in name only) or globalist shills. This growing trend of ideological absolutism across the spectrum undermines reasoned debate. Both the woke left and right encourage in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, fostering a culture of mutual suspicion and self-censorship. When disagreement becomes synonymous with moral failure, democracy suffers, and open discourse retreats.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Starmer's enslavement to woke ideology is a gift to the new axis of evil
When wokeness in Britain went from being a loony Left preoccupation to a way of life, hot on the heels of America's wokeward tack in 2020, only fools, villains and villainous fools insisted that nothing much was happening – apart from a bit of long overdue fairness. Of course, they said, the old Right-wing cis white straight men and women were squealing about the embrace by the virtuous of 'social justice' and 'equity,' but that didn't mean there was anything more than a (confected) culture war afoot. It was obvious to me from the start of the woke era, however, that this was not 'just' a culture war but a real one, in a truly modern sense, with real consequences that would be felt far beyond a few workplaces or university seminar rooms. The vaulting from the seminar room into the world of the ideology linking 'white privilege ' to empire to colonialism to the immovable fact of white British guilt has led to poisonous politics on the Left, a troubling reaction on the populist Right, and a ruling class who make decisions with our money, our personal safety and the security of the country based on it. If people have been injured or died already thanks to wokeness – for instance in the failure to confidently and properly police Islamist terror suspects or BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic knife crime), or in the body-destroying treatments handed out by LGBTQ+ allies to kids who said they were trans in the gender movement that followed Black Lives Matter – then much more is set to come. One of the most flagrant case studies in how the woke mindset can be physically dangerous is Starmer's Chagos islands agreement. The 'deal' is to hand the British territory to Mauritius, and lease back the land on the island of Diego Garcia, on which sits a strategically vital Anglo-American military base. The lease costs £30 billion, and will be paid over 99 years. The Government's strange argument for the deal was that it would prevent the security risks that could come from instability due to international lawfare on this last 'colonial' outpost of Britain's. Starmer, somehow, did not think that it was more of a security concern that Chinese influence in Mauritius is malign and growing: China has now announced that Mauritius will be joining its power-grabbing Belt and Road initiative. Indeed, Starmer's comments about the handover in a press conference were very odd. He said with confidence that only Britain's enemies were against it. 'In favour are all of our allies: the US, Nato, Five Eyes, India. Against it: Russia, China, Iran.' Yet days after it went through, China was celebrating. Beijing's ambassador to Mauritius, Huang Shifang, told guests at the Chinese embassy in Mauritius's capital of Port Louis that China sent 'massive congratulations' to Mauritius on the deal, and that China ' fully supports' Mauritius's attempt to 'safeguard national sovereignty '. It's hard to think of a more cynical, almost joyously so, use of this terminology. China, after all, is a country obsessed with taking by force the democratic, independent Taiwan (Mauritius, China has made clear, supports its doctrine that Taiwan is already part of China); repressing free speech in Hong Kong, where it operates a subtle reign of terror, and subjecting its Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang to sadistic treatment in internment camps. And now it gets to set about enjoying all manner of devious proximity to our all-important Eastern base. So yes, Britain's Chagos deal makes delicious sense to China, but makes no sense for us. Unless, of course, you are Starmer and his inner circle, and you're enslaved to the twin ideologies of post-colonialism and 'international law' – which lands you in the awkward and unfortunate position, as we have seen, of ending up in agreement with China on core values like self-determination. It's a mess. All this Chinese gloating disguised as proper appreciation for nations' rights to freedom from colonial shackles serves as a useful reminder of just how suspicious such language has become. Yes, it is mass-peddled by august 'international' bodies, NGOs, courts and the UN. But these have all been corrupted by those with sinister anti-Western agendas. Indeed, the bodies charged with pursuing a kinder world order with 'human rights' pursued through law always seem to favour those who care least about those obligations. It was telling when Lord Hermer, Starmer's attorney general, compared those in favour of withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to the Nazi philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, when what membership of the ECHR really means, in practice, is having to treat terrorists and foreign mass murderers with the utmost consideration. The greatest, longest-running example of the hijacking of a world organisation is the UN, which has been faking outrage at violations of 'international law' to endanger and ostracise Israel for decades. As Natasha Hausdorff, the international lawyer known for pointing out the legal flaws in the numerous evil smears levelled at Israel, notes : 'Armies of NGOs [have fed] the United Nations system and international bodies like the ICC and ICJ' so that 'pseudo-legal language permeates public discourse about Israel. This has now broken into public consciousness, but it has been building in the NGO world and UN world for a long time.' The once honourable ICJ – the International Court of Justice – was seized by South Africa to bring a case against Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal even as Israel sacrificed soldiers fighting Hamas in Gaza, resulting in an arrest warrant for the Israeli PM which Britain refuses to reject. As the famous American lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz says of the ICJ: 'It's not international, it's not a court and it doesn't do justice.' The bloc that still determines the balance of power and the fate of countries – just – is the Western one. And we are now in great peril, due to being gullible and ill-informed, anti-Semitic, terror-appeasing and morally confused. Our cultures have swallowed whole the Leftist cultural theories that were meant to never leave academia – those of post-structuralism and post-colonialism – and under their influence we turn our faces towards the lies pouring from the Eastern axis of 'resistance' – with lethal consequences. The international human rights community in all its respectable clout gives this evil nonsense the stamp of approval. Older people just about remember when international law meant something. Some saw first-hand the real genocide of the mid-20th century, others spectacular bloodshed under monsters and in the course of war. Some of us just remember hearing about those times and events, from parents and grandparents. To us, the souring of organisations like the ECHR, ICC, ICJ, UN – the whole concept of 'international law' itself – is bitter and clear. The rising generation, though, those who have taken up en masse the garbage of third-rate academic theories about coloniser and oppressor, who misuse terms including racism, apartheid, genocide, settler-colonialism, fascism and even capitalism, seem to genuinely think these corrupted organisations are the end of the moral and geopolitical rainbow. That reference to their motions and cases and objections and votes must end all arguments; that the old animating force behind international courts for human rights and justice was just a relic of a racist age, and now we know better. In some ways we do. But those who still chase after international legitimacy are barking up the wrong tree – either accidentally or, like China, on purpose.
The Independent
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Kid Rock applauds Trump for ‘spanking' DEI groups – but rock star notes he helped lead anti-woke push
Kid Rock has hailed President Donald Trump as the 'dragon slayer' of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies within the federal government and praised him for ushering ' cancel culture ' out of the national conversation while acknowledging that, sometimes, 'a little spanking' can be necessary. Speaking to Fox News Digital at his 'Rock N Rodeo' event in Arlington, Texas, on Friday, the singer was asked about the state of the culture wars in the United States since Trump returned to the White House in January. 'I think wokeness and DEI and cancel culture is starting to exit the building, and we can thank President Trump for leading that charge once again,' he answered. 'I call him the dragon slayer in that regard, 'cuz he just came and slit the throat of DEI and wokeness. 'There's always gonna be cancel culture at some level, somebody getting butt sore about this, wants to protest and not buy a product or whatever. You know, me personally, I'm not into seeing people lose their jobs over some corporate decision that was made.' Drawing attention to his own role in the anti-woke pushback, notably joining the conservative boycott of Bud Light beer in 2023 after the brand featured transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a commercial, Rock continued: 'Sometimes there needs [to be] a little spanking there, like Bud Light had from me and some other people, but at the end of the day, we forgave them, said, 'It's all good. Let's get back on track.' 'I do think it's exiting the building right now, and hopefully it stays gone, but we should be a merit-based system. The best and [most] hardworking rises to the top. 'I don't know how we got here, because to me, that's just common sense, that's just the ultimate, highest level of common sense that just the best and the hardest workers rise to the top. It doesn't matter, anything else.' A long-time supporter and Florida golf buddy of Trump, Rock was invited to sum up the president's first four months back in the Oval Office. 'My thoughts on President Trump's presidency? Greatest president ever. I can sum it up like that,' he responded. 'Not only because of our friendship and all the laughs we share on the golf course or hanging out at UFC fights or whatever it might be, but just the tenacity this man has. You know, the most resilient. 'You know, I call myself the American Bad A**, but I think I got to ride shotgun on that moniker when I'm with the president. Just somebody who loves this country unapologetically, and fights for it every single day.' Hinting at the extent of his personal pull with Trump, Rock said: 'I remind him every day that, 'Don't forget, Mr President.' I was like, 'We can deal with reasonable people on the left.' ''That's no problem,' I go. 'But there's a lot of bad actors. Their goal, at the highest level, is to lock you up and take everything you had,' I go. 'And that we can't forget. Those people need to be dealt with. But, other than that, love everybody. Let's bring this country together.''
Daily Mail
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Fresh humiliation for America's wokest DA as liberal hometown newspaper op-ed calls her anti-white racist
A prosecutor condemned as America's wokest over her tough-on-cops, soft-on-criminals decisions has now been condemned by her liberal local newspaper. Mary Moriarty, the Hennepin County Attorney who oversees crimes in Minneapolis, was lashed in a new op-ed published by The Minnesota Star Tribune calling her 'an embarrassment to Minnesota.' Journalist Andy Brehm added: 'Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty is eclipsing even the self-aggrandizing Gov. Tim Walz in the hefty amount of national coverage she's getting these days. And it's not making Minnesota look very good.' Brehm said it was 'hard to believe' that Moriarty was still using an 'equity-focused' charging policy that considers the race of suspects before deciding to how to proceed. Brehm was outraged that Moriarty, a progressive Democrat, has decided to adjudicate the law using 'dermatology' rather than 'impartiality'. Moriarty's alleged racist antics have made her office the target of a Department of Justice probe. And while Brehm says he thinks some of the Trump's moves against wokeness have been vengeful, he is fully supportive of the DoJ decision to come after Moriarty. Also highlighted was Moriarty's decision to let a woke serial Tesla vandal off with keying six cars and causing $21,000 of damage, while pursing murder charges against a cop who lawfully killed a suspect Last month, Moriarty dropped charges against Tesla vandal Dylan Bryan Adams and instead let him enter a diversion program, which may let him keep his job working for Democrat Governor Tim Walz. She broke her own rules with Adams, as Hennepin County Attorney's Office says diversion programs are only suitable for property criminals who've caused less than $5,000 of damage. A woman who keyed a single car was charged with a felony by Moriarty around the same time, with locals accusing her of tacitly-supporting attacks on Tesla cars because owner Elon Musk is a huge figure in the MAGA movement. 'Apparently, if crime is committed in the name of the right left-wing cause in Hennepin County, it need not be punished as harshly,' Brehm wrote. And the progressive prosecutor certainly wasn't in the mood to display the grace she showed with Tesla vandal Adams in the case of state trooper Ryan Londregan. She tried to charge him with murder and manslaughter for shooting dead Ricky Cobb II, a black man killed in July 2023 after he tried to drag Londregan's partner away during a traffic stop. Londregan's decision was credited with saving his colleague's life, but Moriarty 'scandalously' kept pushing the charges against him until they were finally dropped last year. Brehm said Moriarty's two-tier pursuit of justice shows that she has a 'soft spot' for violent offenders - but that she is 'out to get' police officers. The Star Tribune is a liberal newspaper which rarely published conservative op-eds during the woke excess years of the early 2020s. But it has printed a series of scathing pieces on Moriarty in recent weeks as her behavior turned the city of Minneapolis into an American laughing stock. Minneapolis was rocked by the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by white police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Floyd's killing turbocharged the Black Lives Matter movement and saw huge swathes of Minneapolis destroyed by nights of rioting and firebombing. The Democrat-leaning city swung hard left in the wake of Floyd's killing and at one point was even on track to completely dismantle its police force. But soaring violent crime, a fading economy and an increased reputation for anarchy and chaos has seen the city's more extreme progressive decisions criticized in recent months. Moriarty won election in November 2022 and has not said whether she will run for re-election in 2026. But Brehms and others have called for Minneapolis locals to follow the example of other cities like San Francisco and Oakland by booting her out of office should she run again.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The so-called ‘woke right' is just old-school racism by another name
Shiloh Hendrix, a white Minnesota woman, went viral after repeatedly calling a child on a playground the N-word. The financial windfall she then received — reportedly over $700,000 — from crowdfunding donors, many of whom apparently saw in the unrepentant racist a fearless hero, is a despicable and miserable commentary on the current state of America's soul. But it isn't shocking. Far-right racism and white grievance culture have been ascendant and increasingly mainstreamed for at least a decade. Their most influential avatar — President Donald Trump — is once again in power. (It doesn't get more mainstream than the presidency.) But to many of those I call 'MAGA centrists' — ostensibly nonconservatives who blame the left for making them either Trump supporters or very Trump-sympathetic — unabashed right-wing racism is a terrible, but entirely new, phenomenon. And wouldn't you know it, they say 'wokeness' is to blame. They've even coined a name for Hendrix and her donors' style of racism: 'the woke right.' In the MAGA centrists' telling, the woke left is obsessed with identity politics and clings to a perpetual victim mentality, a desire to cancel its adversaries and an adherence to bonkers conspiracy theories, and it rewrites historical facts to suit its political agenda. The woke right, they say, is merely an unfortunate mirror reaction to that. An article by River Page published this week in The Free Press — among the most influential Trump-friendly sites that insists it's nonpartisan despite ample evidence to the contrary — argued that 'the excesses of the left — canceling all those innocent Americans — has triggered an equal and opposite reaction on the right, which has become more and more extreme in railing against cancel culture.' Page added, 'Basically: The left cried wolf, and now the wolf is here on your phone, calling a little boy in Minnesota the N-word on camera — and there's a new, identity politics-obsessed far right waiting in the wings to reward her for it.' This argument, to put it politely, combines an outrageous rewriting of history with a monomaniacal worldview that assumes the left is all-powerful and the far right has no agency. This isn't the first time The Free Press has put the responsibility of overt right-wing racism at the feet of the woke left. In February, amid a spate of what looked like Nazi-esque salutes from powerful MAGA figures including Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, The Free Press published an essay by Richard Hanania, who previously wrote vile, racist content under a pseudonym for the alt-right's flagship website. Explaining his past association with this particular racist, antisemitic, Trump-supporting movement, he wrote, 'To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.' Once again, the identity politics and victim grievance culture of right-wing racists, sexists and homophobes are waved away as unthreatening and understandable (though unpleasant) responses to left-wing wokeness. As far as other traits ascribed to the woke right by the MAGA centrists — rewriting history, dividing people by their identity groups and pushing conspiracy theories — I can think of a few people who fit that bill who can't be dismissed as insignificant internet trolls. How about Tucker Carlson repeatedly pushing the racist and antisemitic 'great replacement' theory on his top-rated Fox News show? How about Vice President JD Vance, who as a candidate last year chose to amplify what he knew was a racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were kidnapping their neighbors' pets and eating them? How about Trump, in his first term, telling U.S.-born members of Congress — who happen to be women of color — to 'go back where they came from?' Or his more recent claim that immigrants are 'vermin' and 'poisoning the blood' of America? What the MAGA centrists call the woke right is merely an evolution of the online alt-right (a brand that few wanted to be associated with after its murderous rally in Charlottesville in 2017) and which was later also referred to as 'the dissident right.' Though they don't all share the same, exact worldview as the Nazi-adjacent alt-right, this 'dissident' right also includes elements of Christian nationalism, QAnon and far-right street militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. All of these entities were inspired and emboldened by Trump and, to a great extent, he embraced them back. Over the past decade, Never Trumper ex-Republicans and ex-libertarians loudly warned of the rising influence and genuine threat posed by what they now call the woke right. But we just called them what they were, racists and aspiring fascists, and refused to buy into the fiction that they were merely motivated by 'economic anxiety.' But a great many of us — who, before Trump conquered the Republican Party and most of the conservative and libertarian movements, had previously identified as on the moderate or center-right — were also critical of the excesses of significant segments of the activist left. Over the past decade, I've blasted elements of the left for mob-led zero tolerance cancellations, winking support for antisemitic terrorists, excusing rioting and wanton violence as righteous expressions of dissent, pushing incoherent definitions of racism and anti-racism as gospel and demanding the government be the arbiters of acceptable speech in the name of fighting bigotry. It isn't a heroic act to hold principles and call out both the left and the right when they stand in opposition to those principles. But many MAGA centrists are either unwilling or unable to do that. Trump is purging librarians, artists, generals and civil servants who won't pledge loyalty to his imperial presidency, and he's issued executive orders against individuals who stood up to his big lie. That's cancel culture. His administration includes people who've paid no price for their public displays of racism and antisemitism, he pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who wore Nazi-themed T-shirts and carried Confederate flags, and he's aiming to gut the Civil Rights Act. That's identity politics and victim grievance culture. And it's hard to know where to begin when it comes to false conspiracy theories and rewritten histories emanating from this White House. Self-reflection is hard and often painful, and for the MAGA centrists who are a bit embarrassed by the increasingly open racism of the MAGA right, it's just easier to blame the 'left.' But when it comes to warnings about Trump and MAGA's racism, lies and predilection to cancel their enemies, the left and the Never Trump center-right (oft-derided as afflicted by 'Trump Derangement Syndrome') were a whole lot more prescient about the horrors we're currently experiencing than the MAGA centrists — who never could accept that what they term the 'woke right' was always there, inside the same MAGA big tent they shared. The 'woke right' isn't an understandable response to the 'woke left,' and it sure as hell isn't new. It has a home in the White House, and MAGA centrists have spent a decade whitewashing its sins and enabling its rise to power. Many Trump supporters say they feel liberated by his re-election to once again freely use slurs that had been previously socially verboten. It's not too much of a stretch to wonder if the N-word-spouting Shiloh Hendrix — and her many donors — have felt similarly liberated by Trump's return to power. 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