Will Jones
Dr Will Jones is editor of the Daily Sceptic. He has a PhD in political philosophy, an MA in ethics, a BSc in mathematics and a diploma in theology. He lives in Leamington Spa with his wife and two children.
Have we finally reached peak woke? Have we developed a vaccine to the woke mind virus? Like a dying religion, it’s certainly in retreat, says Toby in the Standard. But some disciples of Wokus Dei are still clinging on. Here’s an excerpt.
I thought this ideological pandemic had peaked in 2020 when I set up the Free Speech Union (FSU), a non-partisan organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely.
At the launch party, I confidently announced that the radical progressive ideology that had spread like wildfire in the second decade of the 21st century – sometimes referred to as Wokus Dei – was in retreat and the days when people were cancelled for daring to question it were coming to an end.
Then, in May of that year, George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, transforming what had been a fringe political movement into a global crusade. I remember being shocked to see protesters in the Isle of Man confronting a bewildered group of bobbies with a chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Black Lives Matter became so fashionable that the presenters on Sky Sports wore little badges proclaiming their allegiance to the cause.
But it couldn’t last, could it? BLM was an organisation with self-proclaimed Marxists devoted to the overthrow of capitalism. This felt like a strange aberration due to the fact that people were spending far too much time online during the lockdowns.
At the FSU’s third anniversary party in 2023, I made another speech in which I confessed to getting it wrong before, but predicted that now, at last, this quasi-religious cult was beginning to subside.
After all, Nicola Sturgeon had been forced from office by a scandal in which a male sex offender had transferred to a women’s prison, Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and Top Gun: Maverick was smashing box office records.
There was also growing evidence that the public was fed up with virtue-signalling corporations shoving their progressive values down customers’ throats. After Bud Light hired trans activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador, sales of America’s best-selling beer went into freefall, declining by between 11 and 26%.
The message from consumers was clear: Wokus Dei had had its day.
Then, a year later, Labour won a thunderous majority at the General Election, reducing the Conservatives to a rump. Among other things, its manifesto promised to bring in a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy and turbocharge the Equality Act.
So, you can understand my reluctance to proclaim that we’ve finally reached peak woke. I feel a bit like a man falling through a burning building: every time my feet touch what I think is the bottom, the floor gives way and I carry on plunging downwards.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to think the religious fire may have gone out. Exhibit A is the Republican Party’s comprehensive victory last November, winning not just the Presidency, but also the House and the Senate. Part of the explanation for that rout is that the Democratic Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was perceived as being too ideologically extreme. The Democrats had got woke and gone broke.
True, Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 didn’t do anything to stop the momentum of the Great Awokening. On the contrary, it gave it a boost, enabling members of the cult to point to the nasty orange man in The White House and say, “Look! I told you America was a cishet, patriarchal, white supremacist, fascist state.”
But it feels different this time. Taking their cue from the success of the MAGA movement, major American companies like McDonald’s, Google, Boeing, Amazon and IBM have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, has instructed its employees to stop putting pronouns in their bios.
The great liberal citadels of the American media have struggled to retain their audiences since November, with CNN and MSNBC seeing a decline in viewing numbers of 27% and 38% respectively. Fox News, by contrast, saw its viewers jump by 40% in the weeks following the election.
After the 2016 election result, the Washington Post doubled down on its opposition to Trump, adopting the strapline: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Two weeks ago, by contrast, the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper would be taking a sharp, Rightward turn.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he said, prompting the resignation of David Shipley, the opinion page editor.
Mark Zuckerberg, too, is scrambling to adapt to the new political climate. Nick Clegg has been given his marching orders as President of Global Affairs at Meta, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who was once Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W, Bush. At the same time, Zuckerberg said he would be dismantling Facebook’s fact checking programme.
“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said.
So is this finally peak woke? “I’m still not ready to commit,” says Toby, “having been proved wrong so many times before. But for free speech champions like me, things are certainly looking up.”
Worth reading in full.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
