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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.
Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.
Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.
I go back and forth on how much of it was caused by Elon acquiring Twitter, but that was certainly the signal of some kind of turning point.
The Bud Light debacle happened just about a year ago, and still marks the first major culture war 'victory' for the right I can remember in a long time. Followed not too long after by Ivy League presidents getting booted out for plagiarism.
The fact that twitter was 'freed' up from the kinds of controls that allowed them to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story on the literal eve of an election is quite possibly a major reason that those two events were able to gain traction so as to get mainstream attention.
Or, perhaps, maybe they would have been relegated to Facebook or (gasp) Truth Social instead but still would have broken containment.
If I had to take a REALLY out-there guess, the combination of the Ukrainian war dragging out, the increasingly draconian measures they're taking to push the "T" onto children, and the Israel-Palestine war realigning certain incentives are the main factors that are weakening the coalition that held the elements of the lefty media-industrial complex together, and allowing the more effective elements on the right (few and far between) to score some real, if minor, wins.
Also can't ignore the heavy-handed attempts to get Trump, and how various elements of the regime are beclowning themselves in the effort.
Twitter is the schelling point for people who want to come out and dunk on the left's L's, but might not have been in the timeline where Elon got too distracted to acquire it.
It is now 'safe' to resist the Cathedral, and its becoming fun to do so as well.
That was about Jews. Wokestupid is always blundering around the boundaries of cancellable anti-semitism, and above a certain level of prominence if you engage in cancellable anti-semitism, you get cancelled no matter how woke you are. (Wokists are constantly cancelling their own anyway.) It took longer to cancel Jeremy Corbyn than it did to cancel Claudine Gay, but Corbyn was cancelled when the Great Awokening was at its height.
I mean, it was about both.
I don't think anyone believes that they got booted for plagiarism, but it certainly gave sufficient cover for the action. And it explains why some Presidents got booted and some survived. And Rufo leveraged twitter as the platform to get eyeballs on the allegations and increase pressure on the organizations.
Obviously - the point I was making was that the part that wasn't about plagiarism was about a backlash against anti-Semitism that is entirely consistent with the well-understood rules of woke leopards eating woke faces, not some kind of more general backlash against wokeness.
The damage was done by a cabal of Jewish big-dollar donors (of whom Ackman was the public face), and to a lesser extent by MSM coverage of the Congressional hearings. Both the Congressional GOP and the Jewish donors were co-ordinating offline, not on Twitter. There is no way a powerful Blue Triber resigns due to a campaign by Chris Rufo's social media followers.
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