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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke

From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.

The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.

The pivot happened after October 7th, when the woke movement and campus protestors in particular transitioned from anti-white demonstration to protesting Israel. That was the moment the elite apparatus, with Bill Ackman being an iconic example of someone who supported wokeness before that moment, but then had a "realization" that wokeness had run amok and had to be extirpated from elite colleges, began his highly public "war on woke." Ackman, he says, had no idea how dangerous Wokeness truly was until they started protesting Israel:

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

This dovetails with the rise of "anti-woke" figures like Bari Weiss poised to be installed at the top of CBS with her shitty news startup about to be acquired for $200 million, also demonstrating this realignment at the highest levels of media.

an oppressor/oppressed framework

I mean, how did people not see that "racism is power + prejudice" basically pattern-matched to bog-standard anti-semitism? Was it that they didn't want to think it might turn against Jews? That this time, it would be used righteously despite being almost word for word how anti-semites justified hating a small minority that they thought were privileged and had control? (See also: Men Kampf)

I'm pretty sure I brought up that woke was naturally antisemitic before october 7th either here or on the subreddit and was told "nah it'll never happen". The thing is, there have been a lot of firmly antisemtic people on the extreme right for a long time, which made woke people take the opposite side reflexively, that made it seem like the safer bet.

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