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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24346 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.

Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge

These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.

If reporting from Axios and CNN is any indication, the "Woke 1.0" period AOC is referring to seems to be late 2019 to around 2022 or 2023. Or, in other words... the Biden administration?

It's actually kind of incredible how, in a four-word phrase, AOC managed to convey:

  1. The last time Democrats were in power, it was really bad.

  2. You'll probably get a repeat of that if you vote for them again. (Calling something "1.0" implies that a "2.0" version is in the works.)

  3. They think their main problem was that they got a little too uninhibited, in the way that a house party where everyone drinks too much can get "crazy". They haven't reconsidered their actual beliefs or positions at all, and are just hoping to hide them better this time around.

Seriously, if I was the team responsible for writing ads like "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them", I don't think I could have come up with a better line.

Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done.

Why so kind to BLM? Kony 2012 was a well-meaning but silly exercise in virtue-signalling which accomplished nothing and wasted a lot of money in the process. BLM directly precipitated the single worst murder spike in American history resulting in tens of thousands of additional dead young black men, the precise demographic whose welfare the movement was ostensibly so concerned with. It also undermined trust in numerous public institutions (of which American police forces are only one) for no good reason. In the process, the movement funnelled hundreds of millions of well-intended dollars into lining the pockets of cynical opportunists and carpet-baggers.

Kony2012 should be judged a silly time-wasting trifle. BLM should be judged a ginned-up moral panic and an atrocity.

I’d call it Woke 4.0 or 5.0. ‘Racism’ is a Trotskyite concept from the ‘20s. The concept of ‘Whiteness’ was developed and popularized in the late ‘60s. Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s. ‘Critical race theory’ is from the ‘80s or so. And the list goes on. Otherwise I agree. I’d nitpick about Kony2012 as I guess it was mostly and correctly seen as harmless and organized by a lunatic.

‘Racism’ is a Trotskyite concept from the ‘20s. The concept of ‘Whiteness’ was developed and popularized in the late ‘60s.

This rhymes with "rape is really the fault of whomever named the concept, without it there would only be sex".

Are you arguing that there were never any racists, that the Nazis and the KKK were simply "race realists" who had discovered HBD a century before it became cool? That the fascists murdered the Ashkenazim due to an unfortunate sign error when applying their otherwise correct HBD theory?

If you want to argue that racism is one of those problems where the cure turns out to be worse than the disease, that is a point which can be argued, but to argue that the evil commies have invented the concept of racism from whole cloth seems far-fetched. Might as well blame Marx for inventing capitalism.

Likewise, the antebellum Southern States clearly had a concept of 'Whiteness', where certain ethnicities could be full citizens and other ethnicities could be property. Even in the 1960s, a sociologist would likely find that some men who have consensual sex with unmarried white women in the South get shotgun weddings and some get lynched. And he would likely discover that a great predictor for the outcome is skin color.

I'm not him but I'd say a yes chadding is in order. Racism is only bad in so far as whites have been mind broken to consider any other option, while the rest of the world continues to operate on a national/ethnic mode of operation and will continue to do so. Maybe we should choose to take the high road and enjoy the suicide while no one else plays by the same rules.

Since you mentioned rape I’d incidentally argue that leftist culture warriors have successfully manipulated society’s concept or rape largely in the same way they have done so with the concept or racial prejudice/bigotry, the difference being that the word itself already existed in one case whereas in the other a new one was invented. That is, their culture war messaging is aimed at normies who share an everyday definition of ‘rape’ in order to push for new legislation and norms which adhere to their own definition.

But anyway, I’ll try answering in detail. I’d say the interconnected concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘whiteness’ were invented as ideologically motivated tools for culturally transforming and manipulating a Christian high-trust society that was and largely is clueless about the true aims of the revolutionary leftist inventors. The goal was never to actually help black people or women, and none of it has anything to do with how the KKK or the Nazis 'interpreted' the concept of race.

Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s.

Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.

Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.

Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.

What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.

Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s. @JeSuisCharlie recently touted the virtues of a film called PCU, which I haven't seen, although my understanding is that it satirises the political correctness trend on university campuses. See, for example, this clip, depicting a feminist caricature using the phrase "rape culture". This film came out in 1994. Given the lead time to write, produce, edit and release a film, this implies that "political correctness" was ascendant as late as 1992.

Which rather illustrates the point that wokeness is cylical, with periods of ascendancy followed by periods of dormancy.

If feel like "touted the virtues" is overstating things but it is a fun movie that I had recently rewatched and had been considering posting about as an interesting culture war time capsule.

The plot revolves around rich-preppies colluding with university president Jessica Walter, playing an ersatz Hillary Clinton, to drive "the normies" off campus. Part of their plan is to explicitly de-normalize normie behavior like guys asking girls out, so that the university can claim that they are responding to legitimate complaints rather than engaging in illegal discrimination.

The whole "rape culture" thing was satire back in the 90 but now it has fallen victim to Muggeridge's Law.

Wikipedia claims the term was first used in 1974, although I can't remember hearing it before the early 2010s.

Weirdly enough I actually think the term is a perfectly legitimate one: it's uncontroversially true that certain cultures promote rape, downplay the severity of it, or protect those guilty of it rather than protect their victims. It's just that every example of a culture meeting this description is a culture that modern feminists would object to being so characterised. "Gangs of adult men sexually exploit adolescent girls in their thousands, and the police turn a blind eye to it for decades for fear of 'inflaming community tensions' (the perpetrators are disproportionately Pakistani men) and because of the girls' socioeconomic background" is such an on-the-nose description of a rape culture it hurts – but intersectional feminists would likely get mad if I said that the UK was a rape culture provided that the rapists are Pakistani. Likewise, pretty much any Muslim-majority country in MENA could reasonably be characterised as a rape culture.

I don't disagree with feminists that rape cultures exist – I disagree with which cultures ought to be characterised as such.

Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s.

...or the "New Left" of the 60's, or various far-left movements in early 20th century Europe from Spain to Russia, and and so on and so on, probably until the French Revolution, if not before...

I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.

A major difference between woke and the other identity-based tribalisms is that it is adopted and promulgated by members of the hated tribe. Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.

Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.

I'm not convinced. As I was arguing with @6tjk last week. If we take the intesectionalist's definition of "Whiteness" seriously, Stephen King is not white.

Yes, I think enabling this via the use of pseudoscientific language around things like "systemic racism" and "privilege" and all those other terms is the great innovation of Wokeness in updating bog-standard tribalism to a Modern Audience who would reject something that was overtly purely based around selfishness. The gloss of the false claim that The Science - which is objective and universal and True - supports Wokeness is what allowed such naked, self-serving tribalism to appear just not-tribal enough to fit into the egos of people who consider themselves beyond good and evil above all the old tribal nonsense due to their modern, enlightened sensibilities.

Hmmm.

The thing that made Woke different, in my opinion, was social media. To criticise oneself is noble and self-effacing, and a desire to appear such, as well as morally superior, is what I think drives much of wokeness. Essentially white leftists are pick-mes for minorities, they sell out their own race or nationality to be considered "one of the good ones". Some cynically think they are helping minorities upend the entrenched order (to install socialism, or whatever) and that they will be rewarded with a higher position than they currently have in the new hierarchy, or indeed something other than a shallow grave, once their fantasy revolution is complete.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology, rather than an offshoot, or a distinct ideology that shares a common ancestor. Consider the use of the term "rape culture" in that clip: it's the exact same vocabulary, the exact same preoccupations. It isn't hard to find earlier examples of uncontroversially leftist movements which were explicitly not feminist (e.g. just pull up a quote about women by literally any Black Panther of note). My guess is that when we get woke 2.0 3.0 4.0, it'll be pronouns-in-bio, "we acknowledge this meeting is held on unceded Pawnee land" all over again. If the next ascendant thing in progressivism is something radically different (e.g. centred on class consciousness and wealth expropriation), then while it'll still be left, it won't be woke.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot.

Yeah, but I'm saying the 90's were themselves a recurrence. For example, this:

Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.

Was written in the 80's, and the obsession with identity seems to already have been in place, and the author was not the one who came up with the idea either.

In the other comment you put forward a hypothetical of Nazism being defeated, but not condemned in the same way we do it now. I think one of the effects of that would be what we're seeing here - the ideas periodically resurfacing under a new coat of paint, and the old iterations being forgotten.

That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?

The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.

Given the mix of Constitutionalism and Christian Dominionism that motivated both MLK and John Brown I feel like both of their movements read more as "far-right" than "proto-woke".

To invoke God while claiming that people ought to be judged by the content of their character rather than racial or class traits is to explicitly reject intersectionalism and pretty much everything the modern secular left stands for.

Years ago I read an article arguing that the "content of their character" thing, while a memorable turn of phrase, was not really representative of MLK's true beliefs and he did believe that, in the absence of racial discrimination, the ethnic composition of an organisation would be reflective of its host country. Therefore, we ultimately have MLK to thank for affirmative action and DEI. In that sense he was certainly proto-woke, far more so than Lincoln.

And who was that article written by?

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An early example of an insufferable SJW twat wielding real power was Danish physician, philosopher and regent Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772).

The defining feature of woke is the Omnicause, so third wave feminism is the obvious thing to point to.

Right, there’s black supremacists who believe in woke narratives about race, not woke because of their views of women/palestine/the concept of gender. Theres TERFs, actual feminists, not woke because of their beliefs about sex/gender and because they don’t care about Palestine or race. Etc, etc.

07mk upthread mentionned the French Revolution as something people sometimes mistakenly compare to woke, but I think there's definitely significant parallels; a liberation movement (so a "noble" cause, har har har) that devolved into purity spirals and witch hunts. You have the same obsession with redefining the language to erase the traces of the past. I, of course, don't need to be told, I'm just a decent human being who celebrates "holidays" in early Nivôse.

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