8 ms·

This essay is so prescient. Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far, and we're sliding into a 1984-style era full of newspeak, wrongthink, and thoughtc

This essay is so prescient. Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far, and we're sliding into a 1984-style era full of newspeak, wrongthink, and thoughtcrimes? I feel a little afraid to even write that, even as a question mark, even at that level of abstraction. That right there is probably an indication that it perhaps has gone too far. To be clear, this is coming from a person who is hispanic, supports gay-rights, and voted for Bernie. Not that any of that should matter.

moltke 5y ago
We knew where it was going decades ago but it was considered too fashionable.
lashloch 5y ago
After reading your comment, I think it hasn't gone far enough.
- hpvic03 5y ago
  ... and my crime is? Mentioning the idea of wrongthink? You're kind of proving my point.
  - fennecs 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - overgard 5y ago
      I think your post encapsulates what irks a lot of people about the "woke". There's no room for nuance or analysis, just a lot of overdramatized labels (nazi? really? you are aware of what the real nazis did right? stop cheapening history just to increase the temperature of the debate)
      - fennecs 5y ago
        What is the nuanced thing you want to discuss? Maybe just talk about something specific instead of just some broad “woke has gone to far”.
        overgard 5y ago
        > What is the nuanced thing you want to discuss? Huh? Clearly this entire topic is a meta-topic. I have no particular axe to grind at the moment. > Maybe just talk about something specific instead of just some broad “woke has gone to far”. Well, I'm not the one regularly calling anyone I disagree with a Nazi Sympathizer. I'm not sure I've ever needed to, because the actual nazi sympathizers tend to be pretty explicit and proud of their views, and easy to avoid. People are free to lob that around labels like that if they want, but it's going to result in me not taking them seriously. To me, when I hear someone being called a "nazi sympathizer" I just assume that means "I really dislike that person"; which is very unfortunate in a boy-who-cried-wolf sense because I absolutely would like to know who the true nazi sympathizers are.
        fennecs 5y ago
        >"Wokeness has gone too far, but I don't really have any concrete examples, I just guess it has somehow haha" I mean you have to have something to make such a claim in your op. As for Trump, yes maybe they are not precisely but lets be honest - Using fascist political tactics - Said explicitly "Hitler did a lot of good things", doesn't seem a great move to have on the record unless its just to appeal to more radical people. - Hired officials with ties to white nationalist groups. - Empathised with neo Nazis in Charlottesville, eg Proud Boys. - Endorses violence on external/opposition groups. So come on, while themselves are not technically a fascist he definitely responsible for eroding democracy and liberalism. They are a right wing populist. I think it's fair to say sympathiser considering all of this. I feel they deliberately make it murky, more like leaving the door open to more radical people, while still being palatable for the less radicalised. A pretty serious and dangerous situation. Far more than some perceived "woke-ism".
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      By and large, the "woke" subculture hates Bernie. They view themselves in opposition to the dreaded "Berniebros".
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        A subset of people have discovered they can harm other people by exercising "wokeism". They should not be confused with people who work to be woke. There are very strong differences among the latter over Bernie, or almost any other political axis.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      > The government of Texas seems to hate trans people. They banned sex changes for minors. That’s not “hating trans people”, that’s just a policy you disagree with when it comes to defining the degree to which a minor is legally capable of consenting to an adult irreversibly altering their body.
      - lurgburg 5y ago
        Presumably we're banning braces as well then.
        jl6 5y ago
        The Texas law is based on a theory of there being a fundamental right to procreate, which is harmed by the sterilization effect of many gender-related procedures. If you could come up with a theory of harm for braces, you could make a case for banning them too. But I doubt it would be as grave a harm as removing sexual function.
    - moltke 5y ago
      >the last American president was a right wing racist Nazi If you go and ask the actual Nazis (or NatSocs as they prefer) they'll tell you they don't like him because he was not a right wing racist Nazi. CivNat maybe (but if he really is he toned it done a lot to pander to minorities) certainly not a Nazi.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        He is just a grifter who knows his marks. He doesn't actually believe in anything, as such. (That does not make him better than an actual Nazi.)
  - lashloch 5y ago
    Your "crime" is over-acting as you nail yourself to an imaginary cross. Can you be specific about some of the things you believe are "wrongthink" in the eyes of "wokeism"? (Only if you feel safe doing so, of course...)
rspeele 5y ago
The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time. Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them. Maybe you could give an example of something specific?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?” The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.
- humanistbot 5y ago
  > Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse. Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
michaelmrose 5y ago
Maybe it's not so much an indication that reality has gone too far so much as it is that we aren't all equally aligned with reality. You say that you are a little afraid to speak up but realistically you are being deliberately dramatic. Shall we start a campaign to get you booted from your job tomorrow because you are being dramatic? It's not a crime nor a reason for outrage. You face at worst a down vote
- overgard 5y ago
  People get in trouble for decade old social media posts all the time. There's a lot of weird vindictive people that will go through ten years of twitter posts to be like "gotcha". The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Social mores actually move relatively slowly. In 1950 it was OK to be bigoted say towards gay men. In 2022 it is not. In 2022 people may be bitten for something they said in 2012 but it wasn't because such bigotry suddenly became unacceptable in 2013. The vanguard of decency and tolerance had begun advancing in the 60s and was well under way in the 70s. Forty years later they had failed to apprehend the indefensible nature of their position which for most of the roadkill on the road to reason had been underway for their entire lives. > The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing. One could also try not being 40 years behind moving social mores in a way that currently makes your children embarrassed to be seen with you and will in 10 years be seen as indefensibly bigoted or hateful because if its going to get you fired in 10 years its probably already pretty bad you just didn't notice.
nperez 5y ago
I think the term "woke" has been hijacked by some people to refer to anything minorities do in a disparaging manner, so I would need more concrete examples of what that means.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Linguist (and heterodox thinker) John McWhorter has written about this shifting usage: > For example, it’s only recently that he noticed the term “woke” being used beyond black Americans in just the way that “politically correct” was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did. from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futility-of-standing-athwart-language-yelling-stop/563612/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futili...
overgard 5y ago
I think the vast majority thinks that, but the extremists (for or against) are the ones carrying the megaphones because media craves controversy.
majormajor 5y ago
Discussions of "wokeism" should keep in mind that one of the most visible cases of being "canceled" is Colin Kaepernick, and you'd hardly call those blackballing him "woke." Meanwhile other less-accomplished QBs still bounce around from at least backup job to backup job... But beyond that... people have been getting blackballed forever in this country. So it's very important in this discussion to make it clear if you're complaining about just: a) people facing repercussions for saying 'conservative' things or b) people facing repercussions for other things as well or even just something like c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    A lot of influence with no responsibility, that is the hellish combination. If the Twitter mob drives somebody to suicide, no one is going to punish them. Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I think we have to resolve that a real person (or at least a discrete identifiable group) has the actual power, and the responsibility lies squarely with them. That may require them to take heat directly rather than fire some random employee the Internet has decided to hate, but I don't think they get to deflect responsibility for taking the easy out. That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them. I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.
rootusrootus 5y ago
> Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far Yes, because it is locked in a feedback loop with the folks who have recently decided to start saying the quiet part out loud. If people could just all around stop acting like jerks, everything would be much quieter. But nobody thinks they are the jerk.
screye 5y ago
It certainly did. Although, it seems like the opposition to it is in full swing. Wokeness (as portrayed in popular culture) hit its peak during the George Floyd protests and subsequent publishing of the Harpers letter. Since then, an entire ecosystem has risen in opposition to ideas of wokeness. Alas, the reaction to this opposition has not been to find a new consensus. Rather, communities have sharded and further polarized. Now, fervent ingroup loyalty is mandatory while the difference between each ingroup keeps expanding. This is especially noticeable in the most radical communities on the left and the right. From draconian Trans-bans to radical no-questions asked trans-acceptance, these communities have started dealing in absolutes. The more nuanced anti-woke have coalesced around Substack and honestly make good money. But, they rely on word of mouth to reach their readers. The other side of the anti-woke use viral video and aggressive youtube algorithms to reach their viewer base. However, the nature of these algorithms means that strong emotion is promoted over nuance and reason. Finally, there are celebrity faces like Rowling, Chapelle and Rogan, who can't really be deplatformed and serve as lightning rods for criticism, while smaller voices get the necessary protection to build out their platform. The sad part of this, is that you can't be apolitical anymore. There are only 3 acceptable positions. 1. Strong support and be embraced, 2. strong opposition and lose your friends but gain new anti-woke friends and lastly 3.stay silent while nodding to those in strong support. Now, if your profession is one is wholly in-group for the woke, then you will be in a difficult situation. Academia, print journalism and legacy media practically force you to be #1 or #3. If you are in a more technical field like tech, it doesn't really affect your life. But, if you choose to interface with social-sciencey aspects of big-tech such as ResponsibleAI, DEI or hiring, then you will also be forced into #1 or #3.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Also, Trump's visibility in media has been reduced. I believe that Trumpesque utterances were driving certain demography crazy and it overcompensated by going all in into wokeness and doubling down. And while Trump was president, there wasn't a chance to escape his daily, uh, serving of wisdom, which served as an irritant that had to be scratched, scratched, scratched, scratched. Nowadays Trump is much less prominent in the media and some people started rethinking their previous fervor.
robbyking 5y ago
I don't think "wokeism" has gone too far, I think accusations of it have. There are plenty of high profile sex offenders and homophobic/transphobic celebrities who continue to get work. Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.
d0mine 5y ago
'wkeism' as a tool reminds me about authoritarian states introducing laws that are impossible not to break by design and then applying them selectively to obliterate any dissent.
odonnellryan 5y ago
No. Why do you think it has gone too far?
psyc 5y ago
I agree with them on most issues. I appreciate them raising and theorizing about their more fringe issues. What I don't appreciate are their tactics and aggressive enforcement.

moltke 5y ago

We knew where it was going decades ago but it was considered too fashionable.

lashloch 5y ago

After reading your comment, I think it hasn't gone far enough.

hpvic03 5y ago
... and my crime is? Mentioning the idea of wrongthink? You're kind of proving my point.
- fennecs 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - overgard 5y ago
    I think your post encapsulates what irks a lot of people about the "woke". There's no room for nuance or analysis, just a lot of overdramatized labels (nazi? really? you are aware of what the real nazis did right? stop cheapening history just to increase the temperature of the debate)
    - fennecs 5y ago
      What is the nuanced thing you want to discuss? Maybe just talk about something specific instead of just some broad “woke has gone to far”.
      - overgard 5y ago
        > What is the nuanced thing you want to discuss? Huh? Clearly this entire topic is a meta-topic. I have no particular axe to grind at the moment. > Maybe just talk about something specific instead of just some broad “woke has gone to far”. Well, I'm not the one regularly calling anyone I disagree with a Nazi Sympathizer. I'm not sure I've ever needed to, because the actual nazi sympathizers tend to be pretty explicit and proud of their views, and easy to avoid. People are free to lob that around labels like that if they want, but it's going to result in me not taking them seriously. To me, when I hear someone being called a "nazi sympathizer" I just assume that means "I really dislike that person"; which is very unfortunate in a boy-who-cried-wolf sense because I absolutely would like to know who the true nazi sympathizers are.
        fennecs 5y ago
        >"Wokeness has gone too far, but I don't really have any concrete examples, I just guess it has somehow haha" I mean you have to have something to make such a claim in your op. As for Trump, yes maybe they are not precisely but lets be honest - Using fascist political tactics - Said explicitly "Hitler did a lot of good things", doesn't seem a great move to have on the record unless its just to appeal to more radical people. - Hired officials with ties to white nationalist groups. - Empathised with neo Nazis in Charlottesville, eg Proud Boys. - Endorses violence on external/opposition groups. So come on, while themselves are not technically a fascist he definitely responsible for eroding democracy and liberalism. They are a right wing populist. I think it's fair to say sympathiser considering all of this. I feel they deliberately make it murky, more like leaving the door open to more radical people, while still being palatable for the less radicalised. A pretty serious and dangerous situation. Far more than some perceived "woke-ism".
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    By and large, the "woke" subculture hates Bernie. They view themselves in opposition to the dreaded "Berniebros".
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      A subset of people have discovered they can harm other people by exercising "wokeism". They should not be confused with people who work to be woke. There are very strong differences among the latter over Bernie, or almost any other political axis.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > The government of Texas seems to hate trans people. They banned sex changes for minors. That’s not “hating trans people”, that’s just a policy you disagree with when it comes to defining the degree to which a minor is legally capable of consenting to an adult irreversibly altering their body.
    - lurgburg 5y ago
      Presumably we're banning braces as well then.
      - jl6 5y ago
        The Texas law is based on a theory of there being a fundamental right to procreate, which is harmed by the sterilization effect of many gender-related procedures. If you could come up with a theory of harm for braces, you could make a case for banning them too. But I doubt it would be as grave a harm as removing sexual function.
  - moltke 5y ago
    >the last American president was a right wing racist Nazi If you go and ask the actual Nazis (or NatSocs as they prefer) they'll tell you they don't like him because he was not a right wing racist Nazi. CivNat maybe (but if he really is he toned it done a lot to pander to minorities) certainly not a Nazi.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      He is just a grifter who knows his marks. He doesn't actually believe in anything, as such. (That does not make him better than an actual Nazi.)
- lashloch 5y ago
  Your "crime" is over-acting as you nail yourself to an imaginary cross. Can you be specific about some of the things you believe are "wrongthink" in the eyes of "wokeism"? (Only if you feel safe doing so, of course...)

rspeele 5y ago

The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time. Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them. Maybe you could give an example of something specific?

zozbot234 5y ago
That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.
commandlinefan 5y ago
That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?” The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.
humanistbot 5y ago
> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse. Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

michaelmrose 5y ago

Maybe it's not so much an indication that reality has gone too far so much as it is that we aren't all equally aligned with reality. You say that you are a little afraid to speak up but realistically you are being deliberately dramatic. Shall we start a campaign to get you booted from your job tomorrow because you are being dramatic? It's not a crime nor a reason for outrage. You face at worst a down vote

overgard 5y ago
People get in trouble for decade old social media posts all the time. There's a lot of weird vindictive people that will go through ten years of twitter posts to be like "gotcha". The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Social mores actually move relatively slowly. In 1950 it was OK to be bigoted say towards gay men. In 2022 it is not. In 2022 people may be bitten for something they said in 2012 but it wasn't because such bigotry suddenly became unacceptable in 2013. The vanguard of decency and tolerance had begun advancing in the 60s and was well under way in the 70s. Forty years later they had failed to apprehend the indefensible nature of their position which for most of the roadkill on the road to reason had been underway for their entire lives. > The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing. One could also try not being 40 years behind moving social mores in a way that currently makes your children embarrassed to be seen with you and will in 10 years be seen as indefensibly bigoted or hateful because if its going to get you fired in 10 years its probably already pretty bad you just didn't notice.

nperez 5y ago

I think the term "woke" has been hijacked by some people to refer to anything minorities do in a disparaging manner, so I would need more concrete examples of what that means.

gnicholas 5y ago
Linguist (and heterodox thinker) John McWhorter has written about this shifting usage: > For example, it’s only recently that he noticed the term “woke” being used beyond black Americans in just the way that “politically correct” was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did. from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futility-of-standing-athwart-language-yelling-stop/563612/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futili...

overgard 5y ago

I think the vast majority thinks that, but the extremists (for or against) are the ones carrying the megaphones because media craves controversy.

majormajor 5y ago

Discussions of "wokeism" should keep in mind that one of the most visible cases of being "canceled" is Colin Kaepernick, and you'd hardly call those blackballing him "woke." Meanwhile other less-accomplished QBs still bounce around from at least backup job to backup job... But beyond that... people have been getting blackballed forever in this country. So it's very important in this discussion to make it clear if you're complaining about just: a) people facing repercussions for saying 'conservative' things or b) people facing repercussions for other things as well or even just something like c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter

rootusrootus 5y ago
> c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  A lot of influence with no responsibility, that is the hellish combination. If the Twitter mob drives somebody to suicide, no one is going to punish them. Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I think we have to resolve that a real person (or at least a discrete identifiable group) has the actual power, and the responsibility lies squarely with them. That may require them to take heat directly rather than fire some random employee the Internet has decided to hate, but I don't think they get to deflect responsibility for taking the easy out. That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them. I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.

rootusrootus 5y ago

> Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far Yes, because it is locked in a feedback loop with the folks who have recently decided to start saying the quiet part out loud. If people could just all around stop acting like jerks, everything would be much quieter. But nobody thinks they are the jerk.

screye 5y ago

It certainly did. Although, it seems like the opposition to it is in full swing. Wokeness (as portrayed in popular culture) hit its peak during the George Floyd protests and subsequent publishing of the Harpers letter. Since then, an entire ecosystem has risen in opposition to ideas of wokeness. Alas, the reaction to this opposition has not been to find a new consensus. Rather, communities have sharded and further polarized. Now, fervent ingroup loyalty is mandatory while the difference between each ingroup keeps expanding. This is especially noticeable in the most radical communities on the left and the right. From draconian Trans-bans to radical no-questions asked trans-acceptance, these communities have started dealing in absolutes. The more nuanced anti-woke have coalesced around Substack and honestly make good money. But, they rely on word of mouth to reach their readers. The other side of the anti-woke use viral video and aggressive youtube algorithms to reach their viewer base. However, the nature of these algorithms means that strong emotion is promoted over nuance and reason. Finally, there are celebrity faces like Rowling, Chapelle and Rogan, who can't really be deplatformed and serve as lightning rods for criticism, while smaller voices get the necessary protection to build out their platform. The sad part of this, is that you can't be apolitical anymore. There are only 3 acceptable positions. 1. Strong support and be embraced, 2. strong opposition and lose your friends but gain new anti-woke friends and lastly 3.stay silent while nodding to those in strong support. Now, if your profession is one is wholly in-group for the woke, then you will be in a difficult situation. Academia, print journalism and legacy media practically force you to be #1 or #3. If you are in a more technical field like tech, it doesn't really affect your life. But, if you choose to interface with social-sciencey aspects of big-tech such as ResponsibleAI, DEI or hiring, then you will also be forced into #1 or #3.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Also, Trump's visibility in media has been reduced. I believe that Trumpesque utterances were driving certain demography crazy and it overcompensated by going all in into wokeness and doubling down. And while Trump was president, there wasn't a chance to escape his daily, uh, serving of wisdom, which served as an irritant that had to be scratched, scratched, scratched, scratched. Nowadays Trump is much less prominent in the media and some people started rethinking their previous fervor.

robbyking 5y ago

I don't think "wokeism" has gone too far, I think accusations of it have. There are plenty of high profile sex offenders and homophobic/transphobic celebrities who continue to get work. Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.

d0mine 5y ago

'wkeism' as a tool reminds me about authoritarian states introducing laws that are impossible not to break by design and then applying them selectively to obliterate any dissent.

odonnellryan 5y ago

No. Why do you think it has gone too far?

psyc 5y ago

I agree with them on most issues. I appreciate them raising and theorizing about their more fringe issues. What I don't appreciate are their tactics and aggressive enforcement.