The Trouble with some 'Anti-Woke Influencers'
They don't seem to know how to adapt to a less woke environment
Welcome to the first real post of Breaking the Narrative with Sophie Mat, a new regular column hosted by TaraElla Post. The purpose of this project is to break the Big Woke vs. Big New Right false narrative, by presenting the other narratives being left out of, or at least downplayed by, the well-funded media (including both mainstream and 'alternative' media). Note: we do not imply any endorsement of the people or the ideas featured here. We're simply reporting the things people are saying out there.
The Fake News About Springfield, Ohio
Donald Trump's talk of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs in his debate with Kamala Harris has gotten a lot of people talking. I think this piece by Cathy Young is perhaps the most interesting of them all, because it focuses on the role of at least some 'anti-woke influencers' in stoking the fake moral panic. Here are some of the things she said in the article:
Relatively big names like anti-woke obsessive Wesley Yang and right-wing anti-immigration crusader Nate Hochman (the guy who got fired by the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign for sharing a video prominently and favorably featuring a Nazi “sonnenrad”) rebuked me for not acknowledging the video as corroboration. Never mind that the cat-eating incident happened in Canton (some 175 miles from Springfield) and involved a lone, clearly mentally ill woman, not a family calmly carving up a kitty carcass in its front yard.
It’s difficult to tell how widespread animus toward Haitians is in Springfield. What’s clear is that whatever real migration-related problems there may be, the backlash has often taken the form of blatant and raw bigotry.
Tracinski and others have documented the role of Blood Tribe, an actual neo-Nazi group, in amplifying this bigotry.
Maverick-liberal-to-MAGA convert and The Free Press commentator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, has blamed the bomb threats that have shut down schools, government offices, and other institutions in Springfield in recent days on a shadowy “they” who are trying to make “the Springfield/Haiti story … go away,” because it exposes “Kamala Harris’s border ideology.”
I think this demonstrates how some 'anti-woke influencers' have totally gone down a dangerous rabbit hole. Amplifying fake news, and spreading the messages of dishonest far-right groups and movements around. And it's certainly not the first time something like this has happened.
Also commenting on this (non)-event was Asha Rangappa, in a post titled 'Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts', reversing the famous anti-woke slogan. Her post takes a more academic look at the episode, focusing on why some people continued to believe in the fake news even after fact checking from numerous credible sources, including in this case, even the Republican governor of Ohio.
What’s really interesting, though, is that belief in the lie about Haitians eating pets varies depending on partisan affiliation.
Directionally motivated reasoning leads people to seek out information that reinforces their preferences (i.e., confirmation bias), counterargue information that contradicts their preferences (i.e., disconfirmation bias), and view proattitudinal information as more convincing than counterattitudinal information (i.e., prior attitude effect).
I think this is what is happening with at least some anti-woke influencers. They feel a need to be loyal to the 'anti-woke movement'. Unfortunately, the anti-woke discourse is often infested with fake news nowadays, and also more broadly being manipulated by certain unsavory political interests.
What is also interesting is the fact that the aforementioned behavior keeps getting worse, even as wokeness is declining in the mainstream (more on this later). It seems that these anti-woke influencers have a real need to hold onto the anti-woke movement, and to keep it both relevant and intact, at a time when attention on woke vs. anti-woke battles is clearly fading, and the old anti-woke movement is clearly splintering into new anti-populist, pro-populist and 'couldn't care anymore' factions. In other words, they seem to want to party like it's 2020, when it's objectively 2024.
Is Wokeness Still Raging On?
Jamie Paul from American Dreaming reviews Bill Maher's recent book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, in an article titled Yes, We've Reached "Peak Woke". The article highlights how Paul notices that the world around us is no longer like what is described in Maher's book, even though all the events from the book are just from the last few years. While many people have talked about how wokeness seems to have been declining since around 2021-23, Paul's article gives us some solid evidence of this. Here are some examples he gives:
When was the last time I came across major publications replacing the word “women” with “birthing people”, “menstruators”, or “bodies with vaginas”; or arguing in earnest that sports shouldn’t be separated by sex; or suspending a journalist for retweeting a throwaway joke?
Or online mobs denouncing folks for the unforgivable sin of not posting the right kind of black square on Instagram (Emma Watson), or losing excess weight (Adele), or curing the blind (Mr. Beast). Or theaters issuing trigger warnings about “haze” or “moments of darkness”, or online sleuths trolling through every word someone ever said to get them un-hired from hosting Jeopardy or joining Saturday Night Live.
It’s been a while since I encountered news stories about statues of George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant being toppled, or Abraham Lincoln’s name being removed from schools. Or grade schools teaching kids that white colonizers created the gender binary, or children’s books that say white men invented fat shaming. I don’t hear about professors being disciplined for cracking silly elevator jokes, or being accosted by shrieking students over Halloween costumes, or being suspended and forced to write “reflection papers” for including redacted slurs in a law school exam. No one is getting fired for making an “okay” hand symbol these days, or being ousted from their Senate seat over a joke photograph, or being forced to resign from their job for having a consensual relationship with a 49-year-old executive.
It is important to have these concrete examples, because some on the populist right who want to keep beating the drum of the woke 'emergency' keep denying the decline of wokeness, despite the fact that almost everyone can feel the vibe shift that has happened. I acknowledge that even if wokeness has declined in intensity and popularity, it is still a problem that needs to be addressed intellectually. But an emergency it clearly isn't anymore, even if it once might have looked like one. It's now clearly just a problem that we need to rationally deal with, perhaps in the medium to long term. Understanding this makes the 'fight authoritarianism with authoritarianism' and 'we need emergency measures' arguments of movements like 'National Conservatism', and their cheerleaders in the online 'alternative media' untenable.
Are the Democrats Woke?
Robert Tracinski writes in the Discourse Magazine, in response to the Harris campaign's focus on 'Freedom', that there are two types of freedom (i.e. what we normally call 'social' and 'economic' freedom), and the Democrats seem to only believe in one (social freedom, of course). Still, he notes that the Democrats are now actively shaking off their perceived association with wokeness, and 'attempting a return to old-fashioned 20th-century left-liberalism'. He also notes that:
This initiative never came top-down from top Democratic politicians, mind you. It was enforced bottom-up by overzealous volunteers. But it associated the entire American left with a secularized Church Lady attitude that was eager to rap us on the knuckles at any sign of disobedience. It made the Democratic Party synonymous with conformity rather than freedom. Conservatives sensed this and reorganized their whole movement around the culture war and a notoriously vague concept of anti-wokeness.
The Democratic Party is now attempting to shake off this association by positioning itself as the party of freedom that will respect your personal choices “even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves.”
I agree with the observation that the Democratic Party itself never truly embraced wokeness, and the perceived association is, to a large extent, a narrative created by the Republican Party. I mean, they nominated Joe Biden in 2020, one of the least woke candidates from their pool of 20+ choices, when wokeness was arguably at its peak. The nomination of Biden demonstrates the DNC's utter lack of sympathy for wokeness. But back then, at least some candidates and Biden surrogates would pay lip service to some woke ideals and jargon. Kamala Harris was certainly in this category back then.
Fast forward four years, no mainstream Democrat does that anymore. Indeed, I've noticed how Harris herself intentionally avoids all things woke these days. This is a big shift that nobody in the mainstream duopoly discourse wants to talk about, because the Democrats don't want to alienate the hard left too much (because they don't want to lose votes in a close election), and the Republicans want to keep painting the Democrats as woke. But this shift has indeed happened, and I'm happy that more people are noticing it.
The other important thing to notice here, besides choosing 'freedom' over embracing woke conformity, is that the Democrats are also choosing to be 'normie' over embracing weirdness. This was actually the subject of a TaraElla Post article back in August, when Tim Walz made the 'Republicans are weird' thing go viral. The choice of both normality and freedom over both wokeness and weirdness is clearly intended to send a message. It is unmistakable and unmissable. It's almost like how Tony Blair campaigned on how he remade British Labour into 'New Labour' back in 1997.
Conclusions: Our thoughts on all this is that, as wokeness objectively declines in intensity, the anti-woke movement, which was ultimately not much more than a reaction to wokeness itself, naturally dissipates in energy too. Moreover, the anti-woke movement was always a coalition between anti-woke liberals, conservatives, and those further to the right. (We remember a survey of some prominent anti-woke voices in 2020 as to whether they thought Biden or Trump would be better from an anti-woke perspective, the result was a roughly 50-50 split.) The rise of right-wing populism has further divided the movement, and as right-wing populism has become more prominent than wokeness, the things that divide what remains of the anti-woke movement have taken on more urgency and relevancy than the things that used to unite it. In this environment, the anti-woke movement really isn't what it used to be. Many of the people who first became prominent because of their involvement in anti-wokeness are desperately holding onto their moment of relevance, and it seems that some would do anything to prop up what remains of the 'peak woke' moment. Ironically, for all their complaints about wokeness, they seem to have a difficult time adapting to a less woke environment. What they don't seem to be able to do is to continue their criticisms of wokeness, but in a more calm and rational manner befitting of the changed conditions. It seems to us that the ultimate problem here is that these people do outrage politics well, but fail at the kind of calm and rational critique that woke skepticism must now turn to.
Other interesting articles:
Landry Ayres wrote an article about how Elon Musk is a 'Phony Free Speech Absolutist'. I know we already have many people saying the same thing, but we really need more attention on the fact that X is not a level playing field at all.
Matthew Downhour acknowledges that liberals too often 'see the press as a natural ally', and have a lot of difficulty taking a stand opposed to 'respected media sources' (i.e. non-right wing mainstream media). While I don't entirely agree with the article, it is good that the uncritical liberal deference to establishment media is being acknowledged by a liberal here.
John Halpin notes that 'the 2024 election is mostly a cultural battle', and that 'no party truly wins in this scenario'. In another article, he talks about British Labour's recent landslide victory, and concludes that the lesson here is that 'a mainstream party with a trustworthy and pragmatic figurehead focused on the basic needs of working people can build a strong majority coalition'.
Jacob Grier makes the case why libertarians should support the Harris campaign enthusiastically, rather than holding onto their long-standing double hater attitude.
Daniel M. Rothschild argues that we need more 'costly signals' because 'costly signals are necessary to differentiate ingroups from outgroups'. Examples of costly signals he gives include Republicans supporting Goldwater back in the 1960s, and Democrats supporting gay marriage back in the 2000s.