I liken the pervasive grip that the Wokeist ideology has achieved in Western societies to an evil spell.
It is a spell that works by fear, a fear that offending against identarian norms and orthodoxies will result in social and professional death, and that hardly anyone, irrespective of prestige or standing, is immune.
Innumerable examples can be cited, but I will run through a number that exemplify the problem and are revealing in different ways.
Sir Tim Hunt is a distinguished British scientist. A Nobel laureate in medicine, no less, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a founder of the European Research Council, an emeritus professor at University College, London (UCL).
A couple of years ago he spoke at a conference of woman science journalists in Seoul. In his address, he made a few feeble jokes about women in the laboratory, the danger of falling love with them, that they sometimes burst into tears.
He then told the audience they should take no notice of the prejudices of an old codger like him and that it was very important for young women to go into science, that they had a vital contribution to make. The comments were obviously self-deprecatory, and strongly supportive of women in science.
This set off a Twitter storm based on an incomplete report of what he said, that omitted the final part where he stressed women should go into science. It went viral as he was flying home to London. Shortly after his plane touched down he was forced to resign from UCL, disowned by the Royal Society and the European Research Council, anathematized in front page newspaper stories.
Nothing could rescue his reputation. He made a grovelling apology. Distinguished scientific colleagues, including Stephen Hawking and some woman scientists who had worked with him, rallied to his defence. All to no avail. His distinguished career was effectively ended within 48 hours.
Second example. In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the impeccably liberal Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla wrote an article for the New York Times titled The End of Identity Liberalism in which he argued that:
American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing… the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.
Lilla is a committed partisan of the Democratic Party, and in interviews he makes clear his main objection to identity politics is that the alienation of the white working class, a key component of the Democratic coalition since FDR, is a losing electoral strategy.
It was a serious, carefully considered contribution that he later expanded to book length. The response was widespread vilification from American left-liberals, including an article by a Columbia colleague, law professor Katherine Franke, who accused him of - you guessed it - ‘white supremacy’, and placed him in same ideological camp as David Duke:
Duke and Lilla were contributing to the same ideological project, the former cloaked in a KKK hood, the latter in an academic gown
Not very nice is it – waking up to read an article in one of the major national newspapers that brackets you with the Ku Klux Klan just for querying the identarian ideology.
More recently there is the case of Laurence Fox, the popular TV actor and star of the crime series Lewis. In January he was a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time program. The issue of Megan Markle’s departure from Britain came up. Was she a victim of racism?
Fox was sceptical, to which the questioner suggested he was speaking as a privileged white male. Fox replied that he was born with white skin and that to deprecate people on this ground was itself racist.
Cue shock, horror, outrage, Twitter meltdown. Fox thought things might blow over within a week or so. To the contrary, the denunciations intensified, and continue to this day.
He was disowned by his own union, Equity, the British actors union. He relates how the outrage mob did not confine itself to him, but went after his family members. Offers of acting work dried up, and he is now has to consider his future career. All for expressing his view that deprecating white people was racist.
And let’s not forget what happened to Barry Spurr, the first professor of poetry and poetics at Sydney University, a recognized global authority on T.S. Elliott, and an extremely popular lecturer.
After the leaking to the online rag Matilda of some private emails that he posted to a handful of people that contained some terms that could be deemed racist, Spurr came under ferocious attack by the PC mob.
The university acted immediately, denouncing Spurr to the media, banning him from setting foot on any university campus, even prohibiting him from clearing out his office. Spurr was subjected to a terrible public humiliation.
This all happened literally within a couple of days, before even the formality of a hearing where he could present his case. This is how the university treated someone with a forty-year association with the university. He was subsequently forced to resign on terms that prohibited him from speaking publicly about the matter.
This must surely rate as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of Australian higher education.
These cases are emblematic of a number of things: the utter intolerance by the woke brigade of the slightest deviation from their orthodoxies, especially on the part of those like Jacinta Price who depart from identarian scripts, who merit special vilification as ‘Uncle Toms’ and the like.
The demand for swift and peremptory justice for alleged infractions, a demand that all too often those in authority comply with at the first whiff of grapeshot. And the enormous ‘force multiplier’ that social media – Twitter especially – provides to amplify these witch hunts.
A particularly sinister aspect that we see all the time is the insistence on guilt by accusation. Punish first, substantiate the charges later – if at all. Hence in America any police shooting is a racist murder.
Evidence to the contrary must be disregarded, as in the case of the Ferguson shooting, one of the original triggers of the BLM movement, that pseudo-scholars of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘whiteness studies’ continue to call a racist murder, and demand the officer involved be punished accordingly, despite conclusive evidence that it was nothing of the kind.
A question often asked is: Where are the adults in the room, the people in authority, who should be voices of restraint and moderation? The answer, sadly, is that all too often they are cringing under a table, hoping they can sate the mob by issuing groveling apologies and throwing a few people under the proverbial bus.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, things have gotten considerably worse with the radicalization spiral that followed the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis in May. Since then, notions that a few months ago would have seemed clinically insane, like the demand to defund police forces, have moved into the mainstream.
All over the world, we see people from various backgrounds including, members of police forces, making the supine gesture of submission of ‘taking a knee’. In America, we see inner cities wracked by rioting and mob violence, that mainstream media insist on characterizing as legitimate, essentially peaceful protest.
So that is the situation we find ourselves in. We face a global movement to deprecate and undermine Western civilization, destroy free speech and replace it with an unchallengeable ideological orthodoxy enforced by threats of social obloquy, public humiliation and career destruction and, increasingly, violent thuggery by masked, black-shirted thugs who have the temerity to style themselves as anti-fascists.
So, how do we break the spell?
The first point to note is that most normal people don’t buy this stuff, especially the palpably crazy propositions, like defunding the police. Polls across the Western world consistently show majority opposition to tearing down statues, the holding of demonstrations in defiance of COVID precautions, the ridiculous extremities of racial and gender politics and political correctness, and especially the violence.
Furthermore there is reason to believe that there is far more latent opposition to identarian ideology in the general population than is apparent on the surface. In Britain, a poll by Gallup showed that around one third of the population were afraid to express their real views on contentious issues, not least because of what it might mean for their employment.
The flipside is that tireless activism can inflate the apparent support of the Wokeists, especially the ‘keyboard warriors’ of social media. For example, an outfit called Sleeping Giant has been very successful in intimidating advertisers to boycott certain TV and radio programs, such as Andrew Bolt on Sky News. Yet, in Australia, Sleeping Giant’s twitter campaigns are the work of a handful – actually several – Twitter campaigners. As the old adage says, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Yet mainstream politicians, corporate leaders, and university Vice-Chancellors and Presidents seem extraordinarily reluctant to take a stand against the activists.
A number of people have spoken about the folly of apologizing for offending woke ideology. It is understandable that people do this, especially those in vulnerable occupations like teaching or the entertainment industry. But as cases like Sir Tim Hunt make clear, it is naïve to think an apology will bring mercy. On the contrary, an apology is never accepted in good faith. Rather, it is taken as an admission of guilt. It acts like blood in the water in a shark tank.
But even among those inclined to resist to some degree, there is far too much deference to Wokeist claims, too much willingness to acknowledge the good intentions of the bullies.
Take for example the UK Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, who described the Black Lives Matter demand that white people ‘take a knee’ as a ‘symbol of subjugation and subordination’. He was immediately denounced by all the usual suspects, especially Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians, the leader of the latter demanding a ‘fulsome apology’.
Well, credit to Raab for not submitting to that demand, but he did go on Twitter to say:
To be clear: I have full respect for the Black Lives Matter movement and the issues driving them.
No! This is all too typical. Nobody has an issue with the proposition that black lives matter. They matter every bit as much as the lives of any other racial or identity group. But the eponymous movement is utterly toxic. It is a violent, racist movement, founded by Marxist ideologues and has a Marxist agenda to dismantle the existing social order. Why on earth is a conservative politician expressing respect for a group like that?
And as is typical of activist ‘social justice’ movements, BLM is totally indifferent to the consequences of its activities. It does not care about black lives, unless they confirm to its preferred narrative of racist oppression. The number of blacks who die from black-on-black gang violence exceeds by several orders of magnitude the number of racially motivated police shootings.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that BLM activities, especially after the Ferguson shooting, have contributed to thousands of excess black deaths as police are intimidated into stepping back from the proactive measures that have been so effective in reducing homicide rates in recent decades.
There has been a similar surge in black homicide deaths in major cities since the Floyd incident, including a nearly 200 percent increase in New York City this July compared to last year. BLM could not care less about this, nor about the destruction wrought on black neighbourhoods, the businesses shut down or fleeing the area, the urban desolation, that their rioting has brought in its wake.
Here is my view. The time for tepid, qualified opposition to this ideology is over. It needs to be tackled comprehensively. We should not accept how these people frame issues, we should reject their nomenclature, and we should contest the ‘theories’ hatched in academia over decades that rationalize their causes.
I think we might be encouraged by how this might be received, even by those who see themselves as leftists. Having done a number of talks and articles about this over the past several years, including my recent piece in the Weekend Australian, I have often found myself ‘pushing on an open door’, even with left-leaning audiences.
Many people sense there is something deeply wrong with this ideology, something profoundly counterintuitive for genuine progressives, even if they are hesitant to express it, and are relieved when someone spells it out. I think there is a special obligation to speak up on the part of those who, like me, are relatively invulnerable to retaliation from the activists.
Consider the matter of race and racism. In most people’s common sense understanding a racist is someone disposed to think ill of, or discriminate against, a person simply in virtue of his or her race, understood to refer to surface physical features like skin colour. Anti-racists of an earlier generation urged that race was something we should aspire to transcend so that in the words of Martin Luther King we are judged by the content of our character, not the colour of our skin.
If we accept this definition, how is it not racist to constantly deprecate ‘white people’ as a class, as is common in Wokeist circles, or to liken ‘being white’ to a ‘tremendous, or even radical sin’ as was done by the head of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website on a Radio National program? Imagine the reaction if ‘black’ or ‘brown’ were substituted for white.
How can they justify this? Well, just like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland they redefine the term to mean just what they want it to mean, no more, no less. According to the academic ‘critical race’ theorists, it is impossible for ‘people of colour’ to be racist against white people. They can be prejudiced perhaps, but not racist, since according to their definition racism equals prejudice plus power. So they narrow the definition so all this anti-white people rhetoric is held to be legitimate, or at most a misdemeanour.
Hence the New York Times can welcome onto its esteemed editorial board a young woman whose twitter feed is full of anti-white bile, including one about how much she enjoys being cruel to ‘old white men.
On the other hand, they want to broaden the definition of racism when it suits them so that, for example, it can encompass criticism of Islam, since according to the theorists Islam has been ‘racialized’ and is thus an oppressed identity.
I won’t bother to labour the absurdity of this kind of theorizing. The distinguished black American intellectual Thomas Sowell has pointed out that according to the racism equals prejudice plus power definition, Hitler would not have been racist when he ranted against the Jews as an impoverished denizen of Vienna dosshouses before World War I, only morphing into a racist when he entered the Reich Chancellery. The obvious circularity in arguing that opposition to Islam is racist because Islam is ‘racialized’ needs no emphasis.
On any reasonable definition, all this anti-white-people talk is racist. Plain, vanilla racism, if you will excuse the pun. The ideology and the theories that underpin it are atavistic and reactionary. I think this is a case that can and should be made, not least to people who identify as leftists.
Which brings me to my final point. We need to assemble a broad coalition if this battle for civilizational survival is to be won. It should not be seen as something solely for conservatives, and we should resist characterizing any leftist who supports it as having defected wholesale to the conservative camp.
Rather, we need to reconstitute something like the Cold War coalition of conservatives, liberals and social-democrats who will no doubt disagree about all manner of things, but unite in defence of the foundations of our free, liberal and democratic civilization.