How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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No one appears to have told Khan that he doesn’t actually have the power to change national drug policy. But, with his eyes set on loftier heights, he is clearly trying to develop his national and international profile and campaign for policy changes he’d like to see. Has woke “won”, as Williams claims? Her extensive survey of the spread of woke, taking in developments in the UK, the USA, and Australia — remember Yassmin Abdel-Magied stomping out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016? — certainly indicates that woke is ascendant and that its influence is pernicious. But Williams concedes rather too much in declaring that woke has already clinched victory. “Ultimately,” she argues, “woke is a defensive stance from an elite that has lost its authority.” Perhaps the starkest illustration of how reducing everything to single frames of vision can distort understanding comes in the debate about antisemitism. In his new book Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel shows how the view of Jews as “privileged” or “white” leads many progressives to ignore antisemitism, even collude with it. Baddiel seems more interested in ensuring that Jews can join the carnival of identities than in challenging identity politics; nevertheless, his central point about the failure of many to recognise antisemitism remains important. It may be that the word ‘woke’ is irrecoverable, that it has fallen too far into the hands of people who want to use it to stoke division, rather than illuminate injustice. On every other measure, O’Sullivan had the better of the Scotsman. Thirty-eight ranking titles to Hendry’s 36. Seven Masters titles to his six. Seven UK Championships to his five. When they played head-to-head, O’Sullivan had 30 victories to Hendry’s 21. Hendry was the King of the Crucible. After O’Sullivan’s 18-13 victory over Judd Trump last night, that is an honour he must now share. As for the question of who is the GOAT, there can be no more argument.

The fall of Russell Brand is no victory for women - spiked

Of course, words and phrases change their meaning all the time. Jonathan points to ‘right on’ as an example that followed a similar trajectory to ‘woke’. There has been much criticism of taking down statues as the “rewriting of history”, but little recognition that many statues themselves were erected to substantiate an often distorted historical narrative. Monuments, whether to Winston Churchill or to the Bristol slaver Edward Colston, or indeed to Mary Wollstonecraft, are not just dumb pieces of stone. Each is designed to tell a particular story. The subversion of ‘woke’ is political and means the word can now be used to perpetuate the very injustices it sought to eradicate in the first place. I like reading about this topic to better diagnose what the problem is, because it’s a tough one to understand. The problem that authors face right now is that this topic is extremely saturated, so it’s difficult to write something new. But when I saw Joanna Williams’ subtitle to this book, it definitely caught my interest with it’s focus on this being an elitist movement. This is something Rob K. Henderson discusses with his theory of “luxury beliefs”. While this is a great book, there’s a lot in it that’s already been said.As mainstream broadcasters now seek to distance themselves from Brand, it is worth remembering the role the media played in making him a star. In the mid-2000s, Brand was named the Sun’s ‘Shagger of the Year’ three years in a row. He would later boast about ‘bedding nine women in one evening’. ‘Instead of taking someone for a date and then going to the pictures and then calling them, I was able to go, “Let’s do sex right now!”’, he said in a 2010 interview. Many view such blindness to antisemitism as a product of “wokeness”. But the unwoke can be equally unseeing.

How duty can set us free - spiked

spiked is free for all to read. But to keep it that way, we ask loyal readers like you to support our work. It’s hardly surprising so few of us encounter racism on a daily basis. According to the latest report from one of the most reliable barometers of Australian society, the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey, that segment of the population with racist or xenophobic views is shrinking rapidly. Even during the long months of the pandemic — when Mr Tan insists that instances of race hate spiked — the Scanlon survey reported high levels of harmony in the community. But there was a puzzling spike of 20 per cent in the number of those who did think racism was a problem; a finding that baffled report author, Andrew Markus, seeing as how it conflicted with Scanlon’s findings in all previous years.Nonetheless, Williams guides the reader through the tangled ideological undergrowth while never losing her focus on the significance of the threat that woke poses. “Woke might be difficult to pin down,” says Williams, “but it is a useful concept. It allows us to describe the outlook the currently dominates our social, cultural and political lives.”