The Social World

Tag: woke

  • They should never make another James Bond film

    They should never make another James Bond film

    The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.)

    Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise. According to an unnamed “source close to the production” who spoke to RadarOnline, “Writers are tearing their hair out.” At the end of No Time to Die, “Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death – he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.”

    It’s a conundrum for sure. Let me modestly suggest an obvious solution: Bond, having died, can stay dead. There should never be another Bond movie. He has lived his life and fulfilled his purpose.

    No Time to Die ended the internally coherent, five-film Daniel Craig saga neatly. Having long since run out of Ian Fleming novels to base movies on, the producers had taken to plumbing the lore of the franchise itself, inventing more backstory for a character so iconic that merely saving the world was not enough. For Craig’s Bond, that meant wrestling with an inability to form trusting, lasting relationships with women – given how many of his femmes turn out to be fatale – and adding baddies that turn out to have a connection to his childhood past, such as the reveal in Spectre (2015) that longtime series big bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld is Bond’s adoptive brother.

    No Time to Die, despite some criticism that it had made Bond “woke” by turning Q gay and having the 007 moniker taken up by a black woman, thus found the logical and indeed only way to level up the stakes for a hero who had already bedded 60 years’ worth of Earth’s most gorgeous women, driven the coolest cars, defused nukes, been to space, and helped defeat the Soviet empire: It made him a father. Its climactic scene sees 007 sacrificing himself for his little girl as he tells her mother over the radio, “Madeline, you have made the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Perfect, because she came from you.” Léa Seydoux’s Madeline assures him, in a stoic attempt to hide her heartbreak with flirtation, that “she does have your eyes.” Bond’s last words are “I know, I know.” Perhaps parents never really die.

    The genius of the James Bond character, and the reason it became the most iconic film franchise of all time, is that it fulfills two fantasies at once. The first is of a Britain that did not come undone after winning World War Two. The post-war Britain in which the novels appeared was still in an era of rationing, and it salved a great society’s wounded ego to imagine that her majesty’s agents were not only saving the world, but doing so while sipping Bollinger. The second is male wish-fulfillment. Put a suave man in a situation where competently applied violence is the answer, and he’ll have found his purpose – or so he imagines. Shake (not stir) these two fantasies together, and that’s why people love 007.

    No Time to Die had to deal with the baggage of 60 years of film audiences who had already seen Bond fulfill all those wishes, though. So it drew on the unfairly hated source text of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the sixth film, starring one-timer George Lazenby. In both No Time to Die and OHMSS, we see Bond undo a sinister biological-weapons plot and drive the same Aston Martin DBS to the same baleful Louis Armstrong song. We also see him break the canonical formula of self-contained stories to do some family formation, in this case getting married to Tracy Bond, who is then tragically gunned down in his arms.

    Whether or not the producers intended No Time to Die to be woke, it is a deeply conservative movie, a paean to the goodness of bourgeois values. Its message is ultimately that the best, highest calling of a man is not to be as good at seducing women as possible or at doing violence as possible, which is the thinking of a young man. No, it is to have a family, to be a husband and father, something no number of flings or amount of skill with a Walther PPKs could begin to approach. That is what gave the writers the artistic license to kill Bond at the end of No Time to Die. Our hero had finally actually, after all this time, figured out how to be a man.

  • Why woke doesn’t work

    Why woke doesn’t work

    Many conservatives will have long suspected that “woke” language – the cocktail of victimhood narratives and group identity – alienates most Americans. It is simply too grating, and it is simply too divisive. And no matter what your politics, it is almost impossible to imagine a healthy society that is built on an aggressive competition over who is the most historically aggrieved. 

    Up until now this has been mostly an intuition. But a new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) finally puts evidence on the table: that this “woke” language actively provokes real anger, defensiveness and bile in respondents. Woke language is often used as a way to browbeat ordinary people into submission, but we now have plausible grounds to conclude that it’s achieving the precise opposite. 

    Many leaders have tried solving (often very real) social problems by applying “woke” doctrines, but have usually ended up making things worse. Why? This kind of politics offers a very dubious picture of how society actually works, and an even weaker guide to what we should do about it. Peoples and nations are vast and complex, and it is incredibly difficult to make any high-level policy decisions based on simplistic evaluations of group victimhood or oppression. More than anything else, “woke” was just stupid. 

    But our research shows that there is more to this story. The survey tested the actual effect of “woke” language on Americans by drawing from public messaging put out by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The organization is one of America’s most influential liberal NGOs. It has been at the forefront of shaping how anti-Semitism is taught in schools across the US, developing a variety of educational resources like handbooks and curriculum programs.

    In an effort – no doubt well-intentioned – to fight the scourge of increasing Jew hatred, the ADL embraced the language of “woke” in their campaigns. And, generally speaking, they have increasingly adopted language that presents Jews as victims: of physical violence, of prejudice, of “silence” from neutral bystanders. Jews are framed simply as one of many oppressed group identities in America and, so the logic goes, we can fight anti-Semitism by getting people to see them in such “woke” terms. 

    The problem is that this type of rhetoric only partly stimulates feelings of solidarity, care, concern, positivity or even respect. Most strikingly, the study demonstrates that exposure to this psychological framing actually increases participants’ reported anger, defensiveness, even hostility towards Jews. It also increases something called the “hostile attribution bias” – a jargonistic way of assessing whether you interpret people’s behavior in good faith or not. 

    Paradoxically, fighting anti-Semitism using the ADL’s language can measurably increase feelings of anti-Semitism. Talking about social issues like inequality or racism in “woke” language appears to upset people because it divides, accuses and relies on a message of competition rather than unity. Conservatives have long suspected this. Now, we have some more hard evidence.

    This is not the first study indicating that “woke” messaging creates more hostility, not less. Back in November last year, the NCRI ran a similar research project after learning that an astonishing 52 percent of US professionals have to attend DEI meetings and training events at work, with the stated intention of increasing awareness of and opposition to “systemic oppression”.

    Yet, surprisingly, nobody had bothered to run the numbers before and see if this corporate training works. If they had done so, they’d see that, more often than not, the cure is worse than the disease. (And even that’s only if you actually believed that DEI was about curing anything, as opposed to, say, subsidizing a class of HR professionals and conjuring an entire micro-economy – totaling $8bn according to McKinsey – out of thin air.)

    We found that when Americans were exposed to messaging lifted directly from the work of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, as these DEI programs entail, it significantly increased their perception of racism in the workplace – even without any evidence for it whatsoever – resulting in heightened racial prejudice, intergroup hostility, suspicion and division. (The same is true for Islamophobia.) These programs also led to increased support for actual punishment against those who committed “microaggressions”, something which has caused people to lose their jobs and livelihood.

    The implications of these studies are enormous. Even anecdotally, it’s been obvious over the past few years that “woke” language alienates voters and drives social polarization away from the political center of shared values. Trump’s election was, inter alia, clearly a reaction to the increasing “wokification” of American politics and culture. And when public institutions adopt this kind of messaging, they find themselves unable to positively shape hearts and minds on social issues, no matter how noble. 

    Yet this doesn’t mean we should toss out the ambition of making society at least a little bit less crap – particularly for the long-suffering American middle classes. Most interestingly, what our study also showed is that you can reverse the negative effects of DEI training by simply adopting a language of shared humanity instead of “woke”. If you shift the framing from competition to cooperation, adopt a message of common dignity and responsibility towards each other, this new bad blood almost completely vanishes. Woke, in short, does not work. The language of shared humanity and common cause might be the secret to shoring up an increasingly faltering civilization.

  • ‘Media Literacy’ and the decline of Woke

    What is “woke”? To Jordan B. Peterson it is “postmodern neo-Marxism.” To James Lindsay it is “critical race theory” and latterly “revisionism” in general. These theories of what woke means take for granted that one of its core tenets is a denial of objective truth under the influence of what is broadly called “critical theory,” but the thinking behind contemporary wokeness falls far short of these theoretically exalted standards.

    Critical theory was a movement, primarily among academics, in the mid 20th century which had a diverse array of followers, but the common denominator was the belief that texts, whether literary works like novels, or historical documents, had no inherently “true” interpretation. What this means, to hugely simplify, is that there exist as many ways to read a story as there are readers. The critical theorists arrived at this idea by different arguments, one of the most famous is Roland Barthes’ reading of Sarrasine, a short story by the 19th century French writer Honore de Balzac, by breaking down each sentence into a system of “signs” largely borrowed from psychoanalysis. 

    It is pretty obvious, if you are an activist interested in spreading your ideology to as many different media as possible, that an idea which lets you disregard the intention of the original author would be appealing. When critical theory crossed the Atlantic (and hopped across the Channel), it rapidly lost its brooding, Nouveau Roman character and found its utility in readings which emphasized the implicit racial, sexual and gendered meanings of texts. This was not always the case: one of the foremost critical theorists, Paul de Man, was a collaborationist writer in Nazi-occupied Belgium. De Man conceived of his own brand of critical theory as a means of pre-empting, and expurgating, any intrusion of “the social” into literature by claiming that any such reading was arbitrary. 

    However, today, the left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism present in retro-eighties critical theory. The phrase of the day is “media literacy,” a meme implying that there is an objectively “correct” way to read texts, or watch movies, and a set of compulsory moral judgments about art to be derived from it. Go on Google Trends and you’ll see searches for “media literacy” jump in the 2022-23 mid-Biden era, when woke influencers like Hasan Piker and @woke_karen on TikTok began using the term. Search the tweets of a typical woke kingpin like evan loves worf or Will Stancil on X and you will see “media literacy” breathlessly invoked as if it were the God of a newly imported cult. The term is ubiquitous in the subreddits associated with these communities.

    Media literacy does not, like the critical theorists, try to read texts through complex philosophical lenses like Marxism, let alone deconstruct them. It exists at the intersection of the vast online world we call “fandom” – in which very basic storytelling techniques, tropes and characterization are explained in less rigorous terms for the sake of entertainment – and the lowest levels of woke academia (“Why The Matrix is about Late Capitalism”). If critical theory proclaimed the death of the author, media literacy is the deification of fandom. What other people say about the work is all that matters to understanding it.

    The left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism

    What does this look like in practice? A frequent subject of the media literacy polemic is the film Starship Troopers, beloved of many online right-wingers because it shows a militarised, quasi-fascist society battling hostile aliens. An Adorno, a Derrida or a Foucault would, albeit badly, try to analyze what this says about fascists. The contemporary woke leftist can only point to the dismal intention of the creators for this to be a “satire”. This is what the term means 90 percent of the time it is used: a generic right-winger, somewhere, likes a piece of art but rejects the moral assumptions of the fandom or the creator. Thus, the right-winger is somehow “illiterate” because… because… they just are. Much like, I suppose, anyone who reads The Tempest, and finds the portrayal of the colonized subject Caliban more sympathetic than Prospero, “doesn’t understand” Shakespeare. 

    An uncontroversial standard of “good” art is that it should stand on its own terms and be judged on qualities inherent in the work – in common parlance “show, don’t tell.” The judgment of fandom websites and creators is an example of telling and not showing. The fact that a creator wills something to be a satire does not make it satirical. Satire, for example, requires at least some people to find it funny; the 2008 comic strip PowerUp Comics is intended to be a “satire” of George W. Bush but does not work because it is so obvious. Contrary to the creators’ intention, the comic today is enjoyed ironically as an example of on-the-nose moralizing. 

    Similarly, simply declaring that you find your creations immoral does not mean people with different moral views are “misunderstanding” the work. When right-wingers decide that they support the supposedly parodic protagonists of Starship Troopers, Watchmen and Warhammer 40k they are not failing to understand something about the show. Rather, they are rejecting socially mediated signifiers to liberate the pure text. They are, in short, ideal postmodern readers.

    Modern wokes remind me of the career of an earlier French literary critic, Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve thought that he was woke. He was steeped in Eclecticism, a minor philosophical movement which took inspiration from Hegel. But Sainte-Beuve got it wrong. He thought that what this meant was that writers could only be understood by their biographies, which inevitably included a great deal of moral commentary on the value of the lives in question. He rapidly became a catchphrase of ignominy among 19th century cognoscenti. Nietzsche called him an “ass” and Marcel Proust devoted an essay to making fun of him, because his oeuvre rapidly degenerated into a series of tabloid kiss-and-tell stories about whether such-and-such writer was a good husband. 

    So, too, have many educated in the tradition of critical theory ended up recapitulating a basically Victorian literalism in how they see art: art is good if it is produced by good people, if it carries sentimental value and if it edifies society. Criticism is good if it comprehends the moral intention of a morally virtuous creator. This is not just bad news for the arts (left-wing people are and will remain dominant in culture for at least another generation) but bad news for the left. As we see Trump’s Department of Homeland Security making repatriation the subject of jokes, it is not that the right “doesn’t understand” some facet of left-wing morality – they actively reject it. If the left wants to put up a persuasive counterargument, it must be prepared to face moral differences head on, rather than outsource their critical faculties to consensus.

  • After Charlie Kirk, Trump should crack down on campus ‘safetyism’

    An assassin who wants to silence a debate in America’s colleges can’t do it just by killing Charlie Kirk. Although Kirk was an exceptionally effective campus speaker – maybe the most effective since William F. Buckley Jr. in his heyday – he was far from alone in voicing conservative ideas in academic settings where they are generally unwelcome and at times violently opposed. There are others who will pick up Kirk’s microphone. But Kirk’s murderer has allies who can do systematically what the gunman could only do once. His allies in silencing voices like Charlie Kirk’s are university administrators who respond to violence by imposing stifling security costs on the targets of violence and intimidation.

    America’s colleges and universities too often give militants a veto over campus speech. This was true long before Kirk’s murder. A few years ago students at a small Catholic college in Texas invited me to speak on their campus. I’m not exactly a well-known firebrand likely to draw an enraged mob anywhere. But this Texas Catholic college told the students they couldn’t host a conservative speaker without security insurance that they couldn’t afford. This wasn’t a response to any threat: it was a simple act of censorship by administrators too craven to ban a speaker forthrightly. They used safetyism as a convenient excuse.

    My experience was not unique – colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence. Instead of imposing the costs of violence on those who threaten violence, institutions of higher education in our country impose those costs on those who are threatened. They impose those prohibitive costs not only on high-profile targets like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Riley Gaines and Andy Ngo, but also on speakers who aren’t targets at all. This is not a good-faith attempt to prevent violence; it’s a bad-faith strategy for stifling campus debate. Can you imagine a speaker invited to express views approved by a college administration being stuck with the bill for his or her security?

    Most left-wing violence on campuses is far from murderous – it more often takes the form of rowdy mobs shouting down or attempting to intimidate speakers. These mobs do not exist because the violent left is unstoppably powerful on the nation’s campuses; they exist because the administrators in charge of campuses are unwilling to enforce basic rules on unruly children. The intimidation is opportunistic. Cowardice, more than adolescent extremism, is the root of the problem. If administrators really do fear that any conservative speaker will be met with rioting and violence, they have obviously already failed in their duty to maintain a safe environment for their students – they failed by allowing lunatics to amass enough power they could silence their critics without even having to riot.

    Colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence

    Some administrators are timid; more are not so much frightened of violence as frightened of having to take a side between freedom and leftism – they pride themselves on their progressive attitudes, yet they can’t admit that the price of those attitudes is deference to censorious radicals. Left-wing bullying is carried out in the name of anti-bullying; it’s cruelty masquerading as compassion. Calls to censor Charlie Kirk were typically framed as if doing so was necessary to protect transsexuals, racial minorities and “democracy” itself. (The scare quotes are appropriate since actual democracy without free speech is well-nigh impossible.) Aggression against conservatives – who are a minority on almost all campuses – gets whitewashed as altruism. Left-liberal administrators who like to imagine themselves as broadly in favor of free speech get their principles put to the test when anyone farther to the left claims that Charlie Kirk or some other conservative is really a purveyor of “hate speech” and indeed that their speech is actually “violence.” With administrators who believe in “trigger warnings,” speech can be killed without an assassin’s having to pull the trigger.

    If there is a legitimate reason to charge security or insurance fees, the university, whether it’s a state school or a private institution that receives any taxpayer dollars, must bear the cost. Colleges that are fully privately funded can do as they wish, but if an institution receives public money, it cannot allow only viewpoints that are aligned with the left to have representation. Charlie Kirk’s murder should spur the Trump administration to compel institutions of higher education to live up to their duty to the public and to their own students. And if hosting speakers whose lives may really be in danger seems costly, universities should cut the problem off at the source by making their campuses safe for civil discourse in the first place. The Trump administration has so far made Israel and anti-Semitism the focus of its attempts to change the culture of higher education, with policies that in some cases actually harm free speech. So far as any evidence suggests, Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed for talking about the Middle East. His assassination is about America’s freedom of political speech at home, in the very institutions that are meant to be most dedicated to free inquiry. Sly techniques of censorship, such as pricing conservative speech out of campus discourse, cannot be tolerated.

    There’s danger enough in the risk of further self-censorship on the part of conservatives. The left – in the form of both aggressive activists and pusillanimous administrators – doesn’t need to intimidate the right with violence when it can do so effectively by simply imposing costs, from the cost of providing security for a speaker to the costs to one’s career prospects of being known as a conservative or Trump voter. Make it more expensive to be a campus conservative, at every point along the line, and there’s no need for overt censorship. The economic incentives will do the ideological commissar’s work for him. The safetyists understand this, while conservatives who sometimes have a genuine concern for their own safety increasingly internalize the left’s mentality along with its threats. The left largely exists to make everyone feel vulnerable and victimized, in need of protection not just by metal detectors but by censorship and supervision. The more the right feels besieged and beleaguered, forced to pay for its own basic freedoms, the more it will willingly surrender to the left’s fearful way of thinking and living. Charlie Kirk didn’t die for that – he died, as he lived, to defy it.

  • The death throes of free speech in Britain – and its opponents

    Free speech, the very bedrock of constitutional democracy, is writhing on its deathbed in England. It will take a mass movement to restore its vitality. Fortunately, one can see that movement emerging among a once-free people, tired of government suppression.

    The dire state of British liberties was outlined Wednesday in Congressional testimony by British MP, Nigel Farage, who testified before the US House Judiciary Committee. He was backed by the committee’s Republican members and attacked, alas, by Democrats. 

    Powerful as his testimony was, it was overshadowed by an even more striking event: a phalanx of armed police arriving at Heathrow airport to arrest an Irish comedian for a tweet he posted in Arizona. His crime: he made fun of transgender people. Toss him in the dungeon.

    This is the same law enforcement, mind you, that ignored decades of child rape and “grooming” by Pakistani Muslims in northern England. 

    How is the lax treatment of grooming gangs connected to the harsh treatment of tweeting? By more than the lunacy and hypocrisy. The deeper connection is that successive Labour and Conservative governments have considered it more important to “protect” minority groups against bad words and criminal investigations than to protect innocent children or ensure free speech and open inquiry. “Social justice,” don’t you know?

    The collapse of free speech, under the repressive hand of British government, is deeply linked to the massive influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who have little interest in adapting to English laws and customs and every interest in protecting the customs of their native lands. They have consistently refused to adopt the basic ideals of tolerance and forbearance that are fundamental to any functioning multicultural democracies.

    Instead of pushing back against this illiberal tide – an essential task if liberal democracy is to survive – political leaders in the UK and most of Western Europe have appeased it. Just as bad, they have suppressed any opposition.

    The common theme among these feckless leaders is their lack of confidence in their own cultural traditions and historic national achievements. They have refused to stand up for those basic values and traditions in the face of ferocious, illiberal assaults, stemming mainly from these hostile immigrant communities, often supported by progressive elites, who share the leaders’ lack of cultural self-confidence. Instead of resisting these illiberal assaults, halting immigration, and limiting the lifelong provision of free housing and income, those leaders have acceded to these demands and smacked down anyone who says different. The price has been enormous.

    How bad is it? Bad enough that people are now being arrested in England and Scotland for putting up flags or wearing them on their clothes. Waving the national flag is somehow considered an insult to immigrants. This show of patriotism must be stopped and the miscreants arrested.

    These arrests do more than crush free speech. They also deter free assembly, or at least they are intended to do so, if that assembly opposes government policy. But the right to assemble peacefully to protest government policy is the very essence of a functioning democracy.

    The connection between speech and assembly is often overlooked, but it is crucially important. It is free assembly – mass crowds, mobilized around political demands – that threaten governments. That is why the two rights, speech and assembly, are paired in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. That is why their absence in English law is so devastating. Their absence gives free rein to a repressive government. That is exactly what is happening now in England and Scotland.

    The right to speak openly and assemble freely, allow citizens to voice their opinions, demonstrate the intensity of those views, protest some government policies and advocate others, and express those opinions without seeking permission from the very government they may be contesting.

    The British, who have no written constitution or bill of rights, give no such protections to their citizens, either in theory or in practice. That is why today’s repressive governments can treat citizens like subjects, to be suppressed or arrested when they say something objectionable to those in power. What is objectionable? We in power will decide. Not you.

    It is a special tragedy to see this repression take place in England, the fountainhead of free speech and assembly in western civilization. The theory was best stated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), with roots that run back two centuries to John Locke and still further to the Glorious Revolution and Magna Carta. Mill’s vital points are that ideas need to withstand the test of counter-arguments and best evidence, that multiple views need to be heard and tested, and that citizens can then reach their own, informed judgments.

    The wisdom of Mill’s analysis was not limited to his book or the scholarly discourse it prompted. It was already embedded in Parliamentary debate, public speeches, and the free publication of newspapers and magazines.

    This open discourse is a magnificent achievement and a historically rare one. Few countries have ever permitted it, and it is in jeopardy now in the very birthplace of these freedoms, trampled by ignorant and malign political leaders. It’s easy to see why those in power don’t want to hear opposing voices or critical tweets. They don’t say so plainly, of course. They prefer to wrap themselves in the high-flying moral language of “social justice.” Whatever the justification, they use the full repressive weight of state power to smash alternative views. They alone decide which views are permissible.

    They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this power grab – this blatant suppression of basic democratic rights. Politicians, bureaucrats, and police shouldn’t decide what can be said and what must be silenced. Not in a free country. They shouldn’t be allowed to turn the birthplace of liberty into its charnel house.

  • Father Ted and Havel’s Greengrocer

    A softer version of totalitarianism has been gnawing its way through the British body politic like a cancer for many years now. With the Graham Linehan (creator of the classic sitcom Father Ted) arrest at London’s Heathrow Airport this week, it seems to have metastasized into something entirely malignant. If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be?

    A decade ago, living in the US at the dawn of the Great Awokening, I began hearing from older people who had fled to America from the Soviet bloc, seeking freedom. They were telling me that the things they were starting to see in their adopted country reminded them of what they had left behind. 

    They spoke of people having to watch their words for fear that they would step on an invisible land mine, and put their jobs and businesses at risk. They talked about the abandonment of classical liberal values, and the adoption of “social justice” norms that judged people based on group identity. They witnessed ideological mobs intimidating people into silence, and institutional elites changing language to fit a utopian leftist paradigm.

    I found this hard to grasp at first. If this was totalitarianism, where were the gulags? Where was Big Brother? This was precisely the problem, I came to understand. The fact that relative to life in the Soviet bloc, the West remained free and prosperous helped conceal the totalitarian threat. That, and the fact that this new ideology presented itself in largely therapeutic terms: as a program not only for achieving social justice, but of easing the burden of groups suffering the pain of marginalization.

    Yet the more conversations I had with these people, the more I experienced their anger at the inability of Americans to comprehend what was happening. Said one professor in the Midwest, “I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated.”

    Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift even further back in time: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

    “I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

    My conceptual breakthrough happened when I realized that growing up during the Cold War, I had come to imagine totalitarianism according to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, the emerging therapeutic totalitarianism in the West today is far more like Aldous Huxley’s model in Brave New World. The outcome is the same: the gradual erosion of liberty and individuality, and the seizing of power by ideological fanatics who asserted the power to alter reality. By the time the book I wrote about this phenomenon, Live Not By Lies, was published in 2020, wokeness had conquered US institutions, and one could be sent to the unemployment line for refusing, say, to agree that men could be women. 

    For all the madness that ensued, no American had to fear arrest for stating anti-woke opinions, because we have a constitutional right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is why the fate of Graham Linehan, like the fate of so many lesser known UK dissidents from the ruling ideology, could not happen in America. But it can happen in Britain, and is happening. The spectacle of English patriots being taken into custody for flying the Union Jack, on grounds that it might cause distress to foreigners, many of whom came into the country illegally, reveals the absolute state of the tyranny now reigning in once-free Britain.

    Yet if the Soviet bloc emigres reveal to us the truth of what was and is overtaking the West, those who stayed behind tell us how to resist and overcome it. In researching Live Not By Lies – the title is taken from a Solzhenitsyn communique to his Soviet followers, on the eve of his exile – I traveled through the former communist lands to ask ex-dissidents for their advice.

    The core lesson: you must be willing to suffer for the sake of the truth. Those in power count on a population cowed by fear. Nearly everyone is willing to live under the yoke of ideological lies, because they are understandably afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t. Those brave souls who dare to tell the truth, and who are willing to suffer for it, hold the key to society’s liberation.

    Czech dissident leader Vaclav Havel explained why in his famous Parable of the Greengrocer, from his 1977 book-length essay, The Power Of The Powerless. Imagine, he said, a simple greengrocer in a communist city, in whose shop window hangs a sign saying, “Workers Of The World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it, nor do any of the other shopkeepers who display the same sign. They do it out of fearful conformity.

    One day, the shopkeeper decides he won’t lie anymore. He removes the sign. What happens next? He is arrested. The state confiscates his business. He must endure punishment, including loss of privileges, and becoming a social pariah to his former friends. He pays a significant price.

    But what does he gain? For one, he gains self-respect, for having defending his own integrity. For another, he demonstrates to society that it is possible to live in truth, provided you are willing to suffer for it. If enough people within that oppressed society take courage from his example, and accept the challenge of suffering for truth, then eventually the entire system built on lies will crumble.

    Solzhenitsyn said something similar in his 1974 “Live Not By Lies” message. It is not possible to go to Red Square and shout, “Down with communism!” he said. But that does not mean ordinary people are without means of resistance. He recommended practical everyday means of refusing to cooperate with the official lies. 

    “Our way must be: never knowingly support lies!” he wrote. You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

    Graham Linehan is a comedian and actor, but he is also Havel’s Greengrocer. So is J.K. Rowling – and though it must be conceded that it’s easier to live not by lies if you are sitting on a mountain of cash from book sales, she has nevertheless become a total pariah to many of her peers and admirers, because she would not bow her head to the misogynistic lies of gender ideology.

    The British people are being put through an extraordinary test now by their government, their media, and all the institutions of the ruling class. They are being forced to endure humiliation, criminality, displacement, and the virtual expropriation of their land, with its ancient liberties, by an ideologically captured ruling class. 

    Earlier this year, I was in London for a screening of the documentary film series Angel Studios made from Live Not By Lies. I had seen the film many times before, but watching it in the British capital, it struck me how many of the people in the documentary are British people, talking about actual existing tyranny in Britain today. 

    They are people like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the Christian pro-life campaigner shown on camera being arrested for praying inside her head near an abortion clinic. Vaughan-Spruce is also Havel’s Greengrocer – a brave person who possessed enough self-respect and love of truth to suffer arrest, multiple times, for thoughtcrime.

    The older men and women of Eastern Europe know what the British are suffering. The fact that British totalitarianism is softer than its Soviet antecedent makes it no less totalitarian in spirit. A former Soviet citizen now living in America told me what is coming for us if we don’t derail the totalitarian train now.

    “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow,” she warned. “You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works.”

    Then as now, there remains only one sure antidote to it: ordinary citizens realizing that enough is enough, and at personal risk to themselves, choosing to live not by lies. This is the hope that Solzhenitsyn offered to his people in 1974 – and the challenge.

  • Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

    Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

    Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”  

    Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states. 

    Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.” 

    The institution is named for the British chemist James Smithson, whose fortune was bequeathed to the United States in order “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men. Back then money made a physical impression. President Andrew Jackson deputed the diplomat Richard Rush to retrieve the pelf, which he did in 1838: 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns, worth about $500,000 at the time – $15 million today.

    Back then the phrase “useful knowledge” was touted everything. That’s what the Smithsonian was created to promote. That was then. “In recent years,” as Trump notes, the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” 

    Trump mentions an exhibition called The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture which purports to show how “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” What it really does is undermine any sense of patriotism and shared American identity.  

    Executive orders are one thing. Enacting or enforcing them is something else. Donald Trump understands this. Thus it is that his order to abolish the racist practice of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” industry was followed up by fines of hundreds of millions at Columbia, Harvard and many other institutions that continued the practice overtly or by stealth in defiance of the law. 

    And thus it is that Trump’s order to restore “truth and sanity” to the institutions charged with preserving and disseminating American history has just been given teeth. Yesterday, Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian, received a letter whose subject line reads “Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials.” Signed by Lindsey Halligan, Special Assistant to the President, Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the letter announces a “comprehensive internal review” of the Smithsonian, its exhibitions and curatorial procedures. “This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” 

    How will that happen? Well, the administration will review “exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.” It will interview curatorial staff “to better understand the selection process, exhibition approval workflows, and any frameworks currently guiding exhibition content.” One major focus will be on how the Smithsonian plans to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary next year. Out will go the divisive anti-American racialist rhetoric that has disfigured so much official cultural patronage in recent years. In will come affirmative exhibitions that acknowledge America’s many achievements and that emphasize the traditions and historical realities that unite us.

    What is happening, and what is going to happen, at the Smithsonian museums may seem like a footnote to the larger Trump agenda of “Making America Great Again.” In fact, it stands at the center of that project. Donald Trump understands something that the left has grasped at least since the 1960s but that conservatives have grasped dimly if at all. If you want to restore society, you must commandeer the institutions that represent elite culture. Over the last several decades, those institutions have gradually become captive of a woke ideology that denigrates America while simultaneously celebrating the entire radical menu of racialist redress, sexual exoticism and political intransigence.  

    Back in January, I wrote an column claiming that Donald Trump was “a great man of history.” That occasioned a fair amount of ridicule. But as the months pass and Trump moves from one triumph to the next, doing beneficent things that no previous president would have thought possible, my description seems more and more apt. Trump is not only making Americans safer and more prosperous. He is also moving on several fronts to give them back their cultural and educational institutions. His actions at the Smithsonian are the tip of that liberating spear.

  • Is Hollywood’s woke tide finally turning?

    On reading that Dean Cain (the actor who played the television Superman) had become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, I felt a thrill of insurrection – so hot on the heels of the revelation that naughty Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican! I imagined Rosie O’Donnell crying into her morning decaf, Lizzo swearing at her gender-fluid cat, Ellen DeGeneres taking it out on the help from sheer liberal frustration. Because celebrities aren’t allowed to be right-wing (‘right-wing’ now being dunce-speak for anyone against limitless illegal immigration and transvestite men colonizing women’s spaces.)

    Undaunted, Cain told Fox News:

    “I’m actually a reserve police officer… so now I’ve spoken with some officials over at ICE, and I will be sworn in as an ICE agent, ASAP. This country was built on patriots stepping up, whether it was popular or not, and doing the right thing. I truly believe this is the right thing. We have a broken immigration system. Congress needs to fix it, but in the interim, President Trump ran on this. He is delivering on this. This is what people voted for. It’s what I voted for and he’s going to see it through, and I’ll do my part and help make sure it happens.”

    Cain has previous on stepping up, whether popular or not. I think we can safely say that being a “liberal” (a liberal in the modern sense, being a censorious nag, rather than the old sense, one who is inclined to live and let live) has been for a long time the only political stance acceptable in show business and entertainment, especially in Hollywood. Often, especially when used by men, this is merely a “wokescreen” – think of Harvey Weinstein, of whom Rebecca Corbett (the journalist who oversaw the New York Times investigations into allegations of rape and sexual abuse by Weinstein) said in the 2020 Reuters Memorial Lecture:

    “At the beginning of the Weinstein investigation, we had no idea whether the producer had done anything wrong. He cast himself as a champion of actresses, a Democratic Party fundraiser, a feminist who joined marches – a man considered reliable enough that Barack Obama’s older daughter had worked as a summer intern at his studio.“

    Dean Cain needs no wokescreen from behind which to conduct evil deeds and is therefore refreshingly honest. He recently came out as a Hollywood outsider for mocking the latest Superman film as “woke” after director James Gunn described the character as an immigrant, telling TMZ: “How woke is Hollywood going to make this character? We know Superman is an immigrant – he’s a freaking alien… the ‘American way’ is immigrant-friendly, tremendously immigrant-friendly. But there are rules… there have to be limits, because we can’t have everybody in the United States.”

    Cain is an interesting man. He’s partly of Japanese descent, a Democratic voter as a youngster, teenage boyfriend of Brooke Shields when they were at university, dater of Playmates and swimsuit models, he also trolled Dylan Mulvaney in a spectacular fashion when he commented on a video of Mulvaney and another cross-dresser, saying “Neither of you are girls.”  “You were never Superman either,” snarked an “ally”. “Correct. I pretended,” Cain replied.

    In 2021 he gave a sparky interview after DC Comics had Superman’s son come out as a bisexual:

    “I say they’re bandwagoning… Robin, of Batman & Robin, just came out as bi or gay recently. And honestly, who’s really shocked about that one? The new Captain America is gay. My daughter in Supergirl where I played the father, she was gay… So I don’t think it’s bold or brave or some crazy new direction. If they had done this 20 years ago, perhaps that would have been bold and brave. Brave would be having him fighting for the rights of gay people in Iran, where they’ll throw you off a building for the offense of being gay… They’re talking about him fighting real-world problems like climate change, the deportation of refugees and he’ll be dating a “hacktivist”, whatever a “hacktivist” is… Why don’t they have him fight the injustices that created the refugees whose deportation he’s protesting? That would be brave.“

    Cain has a hinterland, it’s fair to say. What he doesn’t have – unlike most celebrities, are “luxury beliefs,” the phrase created by Rob Henderson as “ideas held by privileged people that make them look good but actually harm the marginalized.” These can be found in many professions, but it’s probably when they’re propagated by the massively-privileged showbiz “community” that they irritate most, preaching defunding of the police from their privately-policed gated communities.

    Regrettably, the stars who aren’t left-wing these days are a mixed bag. I was cheered to hear that we have Kelsey Grammar, Chris Pratt, James Woods, Alice Cooper, Gary Sinise (who, in parts both poignant and amusing, started up Friends of Abe, a support group for Hollywood Republicans) and the iconic ex-Runaways singer Cherie Currie. I am less happy with Mel Gibson, Kid Rock and Vince Vaughn. 

    But does which way entertainers swing politically really matter anymore? The last American election indicated not. As I wrote in May of the actor James Corden’s political ambitions in Britain, “How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements/involvements not work, but have an actual repelling effect? Beyonce and ‘The Boss’ sure helped cook Kamala’s goose; when the rich and famous swank around telling hoi polloi who to vote for, the masses have a habit of doing exactly the opposite.”

    When that wily old fox the tax-avoiding Mick Jagger allegedly said “My heart is Labour but my money is Conservative” he was being honest in a way most pop stars (see the financial behavior of U2) would never dare to, lest their fans turn on them. Entertainers follow the path they do because they want attention and they want to be rich. If they really cared about making things better for people, they’d have trained to become nurses or firefighters.

    Still, celebrity Democrats could learn a lesson from Republicans like Cain and Sweeney, who don’t see the non-famous as Deplorables put on earth to be preached at.

  • Why the world is obsessed with white women

    Why the world is obsessed with white women

    Until a couple of weeks ago, the clothing company American Eagle was mainly known as a kind of low-rent Levi’s. Founded in 1977, headquartered in Pennsylvania, the firm – specializing in denim, casual wear and kids’ clothes – has quietly expanded into Europe, and beyond, without ever generating much excitement. Let alone a worldwide culture war.

    All that changed in July, when the company launched a new ad campaign featuring the petite, sassy, curvaceously ubiquitous actress Sydney Sweeney – very much This Year’s Blonde – draping her desirable shape in the company’s clothes. Several ads have been made; they all feature variations on the line “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” A clear pun on genes.

    The result, whether intended or not, has been online uproar. Entire data centers have been devoted to churning out TikTok reels and YouTube mewls where women – and it is nearly all women – complain about the ad blitz, denouncing its connotations of white supremacy, of eugenics, of Nazi racist hierarchy – and of enforcing 19th-century imperialist ideals of European beauty. All the more since Sweeney has been identified as a registered Republican in Florida. Some of the women complaining are white liberals, many are Asian or black (often in tears of fury or distress).

    Sydney Sweeney, of course, is notably young, blonde, blue eyed – and white.

    And there, I fancy, is the rub. What we are witnessing is not peculiarly or entirely a modern kulturkampf against renewed colonialist discourse. What we are witnessing is, as well, the age-old and rather awkward fact that pale/white women are perceived by almost all humanity as more desirable, and have been for all of recorded history. And this evokes – understandably – resentment, envy, anger, even rage, and now tearful TikToks, in others.

    Don’t believe me? Think I’m trolling? Let me run you, like a blonde girl dancing through harvest corn in a retro cereal ad, by the plentiful evidence.

    As long ago as 3000 BC Egyptian art shows high class women (or deities) as being desirably paler than males. This can be found on tiny faience figurines and enormous funereal paintings, and it persists for 30 centuries. Egyptian love poems also praise the pale skin of mortal sweethearts – the earliest written evidence for the preference. Again, this poetic trope lasted for millennia.

    Moving on to Greece and Rome, we find the same pattern. Upperclass Greek women were so keen to enhance their whiteness they used toxic white lead as face paint (a phenomenon that recurs throughout history – think of England’s white virgin Queen, Gloriana).

    The concept – white women best – was amplified in Imperial Rome. The poet Ovid explicitly mentions it in his work Medicamina Faciei Femineae. Like the Greeks (and so many others) high-status Roman women used dangerous cosmetics – cerussa – to preserve the wanted pallor. Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk to accentuate the milkiness of her skin.

    Nor is this exclusively a European and Middle Eastern phenomenon. In Ancient Han and Tang China, the preference for white-skinned women was deeply ingrained. The legendary beauty Wang Zhaojun was famed for her “pale skin.” Chinese women even drank “pearl powder” to achieve a pearly whiteness.

    Further east, in Heian Japan, the yearning for whiteness was easily as marked, with porcelain pale skin seen as the acme of loveliness (think of white-painted geishas, even today). An enduring Japanese proverb says “white skin covers the seven flaws” implying that white skin is such an erotic prize, it can compensate for other physical or social disadvantages.

    One of the most notable examples of this sociocultural phenomenon can be found – perhaps ironically – in Islam. Many know that dead jihadi warriors are promised “72 virgins in paradise,” but fewer realize that the Quran and various hadiths promise, overtly, that these wonderful virgins will be white: fragrant “houris” with skin so translucent you can “see the marrow in the bones.”

    This urgent preference for white-skinned women runs throughout Islamic history. Early Islamic warriors were fired up for battle against Byzantium with the promise of “the white girls” they would find as booty within Byzantine cities. Over following centuries Muslim emirates, kingdoms and empires made plain their wants via the slave trade, where white women – especially blondes – fetched far higher prices in the slave markets of Constantinople.

    Some historians have argued that the southwards Viking slave trade through Russia existed primarily to sate this imperious Muslim hunger for white-skinned blue-eyed blondes, fetched from the British Isles, northern Europe and Slavic countries. Circassian girls from the Caucasus mountains – famed for their soulful whiteness – were exported throughout the Islamic world, and this trade continued into the early 20th century.

    The case is made, but not explained. Why has much of the world desired paler, whiter women? The obvious answer is that, through most of history, darker skin has denoted outdoor toil, farm work, poverty. The ability to avoid this and stay indoors, or under a parasol, soon became associated with high status and elite women, and thus a sun-less pallor became a near-universal preference.

    There are also some highly contentious evolutionary explanations. Women of all ancestries tend to be paler than men, paleness therefore equals femininity, ergo “the more paleness the better.” There is also some evidence that female skin darkens as women age, so whiteness or paleness perhaps equates to youth, fertility, nubility. And desirability.

    None of this denies that European colonizers – in the 19th century – imposed grotesque, racist European ideals of beauty across the world. Nor does this deny the real harm that rigid beauty standards can inflict. When young women of color grow up seeing only pale-skinned models celebrated in media, when skin-lightening creams cause genuine physical damage across Africa and Asia – these things are immoral or unjust. But the truth is, “white woman equals beautiful woman” is a concept so deeply rooted in human culture, right back to the Sumerians, it is probably ineradicable.

    Will any of this matter to Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle? Maybe they will be intrigued that their ad campaign is perpetuating a stereotype that dates back to an early Egyptian poet near Luxor, who praised his lover’s “brilliantly white, shining skin.” They will probably be more excited by the fact that, as I write, American Eagle’s stock price has risen 10 percent.

  • Trump eulogizes Woke on Truth Social

    ​​President Trump announced a major vibe shift on Truth Social today, declaring that he, like any other sane red-white-and-blue blooded American, finds Sydney Sweeney sexy, especially because she toes the party line. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there,” he posted. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em, Sydney!” Why Trump put “flying off the shelves” is a question only for advanced semioticians, but the White House’s stance is clear on this cultural hot point: Sydney Sweeney good, left-wing “Nazi” denunciations of Sydney Sweeney bad. 

    But Trump wasn’t done. He turned his Sydney Sweeney boosterism into a full-blown cultural critique. His ever-active mind veered to the “other side of the ledger,” bringing up a disastrous multicultural, gender-fluid ad that Jaguar put out last year. “Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad.” Donald, you forgot a question mark? Also, Cockburn would argue that Jaguar already had tremendous problems as a brand before the ad, with severe quality problems and a rapidly-declining market share, and that the ad was just the capstone to a car company in death spiral. But whatever, let the President cook. 

    ​He wasn’t done yet, spending precious characters rehashing the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, in which Bud “went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company.” The most popular beer in America then became Modelo Especial, which couldn’t possibly please the Donald, and Bud has recovered somewhat from that marketing error. But Trump had an even more sacred cow to gore: America’s sweetheart, Taylor Swift:

    “Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can’t stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT,” Trump said. While it’s true that T-Swift may have over-flooded the zone with her recent tour, and it’s also true that she’s no fan of the President’s, there are countless millions of people who would disagree with her declining hotness. Sydney Sweeney has a good screen presence and amazing jeans, but Swift’s Q-rating and body of work still rank her higher on the cultural totem pole. 

    However, that’s not what The Donald is announcing with this post. He’s wrong that Taylor Swift is in decline, but he’s right in proclaiming that the woke era is over. It’s once again safe for boys to put whackoff posters of hot models on their walls and it’s time for bald black lesbian actresses with nose piercings and Nosferatu nails to stop playing Jesus Christ at the Hollywood Bowl. The theater kids lose, normal America wins. 

    “The tide has seriously turned,” the President tweeted. “Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.” We’d like to thank the President for his attention to this matter. America is back, baby! At last, a true hot girl summer has arrived.