Woke wakes up

Remember when people talked about wokeness? Remember how boring that got? Well, it turns out it’s back.

Exactly which side is winning the world’s most tiresome rhetorical battle depends on who you ask.

The right claim to be making progress in destroying, well, progress. The Australian’s Timothy Lynch writes that Donald Trump has “opened several fronts in this war on woke [and] is winning on nearly all of them”. These fronts apparently include the scourge of universities and DEI initiatives. 

Meanwhile, Joel Kotkin at Spiked points to David Ellison’s purchase of Paramount and CBS (and subsequent takeover attempt of Warner Brothers), Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter, and Trump enveloping the Kennedy Center as evidence of woke being driven from the media. 

In the opposite corner stands Zohran Mamdani, perhaps flanked by a guy called Zack Polanski (the leader of the UK Green Party, for those who have previously lived a peaceful existence of not having known that). 

This so-called war is about as self-defeating as it gets, but it does have real world cultural impacts.

A new report from Pride in Diversity (PID) found major Australian employers are toning down their DEI programs, while some have scrapped them altogether. 

Media coverage is changing - Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill recently got the SMH ‘Lunch With’ treatment, despite the company’s North West Shelf extension in Western Australia expected to emit more CO₂ equivalent a year than some countries.

And ​​David Szalay’s Flesh won the Booker Prize this year, a moment the FT claimed was the “coup de grâce” for woke’s demise.

No one would blame you for instantly switching off the moment “woke” is mentioned. It is, after all, painfully dull. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the impacts of a battle that is very clearly still raging.