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. 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. After a hundred years of continuous Unionist majorities, the prospect of an ex-paramilitary republican party coming out on top has a powerful symbolism, but perhaps no more than just symbolism. Far from gaining ground, Sinn Féin is confidently expected to lose support compared with the last Assembly elections in 2017. If it tops the poll this time it will be because the DUP has lost even more support. The latest poll puts Sinn Féin six points down on 2017 with the DUP down eight points. Jonathan explains that these kinds of shifts can happen from over-use. That once a word slips into the mainstream it can fall out of favour with the marginalised groups who originally created it, as it is co-opted and misused by other groups.

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Dr Joanna Williams is Head of Education and Culture at Policy Exchange. She is an author, commentator and the associate editor of Spiked. Remember when radio host Eammon Holmes ranted that Meghan was ‘awful, woke, weak, manipulative and spoilt’? Where does the word ‘woke’ come from? And it’s no coincidence that so many of the negative references to ‘wokeness’ are directed towards Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Joanna is the author of Consuming Higher Education Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her most recent book is Women vs Feminism (Emerald, 2017). All too often, the sense of virtue that comes from claiming to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent – and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission.

Woke has conquered the West. Identity politics, cancel culture and trans ideology reign. The values of “inclusivity” and “diversity” dominate politics, academia, the media, the judiciary, big business and the very language we speak. Censorship and public shaming are the price paid for dissent or even staying silent. Racial divisions are rehabilitated in the name of anti-racism. Women’s rights are destroyed in the name of trans rights. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical. Jonathan adds that what has happened with the meaning of ‘woke’ comes down to the original intention of the word itself.

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy

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.” We feel as if we’ve run into a mental wall, and the whole woke business is running out of road. ‘Intersectionality’ – the academic word for the game of victimhood top-trumps which has dominated our discourse for so long – seems to have metastasised so much it makes no sense to anyone. New neurodiversities, new genders, new sexual orientations, new disadvantages are spawned every day. Joanna has written numerous academic journal articles and book chapters as well as being a frequent contributor to national and international debates on education, feminism and gender politics.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. Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. We do not know what this man’s motive was – reports suggest he was staying in a homeless shelter. But given all the flak Chappelle has taken of late, it’s hard for the mind not to turn to the deeply intolerant climate we find ourselves in. The climate in which comedians like Chappelle are routinely accused of inflicting ‘violence’ upon various communities, shamed as bigots with blood on their hands, merely for telling jokes about those communities. This is one of the most dangerous ideas of our time. For if you concede that jokes are violence, then some people will start to see violence as a legitimate response to jokes.

How woke won - The Telegraph

If a Sinn Féin first minister is elected this week, very little will change in practical terms. The offices of first and deputy first minister are joint positions. In practice, they are joint prime ministers. In my time as special adviser to first minister David Trimble, all major decisions had to be jointly approved. Executive (ie, cabinet) meetings were always preceded by a last-minute pre-meeting to barter the final disagreements. With a Sinn Féin first minister and DUP deputy, the balance of power will be little different from the other way around. The values promoted by woke are today most associated with an emergent elite that is socially and geographically mobile, highly educated and social-media savvy. Woke may not be this elite’s self-descriptor of choice, but woke ideas underpin establishment decision-making and corporate mission statements. ‘Woke’ refers to the side of the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos.” (p. 15) If being ‘woke’ is a bad thing, the subtext is that speaking out about racial inequalities is a bad thing. The use of this word is a convenient veil. The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Only by exposing these structures is it possible to reveal the extent to which the ‘oppressed’ are held in subjugation by the ‘oppressors’. This is a really good book – with smart writing and (despite the polarizing seeming title) a truly inclusive (classically liberal) message about the current stage of the culture war where cultural distinctions and criticisms have gone way beyond concerns of preference and taste to moral evaluations and proclamations on the right to even exist (ie. The Cancel Culture).

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Pedants might point out that Joe Davis won the world title 15 times in a row between 1927 and 1946, but the World’s Professional Snooker Championship, as it was known from 1935, was a rinky-dink affair by modern standards, involving as few as two players battling it out while taking a break from the supposedly more serious game of billiards. Fred Davis – Joe’s brother – won a somewhat more coherent version of the competition on eight occasions after the war. John Pulman won something that was technically the world title eight times between 1957 and 1968, but the game was in the doldrums by then and these matches were little more than exhibitions, with a lone challenger allowed to take on Pulman. Three of his titles were won in a single year (1965). Now, rather than signifying an awareness of social injustice, it is used to suggest that someone is being pretentious and insincere about how much they care about an issue. Many view such blindness to antisemitism as a product of “wokeness”. But the unwoke can be equally unseeing. 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.” The presenter is so fond of using the word ‘woke’, he even argued with radio host James O’Brian about its true meaning.

Introducing… How Woke Won - spiked

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason is a timely call to arms. It is also a reminder that what critics of woke need is, firstly, courage to speak out in the certain knowledge that they are not lone voices and that woke is not popular. The second thing critics of woke need is determination to mount a rigorous and persistent defence of free speech.

If we want to discuss the rewriting of history, those words are as good a place to start as any. For this is the same Rhodes who believed that non-white areas of the world were “inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being” needing to be “brought under Anglo-Saxon influence”. It’s the “not essentially racist” colonialism about which the Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke could boast that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of Eastern peoples”. It’s the empire so modernising that during the course of British rule, India’s share of the world economy fell from 23% to less than 4%. Biggar is not against the rewriting of history. He just wants to rewrite it with his own myths. She concludes this podcast with a passionate call for free speech and democracy. Saying: “We need to challenge Woke. We need to have free speech to involve more and more people in our democratic institutions and put far more issues to the public to let them have their say rather than it being a protected realm of a small elite.” Earlier this year, former actor Laurence Fox caused a stir on Question Time by claiming to be ‘anti-woke’ and repeatedly slamming ‘wokeness’ on various media platforms. His comments won him hoards of followers on social media and he used his fleeting relevance to criticise Oscar-winning film 1917 for including Sikh soldiers. Germany/Turkey 2007, 122 mins. Director Fatih Akin. Starring Nurgul Yesilcay, Baki Davrak Tuncel Kurtiz and Hanna Schygulla.