When a wild dog is captured or cornered, it becomes even more ferocious. I have a sobering message for the people here: if you think a Tru.mp victory is going to make the enemies of civilization, the enemies of cognitive liberty, the enemies of civility itself, any kind of basic freedom, to quote the famous poem, "go quietly into this good night," I have a sobering message for you: you're a fool. You're grossly mistaken. That will not happen.

I predict that we will see a ferociousness and a tenacity and a pathological vengeance upon the people, and the cronies that we have thrown out of office, the people who have basically terrorized the United States and the west of the world for, at the very minimum of 12 years.

So, let's take a look at that landscape. What does it look like and who holds the levers of power>

Here's what we're fighting right now. In my opinion, the most important battle is in the academies. All of our academies are controlled by woke maniacs. All of them. If you look at the -- and this is not my, uh these are not my data points -- FIRE, Greg Lukianoff's organization does an excellent job of breaking down right, left, I don't think that those are very useful demarcations any longer. But just as a placeholder, we can use them. The overwhelming majority of college professors are in the far-left camp. That would be one thing, but they identitarians as many people on the panel have discussed. So, we have the control of the academies still belongs to the far-left, not merely the left. The control of teacher colleges of education, where teachers become certified, is controlled by the far-left.

The media landscape. Now the good thing about this, the positive news, and this is not a kind of pollyanna optimism, the positive news is that the media has been damaged tremendously from this. The legacy media. I wouldn't say that it's in tatters, but it's taken a blow. If you look at the number one, if you want one single indication of who will vote for whom, it boils down to a single sentence: how much do you trust legacy media? The higher the trust in legacy media, the more likely they are to vote Democrat.

So, let's take a look at the broader culture war. Four or five things pop to mind. One thing which is crazy. You have normal crazy and then you have extra-crazy. Anything with trans is extra-extra-crazy. So, for example there's someone, Eithan Haim, who blew the whistle on doctors mutilating the genitals of children in surgeries. And Dr Haim, instead of being given an award and thanked, was prosecuted by-- you're probably very familiar with this, yeah, he was prosecuted by the full extent of the law. And he told me in an interview, in no uncertain terms. If the Democrats get in, he's going to go to a Federal Penitentiary. For exposing the people who have mutilated the genitals of children, he will go to a federal penitentiary. The story is really-- I know someone will think, well there's got to be something more, but there's actually really nothing more to it than that.

Okay, so we have the trans issue, we have the quote-unquote transing children under 18. You cannot change your sex, by the way. That is, it's not even a myth. There's some great stuff if you have a chance, you want to look up the work of Mia Hughes which she's exposed something called the WPATH Files. So, the trans war, it plays large in the culture war.

Things that 20-30 years ago played in the culture War, for example abortion, plays much less in the culture war. Other things now have come to the fore: freedom of speech -- again the same ideologues, the same vicious ideologues who control the organs of the media, the organs of what ought to be independent, these are the people who will double down. These are the people who come with a ferocious tenacity, and part of the problem is that they have jobs for life. They're tenured. They're not going anywhere. And they look at the institutions to forward very specific messages to indoctrinate people. Very specific conclusions.

So, you can think about this in right or left. I personally prefer not to think about that, I prefer to think about it in terms of cognitive liberty. The people who want to tell you what to think and what to believe were just thrown out of office. And don't you for a single second think that these people are going to be happy about this and say, well you know, this is really unfortunate, this is really unfortunate we lost. These people will come back with a ferocity and a tenacity that I do not think that we have seen in a long, long time.

So, I leave you with this message. Now is not the time to rest on your laurels. Now is the time to work. Now is the time, right now, when we have momentum, using institutions like the Danube Institute, is the time to fight back and put the final nail in the coffin of the divisive madness which has thrown society off of a cliff in the last 12 years. Thank you.

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@JohnDSailer: In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, a

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In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, among other things, the use of whiteboards perpetuate whiteness in physics.

Here's what's crazy: this "research" was funded by the federal government.

But first: what's Critical Whiteness Studies?

Per the article, it's a research framework that starts with the assumption that omnipresent, invisible whiteness pervades our ordinary interactions and institutions to ensure "white dominance."

t's a bold starting point—with more than a hint of racial animosity. Applied to physics, it gets weird.

The article finds that the values of "abstractness" and "disembodiment" in physics ("physics values") reify whiteness and reflect human domination and entitlement.

It goes on to declare that, yes, even whiteboards "play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization."

They do this by "collaborat[ing] with white organizational culture" where ideas gain value "when written down."

Again, this is funded by, well, you...

Look at the National Science Foundation's recent budget requests: The federal agency has spent a quarter-billion-dollars annually on it's "Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM."

That doesn't account for projects on race and equity funded by other division.

Thus, "Observing whiteness in introductory physics" was funded by the National Science Foundation.

It was a part of a half million-dollar project unpacking which "strategies, tools, and materials" contribute to marginalization.

This sort of research is the most noticeable consequence of the NSF's now-well-documented push to fund social justice projects.

But, in my latest, I argue that it's not by any means the most consequential, and it's why I'm not at all convinced that "wokeness" has peaked.

Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? - American Compass

New developments on campus may seem promising for academic freedom, but the more meaningful problems are deeper

American Compass

It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural change, it seems that “wokeness” is in remission.

Viewed from a certain angle, even developments in higher education, despite the tumult of the last year, might serve as an example of how we’re past “peak woke.” In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suddenly banned the practice of requiring faculty job applicants to write “diversity statements,” becoming the first elite private university to ditch the policy. It turned out to be a watershed moment: Left-of-center academics applauded MIT. Bill Maher praised the decision on his late-night show. Even the Washington Post’s editorial board came out against the policy. Soon after, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed suit.

No doubt, MIT and Harvard’s decisions marked a real victory for academic freedom. The practice of requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to a progressive social cause is so obviously contrary to the spirit of intellectual freedom that even many staunch progressives have voiced their opposition to it.

But this sort of policy—much like the decision by Vanderbilt, Stanford, Penn, and many others to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality on political issues—demonstrate far less serious reform than one might expect. This is because the policies most emblematic of “wokeness” didn’t simply leap onto campus out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. They are the result of structural incentives, and those incentives have yet to change. The worst offender might be the National Science Foundation.

A recent and widely circulated report by the Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hints at a serious problem for higher education reformers: structural impediments to change, built up in recent years, will be more difficult to undo than changing a few policies. The report reviewed the number of NSF grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—finding that it spent $2.05 billion funding DEI projects over the last four years.

It’s worth noting that even by the NSF’s own accounting, the spending on social-justice-related grants is immense. In the NSF’s annual budget, the spending by the “Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM” has gradually increased, from $214 million in spending in 2021 to $267 million in the NSF’s 2025 budget request.

The report highlights how these grants span the full gamut of DEI-related projects, including one grant to a Georgia Tech professor for a project on deconstructing “racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy.” The report’s takeaway clearly frames the problem: “these kinds of projects mask Marxist social ideology as rigorous and thoughtful investigation. Many of these awards—based on subjective, qualitative research incapable of repetition—failed to follow basic tenets of the Scientific Method.”

Of course, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into universities to advance a social agenda will inevitably produce a string of consequences. It’s therefore worth expounding on the ranking member’s conclusion.     

First, and most basically, it is worth acknowledging that the National Science Foundation—and by extension, the federal government—is responsible for a substantial amount of research that typifies the absurdity of 2010s and 2020s academia. Such entries include “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” by Seattle Pacific University professor Amy Robertson—a study that “synthesize[s] literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory” to “identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”

Robertson goes so far as to assert that whiteboards have perpetuated racism in the physics classroom: “Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

“Observing whiteness in introductory physics” could be mistaken for Sokal-style parody, but for Robertson, it serves as evidence of career success. As the article notes, the research was funded by the NSF, specifically as a part of a half-million-dollar project on “Centrality and Marginalization in Undergraduate Physics Teaching.”

When grantmakers flood academia with research dollars pointed at certain conclusions, they eventually create the illusion of consensus, irrespective of evidence. A 2020 paper purported to find that black newborn mortality is higher when the infants are cared for by white doctors. The paper has now been widely debunked, yet the conclusion still made its way into Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Even a single paper can shape a politically useful narrative; a steady flow of tendentious research can have a much greater effect.

Second, taking one step back, this type of funding shapes a wide array of downstream incentives at universities. For many in the sciences, the NSF is a career-maker that just can’t be ignored. As I’ve argued before, when a key source of cash and prestige declares a priority, everyone down the funding food chain—from graduate students to scientists to administrators—will inevitably adapt.

To give just one example of how this plays out: by NSF’s own account, the CAREER award is the agency’s most prestigious source of funding for early career scientists. As a further honor, the NSF nominated the “most meritorious” CAREER recipients or the “Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers” (PECASE). But, remarkably, one of the three criteria for selecting PECASE awardees is a “commitment to STEM equity, diversity, accessibility, and/or inclusion.”

The effect of this sort of mechanism goes far beyond politicized or low-quality research. It creates an incentive to act and speak a certain way. For young scientists, the value of “getting with the program”—that is, at the very least, getting behind race conscious policies—is too high to ignore. And of course, since the NSF openly funds this priority to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not just early career scientists who inevitably find themselves weighing the costs and benefits of a certain brand of social justice language.

Third, and most relevant to the pedantic “peak woke” debate: the funding ensures that universities will maintain the NSF’s race-conscious priorities in ways that are hard to roll back.

Last month, the New York Times ran an expose of the sprawling inclusion bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. The article notes how the university evaluates its job candidate diversity statements for their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” As it turns out, the University of Michigan’s hiring protocols—which encourage search committees to heavily weigh diversity statements—have been adopted across the country. This is thanks in no small part to the NSF.

The University of Michigan was one of the first recipients of the NSF ADVANCE award, which funds university offices focused on recruiting women and minorities in STEM. Michigan’s ADVANCE office—which has remained even after its funding expired—produced a hiring framework, “Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence,” or “STRIDE,” that heavily emphasizes DEI. The University of Louisville, Northeastern University, and Rutgers are among those that have adopted the STRIDE framework, through the work of their own NSF funded ADVANCE offices. At Rutgers, the diversity statement rubric rewards faculty who display their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities,” a rubric developed with the University of Michigan STRIDE committee.

Low-quality research propped up by excessive cash will end when the funding dries up. But institutional policies, once adopted, can endure. This is the real lesson of the NSF’s decades-long foray into social justice funding.

In fact, mandatory diversity statements, a policy increasingly unpopular amongst even several prominent staunch progressive, emerged as a “best practice” through programs directly funded by the NSF.

In 2013, faculty throughout the University of California System convened to discuss how to require and evaluate contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty selection—a convening funded by the NSF ADVANCE program. The result of the discussion was a rubric that evaluated such contributions in three key areas: their awareness of “inequities,” their track records of “removing barriers,” and their future plans for promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives.

This is the prototype for the now notorious rubric used at UC Berkeley, which calls for penalizing faculty who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” Versions of this rubric—brought to you in part by, well, you, the American taxpayer—have ended up in the hands of faculty search committees from South Carolina to Texas to Ohio.

These cases make two takeaways inescapable.

First, in assessing the power of identity politics, race-conscious policies, or illiberal progressivism—however you want to define “wokeness”—policymakers should be careful not to mistake changes in weather for changes in climate. In advancing the peak woke thesis, one of the most astute theorists of wokeness, Musa al-Gharbi, points to the demonstrated decline in whiteboards-are-racist style papers. But if the underlying structure remains—if our sense-making institutions still require fealty to race-consciousness—this decline might turn out to be an epiphenomenon, a surface level change.

Second, once again, we should be ever mindful of the extreme power of federal grantmaking, especially in the sciences. MIT banned mandatory diversity statements. States like North Carolina and Texas have pushed a comprehensive reform agenda. Yet, even in these states, NSF funding continues to roll out ambitious personnel-building projects with the explicit goal of “cultural transformation.”

For reformers, this should be cause for sobriety—but also hope. Funders like the NSF shaped the American university we have today, a system inclined to sacrifice its basic mission for the cause of social activism. The same tools can be used to steer higher education back toward true intellectual freedom.

Voting Against ‘Wokeness’ Is Not Single-Issue Voting—It’s Every-Issue Voting

Wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area is viewed and scrutinized.

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As the election approaches, American voters are compelled to introspect and decide who will earn their vote. Naturally, this decision-making process involves identifying which issues they hold most near and dear. For some voters, a single issue—such as immigration, abortion, or free speech—determines their choice. Increasingly, however, many Americans are also considering their stance on “wokeness”—a term often used to describe the perceived excesses of Critical Social Justice ideology, which encompasses Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Postcolonialism—as a potential deciding factor.

In 2021, at a rally in Cullman, Alabama, Donald Tru.mp famously quipped that “everything woke turns to shit,” and that it’s “a shortcut to losing everything you have.” Similarly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed vehement opposition to wokeness—“Woke needs to die”—and has even signed the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited the teaching of certain activist concepts surrounding race and gender in schools and businesses. Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate, centered much of his campaign on opposing wokeness, even authoring a book in 2021 titled Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.

Critics often dismiss voters primarily motivated by a disdain for wokeness as narrow-minded or overly engaged in the culture wars. For instance, earlier this week, neuroscientist and noted Tru.mp critic Sam Harris, during a debate with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, labeled these people as “low information voters.” He argued, “[T]here are many people for whom wokeness and far-left identity politics has become a single issue around which they’re going to react.” But is Harris’ characterization of these people as “single issue” voters accurate?

The answer is no, because the reality is that wokeness is multifaceted, and voting to oppose it does not equate to a “single issue” stance like voting based solely on abortion access or climate change policy. The adverse impacts of wokeness are neither peripheral nor trivial. Contrary to portrayals by some on the left, wokeness extends beyond mere debates over bathroom access or children’s library books. It poses a profound threat to a wide range of fundamental values cherished by many Americans. This is because wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area, from science and medicine to education and social issues, is viewed and scrutinized. Consequently, a voter primarily driven by opposition to wokeness is closer to an “every-issue” voter than a “single-issue” voter.

Woke concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are used to reshape policies at every level. This worldview challenges some of our most fundamental and valued beliefs, such as equality under the law and valuing individual merit over group identity. Instead of honoring individual achievement, “equity” demands that all disparities—whether in the workplace, the classroom, or the justice system—be eliminated to produce equal outcomes. This is routinely accomplished through preferential treatment based on race, sex, and other identities that comprise the intersectional stack. This represents a perfect reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless ethical guidance to judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Elevating group identity over the individual not only fuels racial tensions but also undermines both King’s Dream and the American Dream.

The negative impact of policies rooted in the woke concept of “equity” is profound and not always immediately obvious. Consider the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, in response to activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system. How is this statistically equal racial outcome achieved, you ask? By making it more challenging to remove black children from abusive and unsafe environments. Such actions have resulted in a rise in the proportion of black child maltreatment deaths. To echo the thoughts of Thomas Sowell, woke equity appears more focused on sounding good than on being effective.

The First Amendment—our fundamental right to free speech—is a primary target of woke ideology. Just weeks ago at the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, former secretary of state John Kerry described the First Amendment as “a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” Tim Walz also demonstrated a misunderstanding of free speech by stating on multiple occasions that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” despite the Supreme Court’s repeated affirmation that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Woke DEI policies have become synonymous with censorship, restricting ideas and individuals that don’t align with a narrow view of what constitutes “inclusion.” Therefore, voting against wokeness is not about opposing diversity but about defending open debate and merit-based achievement.

The catastrophic impact of Queer Theory on science and medicine cannot be overstated. Queer Theory contends that reality is merely a construct devised by the powerful to sustain their dominance, positioning itself in stark opposition to scientific principles. It insists that all natural categories, even fundamental biological distinctions such as male and female, must be “queered” out of existence to achieve liberation. This ideology has transformed reality into a farcical Monty Python sketch, where men claim to be women and demand to be treated as such in every conceivable context, including sports, prisons, and sex-segregated public spaces. The influence of Queer Theory on medicine has led to the widespread acceptance of pseudoscientific concepts like the “sex spectrum” and an innate “gender identity” or “brain sex” that purportedly can be misaligned with one’s physical body. These views are used to justify interventions like halting the puberty of confused and troubled children, followed by administering sterilizing cross-sex hormones and conducting extreme and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries.

As a scientist committed to the truth, addressing the spread of this harmful pseudoscience and protecting children from permanent bodily harm is a major concern.

Wokeness extends its reach further through Postcolonialism, which reduces all geopolitical events to a binary of oppressor versus oppressed, typically based on perceived colonial status. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, especially following Hamas’ October 7th massacre of over 1200 men, women, and children in Israel. The woke “decoloniality” framework labels all Israeli residents as “colonizers,” thereby casting innocent civilians as legitimate targets. Considering the pervasive history of human colonization over past millennia, it suggests that no group could claim legitimate ownership of any land without the possibility of being forcibly expelled or slaughtered. Because of this, I’ve previously described the ideology of decolonization as a woke parallel to jihad.

The examples of the detrimental effects of woke ideology on our society and globally are extensive, and I’m sure readers can identify many more. Importantly, woke ideology is not a marginal belief; its impacts are profound and widespread, representing a degradation at the core of numerous values that Americans hold dear.

Let’s be clear: Tru.mp is the anti-woke candidate. While I’m not in the business of telling people how to vote, it stand to reason that if you agree with my premise that the problem with wokeness is not a single issue but closer an every-issue, then the choice becomes more clear. A vote for Tru.mp is a gamble to purge our institutions of wokeness and its pervasive influence. A vote for Harris would guarantee its further entrenchment. Can they recover?

You may object—didn’t wokeness dramatically intensify during Tru.mp’s first term? Indeed, it did. Even Sam Harris, during his aforementioned debate with Ben Shapiro, expressed concerns, stating, “it will be all woke all the time under Tru.mp.” But wokeness gets more rabid during a Tru.mp presidency for the same reason the possessed girl’s head in The Exorcist started spinning and spewing vomit when the priests began the exorcism process. The woke ideologues possessing our institutions will not relinquish their power voluntarily, and will go absolutely bonkers in the process of losing it. Nevertheless, this should not deter us from initiating the exorcism process.

Ultimately, opposing wokeness means upholding fundamental principles cherished by many Americans: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, scientific integrity, and women’s sex-based rights. To dismiss opposition to wokeness as a “single issue” trivializes the magnitude of the ideological shift at stake and its destructive nature on everything it touches. Voting against wokeness is not single-issue voting—it’s voting to protect nearly every issue that matters.

The choice is yours. And we can still be friends if we disagree.

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

The woke corruption of science

A widely believed study claiming that black newborns are harmed by white doctors had no basis in truth.

spiked-online.com

Calls to ‘trust the science’ need to be treated with severe scepticism. This was brought home by the recent debunking of a widely cited 2020 study in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article and the attention it attracted illustrate how the authority of science can be used to mislead the public.

The study at issue – entitled ‘Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns’ – examined 1.8million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015. It purported to show that black newborns died more frequently when cared for by white doctors than they do when cared for by black doctors. This led the researchers to conclude that ‘black physicians systemically outperform their colleagues when caring for black newborns’.

Most major media outlets interpreted this as a prime example of systemic racism in American healthcare. Some even wondered if perhaps white doctors were sabotaging the treatment of black infants. The findings were so shocking that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted the research in her dissent from the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action in higher education. Also in the affirmative-action case, several prestigious medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, filed an amicus brief containing the following conclusion: ‘For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.’

The only problem is that the findings of the study were completely untrue.

The reason for the disparity in newborn deaths was not due to the race of the physicians or to systemic racism, but to a flawed study design. After four years, a second group of researchers finally revisited the study data and found the original researchers did not account for difference in birth weight, a key determinant of mortality in neonates. While uncommon, low birth weight occurs more frequently in black newborns and accounts for a disproportionate number of neonatal deaths.

Because these infants were usually treated at major medical centres, where most of the physicians are white, deaths in the original study attributed to white physicians were actually the result of their caring for sicker patients. After controlling for low birth weight, the difference in care between black and white physicians effectively disappeared.

This study was fundamentally flawed. When studying mortality in neonates, low birth weight is a key determinant. This is paediatrics 101. It is essential that low birth weight be factored in. Yet at every stage of the scientific publication process for this study, the role of low birth weight was ignored.

The problem began with the original authors. Before cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn, any study of the relationship between mortality and care must account for severity of illness – in this case, low birth weight. For example, emergency-room patients with head trauma who receive CT scans have higher mortality than those patients who don’t have CT scans. This is because only those with more severe trauma are referred for scans. The higher mortality among CT-scanned patients has nothing to do with the CT scan itself.

In this case, the authors never even mentioned low birth weight in the article’s section on the limitations of the findings. One could give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, every researcher at one time or another has neglected an obvious variable. But such an obvious omission raises the suspicion that they wanted to obtain a desired result – that is, they wanted to demonstrate systemic racism in American healthcare. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once cautioned, ‘you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool’.

At the pre-peer-review stage, the journal editors also failed to note the absence of low birth weight as a key factor in neonatal mortality. The PNAS editors who initially received the article are the pinnacle of scientific authority. They are all top scientists in their respective fields at major academic centres. This particular journal even includes a statistical review committee, which looks at methodology and statistics. It should have flagged the glaring omission of low birth weight immediately and sent the article back to the authors for revision before the next step of sending the article to outside peer reviewers.

And what about those outside peer reviewers? The whole job of these subject-specific experts is to read with a gimlet eye, looking for errors, contradictions, biases and flaws in study design. Not infrequently, they recommend rejecting publication of an article on the thinnest of pretexts. Overlooking severity of illness is not a minor mistake. It is a major study-invalidating error. It is almost unbelievable the peer reviewers did not reject the article on that basis. It raises the question of whether they wanted to see the publication of an example of systemic racism at the expense of a careful critique of the data.

After the outside peer reviewers, the article would have come back to the journal editors, in the post-peer-review phase. The original journal editors therefore had one more chance, with the help of the expert peer review comments, to consider whether the article should be published. Why in this case didn’t they ask what caused the excess mortality when white physicians cared for the infants? Did white doctors deny black newborns access to intensive care or ventilators or antibiotics? (These cases weren’t surgical, so surgical skill was not an issue.) In addition, if you believe in systemic racism of physicians then the differences in mortality were considerable (absent the consideration of low birth weight). They were almost too good (or bad) to be true. As the journal editors surely would have known, when data are too good to be true, they probably are not true.

After publication, the article would have been seen by scientific journalists. They are trained to evaluate and interpret science for the public. Journalists who read the initial article should have identified right away there was no control for severity of illness. Their failure to notice this suggests either incompetence or confirmation bias (that is, they believe so strongly that healthcare is systematically racist, this is precisely the result they expected to see.) If they did notice and did not report it, that is even worse. Did anyone in the community of scientific journalists really want to challenge the study?

After the scientific journalists come the lay journalists. When this study was reported in the lay press, especially in connection with the Supreme Court affirmative-action decision, it emphasised the disparity between the quality of black and white physicians and the huge effect on mortality in black newborns, which was going on for nearly a quarter of a century. Such an appalling situation would surely have been obvious to nurses, hospitals, patients and families well before the publication of this paper. Yet no journalists asked why no one had come forward in all that time to expose it.

If this debacle teaches us anything, it is to be far more sceptical when faced with studies of this kind. In one of his legendary lectures on science, Richard Feynman said that the layman has ‘as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments – but be patient and listen to all the evidence – to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at’. He added: ‘The experts who are leading you may be wrong.’

Remember this episode whenever someone tosses out the phrases ‘trust the science’ or its close cousin, ‘evidence-based’. This may be an attempt to pass off a political view as a scientific fact. Science is an ever-changing endeavour, difficult to interpret, subject to manipulation and susceptible to personal bias, as the 2020 PNAS study illustrates.

When it comes to science, it’s best to channel your inner Ronald Reagan, ‘Trust, but verify’.

At the end of last week, the American economist and writer Professor Glenn Loury spoke on a panel as part of a conference held at King’s College, Cambridge. The event, ‘Towards the Common Good: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century’, was organised by The Equiano Project and aimed to promote liberal and universalist approaches to tackling racial conflict and inequality.

An edited version of his speech is printed below.

Fellow combatants in the culture wars, we are fighting for our lives here. We are fighting for the preservation of Western civilisation and the hour is late. I only mildly exaggerate.

I am an economist by training and that is a bust of the great John Maynard Keynes, here at King’s College, Cambridge. It resonates.

I agree with my friend and colleague Shelby Steele that, for black Americans, when we talk about disparities in race the problem is not oppression: the problem is freedom. The problem used to be exclusion and discrimination; the problem today is freedom. We’re well into the 21st century and African Americans have equal citizenship before the law in the United States, as a matter of fact.

Don’t bother me with anecdotes. I’m talking about the basic structure of citizenship. It’s a level playing field; it’s an open field. The ball is in our court. The issue is, what shall we do with our freedom?

I’ll quote another great economist, Thomas Sowell, who has taught us that disparities are one thing and discrimination is another. This is now my second point. The first point is, for black Americans the problem is the problem of freedom, not unfreedom. My second point is that disparities are one thing, discrimination is another. Disparities are not, ipso facto, evidence of unfreedom. Disparities are to be expected.

There’s a deep irony here when the identitarians become group egalitarians. The identitarians are the ones who are constantly telling us, “This is my identity; this is who I am; this is my group; this is my culture; these are my people. Don’t tread on us; don’t culturally appropriate us. We are an integral, distinct, identifiable type.”

Okay. So you have your blacks, you have your browns, you have your yellows, you have your gays, you have your whatever. How, then — since you are so insular, distinct, identity-based and different — should we expect that you would represent yourselves in equal numbers in every dimension of human activity? That there would be the same number of doctors, the same number of engineers, the same number of financiers, the same number of school teachers, the same number of criminals, the same number of shopkeepers per capita across all these different identity categories — if, indeed, identity is a real thing. The position is incoherent.

We should not expect group equality across every aspect of humanity and we don’t see it, and this was Thomas Sowell’s empirical point in book after book after book. Everywhere you look in the world you see disparities because everywhere you look in the world you see cultural differences which reflect themselves in human behaviour, which then lead to different representations in various areas of human activity. So disparities are not ipso facto a problem.

Finally, I want to say that equity is not equality. I could name them but I won’t: the writers in the US who are so prominent now — Ibram X. Kendi comes to mind — in promoting a certain ideology assert, “I see a disparity. I want equity.” And by equity they mean an equal representation. This is not equality.

If you use a different standard of assessment in order to achieve equity, you have just patronised me. You have just communicated tacitly that you don’t think I’m capable of performing according to the objective criteria of assessment as well as anybody else. I am now your client. I am now a ward. I go or come by your leave.

This argument that “We blacks must be made equal and you have to open up the doors and let us in! Never mind that our test scores are not as great” is pathetic. It’s a surrender of dignity. You will not be equal at the end of that argument even if you get what you ask for. There’s no substitute for earning the respect of your peers: if they grant it to you out of guilt or pity they have just reduced you, not elevated you.

America is becoming less “woke”

Our statistical analysis finds that woke opinions and practices are on the decline

The Economist

Regina Jackson and Saira Rao achieved a degree of fame at the height of the backlash in 2020 after police killed George Floyd, an unarmed black American accused of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note. For a hefty fee, rich white women would hire the pair to help them confront unconscious biases at dinner parties that featured such ice-breakers as, “Raise your hand if you’re a racist.” Guests may often have broken down in tears when told that their claims to be colour-blind were simply another brick in the edifice of white supremacy, but there was lots of interest. The two women were featured in many news reports and made a film about their dinners, “Deconstructing Karen”, in which a guilt-stricken participant confesses, “I am a liberal white woman. We are absolutely the most dangerous women.”

The media scrum has since subsided. The last “Race2Dinner” event took place a year ago. The pair now host screenings of the film instead. The problem, says Ms Rao, is not just that they are fed up with having to “sit across from a white person to tell them why they can’t use…the N-word”. It is also that public interest in matters of racial injustice has cooled. “The pulse of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-genocide, is dead. There is no pulse,” Ms Rao laments.

Republicans love to blame everything they consider wrong with America on an epidemic of “wokeness”, by which they tend to mean anything that smacks of virtue-signalling or political correctness. Thus a bridge over Baltimore harbour collapsed earlier this year not, as it might have seemed, because it was hit by a wayward cargo ship, but because one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black woman whose human-resources firm helps companies assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things—or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah asserted. Donald Tru.mp, when accepting the Republican nomination for president in July, blamed “woke” leadership for the failings of America’s armed forces. The party’s official platform this year complains of “woke…government” spurring politically motivated prosecutions. The implication is that woke attitudes are proliferating, and that only Republicans can stem their rise.

In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Tru.mp appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since (see charts). The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two.

The term woke was originally used on the left to describe people who are alert to racism. Later it came to encompass those eager to fight any form of prejudice. By that definition, it is obviously a good thing. But Democrats seldom use the word any more, because it has become associated with the most strident activists, who tend to divide the world into victims and oppressors. This outlook elevates group identity over the individual sort and sees unequal outcomes for different groups as proof of systemic discrimination. That logic is then used to justify illiberal means to correct entrenched injustices, such as reverse discrimination and the policing of speech. It is this sort of “woke warrior” that Republicans love to lambast.

Our analysis subsumes both the advocates and the denigrators of woke thinking, by looking at ideas and actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for ill. It measures, for example, talk of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) in the corporate world, regardless of whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the under-representation of women and racial minorities or as an example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke activism, such as the number of drives to censure academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has passed “peak woke”.

The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.

Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.

To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.

We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023 followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024.

In academia, which is often thought of as a hotbed of wokeism, the trend is much the same. Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for scholars to be censored or cancelled. These findings also dovetail with polling data: the share of Americans who think that expressions of racist views should be restricted rose sharply between 2016 and 2021, reaching around 52%, and has since declined slightly, down to 49% in 2022.

Teaching and research also seem to be shifting away from wokery, at least somewhat. The use of our set of 154 woke terms began to rise sharply in 2015 in papers on the social sciences collected by JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals. By 2022 the incidence of “intersectional”, “whiteness”, “oppression” and the like were at their peak. At our request, Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford University, counted the frequency of woke words in a collection of course catalogues from American universities. Classes that invoked woke terms in their name or synopsis rose by around 20% between 2010 and 2022, but remained stable last year.

In part, academia’s retreat from wokeness has been ordained by law. The Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action in admissions last year. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 86 bills in 28 states have aimed to curb DEI initiatives in academia over the past year; 14 have become law. For example Alabama will from October 1st prohibit state-funded universities from having any DEI offices or programmes, from promoting “divisive concepts” about “race, colour, religion, sex, ethnicity or national origin” and from allowing transgender students to use the toilets of their choice.

Nine states ban academic institutions from demanding “diversity statements” from job applicants. Critics have assailed these personal meditations on the importance of inclusivity as ideological litmus tests. Earlier this year several prominent universities, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave in to pressure from donors and alumni and dropped them. Others, such as the University of California, have faced lawsuits over their continuing use.

Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of 2024, mentions were only around three times higher than before Mr Floyd’s death.

The share of new job listings that mention diversity continues to grow, however, as ever more firms add boilerplate about inclusivity at the bottom of ads. But the evidence also suggests that firms are less willing to put their money where their mouth is, DEI-wise. The number of people employed in DEI has fallen in the past few years. According to Revelio, which tracks labour statistics at a group of big American firms, DEI roles as a share of overall employment doubled from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2022 (to 0.02% of all employees, or around 12,600 roles). But in the most recent estimates, from July, these numbers were down by 11% from their peak (to 0.018% of employees, or 11,100 roles). According to Farient Advisers, a pay consultancy, the share of S&P 500 companies that tied bosses’ remuneration to diversity targets peaked in 2022 (at 53%) and dropped in 2023 (to 48%).

The fall in corporate enthusiasm for DEI could have several causes. First, in any belt-tightening, support functions are the first to suffer cuts. This is how DEI consultants explain away the recent shrinkage of DEI departments at big tech firms such as Meta and Microsoft. Second, after the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in education, companies are scared that they may be sued for any practices that could be construed as discriminating against certain groups. A third possibility is that firms are taking note of declining public enthusiasm for corporate social activism. Gallup detected a big drop between 2022 and 2023 in the share of Americans who like companies to take a stand on matters of public debate. Less than half, for instance, think businesses should speak out on racial issues or LGBT rights. Bud Light, a popular brand of beer, suffered a big drop in sales last year after a promotional collaboration with a transgender social-media star. Its parent company’s shares have only recently recovered.

Asked why firms that two years ago were happy to talk up their DEI credentials were now ghosting The Economist, Johnny Taylor, from SHRM, an association for people working in human resources, says with a laugh, “Two years ago Budweiser was the number-one-selling beer in the country.” Other big brands including Disney, a media firm, and Target, a retailer, have also experienced backlashes for behaviour some customers considered too woke. Robby Starbuck, an activist who campaigns for firms with relatively conservative customers to abandon DEI, says he wants to “Make Corporate America Sane Again”. Egged on by the likes of Elon Musk, a billionaire conspiracy theorist, he has won concessions and grovelling apologies from Coors, Ford, Harley Davidson, Jack Daniel’s and John Deere. Mr Starbuck claims that whereas his first targets relented only after he posted castigating videos about them online, these days firms are beginning to drop DEI initiatives pre-emptively.

Although our analysis shows a clear subsidence in wokery, there are several reasons for caution. For one thing, although all our measures are below their peak, they remain well above the level of 2015 in almost every instance. What is more, in some respects, woke ideas may be less discussed simply because they have become broadly accepted. According to Gallup, 74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity, whatever the troubles of DEI.

Over time, attitudes to wokeness will doubtless change again. It’s easy to see how Mr Tru.mp might prompt a revival in woke activism on the left if he wins the presidency again. By the same token, if Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, becomes president next year, she may spur a reaction among anti-woke activists. After all, some of the biggest differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans concern social issues: 80% of likely Democratic voters believe the legacy of slavery still affects black people, for example, compared with only 27% of Mr Tru.mp’s supporters, according to Pew. There is also a chance that Gen Z, the most woke generation, retains this outlook as it ages, which would lead to a gradual increase in woke views among the broader population.

For now, however, advocates of woke thinking are in despair. Ms Jackson, from Race2Dinner, thinks things have got “much worse”, particularly when looking at “what’s going on with banning books, banning LGBTQ, banning trans folks, stopping DEI”. She thinks Mr Tru.mp has “given everybody permission to just be an asshole”. Critics are exultant: Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, says, “I think people will one day look back on the 2015 to 2025 era as being a bit of a moment of madness.” But even though Mr Teixeira thinks the woke wave has set social progress back, he does note that, over the long run, America has been reducing discrimination and improving opportunity for minorities of all sorts. That trend, he believes, is lasting.

Wokeness is the belief that (a) the facially neutral institutions of society are structured to oppress, (b) ~all group performance gaps provide evidence of this, and (c) the solution is equity- proportional representation across group lines without regard to performance or skill.

Andrew Doyle: This ideology has infantilism built into its core. And when it captures various institutions, they all become infantile. If you take, there was a conference called "Resisting Whiteness" at Edinburgh University where the organizers had said, that--

Meghan Murphy: You come, you show up, you peel your skin off, burn it.

Doyle: Well, I mean, they had a separate space, they had separate-- they separated people by skin color. But they also had a Q&A after the event where they said, white people weren't allowed to ask questions. But then that raises the question, what if you're half? What if you're mixed-race? Do you get to ask half a question? How do they even know, it's not always obvious. So, that's a childish thing to have. But that was done by adults in a university. In a top university.

So, yes, I think it's to do with the complete lack of the capacity for critical thinking, the first lesson of which is that there is always something to learn from your detractors, right. There is always a kernel of truth in everything that people say, and there's always merit to listening to what-- to having your ideas challenged.

These are people who are fixed to a script, which has been provided for them. Which is the same as any ideology. It's the same as any fundamentalist religion. ISIS fighters don't think critically, they have a script handed to them, a holy writ and it's been interpreted for them by the worst demagogues in that community.

And the same goes for any form of ideology. If you're a strict whatever. Marxist, or you're a strict-- you know, it can be anything.

Murphy: Feminist.

Doyle: Feminist too, it can be-- if you have a strict set of rules, it means you're not thinking for yourself. I like to be surprised by people's opinions, I don't like to be predictable. And I think that's a real loss when people can't say, "well, hang on, maybe I'm wrong about this. Let's talk to someone who disagrees. Maybe I can come out of this."

You know, if you take someone like Daryl Davis, who has deradicalized members of the KKK, can you imagine that? This guy sat down with them and talked them out of this, right. I couldn't do that; I don't have the ability to do something like that. But those people were people who were not thinking for themselves, thinking from a script. It's really, really rife.

And yes, I tie it to-- I suppose it's what children do, because children crave someone to tell them what to do, that's why they all need discipline.

Decolonizing the Drugstore

“This feels like indoctrination.”

https://www.thefp.com/

Mandatory ideological training has now come to the drugstore. In California, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, in order to keep their license, must study the latest in gender identity, colonialism, and white privilege. Such “cultural competency” courses are required by a state law that went into effect this year.

When the bill was introduced, Democratic Assemblyman Christopher Ward, the lead sponsor, said that the continuing education class would help “ensure pharmacists are looking out for the well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals.” 

Like many licensed professionals, pharmacists are required to take continuing education courses, usually with titles like “Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD)” and “Trimming Trends: Unveiling the Latest in Weight Management Guidelines.” Though this new training requires only an hour of the pharmacist’s time every two years, it’s another demonstration of compelling people to passively accept dubious assertions and assumptions, or risk losing their livelihoods.

One such course, titled Caring for All: The Pharmacy Professional’s Role in LGBTQ+ Health and Equity comes from the California Pharmacists Association (CPhA). The outline, obtained by The Free Press, features many charts that are hard to square with the duties of a pharmacist. There is a chart illustrating many “systems of oppression.” These include “sexism,” “cis-sexism,” “heterosexism,” and “adultism.” 

Another chart describes “effects of colonialism and colonization on pre-colonial ways of being.” It states: “Racism creates race: otherness and whiteness.” Some of the pre-colonial ways of being pharmacists are taught include “two-spirit,” the term used by Native Americans to describe someone who has “both a masculine and feminine spirit.” 

The training also suggests that pharmacists introduce a question about a customer’s gender at their first interaction. The course gives this prompt: “Hello, my name is Jay. I use they/them and he/him pronouns. How would you like me to address you?”

Click here to see a slide show of the training.

What does any of this have to do with being a pharmacist? Not much, said several pharmacists The Free Press spoke to.

Lisa Marino, 54, a hospital pharmacist in Los Angeles County, says the new cultural competency course provides nothing that relates to her job. “Our role is to aid in providing safe and appropriate use of medication for all people, regardless of culture, and with a respect for everyone’s privacy and dignity,” said Marino. “This feels like indoctrination.”

Joe, 50, who asked The Free Press not to use his last name, worked as a pharmacist for 25 years and owns an independent pharmacy in Los Angeles County. He says that respecting all customers, no matter their race or sexual orientation, is a given.

“To be a competent pharmacist, you need to know about medications, professional ethics, and the law,” said Joe. “That’s it.” 

Dr. Carrie Mendoza is an emergency medicine physician and the recently appointed director of Genspect USA, an organization that seeks evidence-based treatments for people with gender distress. She says people are taught to be so hyper-sensitive to avoid offending people, especially to those in a designated “marginalized” group, that pharmacists may be afraid to bring up legitimate concerns. “A pharmacist might not raise medication safety concerns such as adverse effects [or] inappropriate dosing. . . out of fear they will be called discriminatory,” said Mendoza. “Political trainings like this undermine safety for all patients and should be immediately removed from our healthcare system.”

But one of the three CPhA cultural competency course authors, Dr. Tam Phan, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California—and the clinical pharmacy program coordinator at the Los Angeles LGBT Center—told The Free Press in an email that a pharmacist’s role has expanded beyond quick interactions at the prescription counter. 

“Pharmacist prescriptive authority in California has expanded to immunizations, hormonal contraceptives, travel medicine, nicotine replacement products, and HIV. . . treatments,” he wrote. “For pharmacists who are not interacting with patients directly, LGBTQ+ cultural sensitivity is still important since pharmacists should be knowledgeable of potential drug interactions between hormones being used in gender affirmation with the patient’s other medications.”

San Francisco Unified School District provides training to staff that labels "perfectionism" and "individualism" as characteristics of "whit

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to the San Francisco Unified School District seeking any materials provided o

Parents Defending Education

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to the San Francisco Unified School District seeking any materials provided or shown to staff during training regarding students who are immigrants or in the United States illegally. The district provided PDE with hundreds of pages of documents. One document that PDE received was titled “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.” The document has a list of perceived characteristics of white supremacy, including “perfectionism,” “sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” “individualism,” and “objectivity.”

PDE also received a document titled “Newcomer RTI Support Services Planning Guide.” One point in this document is to explicitly protect illegal aliens: “Adherence to & Promotion of Sanctuary City Ordinance.” The document also states that staff should have training in “Cultural Competency & Humility” and “Immigrant Youth & Police Contact.” Another point is “Recognizing specific challenges of newcomers.” This includes “immigration status” and “court appointments.” This document also includes a list of resources for illegal students.

PDE additionally received a presentation titled “Understanding & Supporting the Newcomer Journey.” This presentation starts with a “Land Acknowledgment” and promotes “racial equity” and “anti-racism.” The presentation features videos that appear to promote illegal immigration, such as “Children on the Run in Central America” and “The Life of an Unaccompanied Minor in L.A.”

Another presentation is titled “Building Sanctuary.” This presentation starts with a “Land Acknowledgment” that states “no one is illegal on stolen land.” A focus of this presentation is “Racial Equity Framing” and states that “immigration is a black issue.” The presentation promotes that California is a “sanctuary state” and that the district is a “sanctuary school district.” This presentation tells staff how to handle U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The most authoritarian force that faces us in the western world is what we colloquially called, "the woke movement." Where it comes from is the enduring appeal of authoritarianism and that seems to be manifesting at the moment in the woke.

If you want to define woke, a lot of the people who self-define as woke say what they mean is being alert to injustice, especially racism. But they're missing, they're missing three words there. And the three words they're missing is "by authoritarian means."

Whatever the intention is, it's being established through authoritarianism. That's what's happening with the Irish hate speech bill, that's what happened with the Scottish hate speech bill, similar things in Canada. And it's spreading.

Once we recognize it in ourselves, and how difficult and rare the idea of freedom is, and freedom of speech. The idea, you know to live in a country where freedom of speech flourishes is a global and historical aberration. We shouldn't take it for granted.

The Waning of “Woke”? — Presser

In this exclusive excerpt from her new book, The Counterweight Handbook , Helen Pluckrose explains why the influence of Critical Social Jus

Presser

Many social scientists, as well as political and cultural commentators of various kinds, have begun to argue that Critical Social Justice (usually referred to as “wokeness”) “peaked” in 2020 and has since been on the decline. There is evidence to support the position that there is a growing resistance to Critical Social Justice and a general sense of culture war fatigue. The overall attrition rate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles was 50 percent higher than non-DEI jobs in 2022, as many companies began phasing out certain DEI positions. Further, while job postings for DEI positions expanded by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021, they dropped by almost an equal percentage between 2022 and 2023.

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined from 67 percent at its peak in 2020 to 51 percent in 2023, and a majority of Americans say the increased focus on race since the 2020 George Floyd protests has not improved the lives of black people. There are also signs that other areas of Critical Social Justice focus have decreased in popularity. Analysis by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, arguably the most meticulous documenter of this trajectory across many spheres of society, reveals, among much more, a decline in relevant journalistic word usage as well as a drop in cancellation events, a decrease in academic output using Critical Social Justice theories, a greater confidence of students to express their views, and a greater pushback against DEI from both employers and mainstream outlets.

This is supported by research examining the language of 725 corporate social responsibility communications undertaken by Adam William Chalmers and Robyn Klingler-Vidra. Whereas companies once primarily used the term “civil rights movement” when discussing issues of social justice, their language shifted in 2015 and became dominated by “wokeisms” such as “allyship” “diversity equity,” “equity and inclusion,” and “racial justice.” Since 2021, this language has been in decline.

There is certainly room for optimism that Critical Social Justice is losing its social prestige. Some portion of this shift was inevitable because Critical Social Justice has always been destined to implode for three primary reasons. Firstly, Critical Social Justice has a concept of society that is not rooted in reality and relies on methods that do not work. The need to take the claims of the theorists and activists on faith is one of the reasons it is often likened to religion. Unlike religion, however, we do not have to wait until after our deaths to find out if its texts and prophets have steered us right. The failure of Critical Social Justice to accurately describe social reality and effect positive change is becoming increasingly hard to deny. Its DEI programs have spectacularly failed to decrease racism or reduce disparities in workplaces and instead either had no effect at all or worsened them. Its intense and divisive focus on racial and LGBT identity politics has not improved race relations or the acceptance of sexual minorities but contributed to a resurgence of race-consciousness and white identity politics and a reduction of support for same-sex relationships.

Secondly, Critical Social Justice is too unstable and cannibalistic to become a long-term ethical framework for most people. Because it works on “problematizing” everything, including itself and its allies, its ideas become complicated, contradictory, and confusing and change at a rapid pace all the time. Terms and concepts that were acceptable a few months ago may not be so today. “Allyship” and “checking one’s privilege” were once required signs of commitment but have since been problematized in some quarters (but not others) as performative and self-centering and replaced with “solidarity” and “complicity.” “Diversity” has been a core feature of Critical Social Justice activism, but, in some circles now, it can be seen as an attempt to make members of marginalized groups conform to white, Western ways of knowing and avoid the hard work of “decolonization.”

This is not user-friendly for real people, most of whom have jobs and cannot keep up with all this. It also creates a culture of fear where committed and well-intentioned people can be problematized and even canceled for making a verbal slip or missing a metaphorical memo.

Thirdly and relatedly, Critical Social Justice has alienated too many people. It gained some general popularity in the first place because it contained a kernel of truth. It is genuinely naïve to think we can just change laws and prejudice and discrimination will just go away. If biased attitudes remain, and they do, discrimination will still happen on a more covert level, and there is a need to be alert to that. Following the rush of equality laws in the 1960s and 70s, which included the decriminalization of homosexuality and made discrimination on the grounds of race and sex illegal, many liberals on both left and right were concerned about the way in which such discrimination had just been accepted for so long. What were we still not questioning? People looking into this is surely a good thing.

Nevertheless, the methods of Critical Social Justice in practice have been steadily alienating more and more people. White women have been consistently problematized not only by Critical Social Justice scholars and activists for their voting patterns but also in the popular press, as evidenced in the birth of the “Karen” meme.

Gay men have been scorned for failing to be consistently intersectional (or queer), while the visibility of lesbians among gender-critical feminists (colloquially known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists or, disparagingly, TERFs) made them increasingly suspect as a group. Parents of all political persuasions and races have become alienated from the movement after raising concerns about their children being taught that their race determines their values, beliefs, and experiences and their interests decide their gender identity — and after being informed that it is they who hold regressive views and are racist or transphobic. Artists like Adele and Rebel Wilson have been criticized by Critical Social Justice advocates for simply losing weight, thereby alienating those who think managing one’s weight and being attentive to one’s health is important.

Critical Social Justice took a particularly steep nosedive in credibility as an ethical movement for social justice following the response on elite university campuses to the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that often extended beyond anti-Israel protests to antisemitic slurs and abuse. The congressional testimony by presidents of three such American universities made international headlines when they all equivocated when asked if calls for the genocide of Jews would be considered harassment according to their campus policies. The uproar in the wake of this testimony led to the forced resignation of two of the presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard University. The presidents’ responses made perfect sense in the logic of Critical Social Justice, and the entire episode called considerable attention to the ways in which DEI policies and activist Critical Social Justice scholarship, particularly in the form of the “decolonize” movement, have contributed to this hostile atmosphere by framing everything in a simplistic oppressor/oppressed binary. Renowned cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, a long-time member of the Harvard faculty, beautifully summed up the reaction to Gay’s testimony given Harvard’s well-earned reputation for promoting, if not enforcing, Critical Social Justice ideology on campus: “The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context.”

As Pinker noted, the negative response to the testimony wasn’t coming simply from a narrow range of liberal writers or from conservative reactionaries. It was also alumni, donors, faculty, and citizens from all over the political spectrum voicing considerable concern, including a White House spokesperson and the second gentleman of the United States. A significant number of individuals across the mainstream have begun to openly and urgently ask: how have we reached a point in which a university’s administration does not support a biology instructor who is forced from her job for saying sex is a binary while, at the same time, it says students can call for the genocide of Jews without censure or penalty? As Pinker rightly pointed out, it was not that Gay was wrong to defend the rights of academics and students to argue even abhorrent ideas like this in the appropriate setting, but rather that they or their universities had demonstrably not defended this freedom for those who contravened the rules of Critical Social Justice—and, in the case of Gay, had reportedly even played a role in punishing insufficiently “woke” faculty herself.

The growth of negative perceptions of the Critical Social Justice movement is demonstrated by the negative connotations of the term “woke,” which has increasingly been used and understood as a term of disparagement to the point where some people believe it to have been invented by its critics. This shift began because people who understood, if not directly felt, the negative effects of the Critical Social Justice movement needed a word to identify the ideology they sought to criticize but often didn’t have the precise academic language or knowledge to do so.

This was especially important because, unlike longstanding political and philosophical movements like conservatism, liberalism, or socialism that describe specific aims to conserve cultural traditions, oppose constraints on freedom, and seek social ownership of the means of production, respectively, the Critical Social Justice movement has tended to give itself titles that encompass the values of anybody who isn’t a hateful extremist—Social Justice, Black Lives Matter, Antifa (i.e., anti-fascism), etc. When it first emerged, this made it difficult for those concerned about growing illiberalism to criticize it without seeming to be against social justice or to disagree that black lives matter or that it is good to oppose fascism. The term “woke,” which captured its identifying feature of theorizing largely invisible power dynamics to exist everywhere and always but that are undetectable to the untrained and uneducated, was thus seized upon as a means of naming the ideology so that it could be better identified and resisted. Today, 40 percent of people in the United States would regard being thought “woke” as an insult, while 32 percent would see it as a compliment. Americans are similarly divided over whether it simply means being informed on social injustice or whether it means policing others’ words. Comparable percentages are found in the United Kingdom, with 42 percent of Britons saying they would regard being called “woke” as an insult (up from 24 percent in 2020) and 27 percent saying it would be a compliment (up from 26 percent). One in seven now identify as “anti-woke.”

As a reflection of this growing expression of public opinion, we are seeing small, if symbolic, moves away from Critical Social Justice in areas where it was once uniformly accepted, including in the entertainment and media industries, where consumers make their opinions known with their wallets. Netflix shelved a plan to adapt Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby and streamed a stand-up special by unapologetically “problematic” comedian Dave Chapelle in the face of an employee protest, telling employees to find another job if its decision was intolerable to them. Its subscriptions increased by 7.6 million, which may not have been a coincidence. Similarly, Disney responded to accusations of political bias with the reinstatement of Bob Iger as CEO and a promise to “quiet things down” on the culture war front and to respect its audience.

These moves correspond with changes in the broader cultural mood. For example, the percentage of the American population that believes trans-gender athletes should participate only on teams that align with their biological sex has risen from 62 percent in 2021 to 69 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, the predominantly left-leaning New York Times has responded to open letters from both GLAAD and its own employees demanding greater conformity with Critical Social Justice ideas, particularly around transgender issues, with statements asserting its commitment to free speech and viewpoint diversity, informing employees that it would not tolerate attacks on colleagues. The New York Times has also increasingly started to feature pieces that openly question issues that Critical Social Justice has tried — and largely succeeded in — making unquestionable. For example, in February 2024, it published a lengthy article titled “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans: Now, They No Longer Do” that raised concerns about the popular narrative that children with gender dysphoria should undergo transition and called attention to the ideological bias of gender clinics. Although the story ran as an opinion piece, this sort of coverage, which included interviews with detransitioners, has been notably absent in mainstream U.S. media in recent years.

There is reason to be optimistic that Critical Social Justice is losing its social prestige, but there is no cause to be complacent. The ideology remains well-entrenched across institutions, and troubling trends continue. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), for example, continues to record a growing trend of deplatforming in universities, the usage of terms related to queer theory and related trans activism appears to be continuing to rise, and some have argued that, far from declining, “woke” is becoming the new normal. Also, while Critical Social Justice terms have begun to recede in usage among companies in the United States and the United Kingdom since 2021, their use has accelerated among companies in Canada and parts of Europe over the same time period.

Even though the movement is too divorced from reality, chaotic, contradictory, ethically inconsistent, and alienating to survive, it has done a great deal of damage socially and will likely do a lot more before it falls. Precisely how it will fall and what will move into its place remain matters of grave concern.

This essay is excerpted from The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice―at Work, in Schools, and Beyond.

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and was one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice and writes at The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain on Substack. She lives in England.

Peter Boghossian: Why do you think people are so hoodwinked by this?

Douglas Murray: Because it's an answer to a number of very big questions. In the gap left by religion, it's an answer to the question of what should we be doing with our lives on Earth? That's a good question to address. And if you say, or anyone says, I have the answer, I know what you should be doing. I know what you should be doing...

Boghossian: Fighting for social justice.

Murray: You should be fighting for social justice. You-- it's a reason to get up in the morning, it's a reason to go out campaigning in the afternoon, and it's a reason to fight over the dinner table and tell your family that they're bigots.

This is purpose of a kind. And-- one other thing which is of course it says, i mean this is the real attraction, it says in a quasi-religious manner - in fact it's better than religion isn't it. Because a religion says, if you sort these things out, then in a life to come you will find salvation. And the social justice activists and the intersectionists and much more say, if you do all of these things, we can get justice here on Earth. And who wouldn't want that? If it was able to be achieved and if it was offered to you.

I mean, the appeal of it is extraordinary because, here is-- I mean, the world is wildly unequal, may well always be, I think probably always will be unequal in lots of ways. It's unfair in a huge variety of ways. Our own lives all bear out that experience, we know it collectively as well as individually. And these are all things we rail against or find peace against in our lives as the case is.

But if somebody comes along and says, no, we could solve all unfairness, inequality, inequity, you've just got to join us. Ordinarily that's said by a cult.

Boghossian: It sounds very Baptist to me.

Murray: It's highly Baptist. It has so many resonances from the religious tradition. Which is why I say I think it's trodden into that gap.

Boghossian: So, one of the reasons I think people are so hoodwinked, I think they're hoodwinked by language. I think they're hoodwinked by these words. "Equity" sounds really good. "Inclusion" sounds really good. "Diversity" sounds really good. "Safe space" sounds really good. All of these words sound good, and most people, they don't really know what they mean. It sounds good and it makes them feel good. I mean, just think, "anti-racism."

Murray: Yeah, who's not on board with that?

Boghossian: If you don't know the moral underpinnings of that, or Black Lives Matter. Well, of course black lives matter.

Murray: Yeah, a movement with literally no open opposition.

Boghossian: And they got-- they hoodwink you through those words and people say, I think it was Linda Sarsour who put out a tweet: Antifa. Anti-fascist. That's all you need, what more is it than that?

It is the power of language. There must be something in the brain's architecture or some evolutionary quirk or something that makes us susceptible to these.

Murray: Well, in-group out-group is is the obvious one, is that it's-- once this stuff becomes the dominant theme of the time, once people agree on the reprehensible nature of racism, homophobia, bigotry, misogyny, once they agree on that then of course they want to be on the side of the people opposed to all of that.

The problem is and you jump onto the side of all the people who are opposed to all that and you discover they can do things as wicked as anyone else.

But one other interesting thing about that is that, you mentioned language and of course i've always thought that one of the great advantages that any profession of faith or professed ideology has, strangely enough, is if it looks more complex than it is, I think a lot of people have been intellectually intimidated by the Studies movements, by the grievance industry, by the intersectionalists.

They feel intellectually intimidated by it because the language these people write in is far more complex than the really rather simple ideas they actually espouse. There's never a word they use they don't add syllables to unnecessarily. You know. A problem is never a problem, it is a problematization. You never have a narrative, you always have a meta narrative. And this is the case in every single term. Everything is made to sound more complex than it is. Which, by the way, as a writer, annoys me because i believe the task of writing is to try to take the most complex ideas and make them simpler. Or at least, simpler to understand than they might otherwise be.

And here are a whole set of academics in particular, who take really rather straightforward and simple assertions, which we could all understand, and they make them impossible to understand. They use such deliberately difficult language, and I think a lot of people before that, you know, people whose children return from college and spout this stuff, a lot of people particularly parents, become intellectually intimidated by it.

I think that it's the same thing with all of the implicit bias stuff and all that. You know, your boss tells you to do something that you feel isn't right, but they've got a whole language to explain it and you don't really understand it and you go along with it because you think you must be dumb. And you're not dumb. You're the cleverer person in the room if you've seen through that. But there's not much to help you, very few people are going to reach out. And there's a terrible opportunity cost if you're accused of all sorts of terrible things for even questioning it.