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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

This doesn't take away from your point. Woke as a phenomenon was this alliance between progressive minoritarian interests and establishment institutions where the revolutionary fervor was solely directed at the majority group.

Working for Blackrock, Disney and the CIA could be rationalized as a revolutionary act still, ideology doesn't have to make sense.

What brought it down is that the internal components of the coalition wanted different things. And those things became incompatible.

The US Army didn't get a better war footing from being more inclusive, Disney didn't materialize more interest and sales out of pandering to the margins, and ESG investor funds have long ran out along with ZIRP. All the nice promises that DEI would actually make things perform better could be entertained as luxuries then.

Now that the rubber meets the road, that companies have to perform to get funding, that war is no longer a thing of the past and that sabotage and division aren't affordable luxuries, suddenly the elites no longer like wokeness.

Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

Well yes that’s the problem. Both the true believers and the mercenary government and party apparatchiks considered themselves to be woke. For the last ten years that’s never been a problem, and the two camps have moved in lockstep with regard to domestic policy. But two years ago the international situation exploded in various ways and suddenly there is revealed a number of pretty big gulfs between what the different sub-denominations of woke actually want. And most of the revolutionary zeal is in the true believers, who are becoming disgusted and walking away, leaving the befuddled apparatchiks holding the bag.