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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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The funniest part is that this is the opposite of what the people who came up with it meant.

What did the people who came up with it mean?

There's a lot of motte and bailey around it, but they meant it as a catchall term for the illiberal right, and/or factions of the right that stray too far from the (lowercase "l") liberal consensus. I think "anti-semitism" / skepticism of Israel would put you firmly in that category, given that the term's owner went on some bizarre "imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke"-esque rant about Epstein.

I think it was originally used in reference to "white identity politics," i.e. a perceived desire for white preferential treatment in a similar vein as affirmative action, DEI, etc.

There's something funny in a through-the-looking-glass sort of way about the way the term "woke" has evolved the past decade or so. In entering the mainstream, it became a way to describe old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc., just in a "progressive" direction, using a term that sounded nice, in a way that would be palatable to people who liked to think of themselves as against old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc. But it quickly became identified with that underlying thing it was describing, and now it's being used to describe the old old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc. in the traditional direction, as a way to denigrate it. Perhaps because terms like "racism," "sexism," etc. lost their edge due to constantly being used to describe completely innocuous and often virtuous things, while terms like "woke" kept being used to describe things that were traditionally called "racist," "sexist," etc.

I've quoted Shakespeare before, that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet, and shit by any other name stinks just as foul. Observing this real-time shuffling of words around meanings has been fascinating. It seems that activists who helped to popularize the term "woke" have a real, good faith belief that changing the words we use really, truly, actually changes the underlying thing in some real way - they get high off their own supply, so to speak.