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Well, you absolutely agreed with me that BLM is as American as apple pie, and has no European antecedents. Likewise the term "intersectionality", coined by an American academic. I do think most of modern gender ideology can be traced directly to Judith Butler. When I talk about wokeness in Ireland, I'm primarily talking about BLM, the concept of white privilege, gender ideology, and the nomenclature associated with the ideology. I think it's reasonable to say that, to the extent that wokeness has caught on in Ireland, concepts and paradigms which were invented in the US have had an outsized influence. Maybe it was hyperbolic to say that wokeness was "imported wholesale" from the US, but not extremely so.
Sure, but wokeness didn't actually catch on in Ireland during the lifetime of Foucault or members of the Frankfurt school - it caught on in 2013-4. Maybe American critical theorists were just rephrasing concepts which originated with the Frankfurt school, but I still think they deserve a significant amount of credit for translating it in a way that made it palatable to a young and international audience. Elvis Presley may have been heavily inspired by Chuck Berry, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Elvis who became the King of rock n roll.
That is to say, non-Americans may have significantly contributed to woke ideology, but I think the specific flavour of woke ideology which caught on in Ireland retains a specifically American flavour, even in cases where this makes no obvious sense. Woke people are pretty good at adapting the overarching tenets of the ideology to local parochial concerns (e.g. land acknowledgements for aboriginals in Oz and NZ) but that really hasn't happened here: Irish progressives get far more bent out of shape about alleged racist incidents against Ireland's vanishingly small black population than they do about discrimination against Irish Travellers.
I think Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are uniquely bad examples to illustrate how non-Americans contributed to the rise of wokeness, given that woke people despise these two women for their TERF opinions. In fact, Greer was enormously popular with the second wave of feminists in Ireland and the UK in the 1980s: the rise of wokeness caused a steep decline in her popularity to the point that she's effectively persona non grata in many British universities. Bindel writes for Unherd, for Christ's sake.
True, I can only prove that the cultural dominance of wokeness coincided with the rise of social media, I can't prove a causation. But I do think that social media played a significant role in disseminating and popularizing woke paradigms and concepts. I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook was originally only accessible on American college campuses, quickly became the biggest social media platform in the world, and shortly afterwards an ideology which was invented (or refined, or perfected, whatever) on American college campuses became culturally dominant in the Anglophone world.
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