I thought the Origins of Woke was a great book personally, although I shared a few of Scott's criticisms. Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners, and how much he cared about funding women's sports received. But overall I thought the book was great and captured a major causative factor of how Woke is so incredibly strong.
When people aren't allowed to acknowledge the flaws of Wokeness in the workplace or their employees will get sued, it creates an immense chilling effect. That's probably not the sole cause of wokeness, there are other factors like supporting impoverished minorities being a very convenient luxury belief to signal how much of a good person you are, but Hanania convinced me it was a major factor.
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Notes -
Just a minor point, but it is unclear to me how Hanania distinguishes social progressivism from woke. In particular, I think deBoer's definition matches what is meant by "woke" much better:
It seems to me like deBoer is at least picking up on a very important set of attributes shared by the online woke, and that serious socially progressive people are not a perfect match for this. One can, for instance, be like Ezra Klein, who may have his own issues, but doesn't come off in the same way.
Or perhaps I'm just mistaken, and wokeness is the black sheep of the socially progressive family in Hanania's argument - an embarrassment that is disliked by its own peers, but still to be defended from outsiders.
DeBoer has outright stated that, in his ideal world, "the wokest person you know" get 90% of what they want. Combine that with his strident attitude towards gender topics (where his anti-idpol takes give way to annoyance that anyone has an idpol skeptical take)...
So yes.
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