[Morgoth’sReview] How the post-woke era is destroying the political centre Within the logic of the "Woke Mind Virus" was a faulty piece of wiring that was present all along but not too much of a problem until October 7th, 2023. Where in a worldview rooted entirely in identitarian power dynamics did Jews and Israel sit? Were they, too, a vulnerable minority group? Or were they "white"? And further still, where did Israel sit as a country propped up by the West and predicated (as they saw it) on oppressing powerless non-white people? Generally speaking, the left opted for the safer route of lumping Israel in with the general theory of white privilege, albeit the plot holes and paradoxes were skipped over, mainly.
This meant that when Zionism sought to retaliate against Hamas and other forces aligned against it, it discovered that a considerable number of people embedded within institutions across the West, and particularly in America, agreed with the terrorists!
Conveniently, then, the re-electing of Donald Trump meant that woke would be "put away" because it had become a rival node of power within the system. The institutions were purged of their mad progressive ideas so everyone could return to the 1990s. The Mad Dog left would be taken out back and put down like Ole Yella.
In America, at least, the woke left seems to have taken a drubbing, but I argued a while ago that the possibility of a similar purge taking place in the United Kingdom was doubtful. Yet it can’t be denied that the most egregious and irritating form of woke has indeed receded, and we are in a new paradigm.
The idea that a movement can be relegated to obscurity because its institutional and corporate incentives have been severed is, in my view, becoming a flawed perspective. The human capital that constitutes the ideology does not simply evaporate because the incentives have changed; instead, a more militant rebranding emerges, half in and half out of institutional power structures.
And this is where the post-woke left is now.
The rainbow flags have been replaced with Palestinian flags, and the purple hair has been replaced with a keffiyeh.
The recent Glastonbury debacle, where a black rap artist led the crowd in chanting "Death to the IDF" saw an institutional backlash, though not because the same person also gloated that native Brits would never get their country back. Owen Jones, long regarded as emblematic of the entitled leftist wet lettuce who never knew struggle for a cause, now claims he is prepared to go to jail for his stance on the Israel/Gaza issue.
Across the left, the term "Zionist" is spat out with contempt, and associated with a corrupting force that dictates institutional policy across the West. One young lady on TikTok claims to yearn for the end of the West, because of its unending support for the genocide in Gaza.
More problematic is that the "West" and Israel are inextricably linked in their world view, and in terms of power dynamics, it is difficult to refute. During the Glastonbury affair, the revealed preferences of the mainstream right were, predictably, to instantly white-knight for the IDF and leave the insult to their own countrymen ignored. Objectively speaking, some of the reports of atrocities coming out of Gaza are truly horrific, yet the toilet seat warmers on the centre-right are happy to defend it. The thousands of dead children, families buried alive under rubble, starvation lines, and general sadism — none of it seems to faze the smug idiots of Julia Hartley Brewer-style punditry.