Vivek Ramaswamy, a really wealthy biotech investor who likes to pretend that he is a living example that the American Dream is alive and well, has launched his campaign to become the next U.S. President. His platform is based almost entirely on his critique of wokeness among corporations and government institutions. In a video from 2021, Vivek angrily claims that “wokeism” is the new secular religion in America, and that it has created a culture of fear where good ordinary people are afraid to lose their jobs, fail their classes, and be persecuted for not capitalizing the letter B.
He goes on to declare that woke culture has completely eroded freedom of speech in America and that the Constitution is under attack.
Vivek declares wokeism as the number one issue facing the world today.
Vivek is echoing what is becoming the commander-in-chief talking point for the GOP in America, as is becoming a dominant factor in politics throughout the entire English-speaking world, and in several European nations including Sweden, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and Germany.
Yes, Germany. The one place where absolutely no one wants to see a resurgence of right-wing extremism is, in fact, becoming Anti-Woke. Just like Nazism, the right-wing driven War on Woke got its start in the most racist and bigoted country of them all:
The United Kingdom.
While it is popular to believe that American Republicans started the anti-woke movement, the seeds actually came from left-wing British social critics and satirists. One of the leading voices for this was comedian Andrew Doyle, who created a parody Twitter Account under the moniker Titania McGrath.
The idea was to demonstrate how extremely stupid privileged illiberal elitist thinking could be.
Doyle described Titiana as a:
Radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest who identifies as non-binary, polyracial and ecosexual.
She was raised by parents who lavished her with gifts and money to distract her from her oppression.
She became woke through the Bible passage of the Cleansing of the Temple, which inspired her to a similar thing at the age of four at her local branch of HSBC.
She studied Modern Languages at Oxford University before completing an MA in gender studies, for which she wrote a groundbreaking dissertation on technopaganism and the corrosive nature of cis-masculine futurity.
If you have any sense of humor whatsoever, it’s impossible to read this and not laugh, but that is the idea. It was a joke.
Doyle provided an extreme example of how an extreme minority of extremely privileged people can think and act when they get bored and decide to find some kind of cause to entertain themselves.
Unfortunately, just like so many social critics who get a little bit of fame, Mr. Sullivan fell into the trap of becoming an activist, and thus his message became a focal point for rich and powerful people who didn’t like all the fuss caused by the rank and file.
People like Vivek Ramaswamy.
But Mr. Doyle, and people like him, were not advocating to protect those who openly discriminate against others. Doyle is a left-leaning homosexual who supported the Labour Party in Britain. He is far from being far-right, or a protector of the rich and powerful.
Yet, the rich and powerful in America have taken his message, and those like it, and twisted it to dismiss the discrimination that they actually engage in.
In truth, the current U.S. economy and political system rest upon a foundation of judgment and prejudice that promotes the belief not being rich is a choice, and if you are not rich, it is your fault. Further, if you are wealthy, it is because you provide more value to society. The American culture of wealth veneration is what has led to this anti-woke movement in the states, which is where it has been adopted by the right wing and exported back to Europe and other destinations as the most important cause of the modern political era. The war on woke is important if you believe that wealth should afford you the right to do and say bad things and bend (or even break) the rules, just as long as you provide a valuable service to society.
In America, if you are rich, then the belief is that your very existence is important to society.
For everyone else, adopting the anti-woke battle flag is just silly.
Cancel Culture is not Woke Culture
Cancel culture is old, and it has nothing to do with so-called “wokeism.” As many people already know, being woke goes back to a song from 1938, which told the story of nine black boys falsely accused of raping two white women. Wake up to the injustice and stay woke — that was the message. Fundamentally, it is a positive concept that has to do with being aware of lurking danger from those who would oppress you.
Truly, that’s all it ever was.
Somewhere over the past few years, the American Media-Political-Industrial-Complex packaged “woke” as a saleable product for agenda-driven opportunists to generate a bullshit cause to rally behind.
Woke is the new Antifa. Before that, it was the neo-socialists. Before that, it was the terrorists. Before that, it was something else, and so on. It’s always something. There is always a boogieman that is some type of twisted departure from what it is actually and loosely based on.
The new big bad scary bad woke guy is not one that will shoot you or put you on a bread line or shatter your windows, it is a misguided gender-bended influencer who will spread lies about you so that you’ll be exiled from society, whereafter you will most certainly be violated in some manner by people who don’t look like you.
Watch out.
In reality, canceling is almost as old as time, and some of the biggest celebrity cancellings in America were Bill Maher who was canceled in 2002 for being too liberal on TV, and news anchor Dan Rather in 2006 for making a journalistic error, however, it was one that crossed the Big Bad Bush (President George W. Bush).
But of all the canceling, perhaps the most outrageous was that of the Dixie Chicks, who just prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq dared suggest that Bush was making a mistake. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular American country acts at the time, but a statement that was reported by the British newspaper The Guardian triggered a backlash from American country listeners, who were of course mostly right-wing and supported the war.
The Dixie Chicks were subsequently blacklisted by many country radio stations, received death threats, and were criticized by other country musicians. The backlash slashed sales of the Dixie Chicks’ music and concert tickets and lost them corporate sponsorships.
As it turned out, invading Iraq was a mistake.
Despite that, today the right wing would have you believe that canceling is something that only leftist progressive wokies do.
That is certainly not correct.
The right and left love to cancel each other and they’ve been doing it for the better part of two centuries. Sure, digital media had made that spectacle viewable by all, but the game has not changed.
Do you know what also hasn’t changed? In most cases of “canceling” the canceled end up being just fine. They don’t die alone and poor, despite what the anti-woke pushers would have you believe.
There is no Pro-Woke
Just like the Antifa craze, there is no organized group of antisocial misfits actively organizing to wake you up and take you down. The woke mob, as it is called, is really nothing more than a minority group of over-sensitive social media addicts who use Twitter and other platforms as their favorite place to bitch. If you don’t agree, then just don’t listen.
Sure, there are some areas of society where radical ideas sprout up, such as many corners of academia, or California.
These instances are exceptions.
Regardless of that fact, the right wing has turned an old issue into a nicely packaged new danger. Academia has for a long time been illiberal and ridiculous, but that’s because so many in that world need to create problems in order to validate their funding. California has been passing ridiculous laws for decades, it’s nothing new.
The Media has not been any different either, as the news has been focused on sensationalism and stranger danger for the better part of five decades.
For many years now, censorship, ostracism, anathemas, threats, destruction or vandalism of works of art, attempts at linguistic and historical revision, and media lynching campaigns have been occurring.
But this is not new, and it is not any more of a real problem than it was 30 years ago.
In reality, there is no new woke mob gunning for your thoughts and words, and books.
There are real issues though, which the anti-woke conveniently avoid by hiding behind what they deem an existential threat.
Here are some real problems
According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., if you commute two hours a day in a car, then on average you are inhaling hundreds of gallons of pollution-choked air per day. Furthermore, many studies show that sitting in traffic and commuting during rush hours can raise blood pressure and irritability.
It is proven that driving is one of the most stressful and dangerous things we can do. Driving is an activity in which we are surrounded by hundreds of people having negative emotions. This is all to say nothing of the fact that you can die or become seriously injured as a result of someone driving drunk, angry, or staring at their smartphone.
Cars are also a leading cause of climate change, which is now on pace to deliver an arctic sea without sea ice during summer months by 2030.
This problem can be solved, it’s just that no one wants to solve them. The production, selling, and maintenance of automobiles is one of the largest economic sectors in the world, and thus it is one of the leading employers in both advanced and developing nations.
The world got a glimpse of how to fix the car problem during the pandemic, when most of the world limited all traffic to only the essentials. Everyone else needed to figure something else out, and we did figure it out. We still got food and water, and toilet paper (despite the gold rush on TP).
The problem with cars is not logical, or logistical, or even economic really; it is cultural. People, especially Americans, love freedom, and they believe that the car gives them this. People love the freedom to chart their own course, park in the space of their choosing, and go where only those who have a car can go. They love feeling liberated from having to share space with others.
It’s all an illusion. In reality, people are compelled into driving and car ownership, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
This is an example of a real problem that no one in American politics will touch.
Instead, they all pretend to hunt boogiemen.
I digress.
Wake up about woke
One thing America has always done very well is taking ideas from other places and mass-producing them for export.
This is exactly what has happened with so-called wokeism.
It’s not a real problem, not really, if sensible people just continue to be sensible rather than react and submit to radicals and reactionaries alike. Yet, the right-wing (and now even some moderate centrists) have adopted this fake war on wokeism as the number one crisis facing democracy.
But the real reason this has become so popular is because it is the perfect way to cancel critics of the rich. If you criticize a business leader, you’re woke. If you want to boycott a corporation, you’re woke. If you accuse a politician or CEO of being a sexual predator, you’re woke.
If you think being against stakeholder theory and financial ethics makes someone a greedy capitalist, you’re woke.
If you believe in censorship of misinformation on social media, then you’re woke and are against freedom of speech.
If you believe that corporations should be ethical and consider their environmental and social impact, then you are misguided and woke.
If Vivek Ramaswamy gets his pet issue vaulted to the forefront, especially in primary debates, it will compete with the traditional and relevant GOP issues on the economy, crime, foreign policy, and immigration. Vivek might actually succeed because his rivals Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will rail against wokeness also, and probably even louder than he. All three of these very rich men would love to make this issue the only issue. They would love to hide the fact that their real agenda is to hand even more wealth over to people who already have too much, implement civics tests to attain the right to vote, and repeal and gut every single law focused on women's rights.
It must be stated, however, of all three of these fringe lunatic candidates, Vivek takes the gold medal for being an elitist scoundrel.
If elected President, he will try to eliminate the Department of Education which seeks to provide equal access to education, abolish the IRS which is mostly concerned with taxing wealthy people like him, and disband the FBI, which has proven to cause trouble for powerful people who don’t believe the law should apply to them.
But let’s not talk about that, let’s go after the woke problem.
After all, isn’t the real agenda to make sure everyone is asleep?
Many interesting subjects here, but I'll pick one--as a person who hates cars and driving so much I don't even have a license, it's heartening to see all the trending video essays about new urbanism and the revival of public transit. But, as noted, progress is agonizingly slow because of political malfeasance and the automobile lobby.
I live in a place where cars are an inconvenient luxury, as it is possible to get anywhere without them, and getting around is painful. Yet, people still use them and litter the streets with their parking. I came from Detroit, a place so very proud of their self propulsion, but I detest the automobile. I think it should be only reserved for delivery and emergency uses. Taxis perhaps. The car has been in human existence for a very short period of time, and it should remain that way.