How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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Let’s start off with the most-read spiked article of 2022 – ‘ Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory? Phillips’ attempt to defend the value of ordinary, everyday duties – to one’s family, friends and loved ones – is important. The original meaning of ‘woke’ was to be awake to social injustice – particularly injustices about race. Nonetheless, the Census data released in June 2022 shows the highest proportion ever — 50 per cent — of Australians are born, or descended from those born, overseas.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is wreaking havoc - spiked

But perhaps of more concerns is the impact on debate: free speech is chilled and intellectual conformity is enforced when people fear saying what they truly think. But when other groups feel threatened or challenged by it, they might want to subvert it in some way. The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish.Fraser Myers, our deputy editor, wrote so well on so many topics this year, but this piece on the cost-of-living crisis and elite failure is particularly excellent.

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy

This clearly written, well-organized book is a model of clear thinking on a set of inter-related topics under the umbrella term woke. In practice, however, the human brain – even one as fine as O’Sullivan’s – cannot predict or control the movement of every spinning ivory sphere.

Take a step back from the Russell Brand scandal and you see that a clear cultural shift has taken place – not towards treating victims with respect, as is so often claimed, but towards treating all women as victims. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical. The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. but I found it just a little bit to "wordy" which meant for me I could not read more than a few pages at a time.