Good morning Allison. I understand your feelings on woke culture. You and Penguin have been staunchly critical of woke culture all along.

And I can’t say I entirely disagree. But, I don’t take as hard a line against it as the two of you for a couple of reasons.

One, it seems like a chicken or egg argument to me. This might be part of a backlash, but then, isn’t woke culture itself a backlash against years of certain people being forced into invisibility?

They might get a little ahead of themselves, and yes some of them are straight up cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. They don’t always go about things the right or the best way, they’re terribly disorganized, they don’t even know specifically what they really want — they’re a lot like Occupy Wall Street in that regard; they’re just there— and they’re chaotic and dogmatic in their discourse.

Yep. There’s plenty to criticize.

That said, when you get down to it, what most of these people want is to live authentically without shame, censure, or danger. They want a place in this world just like everybody else. They don’t want to be invisible or hide because their existence makes Billy Bob Bubbalicious worry he might not be as straight-laced and vanilla as his parents informed him he was.

That’s shouldn’t be a hard ask in a free society. It should be a given.

It’s clear not everyone wants a free society. Who’s really the cream puff here?

I’m also aware that things are a little different over in Australia where you are and the UK, where Penguin is than in the US where I am. As such, my second reason for my hesitancy to lay it all at the feet of Wokeferatu (love that term btw) is some of the other things we’ve had going on.

We elected a Black President. While it’s clear that for many it was a long time coming and about damn time, it’s also clear that for many others, well, they just couldn’t handle it at all.

Since the Reagan administration, Christians started messing around in politics and becoming more fundamentalist every year. I have a hard time criticizing LGBTQ for unhinged ranting online as being the source of all political and social evil when Mega Church pastors and fundamentalist preachers with thousands of followers are continually calling for rainbow coalition members to be hunted down, given a summary conviction of homosexuality after a kangaroo show trial by mob, lined up, and shot in the back of the head. I mean, who’s really the unhinged party there? It’s not like LGBTQ aren’t under real threat of life.

And it’s getting worse. There’s little to no push back from other Christians. These fools are building up to calling for religious pograms and Christians can’t be fussed to strip those devils of their pulpits or bare minimum make sure they shut that dumb ass shit up. Jesus must be so proud.

I know you’ve got a little bit of that over in Australia, there’s even less in the UK as I understand it, but it’s getting wicked bad over here. There’s a real play for theocracy being made.

We’ve had gridlocked politics for half a century now. That’s led to increasingly deep frustration amongst the public at large and loss of faith in the government over all. Peope’s patience is worn thin; they’re snapping from the strain. I often struggle with anger myself. Unplugging doesn’t help. I’m angry just living my life because people won’t leave me the hell alone. What Jessica Wildfire says about toxic positivity and social gaslighting really resonates for me. That part of American culture (always being chipper) against the reality of stalled antagonistic governance is mentally and emotionally gruelling. I see a lot of spillover of that dynamic both in woke culture and just generalized societal stress.

There’s been some other things going on that have had an effect as well. 9/11. The wars. For me, I pinpoint the start of the gender wars in the aftermath of Ken Star using the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal to score politically as when that really kicked off. Before then, I could walk alone at night with no fear. Harassment was rare. Sexism and violence toward women existed, but it wasn’t as in your face. Now it’s nearly every fucking day some bro is causing some scene. I saw a man throw a rock at a woman this morning because she wouldn’t give him a handout. Certainly no one was proud of it like men are today compared to a few decades ago. The militarization of the police had caused problems. The war on drugs. The rise of wealth inequality. The undermining of education. And so forth and so on.

I just can’t in good conscience say that woke culture is more to blame than the fallout from any of these other things. I’m not saying that it hadn’t contributed at all, I’m saying it’s one ingredient in the soup not the soup itself.

Lastly, here in the States progressives have always been politically homeless because mainstream Democrats are really Conservative lite. Always have been.

That’s a huge part of the problem too.