As someone who agrees with Naomi that it's important to think about the underlying mechanics, I think my main annoyance with wokeness is when it missidentifies underlying mechanics. For example, Ibram X Kendi's reactions to lower black test scores is not to be concerned that society is failing to teach Black students but that the tests themselves must be rascist. And it feels like that's a wide spread feeling in progressive circles, that these gaps don't really exist, and if they do, then there's nothing we can do to fix them. That feels totally backwards to me. I don't want to overstate this case, it's not like raising any student test scores is an easy task. But we have to acknowledge it's a worthy goal in order to do something about it.
The other concern is that too many woke voices actually don't represent most people that they claim to. I live in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood where former cop Eric Adams did very well in mayoral elections. Why? Because the population is predominantly middle and working class Black voters, Adams' base. These people reasonably felt that their concerns about crime were not being heard by the "Defund the Police" movement. These people are well aware of the abuses that bad police officers can inflict on people and communities but they still prefer cops to criminals. It feels really disengenuos for writers like NK Jemisin to call these voters "White" for their concerns. I don't think she has to agree with them (Eric Adams certainly seemed to be a poor choice for mayor). But her ideology blinded her to the real concerns that people had, and these were the people she was claiming to represent.
I actually think it's because they don't have a broader concept, like humans, to fall back onto. It's hard to come to the idea of better education when you don't believe in anything that can be educated. There's a reason the conclusion runs there instead of an alternative.
Leave it to Naomi to write a mini morality tale in her response!
Very interesting all around, tho I will say, perhaps contra to Daniel’s point, that I did not find the victory of the woke left 7-8 years ago to be as totalizing as he portrays it? Maybe that’s bc I live in West Michigan, somewhat distant from the primary nodes of cultural production, but I simply didn’t see this stuff become as omnipresent to the degree as, say, Brooklyn or SF. So much of the complaints of ppl like Bill D. strike me as the complaints of ppl who expected to arrive at and remain in the room, and consequently bemoan the fact they haven’t. But we’re writers here! Obscurity is our habitat!
I take your point. I think a lot of what I say or write on this topic has to do with pretty elite cultural spaces. I'm not in NY or LA, but Austin is surely quite different than West Michigan. What has been your experience in the arty and intellectual spaces in Michigan? Surely there was a lot of awokening, but it sounds like not as pervasively?
And yeah, no doubt a lot of the complaints from anti-wokesters is a resentment born of displacement. I feel it myself sometimes, and try very hard to hold it in proper perspective. No one owes me anything in this realm, and resentment is pretty toxic not just to one's emotional health but to one's talent.
I think my semi-pushback on both issues is that a) elite cultural spaces matter, precisely because they're elite, ie disproportionately influential, and b) the big cultural/political shift in elite spaces will have good and bad consequences, and it's worth taking stock of what they are.
I don't know how representative my experiences in St. Louis are of the broader Midwest because StL is a once-leading city that has a developed a stark inferiority complex from experiencing severe decline, but I often find culturally aspirational people in the area can be if anything more rigid and brittle about trends and fads on the coasts than people who live on the coasts and thus have a little more cultural self-confidence and psychological room for irreverence. There is no more stereotypical a literal-minded MSNBC #resistance liberal than a middle-aged professional in an affluent St. Louis suburb trying to prove to themselves that they'd fit right in at a dinner party in Georgetown or on Park Avenue.
Lol. I'm fascinated by the regional nuances of these things. e.g when I was in NYC people were very cautious in how they joked about gender and sexuality but pretty loose about race. Then when I moved to Northampton, MA, which is very white but heavily LGBT, it was the opposite -- loose about gender and sexuality but very, very careful about race.
During Covid, or by Summer 2021 maybe, the behaviors around masking and 6-foot distancing were distinctly different in NYC vs STL. In the STL burbs it became much more blatantly a class and status marker with many people being proud of and haughty about their precise hewing to all the rules as opposed to the low class hoosiers who didn't understand the science and know to trust the experts.
Trying to think if I can characterize it in Austin. It's complicated because we're a liberal city but we're still influenced by being in a conservative state, and then on top of that we have this strong tech influence which was still nominally liberal in 2020/21 but was already much more open to dissenting views on covid policy by that point. So it's harder to generalize. I'd say the affluent business class was much more lax earlier, while academics and more politically left groups were more cautious. And then the young people in general (Austin has a lot of 20somethings) were more lax.
A lot of this is very much “your mileage may vary.” I’ve also lived in St. Louis and was actively involved in the (rather robust for a small city) local theatre scene. In my experience, I found the exact opposite to be the case - people in the area were doing much more idiosyncratic, unfashionable work than in New York. Were some of the people I worked with #Resistance liberals? Politically, yes, but they were rarely *artistically* bland.
I also think some of this discussion is collapsing MSNBC-watching liberalism and so-called “woke” ideas like CRT into an undifferentiated liberal ideology, which erases the many ways the left, broadly construed, is quite fractured on how to deal with issues like race and gender. In my experience, your average professor of Black studies is going to be a harsher, more damning critic of someone like Robin DiAngelo than most “anti-woke” people could even dream of. There are real differences between some of these ideas in how scholars approach them vs. how they’ve trickled down into the larger culture.
That's a good point. Even a big difference between the person who's pretty plugged in via MSNBC and Facebook and the professor who's actually read a lot of the theory, much less the person who is just getting it second hand from the MSNBC watcher.
I should have been more specific about the context from the previous reply, was speaking primarily about StL's upscale suburbs like Clayton, Ladue, fancier parts of U City, etc. much more than the city proper or other parts of the region.
Re: the undifferentiated ideology, I tend to think that's more true among diverse people operating out in the real world than whatever gets squeezed into the elite institutional discourse... disagreements among the rank and file don't necessarily register in the gilded corridors of power.
Oh, I definitely agree with you about the tonier suburbs, there is a significant amount of conformity going on (but I also think that’s most suburbs because suburbs tend to be, well, conformist!).
But I’m not sure I agree with your second point, mainly because, in my experience, it’s not entirely accurate. Or at least I’d need to know more about what you mean by “the gilded corridors of power.” Where? Who?
Here’s where I’m coming from: Currently, I work at an elite private university, both as an academic and in student affairs. And yes, many of my university’s non-academic units maintain a certain bland kind of corporate DEI philosophy (one colleague in administration was trying to describe something in terms of “restorative justice” yesterday and I had to work so hard to not roll my eyes at her, lest they spin out of my goddamn head).
But among the faculty, there are some real pockets of dissent and frustration, from a left-wing perspective, directed towards the university’s handling of issues around race, gender, sexuality, class, calling them reductive, tokenizing, elitist, etc.
Like, there are *miles* of difference between how scholars in gender & sexuality studies are talking about, say, trans issues vs. how the academic bureaucracy is talking about them. Just last week I was grumbling with members of my mostly POC, very queer department how we had to do this aggressively mediocre online training on institutional diversity & inclusion - and we’re humanities scholars!
It’s somewhat hard for me to take comments about elite cultural power at face value when we are dealing with the “MAGA is tearing down liberal democracy and obliterating academic freedom” of it all.
*Book Recommendation: Olufemi Taiwo’s book “Elite Capture” does a nice job of capturing the tension between corporate & bureaucratic deployment of DEI & its left-wing critics.
I have seen ‘awokening’ here for sure—the public library in Grand Rapids held drag story time, so that’s probably the most visible incarnation. But here, it seems more of a piece with the alternative and/or underground scenes you get in midwestern cities, rather than some top-down imposition.
The midwest is fairly opaque to me in general. My sister is in Chicago, and one of my brothers in St. Paul, so I have some connections there, but whenever I visit it feels like a lot of stuff is going on under the surface that I don't really grasp.
I’d say that’s accurate! A lot of the energies that go into The Discourse in larger metropolises instead get siphoned into, like, college football. Which is not all bad imo
I was just in St Paul and had a conversation with my brother about how many pro sports teams they had in the Twin Cities, which is all of them. Basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. It's kind of amazing, at least coming from Austin, where we have none (though to be fair we're an exception in Texas).
Is it possible to agree with...both of you? Or is that just some more liberal spinelessness? I kid, obviously, but Naomi's question at the end is well-chosen: "Instead I would worry about the underlying structural mechanics, whatever those might be, that make it so difficult for liberal institutions to stay true to their mission." Just what is the mission of a law firm like Paul, Weiss, or a university like Columbia? Is it to defend freedom of expression and the rule of law, or is it to accumulate large endowments and pay out large bonuses to its partners every year? Can you do both? I grew up in a small rural town in Western Michigan, and when I was young I noticed that anyone who did actual good for people in our community was paid modestly for that work, at best. (And often very poorly.) Social workers, teachers, nurses (like my mother) therapists for the county (like my father), and so on. When I went to a fancy private college, I was surprised to find that the unspoken expectation was that one could both make a large amount of money AND be a good person who did good 'for the world'. Who were these people who did both? They were the parents of my fellow classmates, doctors, lawyers, bankers, professors, and so on. I didn't find this expectation hypocritical or outrageous so much as I found it interesting. Was it really possible to do both? It seemed to me like they were goals that were essentially at odds, but that power and money themselves could serve as advertisements for the good, which would be taken at face value because...that's just what everyone was like at a fancy private college. While I thrilled at the idea of being both, recently I find myself pulled back toward my intuition that I had as an 18-year-old. You can't really be both. Does Janine know this? And if she does, what does she do with this information?
Great comment. I'm also in the position of agreeing with both of them.
I think the critique of the political attitudes of elite liberal institutions, especially in the last decade, isn't that they focused too much on race, or on equality, or on gender, but that their case for various forms of equality was very much the product of, and tailored to, the PMC environment in which it was produced, and thus had some serious blind spots and also certain stylistic peculiarities. This is obviously Shamus Rahman Khan and his student Musa al-Garbi's take, which I know Dan knows well (his podcast with Khan is a must listen). Then, as Naomi says, social media and internet dynamics, especially during the COVID era, sent everything into overdrive. That seems to me to have abated as we adjust to internet dynamics and the movement of life to the digital... but maybe I'm wrong about that and am just not understanding the contemporary situation.
I don't know how we get out of this situation, though, given that the left-right axis in the US and globally has been realigned around education rather than class, as Piketty among others has demonstrated. At the same time, and relatedly, the cultural institutions have become increasingly unimportant to the reproduction of society and economy. The right is unlikely to go to war to take them over when crushing them would be easier and mostly costless. Hard to see how they could be anything other than a Democratic echo chamber in the current climate, with all the pathologies that entails. Reimagining our artistic and intellectual endeavors in forms that are genuinely in conversation with much broader swathes of society seems like the only way forward, but easier said than done.
I somewhat try to think through question -- what are we to do? -- in my next post. I don't really have a systemic or institutional answer, but at an individual level I think a lot of us (you, me, Naomi) are already doing it. It's stepping away from the baggage of woke and anti-woke and being led by our curiosity, passions, fascinations, etc. In this sense I take Naomi's provocation seriously, though I'm not sure it's entirely how she meant it. I don't want to be limited by the anti-woke way of framing things any more than I wanted to be limited by the woke way.
You can be filthy rich and a good person — just ask Joel Osteen and Betsy DeVos! Just like secular ideologies you can cherry-pick which one works for you from the theological ones too! I find in most of these discussions people are mostly talking past each other. I’m ok if folks (not pointing to you directly) want to crap on post-modern, post-structuralism, post-whatever, but they have to do it from a place of knowledge. It’s easy to dismiss what one does not understand.
“Even at a lower level of harm, where lives and political freedoms aren’t at stake, the Trump-Vance-Musk administration is rapidly outdoing what the woke left did at its worst.”
This is where the anti-woke people, dismayed by what’s happening, need to contend with what they have enabled, who they’re aligned with and US history. Anti-woke is really no different than other racial panics that happened post slavery. Race mixing, Yellow Peril, Welfare Queens, Super Predator, CRT, Political Correctness, pushes against desegration etc all led to massive state interventions. Crime bills, immigration acts, punitive welfare measures - restrictive and punishing state interventions against marginalized groups. The DEI initiative at my workplace got a breast feeding room so a prized employee didn’t have to leave. These are not the same. And no amount of annoying Kendi lectures or work telling you to maybe diversify the pool will equate to the ability for racial panics to induce punitive laws enforced by state power. You can’t equate left and right on this issue, the left has no state power to impose or sanction people for anything. And the alt-right/liberals who are anti-woke have only ever really wanted to roll back the clock so they could say the n-word in peace. Of course the internet content amplification machine means we need thousands of words to elucidate woke vs anti-woke, but in the end anti-woke won, like you always do - the state is on your side 24/7.
"I believe the left is the great threat to American intelligence and cultural vitality."
It would be helpful to have specific examples of "visual art, dance, fiction, poetry," critical thought etc that constitute such a threat. Otherwise it's difficult to pin down your charge.
That's a fair point. I mostly wanted to avoid having to make a really detailed case because I'm less interested in debating the issue than I am the questions that arise if you grant that this is my experience of the period we're in.
This is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but have you considered that your experience might just not be accurate?
I’m just thinking about how there’s been so much “anti-woke” discourse that attacks the idea of “lived experience” (*especially* in debates about trans issues). As such, I can’t help but find it mildly amusing and ironic when an “anti-woke” person’s account of left-wing censoriousness is grounded on something akin to vibes, when that same person might turn around and shit on ideas like standpoint theory or microaggressions.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re doing this here! And I believe you when you say this has been your experience. It’s certainly been mine in a lot of my predominantly left-liberal community spaces, where social justice ideas are too easily used as thought-terminating slogans rather than prompts to further thought (which always makes me wonder how much the person saying them even understands the idea they’re espousing, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
I’m looking forward to reading Part #3 of this exchange. I hope you & Naomi do this again!
I have thought about that a lot. And in some respects I'm very open to standpoint theory and microaggressions. These are real things, which we should take into account. We just all need to be careful about what we do after we identify an empirical phenomenon or a good analytic frame. They don't tell us what to do politically. Microaggressions are real, but that means neither that we should implement policy to punish them or that we shouldn't institute such a policy. Wokeness is real, but that doesn't mean we should ban DEI, or take over the universities. Far too often I think people move from identifying a phenomenon to extrapolating in a very linear way what the solution should be.
One reason I initiated the exchange with Naomi is precisely because I want to stay in touch with what I might not be perceiving from my own unique, but limited, standpoint.
I am a member of the anti-woke crowd of a type that Naomi is completely missing. Perhaps I am a rare breed.
I believe that the United States has a deeply racist history and that we have not had sufficient time nor sufficient policies to mitigate that history. Yet I do not believe all or even most of our existing institutions are racist or white supremacist. Generally my orientation is conservative in the sense that I believe most of our institutions have tremendous value and I do not want to see them dismantled, I want to see them reformed.
I do not want to see the University I work at dismantled. I don't want to see the field of study I work in (urban planning) dismantled. It's true that we don't have enough minority planners and I would like to see many more. But I don't want to dismantle the way we educate planners to achieve that goal. We have come at the system of education we have developed through decades of important work, almost none of which was explicitly or implicitly discriminatory.
It is possible to believe both that we have not come close to achieving racial justice, and that most of our institutions actually work pretty well. No one institution or institutional policy can overcome hundreds of years of oppression. What I hate about the woke left is the presumption that legacy institutions or policies are by default racist, guilty until proven innocent.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this is the SAT. Universities removed the SATs hoping it would unleash greater equity, but it just resulted in fewer opportunities for disadvantaged students. Now they are moving back towards re-embracing the SAT.
I guess I would say my frustration with the woke left is the displacement of analysis with ideology. I think the work of fixing our institutions is slow, patient, incremental work. In my own field, I am afraid to speak up publicly about my doubts because the commitment to social justice is so vociferous.
100%. My guess is that Naomi shares your perspective in most or all respects. Where I think she right now, though, is that we shouldn't be wasting energy critiquing or attacking the woke left when the (mostly good) institutions not to mention various civil liberties are under attack from the right.
Where I'm guessing both of us are is that we believe that the woke left is in some sense not our ally against the attacks of the right. Or they're sometimes tactically our ally, in defending the institutions, but in the long term they're undermining them or hollowing them out from within, rendering them more vulnerable.
I've been following this from afar although it's all a bit too insider baseball for me to get seriously involved in. But now that the cuts to the NEH have been announced, I'm interested to hear what Dan and Naomi will have to say. I think I was more on Dan's side but this new turn of events is a point for Naomi, if I can put it like that. This is just awful, awful news. I feel like the challenge is creating a critique where one can criticize cancel culture in the institutions while also criticizing the anti humanistic drives animating conservative politics. The people in the arts who had some optimism when Trump got elected about freedom in the artistic sphere (I saw a couple ridiculous opinion pieces) are looking pretty stupid right now, imo.
I agree that we need to be clear about the damage the right is doing. I just mostly think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And honestly I’m trying to figure it all out in real time. One thing I don’t get into in the back and forth with Naomi is just my struggle to have anything interesting or unique to say about Trump and MAGA. That’s not an excuse for not acting again them, politically, because activism doesn’t need to be interesting to be effective. But it is a challenge for me when I have my writer or podcaster hat on, because I really there’s zero point in me doing those things if I’m not interesting.
I get that--it's boring to say "Trump is bad" because presumably, everyone in this space agrees. So why bother talking about it when it's so obvious. But what surprised me a bit is what happened right after the election when people were getting sort of Trump curious in the arts and cultural scenes. One example would be that piece in The Point where the author goes to NatCon, I believe you and Bill D mention it in your convo. Now, I love The Point, it's one of my favorite magazines, but if I'm being honest I found the piece rather naive. The author takes all these young conservatives at face value and portrays them as intellectually curious and future intellectuals when they say shit like "I want to strike it big in the private sector." I was waiting the whole piece for some level of awareness or irony to appear but it never did. My point is, when these sorts of pieces are published, it then becomes worthwhile to push back against them, criticize Trump and MAGA with respect to their influence on artistic and cultural spaces, and articulate a future artistic landscape that is something beyond the left/right divide we currently have. Anyway, I appreciate your good faith search for this.
The witch-hunt approach (IMO) is what most people object to. People being afraid that they (or their fictional characters) might’ve said something that is too ambiguous and may be interpreted by someone on the left as racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-trans, etc. (granted sometimes objectionable stuff is really blatant in nonfiction writing like equating “old” people with “losers” but of course ageism has never been a big concern of the over-woke in the lit-fiction world.) Before the fiction writer has time to address this issue (explain what they were trying to say) they could be ostracized by the left, pulled from publications, etc. I am a lefty…never voted Republican in my life…and I think it’s fascism how the Orange Terror is slashing DEI programs, CRT, etc., but the witch-hunt attitude on the left seems counter to free speech and artistic expression and has forced everyone to hire sensitivity readers for their public writings. I have a minor character in one of my fictional stories who is disabled and—just because the story’s protagonist feels uneasy and fearful of this same disability one day happening to her—one editor said it is “disabled shaming.” There was a time in academia that my husband could have been fired for mistakenly saying something that might be considered un-woke. (Now, it's the opposite and Desantis is hunting my husband down for doing a project that promotes diversity and social justice.) These people I call “over-woke” in the lit-world seem to demand that all fictional protagonists be woke, which is nuts really. In other ways, like in Apple TV series, for example, wokeness seems to be over-emphasized (the woke character-choices get over-represented) and getting in the way of good realistic (period-piece) storytelling because the woke elements dominate the narrative of say Emily Dickinson in the mid 19th cent. I say everyone has the right to love and marry and be who they want, without govt interference (and systemic racism definitely still exists tho Biden was doing obviously a MUCH BETTER job of beginning to address it). On the other hand, lit mag editors just need to simply make it clear that an author’s character’s opinions are not their own. I think even the most “marginalized” people can see through a lot of the over-wokeness of some of this and find some of it inane and too obvious, sometimes cringy. BTW, I can’t believe how Columbia crumbled to Trump and white-male (WASPy) domination. What a travesty!
Both of you make a compelling case. But I feel Naomi is a little too selective on who she grants agency. Speaking as a frustrated downwardly mobile professional who was disappointed in the slow pace of social progress during the Obama years, I understood the feeling that not enough was being done. But I took ideas seriously. Others had the obligation to do the same.
People engaged in relentless kayfabe about liberalism being an obstacle to progress without seriously thinking about if a left illiberalism could actually succeed in America or if it succeeded what it would actually look like. Half the time I think the woke were hoping an adult would show up so they could keep playing pretend radical.
The left is the enemy of eros?? I invite William Deresiewicz to come down from whatever planet he's living on and visit Alienated Majesty Books, Austin's biggest left bookstore. There are thousands of titles there bursting with eros and "life force."
" Can we really have an intellectual class, in the 21st century, that believes in a racial caste system?
In a caste system all members of the lower caste are forbidden from doing things permitted to higher castes. In the US all roles are open to all races but Blacks on average do less well than Whites. One possible explanation is a lower average IQ — but that is consistent with some blacks being doctors, lawyers, even presidents, which is not a caste system.
Jews in America do better than average. One possible explanation of that is a higher average IQ. Is that a caste system?
We should have an intellectual class that believes what is true.
"Is that intellectual class really going to have a mandate to govern a country that, very soon, will be majority non-white?"
Both the lower IQ claim and the observed lower average income are about Afro-Americans, currently about 14.4% of the US population. The same IQ evidence that suggests a lower than average IQ for Blacks also shows a higher than average IQ for Asians. They may well have a higher average income than whites as well.
I think that's repackaging the whole sjw to dei thing simply as politics, as Oppenheimer distinguished. The left wasn't merely engaging in shutting down speech, it was trying to control narratives in a complete way. That also doesn't address the art disposition we should have.
When sjw's were ran off youtube by, quite literally, most everyone, the skeptic anti sjw had no meaningful way to replace the narrative. That sort of shows the limitation you spoke of. A lot of anti sjw's still bridged over into the sexual, gender etc narratives that sjw's were completely derided on. Afterwards, they refused to speak and shut people down. This involved institutional capture. Celebrities that wore native American costumes at a Halloween party were forced to apologize. This is entirely different from anything that was discussed on the right. Nobody is asking dei to apologize nor to become liberals who love America. It's simply not happening. The backlash to them is very simply, "these people will not allow free speech ever, because it limits narratuve control they speak, and they will go to extreme lengths, bemoan the first amendment, in order to shut down any narrative counter to theirs and that that narrative control ends up becoming indistinguishable between them and Democrats". That's simply how it is viewed by, maybe, half the population. I remember saying to a very nice lady in Colorado that my parents were extremely conservative (my dad is like a blue dog democrat — extremely into unions and doesn't like baggy pants) and she intuited more than was justified because it's not accurate, but this extends to people. Steve Allen himself hated Rock and Roll, almost maliciously, but he was extremely liberal. The range of opinions people have are limited due to this narrative control.
I also want to say, in Utah they have made some western courses about us constitution and basic history leading up to it mandatory for freshman. One of the faculty members made the most inane position against it that they couldn't vote when all those times happened. Presumably we should never study anything beyond the last ten years. There is absolutely no right winger saying that, but that is the default position in every institution by disposition and fear. If you can at least view Trump in 2016 and 2024 as a backlash to *that* then I think the discussion goes way further. There is no Trump, in the policies, dispositions as you're viewing them without the crazy stuff that happened from the other side. That's not a back and forth forever thing because conservativism simply is not capable of the narrative control ideology sjw to dei specifically are solely oriented towards. And we have no art because of it.
Also, I thought it important to add: Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson etc were heavily engaging sjw stuff. It's when they got banned by universities and moved into dei and were mobbed by antifa and threatened with violence and loss of livelihood, social and economic, and, finally, when dei decided no more discussions that the discussions stopped. There has never been an unwillingness to engage them. I try to avoid engaging people when they become malicious and extremely self-absorbed. That mindset and ideology which leads to that, is still present.
Edit: I might as well mention manipulative as well since that's never addressed. It's a preying on people mindset. These people socially engage as predators in their day-to-day lives.
Other edit: I think this is really important too: we have to speak in layers. For example, when I said predator, I was not referring to the child gender thing. We have to walk on eggshells around these topics and word choices. Now whether that's due to right inflammation or not, itis something that is angled around and pounced on by these dei members. This is lived experience. So, the ability to discuss these things has many roadblocks which force disengagement. If anyone is mad someone chooses to dispense with the manipulation and gaming around this narrative control, I'm not sure it's justified. The negative of them not engaging with it is a bluntness that goes too far because there are no social standards which allow disagreement or disengagment. Again, these are real, relevant lived experiences and, again, we've lost so many subcultures just due to this predator mindset.
As someone who agrees with Naomi that it's important to think about the underlying mechanics, I think my main annoyance with wokeness is when it missidentifies underlying mechanics. For example, Ibram X Kendi's reactions to lower black test scores is not to be concerned that society is failing to teach Black students but that the tests themselves must be rascist. And it feels like that's a wide spread feeling in progressive circles, that these gaps don't really exist, and if they do, then there's nothing we can do to fix them. That feels totally backwards to me. I don't want to overstate this case, it's not like raising any student test scores is an easy task. But we have to acknowledge it's a worthy goal in order to do something about it.
The other concern is that too many woke voices actually don't represent most people that they claim to. I live in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood where former cop Eric Adams did very well in mayoral elections. Why? Because the population is predominantly middle and working class Black voters, Adams' base. These people reasonably felt that their concerns about crime were not being heard by the "Defund the Police" movement. These people are well aware of the abuses that bad police officers can inflict on people and communities but they still prefer cops to criminals. It feels really disengenuos for writers like NK Jemisin to call these voters "White" for their concerns. I don't think she has to agree with them (Eric Adams certainly seemed to be a poor choice for mayor). But her ideology blinded her to the real concerns that people had, and these were the people she was claiming to represent.
I actually think it's because they don't have a broader concept, like humans, to fall back onto. It's hard to come to the idea of better education when you don't believe in anything that can be educated. There's a reason the conclusion runs there instead of an alternative.
Leave it to Naomi to write a mini morality tale in her response!
Very interesting all around, tho I will say, perhaps contra to Daniel’s point, that I did not find the victory of the woke left 7-8 years ago to be as totalizing as he portrays it? Maybe that’s bc I live in West Michigan, somewhat distant from the primary nodes of cultural production, but I simply didn’t see this stuff become as omnipresent to the degree as, say, Brooklyn or SF. So much of the complaints of ppl like Bill D. strike me as the complaints of ppl who expected to arrive at and remain in the room, and consequently bemoan the fact they haven’t. But we’re writers here! Obscurity is our habitat!
I loved the mini-morality tale. It is very Naomi.
I take your point. I think a lot of what I say or write on this topic has to do with pretty elite cultural spaces. I'm not in NY or LA, but Austin is surely quite different than West Michigan. What has been your experience in the arty and intellectual spaces in Michigan? Surely there was a lot of awokening, but it sounds like not as pervasively?
And yeah, no doubt a lot of the complaints from anti-wokesters is a resentment born of displacement. I feel it myself sometimes, and try very hard to hold it in proper perspective. No one owes me anything in this realm, and resentment is pretty toxic not just to one's emotional health but to one's talent.
I think my semi-pushback on both issues is that a) elite cultural spaces matter, precisely because they're elite, ie disproportionately influential, and b) the big cultural/political shift in elite spaces will have good and bad consequences, and it's worth taking stock of what they are.
I don't know how representative my experiences in St. Louis are of the broader Midwest because StL is a once-leading city that has a developed a stark inferiority complex from experiencing severe decline, but I often find culturally aspirational people in the area can be if anything more rigid and brittle about trends and fads on the coasts than people who live on the coasts and thus have a little more cultural self-confidence and psychological room for irreverence. There is no more stereotypical a literal-minded MSNBC #resistance liberal than a middle-aged professional in an affluent St. Louis suburb trying to prove to themselves that they'd fit right in at a dinner party in Georgetown or on Park Avenue.
Lol. I'm fascinated by the regional nuances of these things. e.g when I was in NYC people were very cautious in how they joked about gender and sexuality but pretty loose about race. Then when I moved to Northampton, MA, which is very white but heavily LGBT, it was the opposite -- loose about gender and sexuality but very, very careful about race.
Makes sense, of course, but interesting.
During Covid, or by Summer 2021 maybe, the behaviors around masking and 6-foot distancing were distinctly different in NYC vs STL. In the STL burbs it became much more blatantly a class and status marker with many people being proud of and haughty about their precise hewing to all the rules as opposed to the low class hoosiers who didn't understand the science and know to trust the experts.
Trying to think if I can characterize it in Austin. It's complicated because we're a liberal city but we're still influenced by being in a conservative state, and then on top of that we have this strong tech influence which was still nominally liberal in 2020/21 but was already much more open to dissenting views on covid policy by that point. So it's harder to generalize. I'd say the affluent business class was much more lax earlier, while academics and more politically left groups were more cautious. And then the young people in general (Austin has a lot of 20somethings) were more lax.
A lot of this is very much “your mileage may vary.” I’ve also lived in St. Louis and was actively involved in the (rather robust for a small city) local theatre scene. In my experience, I found the exact opposite to be the case - people in the area were doing much more idiosyncratic, unfashionable work than in New York. Were some of the people I worked with #Resistance liberals? Politically, yes, but they were rarely *artistically* bland.
I also think some of this discussion is collapsing MSNBC-watching liberalism and so-called “woke” ideas like CRT into an undifferentiated liberal ideology, which erases the many ways the left, broadly construed, is quite fractured on how to deal with issues like race and gender. In my experience, your average professor of Black studies is going to be a harsher, more damning critic of someone like Robin DiAngelo than most “anti-woke” people could even dream of. There are real differences between some of these ideas in how scholars approach them vs. how they’ve trickled down into the larger culture.
That's a good point. Even a big difference between the person who's pretty plugged in via MSNBC and Facebook and the professor who's actually read a lot of the theory, much less the person who is just getting it second hand from the MSNBC watcher.
I should have been more specific about the context from the previous reply, was speaking primarily about StL's upscale suburbs like Clayton, Ladue, fancier parts of U City, etc. much more than the city proper or other parts of the region.
Re: the undifferentiated ideology, I tend to think that's more true among diverse people operating out in the real world than whatever gets squeezed into the elite institutional discourse... disagreements among the rank and file don't necessarily register in the gilded corridors of power.
Oh, I definitely agree with you about the tonier suburbs, there is a significant amount of conformity going on (but I also think that’s most suburbs because suburbs tend to be, well, conformist!).
But I’m not sure I agree with your second point, mainly because, in my experience, it’s not entirely accurate. Or at least I’d need to know more about what you mean by “the gilded corridors of power.” Where? Who?
Here’s where I’m coming from: Currently, I work at an elite private university, both as an academic and in student affairs. And yes, many of my university’s non-academic units maintain a certain bland kind of corporate DEI philosophy (one colleague in administration was trying to describe something in terms of “restorative justice” yesterday and I had to work so hard to not roll my eyes at her, lest they spin out of my goddamn head).
But among the faculty, there are some real pockets of dissent and frustration, from a left-wing perspective, directed towards the university’s handling of issues around race, gender, sexuality, class, calling them reductive, tokenizing, elitist, etc.
Like, there are *miles* of difference between how scholars in gender & sexuality studies are talking about, say, trans issues vs. how the academic bureaucracy is talking about them. Just last week I was grumbling with members of my mostly POC, very queer department how we had to do this aggressively mediocre online training on institutional diversity & inclusion - and we’re humanities scholars!
It’s somewhat hard for me to take comments about elite cultural power at face value when we are dealing with the “MAGA is tearing down liberal democracy and obliterating academic freedom” of it all.
*Book Recommendation: Olufemi Taiwo’s book “Elite Capture” does a nice job of capturing the tension between corporate & bureaucratic deployment of DEI & its left-wing critics.
I have seen ‘awokening’ here for sure—the public library in Grand Rapids held drag story time, so that’s probably the most visible incarnation. But here, it seems more of a piece with the alternative and/or underground scenes you get in midwestern cities, rather than some top-down imposition.
The midwest is fairly opaque to me in general. My sister is in Chicago, and one of my brothers in St. Paul, so I have some connections there, but whenever I visit it feels like a lot of stuff is going on under the surface that I don't really grasp.
At any rate, you’re obviously playing well in western Michigan.
I’d say that’s accurate! A lot of the energies that go into The Discourse in larger metropolises instead get siphoned into, like, college football. Which is not all bad imo
I was just in St Paul and had a conversation with my brother about how many pro sports teams they had in the Twin Cities, which is all of them. Basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. It's kind of amazing, at least coming from Austin, where we have none (though to be fair we're an exception in Texas).
....what, no love for Austin FC?
(Feels like it's very on-brand for me to pop in at the tail end of this discussion to add "but what abouut soccer?")
Lol. Much love for the green, but MLS is not quite the big leagues yet.
Is it possible to agree with...both of you? Or is that just some more liberal spinelessness? I kid, obviously, but Naomi's question at the end is well-chosen: "Instead I would worry about the underlying structural mechanics, whatever those might be, that make it so difficult for liberal institutions to stay true to their mission." Just what is the mission of a law firm like Paul, Weiss, or a university like Columbia? Is it to defend freedom of expression and the rule of law, or is it to accumulate large endowments and pay out large bonuses to its partners every year? Can you do both? I grew up in a small rural town in Western Michigan, and when I was young I noticed that anyone who did actual good for people in our community was paid modestly for that work, at best. (And often very poorly.) Social workers, teachers, nurses (like my mother) therapists for the county (like my father), and so on. When I went to a fancy private college, I was surprised to find that the unspoken expectation was that one could both make a large amount of money AND be a good person who did good 'for the world'. Who were these people who did both? They were the parents of my fellow classmates, doctors, lawyers, bankers, professors, and so on. I didn't find this expectation hypocritical or outrageous so much as I found it interesting. Was it really possible to do both? It seemed to me like they were goals that were essentially at odds, but that power and money themselves could serve as advertisements for the good, which would be taken at face value because...that's just what everyone was like at a fancy private college. While I thrilled at the idea of being both, recently I find myself pulled back toward my intuition that I had as an 18-year-old. You can't really be both. Does Janine know this? And if she does, what does she do with this information?
Great comment. I'm also in the position of agreeing with both of them.
I think the critique of the political attitudes of elite liberal institutions, especially in the last decade, isn't that they focused too much on race, or on equality, or on gender, but that their case for various forms of equality was very much the product of, and tailored to, the PMC environment in which it was produced, and thus had some serious blind spots and also certain stylistic peculiarities. This is obviously Shamus Rahman Khan and his student Musa al-Garbi's take, which I know Dan knows well (his podcast with Khan is a must listen). Then, as Naomi says, social media and internet dynamics, especially during the COVID era, sent everything into overdrive. That seems to me to have abated as we adjust to internet dynamics and the movement of life to the digital... but maybe I'm wrong about that and am just not understanding the contemporary situation.
I don't know how we get out of this situation, though, given that the left-right axis in the US and globally has been realigned around education rather than class, as Piketty among others has demonstrated. At the same time, and relatedly, the cultural institutions have become increasingly unimportant to the reproduction of society and economy. The right is unlikely to go to war to take them over when crushing them would be easier and mostly costless. Hard to see how they could be anything other than a Democratic echo chamber in the current climate, with all the pathologies that entails. Reimagining our artistic and intellectual endeavors in forms that are genuinely in conversation with much broader swathes of society seems like the only way forward, but easier said than done.
I somewhat try to think through question -- what are we to do? -- in my next post. I don't really have a systemic or institutional answer, but at an individual level I think a lot of us (you, me, Naomi) are already doing it. It's stepping away from the baggage of woke and anti-woke and being led by our curiosity, passions, fascinations, etc. In this sense I take Naomi's provocation seriously, though I'm not sure it's entirely how she meant it. I don't want to be limited by the anti-woke way of framing things any more than I wanted to be limited by the woke way.
You can be filthy rich and a good person — just ask Joel Osteen and Betsy DeVos! Just like secular ideologies you can cherry-pick which one works for you from the theological ones too! I find in most of these discussions people are mostly talking past each other. I’m ok if folks (not pointing to you directly) want to crap on post-modern, post-structuralism, post-whatever, but they have to do it from a place of knowledge. It’s easy to dismiss what one does not understand.
“Even at a lower level of harm, where lives and political freedoms aren’t at stake, the Trump-Vance-Musk administration is rapidly outdoing what the woke left did at its worst.”
This is where the anti-woke people, dismayed by what’s happening, need to contend with what they have enabled, who they’re aligned with and US history. Anti-woke is really no different than other racial panics that happened post slavery. Race mixing, Yellow Peril, Welfare Queens, Super Predator, CRT, Political Correctness, pushes against desegration etc all led to massive state interventions. Crime bills, immigration acts, punitive welfare measures - restrictive and punishing state interventions against marginalized groups. The DEI initiative at my workplace got a breast feeding room so a prized employee didn’t have to leave. These are not the same. And no amount of annoying Kendi lectures or work telling you to maybe diversify the pool will equate to the ability for racial panics to induce punitive laws enforced by state power. You can’t equate left and right on this issue, the left has no state power to impose or sanction people for anything. And the alt-right/liberals who are anti-woke have only ever really wanted to roll back the clock so they could say the n-word in peace. Of course the internet content amplification machine means we need thousands of words to elucidate woke vs anti-woke, but in the end anti-woke won, like you always do - the state is on your side 24/7.
"I believe the left is the great threat to American intelligence and cultural vitality."
It would be helpful to have specific examples of "visual art, dance, fiction, poetry," critical thought etc that constitute such a threat. Otherwise it's difficult to pin down your charge.
That's a fair point. I mostly wanted to avoid having to make a really detailed case because I'm less interested in debating the issue than I am the questions that arise if you grant that this is my experience of the period we're in.
This is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but have you considered that your experience might just not be accurate?
I’m just thinking about how there’s been so much “anti-woke” discourse that attacks the idea of “lived experience” (*especially* in debates about trans issues). As such, I can’t help but find it mildly amusing and ironic when an “anti-woke” person’s account of left-wing censoriousness is grounded on something akin to vibes, when that same person might turn around and shit on ideas like standpoint theory or microaggressions.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re doing this here! And I believe you when you say this has been your experience. It’s certainly been mine in a lot of my predominantly left-liberal community spaces, where social justice ideas are too easily used as thought-terminating slogans rather than prompts to further thought (which always makes me wonder how much the person saying them even understands the idea they’re espousing, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
I’m looking forward to reading Part #3 of this exchange. I hope you & Naomi do this again!
Totally fair question!
I have thought about that a lot. And in some respects I'm very open to standpoint theory and microaggressions. These are real things, which we should take into account. We just all need to be careful about what we do after we identify an empirical phenomenon or a good analytic frame. They don't tell us what to do politically. Microaggressions are real, but that means neither that we should implement policy to punish them or that we shouldn't institute such a policy. Wokeness is real, but that doesn't mean we should ban DEI, or take over the universities. Far too often I think people move from identifying a phenomenon to extrapolating in a very linear way what the solution should be.
One reason I initiated the exchange with Naomi is precisely because I want to stay in touch with what I might not be perceiving from my own unique, but limited, standpoint.
I am a member of the anti-woke crowd of a type that Naomi is completely missing. Perhaps I am a rare breed.
I believe that the United States has a deeply racist history and that we have not had sufficient time nor sufficient policies to mitigate that history. Yet I do not believe all or even most of our existing institutions are racist or white supremacist. Generally my orientation is conservative in the sense that I believe most of our institutions have tremendous value and I do not want to see them dismantled, I want to see them reformed.
I do not want to see the University I work at dismantled. I don't want to see the field of study I work in (urban planning) dismantled. It's true that we don't have enough minority planners and I would like to see many more. But I don't want to dismantle the way we educate planners to achieve that goal. We have come at the system of education we have developed through decades of important work, almost none of which was explicitly or implicitly discriminatory.
It is possible to believe both that we have not come close to achieving racial justice, and that most of our institutions actually work pretty well. No one institution or institutional policy can overcome hundreds of years of oppression. What I hate about the woke left is the presumption that legacy institutions or policies are by default racist, guilty until proven innocent.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this is the SAT. Universities removed the SATs hoping it would unleash greater equity, but it just resulted in fewer opportunities for disadvantaged students. Now they are moving back towards re-embracing the SAT.
I guess I would say my frustration with the woke left is the displacement of analysis with ideology. I think the work of fixing our institutions is slow, patient, incremental work. In my own field, I am afraid to speak up publicly about my doubts because the commitment to social justice is so vociferous.
100%. My guess is that Naomi shares your perspective in most or all respects. Where I think she right now, though, is that we shouldn't be wasting energy critiquing or attacking the woke left when the (mostly good) institutions not to mention various civil liberties are under attack from the right.
Where I'm guessing both of us are is that we believe that the woke left is in some sense not our ally against the attacks of the right. Or they're sometimes tactically our ally, in defending the institutions, but in the long term they're undermining them or hollowing them out from within, rendering them more vulnerable.
I've been following this from afar although it's all a bit too insider baseball for me to get seriously involved in. But now that the cuts to the NEH have been announced, I'm interested to hear what Dan and Naomi will have to say. I think I was more on Dan's side but this new turn of events is a point for Naomi, if I can put it like that. This is just awful, awful news. I feel like the challenge is creating a critique where one can criticize cancel culture in the institutions while also criticizing the anti humanistic drives animating conservative politics. The people in the arts who had some optimism when Trump got elected about freedom in the artistic sphere (I saw a couple ridiculous opinion pieces) are looking pretty stupid right now, imo.
I agree that we need to be clear about the damage the right is doing. I just mostly think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And honestly I’m trying to figure it all out in real time. One thing I don’t get into in the back and forth with Naomi is just my struggle to have anything interesting or unique to say about Trump and MAGA. That’s not an excuse for not acting again them, politically, because activism doesn’t need to be interesting to be effective. But it is a challenge for me when I have my writer or podcaster hat on, because I really there’s zero point in me doing those things if I’m not interesting.
I get that--it's boring to say "Trump is bad" because presumably, everyone in this space agrees. So why bother talking about it when it's so obvious. But what surprised me a bit is what happened right after the election when people were getting sort of Trump curious in the arts and cultural scenes. One example would be that piece in The Point where the author goes to NatCon, I believe you and Bill D mention it in your convo. Now, I love The Point, it's one of my favorite magazines, but if I'm being honest I found the piece rather naive. The author takes all these young conservatives at face value and portrays them as intellectually curious and future intellectuals when they say shit like "I want to strike it big in the private sector." I was waiting the whole piece for some level of awareness or irony to appear but it never did. My point is, when these sorts of pieces are published, it then becomes worthwhile to push back against them, criticize Trump and MAGA with respect to their influence on artistic and cultural spaces, and articulate a future artistic landscape that is something beyond the left/right divide we currently have. Anyway, I appreciate your good faith search for this.
The witch-hunt approach (IMO) is what most people object to. People being afraid that they (or their fictional characters) might’ve said something that is too ambiguous and may be interpreted by someone on the left as racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-trans, etc. (granted sometimes objectionable stuff is really blatant in nonfiction writing like equating “old” people with “losers” but of course ageism has never been a big concern of the over-woke in the lit-fiction world.) Before the fiction writer has time to address this issue (explain what they were trying to say) they could be ostracized by the left, pulled from publications, etc. I am a lefty…never voted Republican in my life…and I think it’s fascism how the Orange Terror is slashing DEI programs, CRT, etc., but the witch-hunt attitude on the left seems counter to free speech and artistic expression and has forced everyone to hire sensitivity readers for their public writings. I have a minor character in one of my fictional stories who is disabled and—just because the story’s protagonist feels uneasy and fearful of this same disability one day happening to her—one editor said it is “disabled shaming.” There was a time in academia that my husband could have been fired for mistakenly saying something that might be considered un-woke. (Now, it's the opposite and Desantis is hunting my husband down for doing a project that promotes diversity and social justice.) These people I call “over-woke” in the lit-world seem to demand that all fictional protagonists be woke, which is nuts really. In other ways, like in Apple TV series, for example, wokeness seems to be over-emphasized (the woke character-choices get over-represented) and getting in the way of good realistic (period-piece) storytelling because the woke elements dominate the narrative of say Emily Dickinson in the mid 19th cent. I say everyone has the right to love and marry and be who they want, without govt interference (and systemic racism definitely still exists tho Biden was doing obviously a MUCH BETTER job of beginning to address it). On the other hand, lit mag editors just need to simply make it clear that an author’s character’s opinions are not their own. I think even the most “marginalized” people can see through a lot of the over-wokeness of some of this and find some of it inane and too obvious, sometimes cringy. BTW, I can’t believe how Columbia crumbled to Trump and white-male (WASPy) domination. What a travesty!
Great discussion. It feels like to write on the internet, one must be woke or anti woke. But I want to be neither. Is that a form of cowardice?
Great stuff.
Both of you make a compelling case. But I feel Naomi is a little too selective on who she grants agency. Speaking as a frustrated downwardly mobile professional who was disappointed in the slow pace of social progress during the Obama years, I understood the feeling that not enough was being done. But I took ideas seriously. Others had the obligation to do the same.
People engaged in relentless kayfabe about liberalism being an obstacle to progress without seriously thinking about if a left illiberalism could actually succeed in America or if it succeeded what it would actually look like. Half the time I think the woke were hoping an adult would show up so they could keep playing pretend radical.
The left is the enemy of eros?? I invite William Deresiewicz to come down from whatever planet he's living on and visit Alienated Majesty Books, Austin's biggest left bookstore. There are thousands of titles there bursting with eros and "life force."
The left loves to talk about sex, to read about sex, to celebrate sex, especially non-hetero sex, but it tends to not actually have very much sex.
I tend to think that people in the past talked a lot less about sex, but had more of it.
You're of that tendency, ey?
I hope your bookstore works out
" Can we really have an intellectual class, in the 21st century, that believes in a racial caste system?
In a caste system all members of the lower caste are forbidden from doing things permitted to higher castes. In the US all roles are open to all races but Blacks on average do less well than Whites. One possible explanation is a lower average IQ — but that is consistent with some blacks being doctors, lawyers, even presidents, which is not a caste system.
Jews in America do better than average. One possible explanation of that is a higher average IQ. Is that a caste system?
We should have an intellectual class that believes what is true.
"Is that intellectual class really going to have a mandate to govern a country that, very soon, will be majority non-white?"
Both the lower IQ claim and the observed lower average income are about Afro-Americans, currently about 14.4% of the US population. The same IQ evidence that suggests a lower than average IQ for Blacks also shows a higher than average IQ for Asians. They may well have a higher average income than whites as well.
Excellent conversation. One question: who is this Bill D.?
Bill Dereisewicz—referring to this podcast https://open.substack.com/pub/danieloppenheimer/p/the-rise-of-the-not-left?r=mfij&utm_medium=ios
I think that's repackaging the whole sjw to dei thing simply as politics, as Oppenheimer distinguished. The left wasn't merely engaging in shutting down speech, it was trying to control narratives in a complete way. That also doesn't address the art disposition we should have.
When sjw's were ran off youtube by, quite literally, most everyone, the skeptic anti sjw had no meaningful way to replace the narrative. That sort of shows the limitation you spoke of. A lot of anti sjw's still bridged over into the sexual, gender etc narratives that sjw's were completely derided on. Afterwards, they refused to speak and shut people down. This involved institutional capture. Celebrities that wore native American costumes at a Halloween party were forced to apologize. This is entirely different from anything that was discussed on the right. Nobody is asking dei to apologize nor to become liberals who love America. It's simply not happening. The backlash to them is very simply, "these people will not allow free speech ever, because it limits narratuve control they speak, and they will go to extreme lengths, bemoan the first amendment, in order to shut down any narrative counter to theirs and that that narrative control ends up becoming indistinguishable between them and Democrats". That's simply how it is viewed by, maybe, half the population. I remember saying to a very nice lady in Colorado that my parents were extremely conservative (my dad is like a blue dog democrat — extremely into unions and doesn't like baggy pants) and she intuited more than was justified because it's not accurate, but this extends to people. Steve Allen himself hated Rock and Roll, almost maliciously, but he was extremely liberal. The range of opinions people have are limited due to this narrative control.
I also want to say, in Utah they have made some western courses about us constitution and basic history leading up to it mandatory for freshman. One of the faculty members made the most inane position against it that they couldn't vote when all those times happened. Presumably we should never study anything beyond the last ten years. There is absolutely no right winger saying that, but that is the default position in every institution by disposition and fear. If you can at least view Trump in 2016 and 2024 as a backlash to *that* then I think the discussion goes way further. There is no Trump, in the policies, dispositions as you're viewing them without the crazy stuff that happened from the other side. That's not a back and forth forever thing because conservativism simply is not capable of the narrative control ideology sjw to dei specifically are solely oriented towards. And we have no art because of it.
Also, I thought it important to add: Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson etc were heavily engaging sjw stuff. It's when they got banned by universities and moved into dei and were mobbed by antifa and threatened with violence and loss of livelihood, social and economic, and, finally, when dei decided no more discussions that the discussions stopped. There has never been an unwillingness to engage them. I try to avoid engaging people when they become malicious and extremely self-absorbed. That mindset and ideology which leads to that, is still present.
Edit: I might as well mention manipulative as well since that's never addressed. It's a preying on people mindset. These people socially engage as predators in their day-to-day lives.
Other edit: I think this is really important too: we have to speak in layers. For example, when I said predator, I was not referring to the child gender thing. We have to walk on eggshells around these topics and word choices. Now whether that's due to right inflammation or not, itis something that is angled around and pounced on by these dei members. This is lived experience. So, the ability to discuss these things has many roadblocks which force disengagement. If anyone is mad someone chooses to dispense with the manipulation and gaming around this narrative control, I'm not sure it's justified. The negative of them not engaging with it is a bluntness that goes too far because there are no social standards which allow disagreement or disengagment. Again, these are real, relevant lived experiences and, again, we've lost so many subcultures just due to this predator mindset.