Bari Weiss the former New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion writer has been described by the Washington Post as someone who: “portrays herself as a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture.” From what I’ve read of her work (and I’ve not read everything) this description is pretty accurate. She comes over as what I would call an old school liberal, concerned with matters pertaining to liberty, freedom of speech and creating a society where equality of opportunity is a lodestone.
She’s recently written an article for Commentary magazine about the rise of the ‘woke’ culture in the United States, its devastating effects on society, why woke culture should be fought and how it can be countered. In this article Ms Weiss gives us a potted history of the rise of woke tyranny from its origins in the institutions of higher learning to its imposition in schools as a new form of cathecism, the only form that the Left which controls so many public institutions these days will allow. She then moves on to describe the negative effects that woke culture has had including the evisceration of freedom of thought, speech and opinion and how it has brought back and made acceptable things that liberals once fought against, things like racial essentialism.
But she also speaks eloquently of how woke culture has managed to take hold and states that this would not have happened had not so many people been cowards when confronted with the demands made by the Red Guards of woke culture. She said that it has been cowardice by everyone from CEO’s to front line staff in organisations that has been a major factor in how we got to where we are today. She said that the woke left are choosing ‘sacrificial victims’ in order to dominate others and terrify them into silence and into accepting and promulgating ideas that they may as individuals find abhorrent. Ms Weiss blames those who did not stand up for those who were targeted by the wokeists and excoriates them for their cowardice in the face of woke activists promoting fact light ideas and concepts. She quotes the British writer Douglas Murray to illustrate her point about the cowardice that has emboldened the woke tyrants.
Ms Weiss said:
As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”
Ms Weiss is correct. The failure by others to defend those who are bullied into submission by the woke Left is a major factor in the woke left’s societal gains. People who should have spoken up instead meekly accepted the woke Left’s prescriptions. Sometimes it was because they did not properly interrogate the woke Left’s ideas and blindly accepted them and sometimes personal cowardice and looking after ones own interests caused people to stay silent when they should have spoken up. Society has found itself in a very ‘Neimolleran’ situation where a failure to speak up about small things has led to much larger problems. It’s a case of ‘first they came for those who questioned the Black Lives Matter movement, then they came for me.’ We now have reached the point where standing up for anything that the woke oppose, even if it is scientific truth, can result in a person having nobody left to speak for them. It has led to the disgraceful and troubling situation where in Britain the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, cannot, for fear of reprisals by an angry and aggressive mob, state the biological fact that only women can possess a cervix.
This is a superb article by Ms Weiss and I would strongly counsel that people give it a read. She’s bang on with her assessment of both the current situation that we are in and the way that we can get out of it. She said that the current situation has been brought about by societal cowardice and we can get out of it by showing some courage. As Ms Weiss says, we must resist the woke revolution.
You can read the entirety of Ms Weiss’s article by following the link below.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/
