The woke are angry, humorless, and vindictive. Surrender is not an option.

All this might be deleterious enough, but woke culture adds to the nightmare by punishing its opponents through disgrace and cancellation, the latter often affecting not only reputation but income. To suggest that surgery and hormone treatment in connection with transgendering may bring biological penalties, or that riotous looting has any connection at all with the Black Lives Matter organization, or that the anti-Israel movements on campus are a form of thinly veiled anti-Semitism, or that defunding the police will above all hurt black and Latino communities—all this under the reign of woke culture is beyond the pale, and disqualifies anyone who dares to suggest any of it. The unwoke are left outside the prevailing culture. But what form might resistance to the dominant regime take? A small number of magazines continue to exist outside the woke culture, among them Commentary, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books. The Journal does too, and ought to be supported. Those journalists and intellectuals who haven’t gone woke need to be encouraged and reminded that they are not alone. Argument and humor must be regularly deployed against the absurdity of woke language and slogans. Diversity, inclusion and equity—put them all together, they spell DIE, and death to much that is best in American life they bode. Those of us who sense that the greatness of the U.S. is dwindling feel that a good part of the reason is the defeat of traditional values and their replacement by woke ones. Identity politics may be the rule in the Democratic Party, but its origin is in woke culture, which accounts for why the country is filled with so many angry people, for whom no evidence of progress lessens the intensity of their grievances.
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