Woke is not an ideology, it's a pathology. Symptoms include constant anxiety manifesting as rage directed at people whose views conflict with their own, leading to an obsessive desire to suppress them rather that enter into rational debate.
The "woke" cannot be debated in the parliamentary sense, where compromise is a recognized element of the process. Rather, the "woke" possess the undeniable truth, and it is your shortcoming for failing to understand that. Woke is a cult with a fanatical attachment to an obviously defective social paradigm. The paradigm itself is irrelevant however. It's the fanaticism that's dangerous. In short, if you want an understanding of the syndrome, you have to look beyond ideology to psychology for an explanation.
It can all be encapsulated by the erudite & insightful Rex Murphy who recently stated that, "Political correctness is toxic and woke is an insult to reason". For the thinking person there is no need to say more.
The natural axis of conflict is up and down. Power and money flowing from the lower, middle and even upper classes upwards to the elites. Acknowledgement of this, let alone action, is a serious threat to those benefiting from this: the media, political and business elites. Therefore, we are kept occupied by petty and unnatural conflicts on a horizontal (left/right) axis of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. "You (Straight/Black/Jewish) are being threatened by those (Gays/Whites/Muslims) and you must respond accordingly!"
Keep looking left and right and you'll never look up.
Hi Tara - what are your thoughts on why "McWokyism" is taking over the left in Canada? It's not a lack of public health care.
My theory is that a side effect of social media (especially Twitter) is that it makes progressive movements around the world try to imitate what they see trending in online American progressivism (i.e. wokeness). That's how you get BLM rallies in England protesting the police, even though street cops over there don't even carry guns, just as an example.
That would also explain why Jagmeet Singh was tweeting about the tragedy of Kyle Rittenhouse getting acquitted (despite that being a fair verdict in a foreign country). He's just following the woke trends on Twitter that are more or less entirely driven by American politics.
I'm worried that Twitter is turning left-wing politics in Commonwealth countries, EU countries, etc. into just a pale imitation of American woke virtue signaling.
My son’s Highschool yearbook quote was “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled….stay woke”. 5 years and a bachelors degree later, he hates what has become of the term ‘woke’. He has also woken up to how strongly the leftist ideologies pervade Universities and had become very disenchanted. Sad because he has such a thirst for knowledge.
Hi Tara, I cannot express how thankful I am for your journalistic integrity. You are a blessing.
I am an independent journalist in Quebec, also formerly left-wing and horrified with this woke culture. I used to work for globalresearch.ca. Incidentally, I was contacted by a mainstream show recently for an interview on cancel culture, which they tried to accuse me of because I regularly send complaints to the media for their lack of respect for basic journalistic values, asking them to either correct their articles so they reflect the facts or retract them. They ended up canceling me!
Things here are extremely worrying here now, hate speech is now rampant in the MSM against people who won't submit to experimental therapy, so much so that I sent a formal notice and a criminal complaint to the Sûreté du Québec against Québecor media and which you can find on my blog, Tribunal de l'infaux.
I would like to get in touch with you to talk about it. You can contact me through my website or through fddlp.org.
Thank you for being honest and for honoring our profession.
We used to make things. Now we make believe. And we can't tell the difference. Hope you'll keep the hoi polloi who didn't hide during the "pandemic" in mind in your work.
Courage and truth will be in style very soon... Good luck here, Tara.
Never ask a professor a serious question again, please. The professor is not overly helpful, he is long winded and people without Ph.D.s are not going to read him...
Great work Tara, very appreciative of the work you are doing for all Canadians. This is a great interview. I would echo any sentiments that Canada is in great need of a platform for open political discussion - dare I say something like Krystal & Saagar with a deeply Canadian perspective.
Funny to think that if the Democrats didn't have "superdelegates" who are basically forced by the DNC to vote for the right nominee in the primaries, that we would have had Sanders instead of Clinton as the 2016 Democratic candidate, and he probably would have beaten Trump (his head-to-head numbers were much, much better). Then we wouldn't have had the DC "terrorist insurrection", endless debates about fake news and problems with reality, journalists self-righteously claiming they're fighting fascism and racism, a dozen Trump imitators in other countries, Q-Anon... And on and on.
Then again, judging by how quickly Sanders fell in to line with the establish Democrats in 2020 and became a water carrier for Biden's lame agenda, maybe he would have folded to the Democrats and we would have ended up in the same place four years later.
It's always nice to see Reed and he's been at it for longer than anyone else but this anti-woke thing has become just another lane for money making and self-promoting masquerading as brave contrarianism.
It's the exact opposite to being intellectually awake. It means believing a bunch of authorities that have lied us into every fucking war we've been in for 20 years. It means believing a bunch of propagandists and celebrities that are paid to produce "their opinion". It's division among races, religions, political ideology, and other nonsense. It's listening to our propaganda "news" sources and believing Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed 2 black men, and thinking January 6th 2020 was a "insurrection".
It's being naive, gullible, easily influenced. It means being poorly read, barely educated, and extremely arrogant and abrasive in your viewpoint to such an extent, to be so propagandized, you can't have a civil conversation with somebody that has viewpoints that counteract your own.
It means you don't do your own research, you don't talk to people outside of the country, that you don't even know what nations your nation is bombing, you don't see contradictions between what an "authority" says and what they actually do, it means you defend "your side" endlessly, it means you think Hunter Biden is an artist, and George W. Bush made a "mistake" when he accidentally lied us into Iraq. It means you think Obama blew up Libya to prevent a humanitarian crisis, the Assad was stupidly and inexplicably using chemical weapons against his own people, that Russian propaganda runs this nation, and that our intelligence agencies are just a bunch of good people who don't do false flags, don't entrap people, and don't lie to the public - and it means you believe our department of justice actually implements justice.
It's being a child.
To be woke, you have to deal with a MOUNTAIN of cognitive dissonance, because everything you have accepted is propaganda, it's contradictory, and it wrong - because that's the nature of propaganda and lies. If you have two conflicting beliefs, find out which belief is wrong, and eliminate it. Do this over and over and over again for a few years, and at the end of it you will realize that not only does the West have propaganda, it's nothing but propaganda.
It's great to hear a critique of woke from the left, although I'm not sure some of the commenters got that. However, I quite agree that interviewing Jordan Peterson is a great idea, especially to discuss your and his perspectives on his tussles with the CBC and other morally didactic media corporations. Now that Wendy Mesley has been devoured by woke, it might be interesting to review her interview of him, which I believe was representative of the corporation's mandated hostility to dissenters from woke, especially popular ones. I would *love* to hear you and Wendy discuss what happened at CBC, and she is such a good journalist, with a remarkable historical perspective (i.e., from the vanguard of sharp women journalists breaking into the establishment to being vanquished of the woke ideology she promoted and participated in) that the conversation would be very rich. Rex Murphy would be another obvious interview, and that would be great. If you could get the irreverent and corporation-enraging Alan Maitland, that would be fantastic. He would be like a patron saint for all your former colleagues who are silently suffering moral injury daily. So many opportunities, Tara! If you really want to make a bigger splash, and I think you should, consider interviewing Jian Ghomeshi. That's what a *journalist* would do. He was acquitted in criminal proceedings without having to enter a defence because the judge found that the complainants had conspired to *deceive the court*. Why is he (still) cancelled? No one is more representative of the power of the ideology that has gripped the corporation. He has his flaws, of course, but was treated quite unfairly. His would be a marquee interview if he would agree to it. Another idea: the man who was recently acquitted of the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, writer of Lucky and The Lovely Bones, after spending 16 years in prison, or the fascinating producer who made that happen.
Contrary to some, I think this is a great piece. It’s good to remember there is an actual rational left that is concerned about good politics. It’s been buried too long by the performative and abusive CSJ garbage. I appreciate the measured tone.
I think this was a worthy piece to follow your launch.
I’m so excited that you’re voicing your thoughts freely and uncensored on this amazing platform. You are saying things that I ‘know’ but never hear anyone else speak about and it’s so dang refreshing. You’re one of the only (ex) voices from CBC with integrity, my car radio dial used to be glued to CBC Radio but since the pandemic I can’t stand listening to that garbage propaganda anymore. Especially when they broadcast BC health minister Bonnie Liarface.
You’re such a beautiful example of what following your integrity looks like 💗
Another excellent piece. Over these past two years, I've despaired for un-state news content, I've searched far and wide, and one of the only media I've found with any proper analysis is (for maybe 60% of their content) is UnHerd. I wonder if you and a few other Canadian journalists gone astray could gather and create such a medium. I don't include Quillette or Reason, or their ilk (though I occasionally go there), in this suggestion because they are much farther right and their journalist quality is suffers from the same one-sidedness as Canada's media. We need a media that does a more profound exploration.
The Brits and the Americans have quality non-state media sources to go, Canada does not. I hope you can bring about change to that picture.
What the heck did he really say? I couldn't understand hime and I seriously think interviewing him was a mistake. I still don't know what 'Woke' means.
Woke is not an ideology, it's a pathology. Symptoms include constant anxiety manifesting as rage directed at people whose views conflict with their own, leading to an obsessive desire to suppress them rather that enter into rational debate.
The "woke" cannot be debated in the parliamentary sense, where compromise is a recognized element of the process. Rather, the "woke" possess the undeniable truth, and it is your shortcoming for failing to understand that. Woke is a cult with a fanatical attachment to an obviously defective social paradigm. The paradigm itself is irrelevant however. It's the fanaticism that's dangerous. In short, if you want an understanding of the syndrome, you have to look beyond ideology to psychology for an explanation.
It can all be encapsulated by the erudite & insightful Rex Murphy who recently stated that, "Political correctness is toxic and woke is an insult to reason". For the thinking person there is no need to say more.
The natural axis of conflict is up and down. Power and money flowing from the lower, middle and even upper classes upwards to the elites. Acknowledgement of this, let alone action, is a serious threat to those benefiting from this: the media, political and business elites. Therefore, we are kept occupied by petty and unnatural conflicts on a horizontal (left/right) axis of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. "You (Straight/Black/Jewish) are being threatened by those (Gays/Whites/Muslims) and you must respond accordingly!"
Keep looking left and right and you'll never look up.
Hi Tara - what are your thoughts on why "McWokyism" is taking over the left in Canada? It's not a lack of public health care.
My theory is that a side effect of social media (especially Twitter) is that it makes progressive movements around the world try to imitate what they see trending in online American progressivism (i.e. wokeness). That's how you get BLM rallies in England protesting the police, even though street cops over there don't even carry guns, just as an example.
That would also explain why Jagmeet Singh was tweeting about the tragedy of Kyle Rittenhouse getting acquitted (despite that being a fair verdict in a foreign country). He's just following the woke trends on Twitter that are more or less entirely driven by American politics.
I'm worried that Twitter is turning left-wing politics in Commonwealth countries, EU countries, etc. into just a pale imitation of American woke virtue signaling.
My son’s Highschool yearbook quote was “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled….stay woke”. 5 years and a bachelors degree later, he hates what has become of the term ‘woke’. He has also woken up to how strongly the leftist ideologies pervade Universities and had become very disenchanted. Sad because he has such a thirst for knowledge.
Hi Tara, I cannot express how thankful I am for your journalistic integrity. You are a blessing.
I am an independent journalist in Quebec, also formerly left-wing and horrified with this woke culture. I used to work for globalresearch.ca. Incidentally, I was contacted by a mainstream show recently for an interview on cancel culture, which they tried to accuse me of because I regularly send complaints to the media for their lack of respect for basic journalistic values, asking them to either correct their articles so they reflect the facts or retract them. They ended up canceling me!
Things here are extremely worrying here now, hate speech is now rampant in the MSM against people who won't submit to experimental therapy, so much so that I sent a formal notice and a criminal complaint to the Sûreté du Québec against Québecor media and which you can find on my blog, Tribunal de l'infaux.
I would like to get in touch with you to talk about it. You can contact me through my website or through fddlp.org.
Thank you for being honest and for honoring our profession.
We used to make things. Now we make believe. And we can't tell the difference. Hope you'll keep the hoi polloi who didn't hide during the "pandemic" in mind in your work.
Courage and truth will be in style very soon... Good luck here, Tara.
Never ask a professor a serious question again, please. The professor is not overly helpful, he is long winded and people without Ph.D.s are not going to read him...
Great work Tara, very appreciative of the work you are doing for all Canadians. This is a great interview. I would echo any sentiments that Canada is in great need of a platform for open political discussion - dare I say something like Krystal & Saagar with a deeply Canadian perspective.
Funny to think that if the Democrats didn't have "superdelegates" who are basically forced by the DNC to vote for the right nominee in the primaries, that we would have had Sanders instead of Clinton as the 2016 Democratic candidate, and he probably would have beaten Trump (his head-to-head numbers were much, much better). Then we wouldn't have had the DC "terrorist insurrection", endless debates about fake news and problems with reality, journalists self-righteously claiming they're fighting fascism and racism, a dozen Trump imitators in other countries, Q-Anon... And on and on.
Then again, judging by how quickly Sanders fell in to line with the establish Democrats in 2020 and became a water carrier for Biden's lame agenda, maybe he would have folded to the Democrats and we would have ended up in the same place four years later.
It's always nice to see Reed and he's been at it for longer than anyone else but this anti-woke thing has become just another lane for money making and self-promoting masquerading as brave contrarianism.
Woke is just another form of propaganda. Duh.
It's the exact opposite to being intellectually awake. It means believing a bunch of authorities that have lied us into every fucking war we've been in for 20 years. It means believing a bunch of propagandists and celebrities that are paid to produce "their opinion". It's division among races, religions, political ideology, and other nonsense. It's listening to our propaganda "news" sources and believing Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed 2 black men, and thinking January 6th 2020 was a "insurrection".
It's being naive, gullible, easily influenced. It means being poorly read, barely educated, and extremely arrogant and abrasive in your viewpoint to such an extent, to be so propagandized, you can't have a civil conversation with somebody that has viewpoints that counteract your own.
It means you don't do your own research, you don't talk to people outside of the country, that you don't even know what nations your nation is bombing, you don't see contradictions between what an "authority" says and what they actually do, it means you defend "your side" endlessly, it means you think Hunter Biden is an artist, and George W. Bush made a "mistake" when he accidentally lied us into Iraq. It means you think Obama blew up Libya to prevent a humanitarian crisis, the Assad was stupidly and inexplicably using chemical weapons against his own people, that Russian propaganda runs this nation, and that our intelligence agencies are just a bunch of good people who don't do false flags, don't entrap people, and don't lie to the public - and it means you believe our department of justice actually implements justice.
It's being a child.
To be woke, you have to deal with a MOUNTAIN of cognitive dissonance, because everything you have accepted is propaganda, it's contradictory, and it wrong - because that's the nature of propaganda and lies. If you have two conflicting beliefs, find out which belief is wrong, and eliminate it. Do this over and over and over again for a few years, and at the end of it you will realize that not only does the West have propaganda, it's nothing but propaganda.
It's great to hear a critique of woke from the left, although I'm not sure some of the commenters got that. However, I quite agree that interviewing Jordan Peterson is a great idea, especially to discuss your and his perspectives on his tussles with the CBC and other morally didactic media corporations. Now that Wendy Mesley has been devoured by woke, it might be interesting to review her interview of him, which I believe was representative of the corporation's mandated hostility to dissenters from woke, especially popular ones. I would *love* to hear you and Wendy discuss what happened at CBC, and she is such a good journalist, with a remarkable historical perspective (i.e., from the vanguard of sharp women journalists breaking into the establishment to being vanquished of the woke ideology she promoted and participated in) that the conversation would be very rich. Rex Murphy would be another obvious interview, and that would be great. If you could get the irreverent and corporation-enraging Alan Maitland, that would be fantastic. He would be like a patron saint for all your former colleagues who are silently suffering moral injury daily. So many opportunities, Tara! If you really want to make a bigger splash, and I think you should, consider interviewing Jian Ghomeshi. That's what a *journalist* would do. He was acquitted in criminal proceedings without having to enter a defence because the judge found that the complainants had conspired to *deceive the court*. Why is he (still) cancelled? No one is more representative of the power of the ideology that has gripped the corporation. He has his flaws, of course, but was treated quite unfairly. His would be a marquee interview if he would agree to it. Another idea: the man who was recently acquitted of the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, writer of Lucky and The Lovely Bones, after spending 16 years in prison, or the fascinating producer who made that happen.
Contrary to some, I think this is a great piece. It’s good to remember there is an actual rational left that is concerned about good politics. It’s been buried too long by the performative and abusive CSJ garbage. I appreciate the measured tone.
I think this was a worthy piece to follow your launch.
Looking forward to more.
I’m so excited that you’re voicing your thoughts freely and uncensored on this amazing platform. You are saying things that I ‘know’ but never hear anyone else speak about and it’s so dang refreshing. You’re one of the only (ex) voices from CBC with integrity, my car radio dial used to be glued to CBC Radio but since the pandemic I can’t stand listening to that garbage propaganda anymore. Especially when they broadcast BC health minister Bonnie Liarface.
You’re such a beautiful example of what following your integrity looks like 💗
Dear Tara,
Another excellent piece. Over these past two years, I've despaired for un-state news content, I've searched far and wide, and one of the only media I've found with any proper analysis is (for maybe 60% of their content) is UnHerd. I wonder if you and a few other Canadian journalists gone astray could gather and create such a medium. I don't include Quillette or Reason, or their ilk (though I occasionally go there), in this suggestion because they are much farther right and their journalist quality is suffers from the same one-sidedness as Canada's media. We need a media that does a more profound exploration.
The Brits and the Americans have quality non-state media sources to go, Canada does not. I hope you can bring about change to that picture.
What the heck did he really say? I couldn't understand hime and I seriously think interviewing him was a mistake. I still don't know what 'Woke' means.