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.
And that right there is why the woke, despite posturing as rebels fighting the system, actually have the full institutional and financial backing of the elites.
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.
I agree...there is a sort of neo-colonialism by American wokesters in other countries. Whatever exists in the USA, must be repeated everywhere else in the world - and the woke in those nations blindly follow. In Australia, Coon Cheese (named after Edward Coon in the 1920s), something that is almost a national icon, had to change it's name. Even though Coon has no racial connotation in Australia. Heck, even in Canada and the Northern USA it tends to refer to Racoons. Australian companies also changed the name of the treat 'red skins' - even though once again had nothing to do with Native Americans. Pre social media, something so idiotic wouldn't have happened. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/cheer-cheese-australia-rebrand-intl-hnk/index.html
Yes, but that's always been the case. This is yet another example of American cultural soft power. Maybe it just spreads faster and farther than it did before.
I think even 10 years ago, no Canadian politician leading a major federal party would have ever publicly called an American jury verdict “another failure by a broken system designed to protect some and hurt others.”
Plus, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, recently said in an interview with Elle magazine that "American-imported woke culture is racializing France and creating more division among minorities". Even his delegate minister for gender equality and diversity (a woke title if there ever was one) followed that up by saying "woke culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France"
Social media has turbocharged American cultural influence on global left-wing politics. Fortunately, the same hasn't really happened on the right; there's no equivalent to MAGA lunatics in Canada (part of why I flipped from Trudeau to O'Toole in the last election; the Conservatives aren't playing with culture-war fire).
Someone whose politics work backwards from "own the libs" and buy into a cult of personality around Trump.
Someone who says liberals are all deviants, but don't have a problem with Trump grabbing random women by the pussy and bursting into teen beauty pageant dressing rooms.
Someone who says gov't is too wasteful, but supports building an expensive pointless wall that wouldn't do much apart from increase ladder sales.
Someone who says gov't needs to be more fiscally responsible, but supports deficit-creating tax cuts.
Someone who says they're a patriot, but who doesn't mind Trump flat out asking Russia to "find her emails", i.e. supporting hacking by a foreign adversary.
And, of course, someone who can't admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
You're from Canada, right? Allow me to provide just a tiny bit of additional information. I know most of the world has bought into the caricature of Trump created by the incredibly biased corporate media, but it is mostly inaccurate.
The tax cut increased tax revenue to the federal government. Unfortunately, as is always the case, Congress went on a spending binge (Congress controls the budget - all the President can do is sign or veto spending bills). And the tax cut benefitted the middle class the most. Reversing the tax cut is a big payback to the wealthy elites who got Biden installed as POTUS.
If walls don't work, why do so many individuals have them around their homes? Why does the Vatican have a wall. Walls are part of border security and can be effective as part of a system.
Trump did not flat out ask Russia to find her emails. That's a gross and negligent mischaracterization of what he said. And, by the way, it is now proven that it was the Clinton campaign in bed with the Russians and not the Trump campaign.
If you read the book "Rigged" by Mollie Hemingway, you learn that there were a vast number of oddities (that's a huge euphemism btw) surrounding the 2020 POTUS election. Where those oddities would settle out, I don't know, but they are certainly worthy of investigation. For example, the 2020 election was the first time in history that election administration was outsourced in many swing districts to a politicized third party organization (called "Zuck bucks"). In several swing states, voting laws were changed unconstitutionally just prior to the election. Do you know about "ballot harvesting" and how the Dems used it? Are you aware of voting data being deleted from servers despite laws requiring it to be kept for, depending on the state, two or more years? Can you explain how several swing states went from "comfortably for Trump" to "won by Biden" between midnight and 4 am?
Trumps policies were very effective. Did you know that women and minority employment and wages reached record highs under Trump? Are you aware of the Abraham accords - something "everyone" said couldn't be done? Did you know that Trump began some criminal justice reform - something none of his predecessors would touch? Did you know that Trump started reducing regulations that were suffocating businesses?
Trump can be a jerk (and he can also be a very good guy). I doubt what I state will make any difference to you, but I am certain you do not have an accurate picture of the vast majority of Trump supporters.
"The tax cut increased tax revenue to the federal government." Bullshit it did. Supply Side economics has never worked, not even once. It's the classic Republican playbook: cut taxes, and then act surprised when the deficit spikes.
Trump's tax cuts added $2.3 TRILLION dollars to the deficit. If a Democrat ran up the deficit that much, Republicans would be apoplectic (see: Obama)
As for walls, they either need to be accompanied by a roof, or else they need to be a small enough perimeter to ensure rapid response. You can effectively patrol a 400 foot wall, but not a 400,000 foot wall.
I'm not one of those lefties that can't admit when Trump did some good things (like the Abraham accords, criminal justice reform, etc.), but you asked what a MAGA lunatic is.
A MAGA lunatic is someone who looks at Trump saying, and I quote: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30000 emails that are missing."
And can seriously say something like "Trump did not flat out ask Russia to find her emails. That's a gross and negligent mischaracterization of what he said."
Congratulations on being a MAGA lunatic. And as for the 2020 "oddities", there's a reason those spurious claims went 0-60 in court. There were some rules changed via dubious processes, but the votes themselves were real. Trump's legal team couldn't prove fraudulent votes happened in 2020 because there WERE no fraudulent votes.
I voted Trudeau 2015. In 2019 and 2021 I voted Conservative. As long as they don't go full Trumpian - I will be with the conservatives for the foreseeable future.
I have no doubt American imported WOKE culture courtesy of CNN has impacted France as it does in other countries.
Canada as example has a substantial Black Lives Matter cohort even though blacks represent less than 4% of the Canadian population and the black experience in Canada being fundamentally different than in the US.
However the Progressive Macron along with his friend Trudeau and their identity politics need to take credit where credit is due.
Yeah, I won't disagree with that. I guess I'm just saying it's an increase in degree not kind. I think this just further down that slope. But that's a semantic argument, the rest is all true.
Twitter is a US intelligence asset. So is Google and Facebook. It's an open secret in Silicon Valley, but nobody believes the engineers that have worked on them.
We've been warning you for over a decade.
Operation Mockingbird was exposed in the Church Committee in 1975, 46 years ago. Do you think they stopped just because it was exposed? Now, it's called "conspiracy theory" officially - even though it's in testimony from a congress which ONCE wasn't totally useless.
Screw it, we've been trying to warn about it for over a decade. It's pointless.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have amassed so much money and power that the puppet strings between them and the Deep State go both ways.
Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the other tech billionaires can and do lobby and influence the government, just as much as the government pressures them to use their platforms as intelligence assets.
You really think that Facebook is, what's their market cap..
about $1 TRILLION dollars
by pushing out ads you never read, and completely ignore?
They don't amass power, they are created by power, directly.
The first sars-cov2-19 "rescue package" in 2020, was $5 trillion dollars. The maximum an individual American could receive was $1,200. There's 330 million Americans. 330 million * $1,200 = 396 billion dollars or about 0.5 trillion bucks - and that's if EVERY American received the largest check possible, and they didn't.
Where did the other 4.5 trillion dollars go?
They went to the companies our Federal Reserve wanted to DIRECTLY support.
We are not in a capitalist system, this is not a free market.
Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and other "tech billionaires" are just puppets. Their job is to take the heat for whatever they are ORDERED to do. They are the government. In-Q-Tel started Facebook - it's CIA.
If these were REAL companies, and they aren't, instead of promoting propaganda, they could simply allow free and unfettered communication. The fact they CAN'T do this (because money dries up if they were to attempt this) is why there are NOW plenty of competitors who are struggling of course, because they ACTUALLY have to make a profit, and don't get sweet "government contracts" and infusions from the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (aka the Plunge Protection Team) - they DIRECTLY invest in the US stockmarket.
We're a fascist system. We're not BECOMING one, we are one.
You might be sitting there and thinking "well, that's crazy, if that's what was going on, I would have heard about it!" - well, I'm telling you, you've heard about it. It's a very simple system.
The FED makes as much money as they want, they dilute the currency of course, they promote industries and areas they want, every company is filled with intelligence assets, the executives are blackmailed, and bribed to do what they are instructed to do, and the company is kept flush with cash as long as they follow orders. Same with our "elected" representatives, same with our "news" platforms.
CNN has less than 1 million viewers at any moment during the day or night, and has had that few viewers for over 4 months now. How do you figure they can continue to operate and pay salaries (which are often 10's of millions of dollars) for years at a time. Do you think the average viewer ends up spending a few hundred dollars because they saw the commercials on CNN every year? That's what it would cost. If CNN was actually supported by commercial ads, and OFFICIALLY they are.
Here, let me explain it even more simply. Our government starting from the Federal Reserve down, is a criminal syndicate. Play ball, or else. It's a mafia. When you use that model, EVERYTHING they do makes perfect sense.
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.
All but the last two words of his statement are from an old & sage comment. Clearly he has grown up, and wised up. You must be proud, if not relieved. This too will pass.
Thank you, yes he’s an incredible young man (another Henley, no relation) and has realized the deeper underpinnings of the state of affairs a long time ago. Used to be called a conspiracy theorist but now even his ‘mainstream-media-type friends’ can see he’s been right all along.
I would have given Mark Twain credit for that well known quote but it’s not proven he was the one who coined it. It was relevant 5 years ago, and is exponentially more so now!
Mark Twain had a far better one which is applicable here and to which I have subscribed for years, being, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education".
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.
What's going on in Quebec is a terribly interesting example of uniquely Canadian politics.
1-Quebec never "joined" Canada, as all the other provinces did, Quebec is a war prize between England and France.
2-Quebec used to be the rebel province, back in the day when people called it the Belle Province, while its institutions were run by the Roman Catholic Church and the Brits, constantly held under, ... but pretty.
3-1970, for a handful of morons, Trudeau Sr declared Martial Law and unjustly arrested and imprisoned several thousand innocent people.
4-1971 Trudeau Sr declared Canada's new official religion to be multiculturalism, relegating Quebecers to just another "component"
5-4 past decades, Quebec-phobia replaced "La Belle Prince" as Canada's national official hobby, with the Feds paying for smearing and fear-mongering during the two referendums, and anglo-Canadian media constantly fueling ROC hatred towards Quebec.
6-Pre-covid, Quebec was the least vaccinated province
Trudeau Senior has won. Anglos are once more dominating the métropole's politics, anglo/American/monarchist sensitivities now dominate the quebec political landscape. A non-political party won the last election, and gave Quebec its final nail in the coffin.
I've had this very conversation many times in the past two years. I first visited Alberta in October 2020 and was immediately forced to confess a half century of bad words.
As we used to say in Quebec: "Ontario, Onta rien d'mandé".
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...
This is not one of his better interviews - maybe he thought he had to walk on eggshells for a Canadian audience. Here he is speaking to an American audience.
They learn how to be muddled in their academic bubbles where they talk to each other in foreign tongues...I used to believe in a university education but now believe it is part of the problem not part of the solution.
What "jargon" and evidence of a "foreign tongue" is in this? He's clearly laying out what he means in English. The only two academic-ish words he uses are "performative" and "expressivist", but you can guess pretty easily what those mean. The rest is normal, albeit highly literate, vocabulary.
Look, the professor knows that the entire woke madness emanates from universities...that alone makes him a poor apologist and explainer. Nothing in this piece alludes to that fact, and that is what makes this a failed piece, in my opinion . And as for 'academia speak', that is a general weakness of professors, not just this one and not just on this topic.
It's not so much "the university" itself, but all the fake science (liberal arts) within. WAY TOO MUCH. People getting PhDs in whatever water colour painter. These things do not contribute to society. Next they'll have a PhD in e-gaming.
No, the reality is we need to bring back proper critical thinking to universities, and pair down those programs back to the essentials.
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 not woke cultural is defined as the following from the Merriam Webster dictionary : "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues" this to is the original definition and later it seems to narrow to, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke
The "woke" generation doesn't seems to follow facts or uses them to support and subvert power to their own agendas. They rather emote or have a knee jerk response then solve issues most of the time. Its like watching a child have a temper tantrum and destroying anything that doesn't support their view or makes them "uncomfortable". Then turning around later and trying to prove an argument with the evidence they "whitewashed or destroyed" because after all it is okay for them to use it just not others. In other words they want to eat their cake and have it to without providing facts having very little to no understanding how what they "feel" they stand for happened.
They don't seem to be able to provide constructive democratic, realistic plan with planned steps and instead go for totalitarian sweeps without foresight. Making it hard to avoid the same pit falls they are fighting. In other words: my way or no way ( woke generation) is the same totalitarian, inflexible judgement and thoughts/behaviors that was wrong with the issue in the first place. That has been discovered by previous generations.
It is the understanding how we got there and how it came about in the first place. Then addressing many parts of society ( inclusiveness and recognizing not everyone is/was the same ) and reaching them not through demands but showing them history and different ways forward from different perspectives. Not the one size fits all option and a denial of history ( tearing down statues whitewashing books and literature) that the woke generation currently is currently involved because it makes them uncomfortable ( emotive). Deny history or propgandize history and we are bound to repeat it. E.g Suggestion for statues don't rip them down rewrite plaques yes they did this but they also did this. As long as it is factually verifiable by credible sources ( not twitter, FB, Youtube, instagram social media) That is the actively aware not woke
The problem is they have allowed Facebook to become an educational tool in schools its not. It sets up a type of behavior definitely not thinking that is 1 herd only anything different like what they are supposedly fighting for is annihilated.
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.
Rex Murphy is to well-reasoned debate what the Klan is to race relations. Like a broken clock, even he can be right twice a day.
Low effort.
Huh?
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.
And that right there is why the woke, despite posturing as rebels fighting the system, actually have the full institutional and financial backing of the elites.
"Keep looking left and right and you'll never look up." Love it (think I'll steal it!)
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.
I agree...there is a sort of neo-colonialism by American wokesters in other countries. Whatever exists in the USA, must be repeated everywhere else in the world - and the woke in those nations blindly follow. In Australia, Coon Cheese (named after Edward Coon in the 1920s), something that is almost a national icon, had to change it's name. Even though Coon has no racial connotation in Australia. Heck, even in Canada and the Northern USA it tends to refer to Racoons. Australian companies also changed the name of the treat 'red skins' - even though once again had nothing to do with Native Americans. Pre social media, something so idiotic wouldn't have happened. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/cheer-cheese-australia-rebrand-intl-hnk/index.html
Unfortunately Singh amps up what he reads on twitter with the intention of virtue signalling on steroids.
A example is His comment when visiting a BC residential school where no one denies children died is “children were sent here to be killed.”
White guilt....it's not just Canada, it's overwhelmingly and Anglophone phenomenon.
Yes, but that's always been the case. This is yet another example of American cultural soft power. Maybe it just spreads faster and farther than it did before.
I think even 10 years ago, no Canadian politician leading a major federal party would have ever publicly called an American jury verdict “another failure by a broken system designed to protect some and hurt others.”
Plus, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, recently said in an interview with Elle magazine that "American-imported woke culture is racializing France and creating more division among minorities". Even his delegate minister for gender equality and diversity (a woke title if there ever was one) followed that up by saying "woke culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France"
Social media has turbocharged American cultural influence on global left-wing politics. Fortunately, the same hasn't really happened on the right; there's no equivalent to MAGA lunatics in Canada (part of why I flipped from Trudeau to O'Toole in the last election; the Conservatives aren't playing with culture-war fire).
What characterizes a "MAGA lunatic"?
Someone whose politics work backwards from "own the libs" and buy into a cult of personality around Trump.
Someone who says liberals are all deviants, but don't have a problem with Trump grabbing random women by the pussy and bursting into teen beauty pageant dressing rooms.
Someone who says gov't is too wasteful, but supports building an expensive pointless wall that wouldn't do much apart from increase ladder sales.
Someone who says gov't needs to be more fiscally responsible, but supports deficit-creating tax cuts.
Someone who says they're a patriot, but who doesn't mind Trump flat out asking Russia to "find her emails", i.e. supporting hacking by a foreign adversary.
And, of course, someone who can't admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
You're from Canada, right? Allow me to provide just a tiny bit of additional information. I know most of the world has bought into the caricature of Trump created by the incredibly biased corporate media, but it is mostly inaccurate.
The tax cut increased tax revenue to the federal government. Unfortunately, as is always the case, Congress went on a spending binge (Congress controls the budget - all the President can do is sign or veto spending bills). And the tax cut benefitted the middle class the most. Reversing the tax cut is a big payback to the wealthy elites who got Biden installed as POTUS.
If walls don't work, why do so many individuals have them around their homes? Why does the Vatican have a wall. Walls are part of border security and can be effective as part of a system.
Trump did not flat out ask Russia to find her emails. That's a gross and negligent mischaracterization of what he said. And, by the way, it is now proven that it was the Clinton campaign in bed with the Russians and not the Trump campaign.
If you read the book "Rigged" by Mollie Hemingway, you learn that there were a vast number of oddities (that's a huge euphemism btw) surrounding the 2020 POTUS election. Where those oddities would settle out, I don't know, but they are certainly worthy of investigation. For example, the 2020 election was the first time in history that election administration was outsourced in many swing districts to a politicized third party organization (called "Zuck bucks"). In several swing states, voting laws were changed unconstitutionally just prior to the election. Do you know about "ballot harvesting" and how the Dems used it? Are you aware of voting data being deleted from servers despite laws requiring it to be kept for, depending on the state, two or more years? Can you explain how several swing states went from "comfortably for Trump" to "won by Biden" between midnight and 4 am?
Trumps policies were very effective. Did you know that women and minority employment and wages reached record highs under Trump? Are you aware of the Abraham accords - something "everyone" said couldn't be done? Did you know that Trump began some criminal justice reform - something none of his predecessors would touch? Did you know that Trump started reducing regulations that were suffocating businesses?
Trump can be a jerk (and he can also be a very good guy). I doubt what I state will make any difference to you, but I am certain you do not have an accurate picture of the vast majority of Trump supporters.
"The tax cut increased tax revenue to the federal government." Bullshit it did. Supply Side economics has never worked, not even once. It's the classic Republican playbook: cut taxes, and then act surprised when the deficit spikes.
Trump's tax cuts added $2.3 TRILLION dollars to the deficit. If a Democrat ran up the deficit that much, Republicans would be apoplectic (see: Obama)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-added-about-3-9-trillion-to-deficits-so-far-budget-group-says-11599669921
As for walls, they either need to be accompanied by a roof, or else they need to be a small enough perimeter to ensure rapid response. You can effectively patrol a 400 foot wall, but not a 400,000 foot wall.
I'm not one of those lefties that can't admit when Trump did some good things (like the Abraham accords, criminal justice reform, etc.), but you asked what a MAGA lunatic is.
A MAGA lunatic is someone who looks at Trump saying, and I quote: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30000 emails that are missing."
And can seriously say something like "Trump did not flat out ask Russia to find her emails. That's a gross and negligent mischaracterization of what he said."
Congratulations on being a MAGA lunatic. And as for the 2020 "oddities", there's a reason those spurious claims went 0-60 in court. There were some rules changed via dubious processes, but the votes themselves were real. Trump's legal team couldn't prove fraudulent votes happened in 2020 because there WERE no fraudulent votes.
I voted Trudeau 2015. In 2019 and 2021 I voted Conservative. As long as they don't go full Trumpian - I will be with the conservatives for the foreseeable future.
What is "full Trumpian"?
I see such type words/phrases used a lot but no one can tell me what they mean.
Next time, don't ask questions you're not ready to hear the answers to.
I have no doubt American imported WOKE culture courtesy of CNN has impacted France as it does in other countries.
Canada as example has a substantial Black Lives Matter cohort even though blacks represent less than 4% of the Canadian population and the black experience in Canada being fundamentally different than in the US.
However the Progressive Macron along with his friend Trudeau and their identity politics need to take credit where credit is due.
Macron is hardly that progressive. He implies that American wokeism may be the biggest threat to France. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9242453/Out-control-woke-leftism-cancel-culture-threat-FRANCE-French-politicians-say.html
Yeah, I won't disagree with that. I guess I'm just saying it's an increase in degree not kind. I think this just further down that slope. But that's a semantic argument, the rest is all true.
Twitter is a US intelligence asset. So is Google and Facebook. It's an open secret in Silicon Valley, but nobody believes the engineers that have worked on them.
We've been warning you for over a decade.
Operation Mockingbird was exposed in the Church Committee in 1975, 46 years ago. Do you think they stopped just because it was exposed? Now, it's called "conspiracy theory" officially - even though it's in testimony from a congress which ONCE wasn't totally useless.
Screw it, we've been trying to warn about it for over a decade. It's pointless.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have amassed so much money and power that the puppet strings between them and the Deep State go both ways.
Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the other tech billionaires can and do lobby and influence the government, just as much as the government pressures them to use their platforms as intelligence assets.
You really think that Facebook is, what's their market cap..
about $1 TRILLION dollars
by pushing out ads you never read, and completely ignore?
They don't amass power, they are created by power, directly.
The first sars-cov2-19 "rescue package" in 2020, was $5 trillion dollars. The maximum an individual American could receive was $1,200. There's 330 million Americans. 330 million * $1,200 = 396 billion dollars or about 0.5 trillion bucks - and that's if EVERY American received the largest check possible, and they didn't.
Where did the other 4.5 trillion dollars go?
They went to the companies our Federal Reserve wanted to DIRECTLY support.
We are not in a capitalist system, this is not a free market.
Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and other "tech billionaires" are just puppets. Their job is to take the heat for whatever they are ORDERED to do. They are the government. In-Q-Tel started Facebook - it's CIA.
If these were REAL companies, and they aren't, instead of promoting propaganda, they could simply allow free and unfettered communication. The fact they CAN'T do this (because money dries up if they were to attempt this) is why there are NOW plenty of competitors who are struggling of course, because they ACTUALLY have to make a profit, and don't get sweet "government contracts" and infusions from the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (aka the Plunge Protection Team) - they DIRECTLY invest in the US stockmarket.
We're a fascist system. We're not BECOMING one, we are one.
You might be sitting there and thinking "well, that's crazy, if that's what was going on, I would have heard about it!" - well, I'm telling you, you've heard about it. It's a very simple system.
The FED makes as much money as they want, they dilute the currency of course, they promote industries and areas they want, every company is filled with intelligence assets, the executives are blackmailed, and bribed to do what they are instructed to do, and the company is kept flush with cash as long as they follow orders. Same with our "elected" representatives, same with our "news" platforms.
CNN has less than 1 million viewers at any moment during the day or night, and has had that few viewers for over 4 months now. How do you figure they can continue to operate and pay salaries (which are often 10's of millions of dollars) for years at a time. Do you think the average viewer ends up spending a few hundred dollars because they saw the commercials on CNN every year? That's what it would cost. If CNN was actually supported by commercial ads, and OFFICIALLY they are.
Here, let me explain it even more simply. Our government starting from the Federal Reserve down, is a criminal syndicate. Play ball, or else. It's a mafia. When you use that model, EVERYTHING they do makes perfect sense.
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.
All but the last two words of his statement are from an old & sage comment. Clearly he has grown up, and wised up. You must be proud, if not relieved. This too will pass.
Thank you, yes he’s an incredible young man (another Henley, no relation) and has realized the deeper underpinnings of the state of affairs a long time ago. Used to be called a conspiracy theorist but now even his ‘mainstream-media-type friends’ can see he’s been right all along.
I would have given Mark Twain credit for that well known quote but it’s not proven he was the one who coined it. It was relevant 5 years ago, and is exponentially more so now!
Mark Twain had a far better one which is applicable here and to which I have subscribed for years, being, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education".
Good one, not sure I’ve heard that one before!
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.
What's going on in Quebec is a terribly interesting example of uniquely Canadian politics.
1-Quebec never "joined" Canada, as all the other provinces did, Quebec is a war prize between England and France.
2-Quebec used to be the rebel province, back in the day when people called it the Belle Province, while its institutions were run by the Roman Catholic Church and the Brits, constantly held under, ... but pretty.
3-1970, for a handful of morons, Trudeau Sr declared Martial Law and unjustly arrested and imprisoned several thousand innocent people.
4-1971 Trudeau Sr declared Canada's new official religion to be multiculturalism, relegating Quebecers to just another "component"
5-4 past decades, Quebec-phobia replaced "La Belle Prince" as Canada's national official hobby, with the Feds paying for smearing and fear-mongering during the two referendums, and anglo-Canadian media constantly fueling ROC hatred towards Quebec.
6-Pre-covid, Quebec was the least vaccinated province
Trudeau Senior has won. Anglos are once more dominating the métropole's politics, anglo/American/monarchist sensitivities now dominate the quebec political landscape. A non-political party won the last election, and gave Quebec its final nail in the coffin.
COMPLETE COMPLIANCE TO TRUDEAU SR VISION
In French, we'd say « à plat-ventrisme »
Canada is victorious.
« Québécois are dead »
All hail the Queen.
If you think Quebec has to put up with a lot of smearing and fear-mongering/phobia, you should see what Alberta has to put up with.
Maybe we should team up against Ontario?
I've had this very conversation many times in the past two years. I first visited Alberta in October 2020 and was immediately forced to confess a half century of bad words.
As we used to say in Quebec: "Ontario, Onta rien d'mandé".
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.
What about Frank Sobotka? I'm not hearing his name anywhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-j5XWo1fPI&ab_channel=WireLover2
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...
This is not one of his better interviews - maybe he thought he had to walk on eggshells for a Canadian audience. Here he is speaking to an American audience.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/professor-adolph-reed-tells-white
Yeah, he's not overly clear in expressing himself. Academics get too bogged down in jargon. Just say what you mean.
They learn how to be muddled in their academic bubbles where they talk to each other in foreign tongues...I used to believe in a university education but now believe it is part of the problem not part of the solution.
What "jargon" and evidence of a "foreign tongue" is in this? He's clearly laying out what he means in English. The only two academic-ish words he uses are "performative" and "expressivist", but you can guess pretty easily what those mean. The rest is normal, albeit highly literate, vocabulary.
Look, the professor knows that the entire woke madness emanates from universities...that alone makes him a poor apologist and explainer. Nothing in this piece alludes to that fact, and that is what makes this a failed piece, in my opinion . And as for 'academia speak', that is a general weakness of professors, not just this one and not just on this topic.
None of that makes any sense. Like, actually. It's totally illogical. Reed laid out what he meant, your reading comprehension is just poor.
It's not so much "the university" itself, but all the fake science (liberal arts) within. WAY TOO MUCH. People getting PhDs in whatever water colour painter. These things do not contribute to society. Next they'll have a PhD in e-gaming.
No, the reality is we need to bring back proper critical thinking to universities, and pair down those programs back to the essentials.
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 💗
Just checked out your substack and subscribed, always great to find a new voice of truth and reason
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.
Woke not woke cultural is defined as the following from the Merriam Webster dictionary : "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues" this to is the original definition and later it seems to narrow to, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke
The "woke" generation doesn't seems to follow facts or uses them to support and subvert power to their own agendas. They rather emote or have a knee jerk response then solve issues most of the time. Its like watching a child have a temper tantrum and destroying anything that doesn't support their view or makes them "uncomfortable". Then turning around later and trying to prove an argument with the evidence they "whitewashed or destroyed" because after all it is okay for them to use it just not others. In other words they want to eat their cake and have it to without providing facts having very little to no understanding how what they "feel" they stand for happened.
They don't seem to be able to provide constructive democratic, realistic plan with planned steps and instead go for totalitarian sweeps without foresight. Making it hard to avoid the same pit falls they are fighting. In other words: my way or no way ( woke generation) is the same totalitarian, inflexible judgement and thoughts/behaviors that was wrong with the issue in the first place. That has been discovered by previous generations.
It is the understanding how we got there and how it came about in the first place. Then addressing many parts of society ( inclusiveness and recognizing not everyone is/was the same ) and reaching them not through demands but showing them history and different ways forward from different perspectives. Not the one size fits all option and a denial of history ( tearing down statues whitewashing books and literature) that the woke generation currently is currently involved because it makes them uncomfortable ( emotive). Deny history or propgandize history and we are bound to repeat it. E.g Suggestion for statues don't rip them down rewrite plaques yes they did this but they also did this. As long as it is factually verifiable by credible sources ( not twitter, FB, Youtube, instagram social media) That is the actively aware not woke
The problem is they have allowed Facebook to become an educational tool in schools its not. It sets up a type of behavior definitely not thinking that is 1 herd only anything different like what they are supposedly fighting for is annihilated.