Freddie (not Frederik any longer?) deBoer remarks on the non-conservative media profession and how they appear to have taken a dislike to Substack, currently the home of deBoer, Andrew Sullivan, and a few other writers who appear to not have much patience with the woke:
Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.
In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?
Having been a little frustrated at the lack of definition of being woke, it’s good to see deBoer, a former academician himself – I think – noting that it’s a confusing and obscure ideology.
I even find it comforting that I’m not stupid. Or at least more stupid than usual. Formulating criticisms of the confusing only really succeeds at the visceral level.
But I’m not referencing deBoer in order to try to say something clever, but to get the word out, especially here in the Midwest, that wokeness does appear to be confusing, obscure, and, if it remains that way, dangerous to those who adopt it.
And to note that, possibly, the conundrum for the woke is that if it does stand up and define itself, it may find that most of the country, even in its academic strongholds, withdraw support from it, especially if it shows gaps between itself and the principles of liberal democracy on which this country has been built, violated, repaired, etc – I feel it’s important to note that principles upon which we built have often been violated by the greedy, by theocrats, and narcissists, in order to make clear that a heterogenuous country, racially, philosophically, ideologically, will violate, with serious consequences, those principles.
And that does not condemn those principles. It only condemns the violators.
