The values promoted by woke are today most associated with an emergent elite that is socially and geographically mobile, highly educated and social-media savvy. Woke may not be this elite’s self-descriptor of choice, but woke ideas underpin establishment decision-making and corporate mission statements. ‘Woke’ refers to the side of the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos.” (p. 15) And it’s no coincidence that so many of the negative references to ‘wokeness’ are directed towards Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

woke culture | The Spectator Why Gen Z is turning against woke culture | The Spectator

Woke thinking has come to dominate so many of our major institutions, from the civil service and the judiciary to the police force and education.Woke has adopted this ambiguity about truth which allows words — such as ‘racism’ and ‘hate speech’ — to take on whatever meaning the user intends without regard to the possibility of countervailing evidence. As Williams remarks: If we want to discuss the rewriting of history, those words are as good a place to start as any. For this is the same Rhodes who believed that non-white areas of the world were “inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being” needing to be “brought under Anglo-Saxon influence”. It’s the “not essentially racist” colonialism about which the Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke could boast that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of Eastern peoples”. It’s the empire so modernising that during the course of British rule, India’s share of the world economy fell from 23% to less than 4%. Biggar is not against the rewriting of history. He just wants to rewrite it with his own myths.

Jokes are not violence – this is violence - spiked

How Woke Won, a new book by Joanna Williams, is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the illiberal and divisive ideas that dominate society today.

Has woke “won”, as Williams claims? Her extensive survey of the spread of woke, taking in developments in the UK, the USA, and Australia — remember Yassmin Abdel-Magied stomping out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016? — certainly indicates that woke is ascendant and that its influence is pernicious. But Williams concedes rather too much in declaring that woke has already clinched victory. “Ultimately,” she argues, “woke is a defensive stance from an elite that has lost its authority.”