by Christopher Gage
Nothing is more appetizing than watching the limbs of progressive icons mulch between the jaws of the Woke.
With a giddy regularity, the picadors of piffle lower themselves to those over which they loft. A glorious sight—like savannah lions ripping through their prey. There’s something deeply primal about it. And something deserved about it.
The death sentence applies for offenses of an increasingly trivial nature.
J.K. Rowling, a scribbler of terrible yet terribly popular tales, recently suggested biology is real. Yes, in defense of a think-tank researcher rendered jobless after tweeting that “Men cannot change into women,” the author broke with the Wokeing Class.
Such reality is unacceptable, such thoughts “deeply problematic.” To describe with accuracy what is before your eyes is now a de facto signature sanctioning your death.
Maya Forstater lost her job as visiting fellow of Centre for Global Development for saying that men and women are different. Not that trans people deserve ridicule or persecution. Merely that men and women are different.
In vain, Forstater tried to explain. “My belief,” she said, “is that sex is a biological fact and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.”
Rowling cushioned her support for Forstater with the qualifier that people should be free to dress, address, and caress whomever or however they like, but biological reality is, well—reality.
A fair glug of common sense, no? Not for the Woke mob. Rowling’s thoughts triggered a trite “discussion” of her “transphobia.”
Horror novelist Stephen King this week broke from his incessant presidential henpecking to scoop a prize for “backward and ignorant” comments.
King, responding to Oscar nominations deemed by the mob as not diverse enough, said he “would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”
Now, that might make sense to you, but King wrote this “damaging,” “thoughtless,” and of course, “privileged” ribbon of common sense on Twitter—an alternate spiritual plane home to wandering embittered souls yet unfit for ascension.
On Twitter, the laws of nature cease to apply. A caps-locked orgy sprawled. King then, of course, walked back his comments—the price one must pay for even partial redemption.
What King said matters most. An artist, he is interested in the truth. When judging art, all that matters is the art itself. This was taken to mean that diversity and quality are mutually exclusive.
By way of his meek climbdown, King offered his own thoughts for re-education and abandoned his mental privacy.
What King did was deny the truth, which is the lifeblood of political correctness, and render his own mind and thoughts unsound.
Something not dissimilar corrupts the wrongly convicted. They, at first, protest their innocence. For a quieter life, they eventually give in, accept their own thoughts as alien, incorrect, defective.
Which is why the Woke enforce the various nonsenses of political correctness so dutifully.
Given its flagrant, gaping untruth, Woke rhetoric depends on indoctrination and brutish enforcement. Dissidents beholden to their own minds are ostracized, canceled from polite society.
Such madness is useful to those gripping the levers of power—the proles are kept busy, resentful of their peers, engrossed in matters thickening by the week in their triviality.
Perhaps a generation raised on self-esteem, Grubhub, and Netflix, believes reality must be tailored to their own algorithm.
This is a generation that finds “Friends” problematic; a generation that soaks itself in “diversity,” as long as that “diversity” ends with the loudest getting what the loudest wants. Wokeness is the political expression of insecurity, diversity a mask of inadequacy, deluding one’s self is less painful than the brief medicine of honesty.
And what is art if not the helpless pursuit of honesty, of the truth?
To the Woke, art presents an unpredictable hazardous threat to the nonsense they’re forced to repeat ad nauseam. Any creative endeavor is pregnant with risk and presents a moment where the mind is unguarded and pliable.
This is especially true in comedy. Laughter, the purest expression of truth, is often involuntary, unfiltered. What makes a joke funny is the atom of truth at its core, and it is this that deems it dangerous to those dependent on the traffic of untruths.
As King and Rowling found out, the truth is not what matters.
And it’s not just within the strange contours of Twitter. An article at Splice Today pointed out a new development: the advent of the “Sensitivity Reader.” Yes, for a small fee, a sensitivity reader will scour your manuscript for “accidental bias”—social offenses determined on the whims of the eagerly offended.
Accidental bias can include “white savior complex” and “improper physical descriptions of minorities.” How such descriptions could be deemed “improper” by anyone not the author is a question nobody is supposed to ask.
Then again, to assume that art should be judged on its quality, and not on the diversity of the artist, was until this week a truth nobody was supposed to question.
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Christopher Gage is a British political journalist.
Photo “Woke Person” by Tony Webster. CC BY-SA 2.0.
