Written by Noah Carl.
During the period from roughly 2010 to 2024, which has become known as the Great Awokening, radical progressives attempted to co-opt every major institution in society for the purpose of advancing their ideological agenda.
Thousands of people were demoted, suspended or fired for saying the wrong thing. Others were banned from social media and even debanked. Cherished monuments were vandalized or torn down. Police officers genuflected before protestors they were supposed to be policing. Universities issued statements that brazenly contradicted their truth-seeking mission. Authority figures started using bizarre, new-fangled terms like “non-binary” and “people of colour”. Once respected medical organisations began referring to people’s “sex assigned at birth”. And there were calls to “defund the police” just as looters and arsonists ran riot through major cities.
This insanity rightly provoked a backlash—from both people on the right and those in the liberal centre. Anti-woke institutions like the Free Speech Union began popping up. Soon there was a cottage industry of journalists and social media activists who would lampoon the latest woke absurdities. Then in 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, arguably the most influential social media platform and surely the most influential among elites. He fired most of the content moderators and unbanned accounts that had previously been suspended, prompting an exodus of liberals and leftists. By 2023, companies that engaged in woke activism were subject to humiliating boycotts. And in 2024, Donald Trump won a decisive election victory after running an explicitly anti-woke campaign. Post-election polls showed that Kamala Harris’s ill-advised focus on “cultural issues” was a major reason voters backed Trump.
