Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative. Woke activists are obsessed with race and gender identity to the exclusion of almost all other issues. Woke describes a moral sensibility that insists upon putting people into identity boxes and then arranging the boxes into hierarchies of privilege and oppression, with some groups in need of ‘uplifting’ while others must beg atonement.” (p. 2) How Woke Won looks at what lies behind the woke world view. It asks how one way of thinking about gender and race has won out over all others. It considers the influence of identity politics and the lure of victimhood in shaping how we relate to others. It argues that elite condescension towards the working class translates into an illiberal and censorious culture. The intention of this word was for it to have a positive outcome for a minority group,’ he explains. ‘But when other groups feel threatened or challenged by it, they might want to subvert it in some way. And by using the enemy’s weapons, that makes it an even more powerful tool for them.’ How does this impact people of colour?

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy

Optimistically she goes on to propound that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe, and it is time to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future. If a Sinn Féin first minister is elected this week, very little will change in practical terms. The offices of first and deputy first minister are joint positions. In practice, they are joint prime ministers. In my time as special adviser to first minister David Trimble, all major decisions had to be jointly approved. Executive (ie, cabinet) meetings were always preceded by a last-minute pre-meeting to barter the final disagreements. With a Sinn Féin first minister and DUP deputy, the balance of power will be little different from the other way around.Nonetheless, the Census data released in June 2022 shows the highest proportion ever — 50 per cent — of Australians are born, or descended from those born, overseas. So it’s also hardly surprising that claims of persistent racism by anti-racism activists do not fit with our experience of living in what is now, by far, one of the world’s most integrated multicultural and multi-ethnic societies.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is wreaking havoc - spiked

For Piers, and his army of followers on social media, ‘woke’ is a negative attribute. It suggests a performative, insincere social consciousness, and inherent weakness. It’s a pejorative term used to make fun of socially liberal ideologies and position them as inferior or silly. How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason is a timely call to arms. It is also a reminder that what critics of woke need is, firstly, courage to speak out in the certain knowledge that they are not lone voices and that woke is not popular. The second thing critics of woke need is determination to mount a rigorous and persistent defence of free speech. Dr Joanna Williams is a columnist for spiked as well as a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times. An academic she is the founder and director of Cieo, which provides a platform for research and debates that universities today dare not touch.

Upcoming Events

All too often, the sense of virtue that comes from claiming to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent – and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission.

Ban Nothing. Question Everything. Drawstring bag - spiked Ban Nothing. Question Everything. Drawstring bag - spiked

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.” Perhaps the starkest illustration of how reducing everything to single frames of vision can distort understanding comes in the debate about antisemitism. In his new book Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel shows how the view of Jews as “privileged” or “white” leads many progressives to ignore antisemitism, even collude with it. Baddiel seems more interested in ensuring that Jews can join the carnival of identities than in challenging identity politics; nevertheless, his central point about the failure of many to recognise antisemitism remains important. Joanna is the author of Consuming Higher Education Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her most recent book is Women vs Feminism (Emerald, 2017). Where this book stands out is when it focuses on how wokeness is an elitist movement. When the author discusses it from this angle, I’m like, “YES!”. She dives into how elites have altered language and other aspects of life to signal their status and then compares it to what’s going on now. I also really enjoyed when she wrote about how major companies are capitalizing on the woke movement while also mistreating and exploiting workers around the world. I’d say that this is maybe 30% of the book. Other than that, if you’re familiar with the topic, you’ll hear a lot of arguments that have been presented before and stories of why they’re issues. It was interesting learning a little bit more about how this is unfolding in the UK as well.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.