Sunday West: February 12

Is woke on the way out?

Morning. This week I wrote about two depressing and quite related issues. Firstly, on the subject of the ‘ok, groomer’ meme and whether radical gender activists are up to something more sinister. Secondly, on last night’s GB News documentary about grooming gangs.

I switched the comments off on that one, because the last time I wrote about the issue it became quite heated. I meant to add a comment underneath to explain why, but it turned out I had disabled even my own comments. So in a display of Maoist self-criticism, I will add that I should have qualified my point about the story being undercovered. Mainstream television has (I believe) yet to cover the national story of grooming gangs as a whole in this way, but on top of the drama I mentioned, there was The Betrayed Girls, a BBC documentary in 2017 about the abuse in Rochdale, and a Panorama episode about Rotherham in 2014 — my apologies to the people involved in making those, that was badly phrased by me. Considering the scale of the crimes, my point is that it is very under-covered as a subject, both in arts/culture and popular memory (in comparison to something like Section 28) and in reporting (compared to, say, the Windrush scandal).

The GB News documentary can be found on YouTube, for those who missed it.

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Elsewhere, there is growing tension over the issue of asylum in Ireland, and Conor Fitzgerald writes about the problem of a country with such strong media group-think.

As the Irish American writer Michael Brendan Dougherty has noted, of all western countries Irish conversation is amongst the freest in private and the most informally restricted in public, and around these subjects this is truest of all.

Ireland is now unique in western Europe in not having a Right-wing populist party, for various reasons; its migrant population is much more European than those elsewhere, and the obvious vehicle for populism, Sinn Fein, is Left-wing. But Ireland’s elites are also quite uniform in their support for the new faith; just as it adopted Christianity rapidly and without conflict, it has now embraced runaway progressivism more keenly than any other.

Similar protests have now taken place in Merseyside. For readers outside the UK, this is a part of England very hostile to the Tories and, though people will blame it on Government rhetoric, the problem is that lots of unvetted young men from around the world are being dumped mostly in the poorest parts of the country.

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Ellen Pasternack wrote a very good piece on ‘daycare ideology’ and the completely bizarre childcare system in the UK.

Daycare ideology is the belief that putting children in daycare and facilitating the return of their mothers to work is an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve the primary aim of supporting families. Subscribers to daycare ideology might think that parents should be “nudged” in this direction even if it’s not what they’d choose for themselves. They might accept creating significant inefficiencies as a cost of imposing their preference.

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Musa al-Gharbi in Compact on why woke-ism is receding.

When workers at Netflix attempted to cancel Dave Chappelle in late 2021, the company didn’t respond by issuing apologies and promising more programming on LGBTQ topics, as it had in the past. Instead, executives issued a memo informing protesting employees that if they weren’t open to publishing content they disagree with, they should quit. When an insufficient number of activist employees took them up on this invitation, the company proceeded with aggressive cuts apparently targeting these employees and the programming they worked on.

Well argued, although regular readers will be astounded to learn that I am not so optimistic about this, and that it will continue to get worse. Literally a minute after reading this piece I got an email from the school about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, about the third or fourth in a fortnight on the subject of race (this didn’t happen until last year).

In Britain, at least, the trans movement has probably gone as far as it can go, but in the US progressives will continue to publicly state things which are obviously untrue for partisan reasons. The more important race aspect of wokeism will continue to get more extreme because the taboo around it is simply too strong. I also used to think that upper-middle-class liberals would change their minds when these things start to affect their own families, but I now believe that most would willingly sacrifice their own wellbeing for sacred issues.

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Since I wrote about drag, a reader (sorry I’ve now forgotten who) pointed me to this Darel E. Paul First Things piece on the subject.

Just as much as progressives cast the therapeutic upon drag, drag draws upon the therapeutic. Devotees of the RuPaul franchise are routinely served hearty portions of therapeutic pathos, ethos, and mythos. Since the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Charles has ended every episode with the aphorism, “Remember, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” Since 2014, regular Drag Race judge Michelle ­Visage has hosted a companion series titled ­Whatcha Packin’,which consists of off-stage out-of-drag exit interviews of contestants. Therapeutic themes of individuality, authenticity, and liberation are always prominent. Visage has said that one purpose of the program is to “tell [contestants] how wonderful they are as human beings.”

Since 2015, Charles has included in each season finale an act of pure self-affirmation in which contestants address photographs of themselves as pre-schoolers. Each drag queen speaks—often emotionally—of personal, even intimate emotional and psychological struggle, using routine therapeutic tropes of confession, growth, self-acceptance, self-assertion, and self-love. Of course, most every reality television show today incorporates such themes. But Drag Race holds pride of place for centering queerness, the distilled essence of America’s therapeutic ­culture.

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Adam Tooze on Iran’s demography and how small families are pushing the protests.

Demography is thus one more zone in which the contradictions of Iran’s gender regime come to the fore. Iran is a society in which maternal mortality is lower than in the US (admittedly not the lowest bar), but only 5 percent of seats in parliament are taken by women. It is a country in which women in university outnumber males, and in which attainment in secondary education extends to over 70 percent of women over 25 (versus 76 percent for men). But it also a society in which female participation in the formal labour market runs to only 14 percent, by the latest UN count, half the rate reported by Saudi Arabia and on a par with Afghanistan before the Taliban returned to power. On top of all this it is society, which went through the fastest demographic transition on record, which the regime is now seeking to undo. 

If people have smaller families, then generally they are likely to want to invest more in their daughters, including their careers. But the mullahs really didn’t have much choice; youth bulges are dangerous to any regime, associated with violence and instability, and the war in Syria was certainly linked to their very high fertility (ironic, since Syria’s regime is secular). They’re doomed either way.

Via Scott Alexander

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Freddie deBoer on why the 90s were better.

They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science. It was the past, but there were vaccines and Jim Crow was over and there was a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet. Bill Clinton sucked and our government was doing all kinds of awful skulduggery in the world, but he didn’t suck in the same way as George W. Bush and there wasn’t this constant sense of the world falling apart. There was optimism about the coming of the new millennium before we found out what a rotten time the next couple decades would be. 

It’s funny how 1991 has become a particular focus of nostalgia, on Twitter at least; I keep on seeing people tweeting about Guns N’Roses and Terminator 2 being a high point. It was also the most murderous year in modern American history. Even in London, the 90s felt a lot more violent and edgy in many ways, but — to sound like some boring old fart — I’m very happy I grew up before smartphones were invented.

Via Helen Lewis.

Have a good day, and I will try to write about something a bit lighter next week.