The woke and the anti-woke are going down together
On two cheeks of the same sociocultural arse
It is worth remembering that eighteen months ago it was the done thing in progressive circles to say that rioting was good. Or not happening. Or both good and not happening. The only thing worse than the opinions of American elites – very few of whom likely have the slightest experience of the jeopardy, anarchy and damage to working people of an actual riot – adopting this kind of decadent pose would be for British elites to take them on without adjusting for a different political context. I was dryly amused, for example, to read an interview at the height of the BLM protests with Ta Nehisi Cotes by Ezra Klein, the latter asking us to imagine a world where the police ‘did not have guns’. Imagine that indeed. Less ‘picture a Utopian society’ than ‘Have you been to Bromley?’
During this outbreak of radical chic, the ‘Free Speech’ podcast circuit became something of a sanctuary for me. Podcasts like ‘Triggernometry’ and ‘Dark Horse’. When nobody is talking about things openly and honestly, when enormous societal changes are being presented as uncontentious positions, any place where people can speak without fear of censure is a welcome sanctuary. And of course on all the free-speech shows there were people of all backgrounds who felt the same as me: That giving politics over to emotion is one of the surest ways to bring forth monstrosities for the ages.
BLM faded, Biden won, and the Democrats paid for their association with the idea of defunding the police, as they had been warned and as they had not wanted to hear. I kept watching the free-speech podcasts, and I still enjoyed them, but I began to see the same faces across them, and hear the same points being made. Slowly but surely, I felt the ‘anti-woke’ folks were developing their own ideology, stitching it together out of an assortment of stances that had become contentious in mainstream media. Fundamentally, the idea of allying being ‘pro free-speech’ as part of a particular viewpoint seemed counterintuitive to me. I support free speech for the benefit of everybody, to use as they see fit, not as the purview of a particular ideological tendency. And, of course, I resented not having the huge audience of these podcasts myself.
A few moments though decisively pushed me away from identifying with those milieus. In July 2020, the rapper Wiley embarked on a series of antisemitic rants across social media, spreading conspiracy and calling Jewish people ‘snakes’. It was one of the most egregious examples of racism I’ve seem, and one of the few things on social media that I could say made me feel unsafe, above all seeing the amount of people who would make excuses or stay silent in face of blatant racial hatred. A 48-hour social media walkout of Jewish people and their allies took place and I participated. I noticed though that a lot of the pro free-speech crowd did not, and indeed objected to a protest being carried out by a group organizing as a minority.
This position is, in the most charitable description, naïve. Naïve for people who don’t realize how high the stakes are. Just because you don’t agree with a particular type of anti-racist politics – and Lord knows I’m not sympathetic to a lot of the ‘everything is White Supremacist’ talk – doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist and is not a great evil. As the free speech crowd clucked out their procedural niceties, I couldn’t help thinking about 1930s Germany, and imagining them responding to Jews protesting their persecution with ‘Well, isn’t it best not to divide people up into categories at all?’ When of course it’s the act of racism itself which has forces people to act and organize as minority interest groups; if you hate dividing people into categories, you must really hate racism. The Jews did not ask Wiley to incite racial hatred against them, but his having done so forced Jews to identify and organize as a group. History is adequately clear that letting things slide is not an option. No, the excesses of modern antiracism don’t negate the evil of racism, and they are to be criticized because they’re not going to reduce racism, not because tackling racism is itself wrong-headed. And even in the context of deciding on best anti-racist practice solidarity with its victims is always welcome. But the free speech crowd were too sappy, and their ideals too settled, to be able to respond like that.
The other moment which pushed me away from that free-speech constellation is its association with sceptics of lockdowns, vaccinations and conspiracies about the pandemic. I myself have very few opinions about covid apart from not wanting to die of it, but I have certainly never understood for one instant the appeal of seeing it as an opportunity to take an ideological stand. Get over yourself, get jabbed, and get on with it. But the free speech podcasts were now full of middle-aged celebrities who seemed to view refusing to wear a mask as some brave act of heroism, or Panglossian doctors telling us it would all be fine. There’s an audience for that kind of thing, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be on podcasts setting themselves up as the heirs of Enlightenment reason. And people on the podcasts weren’t challenging these views - they were indulging them.
I was pushed towards the anti-woke milieu by the excesses, and the unkindness, of a left politics that has become so full of shame and so uninterested in pluralism. The problem with hating things is it removes you of the obligation to be curious about them, and cultural leftism’s lack of interest in any tradition outside itself has transformed it into a dull, pious place. I’ve lost interest. By now, the only people who claim straight-faced that cancel culture doesn’t exist are the people whose opinions are precisely in line with everything that would not get you cancelled, and commit to constantly updating their views, likes, and associations to ensure that is still the case; this is what is meant by ‘Doing the work’. Even a slightest deviation from the Done Opinion, as Diane Abbott recently showed, is enough for your excommunication. For that kind of politics, just wanting to keep an open mind and talk to people of different ideologies has become disruptive and disturbing. Living like that is exhausting and antithetical to achieving anything; it’s the politics of the critic, not the doer. But it just doesn’t seem a logical response to increasing ideological constriction to try and create an alternative ideology out of the disparate parts that ideology has rejected. The point is to be free.
At present, the woke and the anti-woke are in symbiosis. The woke adopt an absurd position; ‘riots are good’, those who say ‘riots are bad’ are expulsed from their community, and these latter then do the round of free-speech podcasts and become part of that milieu. That’s why it so misses the point to say ‘They’re not cancelled, they’re on GB News!’; these people are cancelled in the liberal institutions and sectors which are their natural home, and all of us lose out from this ideological segregation. As long as the liberal media pumps out daft shit and you’re not allowed to say it’s daft, as long as blatantly true statements such as sex is binary, there are two sides to Israel-Palestine, and yes, riots are bad, invite opprobrium in or even exile from progressive circles, the free-speech podcast circuit will thrive. That’s as pure a definition of a parasitical relationship as you could read, and it’s in the interest of neither the parasite or the host that the cycle comes to an end, for it creates (dis)content.
A genuinely pro-free speech podcast would never calcify into an ideology. It would constantly and subtly adjust its views; it would consistently alienate any audience it had developed. But what, really, are views? Life isn’t decided by people’s views of things. It’s decided by the things people, all kinds of people, do and experience together. People from all walks of life and with all kinds of politics. It’s absolutely impossible for a politics based on a particular definition of moral virtue and its assorted apostates to provide us with this. Meanwhile, the rest of us can only hope for fashions to change, and that we find a better guiding fault line to organize our media culture along. I hope I am not inviting accusations of nostalgia when I say that the outstanding candidate remains identifying who has the money. There’s only so long you can be diverted by watching people fight over baubles.
Brilliant article, James. Over the last few years I've found myself following a simialr trajectory and at times, have grown tired of those same guests, doing the same circuit, saying the same things.
Not gonna lie, though, there's points where I've almost found myself addicted to it. Some big event happens, the progessive left goes nuts on-line and the first thing I'm doing is checking to see what Spiked have written about it, it's not healthy and probably not all that helpful.
Thanks for writing so candidly about this, though, even for someone like me, it's genuinely worrying when you don't always agree with the status-quo but stuff like this article helps.
Great read, James. Sorry to hear about your fear following Wiley's comments. Glad you've come round on the one-dimensionality of the 'free speech network.' I've always found those pods/ articles as dumb as the stuff coming from the ACAB crowd.