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News emerging from the US, England, and Brazil points to the decline of wokeness.
On August 2, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) made a remark that both delighted and infuriated opponents of wokeness: “Woke 1 was crazy.” This was not a contrite admission of error, but merely a way of asking the electorate to move past the past follies of hers and her fellow Democrat Francesca Hong. Woke 1 was crazy, so let’s put everything said back then behind us and focus instead on what the candidates are saying right now.
The follies were of this caliber: “In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed ‘defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,’ and that ‘police exist to uphold white supremacy.’ Hong has also called for cancelling Thanksgiving: ‘Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.’” And what was the rational explanation for such lunacy? According to AOC, “during this time and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window […] We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.”
Note the passive language: there was an opening—it wasn’t that anyone actually opened it. Lockdowns caused unemployment—but the woke crowd were the very hysterics who endorsed the lockdowns, demanded ever-harsher measures, and accused of genocide anyone seeking to ease this health tyranny. Further , this statement confirms what the most unhinged, conspiracy-minded elements of the right were saying at the time: that the lockdown was a social experiment designed to implement “socialism.” Just as the QAnon cranks were, broadly speaking, fundamentally correct in claiming the West is controlled by a pedophilic, Satanist elite, the cranks who see “socialism” lurking under the bed were fundamentally correct in their assessment of lockdown policies—provided we are willing to understand that what they label “socialism” is nothing like the Soviet experiment (of which they are ignorant, lacking the necessary education), but rather the woke capitalism of the Democratic Party and George Soros.
Another problem is that the statement makes it seem as though wokeness was merely a pandemic-era phenomenon, which is not the case. As journalist Ryan Zyckgraf aptly summarized: “For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America’s unelected HR regime — a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file. […] Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporised, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred.” Ultimately, the Jacobin journalist accuses the woke crowd of gaslighting—the very thing they accused the MAGA crowd of doing. Indeed, they spent years insisting that woke didn’t exist, and suddenly “woke 1 was crazy”.
On one hand, it is good to see that even the woke crowd doesn’t take wokeness seriously. On the other, the cavalier way they reject wokeness without offering a mea culpa irritates their critics—who were right all along to oppose the madness.
England
In England, the case of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history, caused a stir. The long saga, the sordid details of which thrill the anti-woke crowd, boils down to this: a woke professor showing all the signs of mythomania was accused of plagiarism by a “race realist” (read: a racist), the sort who constantly extols Ashkenazi IQ with great “impartiality,” — himself being an Ashkenazi. Arday resigned and was “found dead”, meaning he likely committed suicide. The case brings to mind that of the black Harvard president, who also fell from grace due to plagiarism after championing the Palestinian cause; and, according to Norman Finkelstein, the wife of the accuser (a right-wing Ashkenazi Jew) was a plagiarist herself. It strikes me as a classic case where there are no good guys.
Jason Arday’s work was a self-pitying auto-ethnography that differed from standard “woke” drivel only by incorporating elements worthy of Baron Munchausen or Monsieur Rocambole. For instance, his list of adventures includes running 35 marathons in 30 days—even though he fractured a leg on the twenty-first day. He kept running regardless. Faced with the magnitude of these tall tales, two conclusions emerge: 1) Wokeness has dragged the academic standards of minorities down to a level approaching the magma of the Earth’s innermost core—low by any point of view; 2) if Jason Arday didn’t magically turn white or neurotypical, yet still had to step down, then the university environment must have changed. What kind of change? The decline of wokeness. Thus, the Jason Arday case is significant primarily for the timeline it presents: in 2020, Routledge publishes his auto-ethnography; in 2023, he is hired by Cambridge; and in 2026, he kills himself, unable to bear the humiliation of being exposed.
Let us hope that wokeness is not replaced by a recycled version of social Darwinism and scientific racism.
Brazil
On August 4—the same week as AOC’s statement—Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, a well-known woke figure, referred to identitarianism (used as a synonym for wokeness in Brazil) as “left-wing fascism.” Interviewed by a prominent Globo figure in Athens, with a view of the Acropolis, the US-based actor complained about the hard life of a successful man unable to engage in dialogue with the Right; he claimed that the Right, despite its meritocratic ethos, condemns successful leftists. The interviewer noted that the “identitarian Left” also ties a person’s standing to what they are permitted to say (for example, that only gay people can support gay people), and the actor vehemently agreed with this criticism, asserting that it amounts to left-wing fascism. Just as with AOC, there was not a hint of mea culpa.
In 2019, writer Antonio Risério—a frequent target of “cancel culture” since 2007, when he criticized the black movement—released the book Sobre o relativismo pós-moderno e a fantasia fascista da esquerda identitária (On Postmodern Relativism and the Fascist Fantasy of the Identitarian Left). In it, Wagner Moura is mentioned as follows: “I hesitated to believe it when I encountered the leftoid-identitarian idiocy (or cunning, I can’t say which) of actor-director Wagner Moura, who justified casting a very black man to play Carlos Marighella in his film about the communist from Bahia by saying: ‘To me, Marighella is a black hero.’ It’s laughable. […] The problem isn’t skin color, but shoddy ideologizing. A director could very well cast a black in the role of the Jewish Bob Dylan […]. What becomes ridiculous is him saying he’s doing so because, to him, Dylan is a ‘black hero’.”
Casting a black actor serves “woke” interests in Brazil because the black movement insisted on denying racial mixing and labeling anyone of mixed race as black. Marighella was the son of a black woman and an Italian man, and he had a complexion that could make him pass for Egyptian. He was not black. Further , he was a guerrilla fighter during the military regime, and the Brazilian Left is obsessed with the “armed fight against the dictatorship.” Thus, Wagner Moura went to the leftist government of his native Bahia to ask for funding for a film about the “black hero” Marighella. The movie is a disjointed action flick in which the black hero pauses briefly to have a secret meeting with his son and deliver a very important message: “respect the girls”—a government slogan for Carnival. A black, feminist hero. If Wagner Moura now praises capitalism and says he wants to talk to the Right, it is because he does not believe Lula will win re-election.
That is precisely what wokeness in Brazil was all about: a spectacle of cynicism starring opportunists. A Spanish informant tells me that in his homeland, these things are backed by general public sentiment; in Brazil, it was always a matter of blatant opportunism. Cash-rich NGOs bought off the media, universities, politicians, and artists. Then came the financial market’s ESG initiatives to make matters worse. Now, we must wait for institutional measures to reverse woke public policies. That shouldn’t take long, given that until recently, anyone who publicly criticized identity politics faced cancellation.
Chronology and causes
In Brazil, as US-based NGOs have been active since the 1960s, criticism of identity politics, coming from both the Right and the Left, has a long history. In the 2010s, these academic fields began to be referred to as identitarianism, much like what is happening in the US today. Thus, the term identitarianism designates both academic fields and the digital mass phenomenon that emerged in the mid-2010s, which is unequivocally known as wokeism.
Naturally, the theoretical aspect is linked to the mass movement. The official prestige of this theory seems to coincide with federal DEI policies, which were in effect in the United States from 1969 to 2025. (I wrote about this here.) It was little than half a century of pestering Brazil, yet it feels like an eternity. The timeline also reveals that Jason Arday was extremely unlucky: he joined Cambridge just as the massive government backing for wokeness was drawing to a close.
As for the mass hysteria, it certainly emerged in the mid-2010s. In a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, former State Department official Mike Benz recounted a plausible story: that Facebook served as a tool for “color revolutions”—successfully helping to trigger the Arab Spring in 2010 while maintaining free speech—but that its mobilization tools were subsequently used by the Russians to support the annexation of Crimea in 2014. (During the present decade, we saw US social media platforms greatly benefit the Palestinian cause, contrary to their owners’ intentions.) Consequently, woke censorship appeared on these platforms in 2016. If we are to believe him, then, the woke phenomenon was driven primarily by the war against Russia. Perhaps that explains why it shows no signs of abating in the European Union.
