If the intention of Woke acolytes is to make everything a lot worse, they should be given a gold star for a job well done. Like King Midas, everything they touch looks pretty but is utterly useless.

For those with a penchant for collecting illustrative nutshells which poetically encapsulate the issues of our time, here are some offerings to go with your repast.

Let’s take the Education industry. Just this month, Maitland Jones Jr., a professor at New York University, was fired from his post because students started a petition insisting that his classes on organic chemistry were too hard.

It does not matter to the university that Jones Jr. has been teaching at the establishment for almost 15 years, or that he is the author of the influential textbook, Organic Chemistry, now in its 5th edition. It also obviously counts for nothing that the 84-year-old professor, caring for his students under Covid restrictions, had spent $5,000 of his own money to record dozens of lectures and make them available for free.

Perhaps what is most disturbing is that – and I can affirm this, as a tortured ex-student of the subject – organic chemistry is hard. For an educational establishment to ignore this fact is mind-blowing.

It baffles me that when a measly 80 whiners from his pool of more than 350 students failed a difficult subject, rather than work harder, they decided to go mewling and spewing to education overlords – and the university capitulated!

Many of the students are pre-med, supposedly on their way to becoming physicians. Ask yourself, would you want any of these petulant future doctors, who might suddenly demand a 10-minute mental wellness break when things get tough mid-emergency surgery, to be anywhere near you holding a scalpel?

The fish rots from the head. After the death of George Floyd, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges took on ultra-Woke ‘anti-racism’ policies. The AMA has since been pushing aggressively to have more people of colour to enter the medical profession and the way they have chosen to do this is by lowering entry standards. Many medical schools, including Stanford and the University of Washington, have already scrapped the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for certain students in the name of diversity.

Medicine is not the only subject that has been affected. Law is also infected by Wokery. Twelve federal judges in America have announced that they will no longer take law clerks who graduated from Yale Law School, the top-ranking law school in the country. This is because in recent years, Yale Law School has shown itself to be run by people hostile to free speech. They have inculcated a generation of future lawyers, judges, and politicians who likewise see opinions they disagree with as intolerable. This in a country where the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression.

Entertainment has been awash with Wokery. Movies are made unwatchable, ham-fisted propaganda pieces. Perhaps the most jaw-dropping and unintentionally funny example is The Woman King, a ‘historical’ epic about the Agojie, an all-female West African warrior unit. While the surface level female empowerment and racial spotlighting is enough to make your average blue-haired Wokester swoon with ecstasy, the truth is much more sobering.

The Agojie was formed not due to some amazing prowess or proto-feminist movement, but because so many men of the Dahomey kingdom, where modern-day Benin is, had died from wars against neighbouring tribes. The Dahomey economy heavily relied on the slavery business, selling captured Africans on the slave market and engaging in human sacrifice using slaves.

Ironically, slavery in Dahomey was ended … by the British Empire. The West African Squadron, the British Navy squadron formed in 1807, is estimated to have freed 150,000 Africans from 1,600 slave ships, with some 2,000 British sailors dying for this cause. Now that would be a movie worth making.

But people are not fooled by the propaganda wing of Woke. The ratings tell the story. The recent Emmy Awards had an all-time low viewership, down 25 per cent from 2021. The Oscars is likewise emaciated. It turns out that the only people who seem to believe in the propaganda are the propagandists.

Sports is being ruined too. Putting aside the kneeling and constant fawning to the Woke (which has lost ESPN millions of viewers), female sports is under existential threat. Trans-woman Lia Thomas, previously an average male swimmer ranked in the 400’s of male competition, has been breaking records left and right, dominating the female competition, including beating female Olympic medalists with ease.

The New Zealand transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was winning gold medals at international competitions into her forties. Emily Bridges, a transgender cyclist, is pushing to compete in the female category at the Paris Olympics, despite winning a men’s race in 2022 at the British Universities Championship. Luckily, due to the understandable indignation from female athletes and parents, sporting bodies have had some sense being knocked back into them. But the threat is far from over.

Such stupid and deeply satisfying illustrations of Woke keep appearing, and politics is a hive for these nuggets. California has recently banned the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Only electric cars can be sold in this Wokest of all Woke states. Days later, this same government told owners of electric cars to stop charging them due to electricity shortages. The shortage is not surprising, as California is leading America in the pursuit of green energy at the expense of all other options. A fool’s errand given that green energy is inefficient, expensive, unreliable, and – ironically – hardly clean.

But to the Woke, reality is only something to be brushed aside when it stands inconveniently between them and their claim to power. Woke is a set of bien-pensant ideas that are half-baked and blindly dogmatic, fuelling a sense of self-importance while barely hiding a brittle ego. It is body-guarded by the most vicious smear machine, immune to reason, antithetical to free enquiry and basic freedoms, while outwardly claiming to be caring and kind.

Christopher Hitchens, when questioned about the robustness of his challenge to organised religion, said that, ‘Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things…one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.’ I agree. And since the Woke keeps on giving, keep laughing.

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