Wokeness Is Dying
Last week the news broke that Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and half the internet — claims it will be pulling back drastically from its censorship policies. Free speech will reign again on Facebook, supposedly. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared on Joe Rogan a couple of days ago to elaborate on this decision. Much of what he says in the conversation — along with the entire conversation itself — would have been unthinkable four or five years ago. But times are rapidly changing.
Specifically, in the interview, Zuckerberg affirmed that there’s nothing wrong with a masculine culture in a workplace — and that, in fact, a lot of companies would benefit from it. Imagine that. Watch:
Eight years ago, these are the kinds of ideas that would’ve — and if you recall the case of James Damore — did get rank-and-file employees fired at Google. And now the head of a major Big Tech company is saying it.
Of course, the obvious response to this interview is that Zuckerberg doesn’t actually believe any of this. He’s just saying it because Trump won the election, and he wants to cozy up with power. And that’s almost certainly true. But it doesn’t fully capture what’s going on — which is that there’s also been a major shift in American culture this time around. After all, Trump won the election back in 2016, too. And Zuckerberg didn’t say anything like this. Instead his companies reacted by entrenching themselves even deeper on the Left. Now the exact opposite is happening.
In the interview, Zuckerberg suggested that some of Facebook’s censorship was the result of pressure by the Biden administration, although he claims to have resisted some of it. Watch:
Of course, it wasn’t just “vaccine side effects” that the Biden administration wanted Facebook to censor. They also wanted Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, for obvious reasons. It was a damning account of the Biden family’s corruption, and no one could really dispute its accuracy because it came directly from Hunter Biden’s laptop. And Facebook went along with that, too, on the ridiculous theory that the laptop was really some secret scheme by Russian intelligence.
It goes without saying that Facebook could have gone public with these concerns at any time in the last several years. They didn’t need to wait until Trump won a second term. So, no, we shouldn’t “trust” Mark Zuckerberg, now that he’s made a calculation that telling the truth is in his best interests. He had a chance to do the right thing when it would have required some measure of courage to do so. Although not that much, considering he was and is a multi-billionaire. That provides you a lot of cover that most of us don’t have. But Zuckerberg waited until now.
There’s a lot of this going around right now. People who are seeing the light and coming out against wokeness, now that wokeness is a punch line and has no political power and little Cultural power. I welcome these people to Team Sanity. But I don’t trust them, and I certainly won’t congratulate them.
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At the same time, again, Zuckerberg’s shift is a reflection of a broader change in the culture. And it’s a shift that’s quite dramatic in some respects. Here’s how the New York Times is reporting on some of the changes at Meta, for example:
The company removed the transgender and nonbinary ‘themes’ on its Messenger chat app. … That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.
Yes, tampons have been removed from the men’s bathrooms at Meta. Presumably the tampons have also been removed from the virtual bathrooms in the Metaverse too, although I don’t have a “Meta Quest” VR headset, so I can’t verify that at the moment. This is a sudden change that happened virtually overnight, after years of having tampons in the men’s bathroom. The CEO decides one day to end it. And it ends.
Why did the men’s bathrooms ever have tampons to begin with? Why did he ever think that was a good idea? Did Zuckerberg believe that men could have periods and then see the light after reading a biology textbook? I don’t think so. He knew it was absurd the whole time.
And guess what? There have been no riots at Meta over this change. There have been no massive protests or mass resignations. The Metaverse hasn’t collapsed. That’s because everyone at Meta — including the supposedly “trans” employees — know that reality is not subjective. They know that men do not need tampons. And now that an adult has told them the truth, they’re accepting it because they have no other choice.
That’s all it really takes for a return to sanity. And it’s happening more and more often.
To give another example — recently a federal court in Kentucky handed the Biden administration a major defeat in a Title IX case. In case you’re not familiar with Title IX, it’s a law that prevents sex discrimination in educational programs, including sports, that receive any kind of federal assistance. The Biden administration unilaterally tried to re-interpret Title IX so that it prevents discrimination on the basis of so-called “gender identity.” Their rule would have required teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns, among other demands.
From a legal perspective, the Biden administration and trans activists thought they had a winning case. And that’s because an earlier Supreme Court ruling had held, by a 6-3 vote, that a different provision of civil rights law — Title VII — prohibited discrimination on the basis of so-called “gender identity” in the workplace. Gorsuch and Roberts sided with the Leftist judges to come up with that ruling.
But last week, a federal judge in Kentucky held that the same logic doesn’t apply to Title IX, because Title IX is explicitly focused on sex discrimination — and no other form of discrimination. This is from the judge’s ruling: “The entire point of Title 9 is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”
This ruling will obviously be appealed, and work its way up the courts. But as it stands, it could lay the groundwork for a new Supreme Court ruling — one that rejects any attempt to conflate “sex” and “gender” within the meaning of the law.
MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+
A ruling like that would’ve been hard to imagine a few years ago. But it’s not hard to imagine anymore. That’s because, even in places like California — some of the most Left-wing places in the country — there are clear signs that people are tired of this insanity. Consider the eruption of anger over California’s DEI policies and general incompetence in the wake of these historic fires, which still aren’t under control.
The corporate press is trying to run the same familiar narrative, where they blame racism and climate change. For example, here’s the AP:
The California wildfires could be leaving deeper inequality in their wake. .. The fires also burned through a remarkable haven for generations of Black families avoiding discriminatory housing practices elsewhere. They have been communities of racial and economic diversity, where many people own their own homes.
The reaction to this article online has been, as you might expect, universal mockery and derision. People aren’t persuaded by this anymore. Well, people never were persuaded by it. The difference is that now nobody pretends to be. No one talks like this, unless they’re a journalist for an outlet like the AP. The rest of us are sharing clips like this one, featuring the chief of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. Watch:
She says: “The #1 thing that attracted me to this role… It’s important for me that everything we do is with an equity lens and social justice.”
It’s reminiscent of the aftermath of the Maui fires, when a top official talked about how access to water should involve “conversations about equity.” These are the kinds of clips that have quickly surfaced in the wake of the California fires. And they’re surfacing because people are tired of DEI hires running their cities into the ground. People are realizing that lives are at stake now.
That’s especially obvious after the discovery that a key reservoir was empty in the Pacific Palisades when the fires began. From the Los Angeles Times:
Officials said that the [Reservoir] had been closed since about February for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades for nearly a year.
Keep in mind, that’s the L.A. Times with that exclusive reporting. That’s the same paper that called Larry Elder “the black face of white supremacy” not too long ago. Then (like Jeff Bezos), the Times’ owner withheld the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, so they’d focus more on the news. Now they’re exposing genuine misconduct and incompetence, no matter how embarrassing and damaging it may be for California’s Democrats.
You won’t find a clearer sign that wokeness — meaning the suspension of reality to appease the preferred demographic groups of the Democratic Party — is coming to an end. It may be coming to an end in part because of self-interested political actors like Mark Zuckerberg. But it’s ending, one way or another, because people are tired of it. When Donald Trump won in 2016, that wasn’t the case. But if there’s one overriding reason for optimism for Trump’s second term, it’s that this time around, no one — not even Silicon Valley mega-corporations like Meta — is pretending to take this nonsense seriously anymore.
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