'But I forgot to add a chapter saying “Oh, by the way, don’t dismantle American science in the name of Zionism and try to deport Asian girls studying in Ivy League schools who have been in the United States since they were little kids.”'
It is extraordinary how quickly things have changed, and your book deserves some of the credit. It is important to remember that, though DEI is rapidly being dismantled in the federal government, it is much less clear how much it has been dismantled in the other institutions in society. My guess is that there is still a great deal of work to do.
I think you're overstating the extent to which DEI/woke has been eliminated. At the universities that I am aware of, the DEI apparatus remains expansive and intact. A few titles have been changed and a few files taken offline, but all the same biased search procedures, DEI requirements for courses, DEI in promotion and tenure... all still there alongside more annoying everyday reminders to "include your pronouns!" They just don't trumpet them as loudly as they used to externally.
The key thing here is that personnel is policy. The people being laid off by universities right now are mostly lab techs and support staff. A few places have dismissed DEI staff, but most seem to have quietly moved them into "student affairs" positions. The radical faculty in particular are still there, still in charge, and still providing veto points on any type of reform at the vast majority of schools.
It remains to be seen if a dramatically pared-down DoE and a "fight everything, everywhere, all at once" DoJ can actually elicit major changes nationally, especially given recent unfavorable court rulings on the new "Dear Colleague" letter on DEI.
Longtime woke liberal here who enjoys your writing and remains perplexed about what exactly “woke” is (or was) and what great harms were done. My sense is you’d agree our recently woke past was preferable to the autocratic idiocratic slide we’re now on.
Racial quotas. Policing speech. Rights for trans youth. Specific topics like these are worth discussing and debating. Jumping them all together as “woke” loses meaning, if not corrupting it altogether. I consider “DEI” a similarly meaningless term at this point. It’s just a form of virtue signaling, whether one is pro or con.
And I hope that in any case this country can remain on a long arc towards deeper equality, deeper empathy, and more liberty for all. People should be able to self determine and live their life to their fullest, as they see fit. The right seems hellbent on preventing that for anyone who doesn’t conform.
Richard, this is apropos of nothing, but your criticism of "ideaism" made me think of a review I read a few months ago about the works of a scholar named Bernard Yack, who is basically the "ideaist" par excellence -- I thought this touched on topics you (or your readers) might find interesting: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-longing-for-total-revolution
More generally, I've been archive-binging the Psmiths and basically every blogpost they have is fantastic. Been a while since I've discovered something so good, and I'd imagine the material would appeal to lots of Hananiacs. (Basically just lots and lots of book reviews from a far-right but non-insane perspective, but just exquisite taste in precisely what books they choose to review.)
I think your institutional lens gets at something essential about how “woke” functions. We seem to agree on quite a bit: that law shapes culture; that DEI was implemented more top-down rather than driven by popular demand; that institutions mostly act in line with incentives; and that the cultural pushback from the left has been surprisingly muted/weak. I agree with you that many on the left haven’t even questioned the origins of these policies, and tend to react defensively when pressed on them, which is obviously hypocritical.
Where I may see things differently (and I’ve only read your articles, not the full book, though it looks interesting—so feel free to correct me) is in how you frame the post-1960s legal regime as an unintended ideological overreach. I would suggest it often functioned as a mechanism of stabilization for institutional, political, and corporate leadership. Much of what’s now been dubbed “wokeness” is ends up being a reframing of class or economic conflict through identity rather than a grassroots movement. Identity-based reforms pose less threat to capital and are easier to track and instrumentalize. DEI was often adopted to reduce legal exposure, manage brand risk, and offer symbolic reformation in place of structural change, particularly after the era you mention.
It also had the political effect of mobilizing parts of the left around causes that tend to alienate poor and working-class whites, even though they’re often subject to the same economic pressures that older forms of left politics were designed to address. Redirecting the impetus for collective action toward identity allowed institutions to absorb and rechannel public frustration into more manageable/less materially disruptive forms.
There are historical precedents for this, such as during and after the Cold War, when a range of actors including CIA-funded cultural organizations and think tanks (among them the Heritage Foundation) actively worked to redirect leftist momentum away from redistributionist politics or other economic reform and toward more symbolic or culturally resonant causes that are easier to divide dialectically. They often placed emphasis on patriotism, meritocracy and identity, which allowed institutions to fragment potential class coalitions while maintaining market dominance. DEI fits this strategy well; it redirects public discontent toward issues that are emotionally salient, but non-threatening on a structural level.
On the other side, I’ve noticed the Right has increasingly relied on anti-wokeness as a unifying framework/Girardian scapegoat mechanism. “Woke” became the abstract enemy onto which conservatives can project a range of anxieties/frustrations, allowing ideological cohesion without necessitating economic critique or infighting. This is one reason people like Christopher Rufo reacted so strongly to intra-right critiques labeling parts of the anti-woke movement such as Christian nationalists as the “woke right.” His objection wasn’t even primarily to the substance of their critique, but specifically the use of the word “woke right” itself in lieu of “alt right” (or other established terms) due to the risk it posed to narrative unity. As Rufo himself put it, internal disagreement is less important than maintaining a unified cultural front in the culture war, even if different factions are being used strategically by others within the group.
Thus, I don’t think the “anti-woke” marks a break with the system that produced DEI, but rather the next phase, a different form of symbolic concession. They will throw the public a bone, so to speak. What’s offered to the public may change, but such gestures remain secondary to broader institutional goals involving securing legitimacy, diffusing unrest and maintaining public alignment needed to pursue other priorities. The gesture’s symbolic content is partly incidental; its main value lies in its capacity to influence perception and gain traction in a managed direction. When that fails, alternative forms are felt out, iterated and reissued. It’s much easier now than ever with algorithmic ranking.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, how this aligns or diverges from how you see it, especially if you think this kind of perspective stretches the institutional angle too far, or if it might overlap with your view in a different way.
Law is boring, while the religious idea of wokeness is exciting. Wokeness is the promise of something new, or a demonic force to rally against. People love to hate Epstein, for example, because he provides the very easy black-and-white vision of the world that there are pedophiles running everything, and if we just "name them," we can save the world. This is more simplistic and titillating than thinking carefully about an impersonal system of laws, regulations, and incentives. The phenomenon of wokeness, as well as the anti-woke backlash, have both been hysterical.
Katherine Dee's work on fandoms and self-deception is relevant here. Ideologies are like teen boy bands from the 1990s. You could get teenage girls to go out in the streets screaming for NSYNC, and now you can get them to march with BLM. But while these sort of cults of personality have been cyclical since Elvis (perhaps going back further to Vaudeville and the Circus, or the political cult of Washington), what is distinct about wokeness is how a-personal it is. There is no king of queen of wokeness.
In this sense, wokeness does share some aspects with early Protestantism, especially the Congregationalists, which was more focused on doctrine than on cultural heroes. Trump presented the exact opposite tendency. There was a logic to the argument that the excesses of wokeness could only be moderated by an alliance with the personality cult of Trump, but now it has developed its own dogmas around immigration and tariffs, divorced from reality.
...You need to go a bit further into the 'law influences culture' concept Richard, to include analysis of how the judiciary acts. In particular, how the feminization of the legal profession has advanced the subjective at the expense of objective, i.e. "concern" for the tree at the expense of the forest.
1960s Civil rights legislation was enacted to address the inequalities between whites and blacks with Affirmative Action its most important manifestation. This was in a nation which was 85 %white, 11 %black with the other racial grouping contained in the other 4% .
Eric Kaufmann has chronicled how in the succeeding decades other groups have been given victimhood status too-Hispanics, Asians, homosexuals and white women who are the biggest beneficiaries from Affirmative action in sheer numerical terms. The incredible distortion that this creates in the US economy is recorded in 2014 stats show that the average black American costs their government $760k over their lifetimes, for Hispanics it was $588k. Inflation would bring that to around 950k and 800k in 2024.Civil rights legislation ain't going to disappear anytime soon.
You've said, in the past, that you regret your vote for Trump. So perhaps there is something that was implicitly in your book that you (by your own lights) did NOT get right: that one ought to vote Republican in part because they will attack woke. Trump came in, and did attack woke, in much the way you suggested. Since you are, in fact, on balance unhappy with the Trump administration, perhaps that suggests that on balance DEI/woke, while bad, wasn't as important as you suggested? Again, going not by my values, but by yours. So even if the individual parts of the book may, in your view, have aged well, the entire message behind the project has not?
Felix sniffed the air. “Smell of the day: meat,” he muttered. A hot dog cart. He veered, already regretting it.
The migraine was coming on hard. His third of the day. His temples throbbed in sync with a street performer’s bongo. He was starting to sway—either from the pain or from slapping too many people into their moral awakenings. He’d never rebooted this many egos in one afternoon.
He rattled when he walked—not just from sequins, but from the Excedrin Migraine bottle in his pocket. He sounded like a high-fashion cat toy.
He handed a five to a kind-eyed street vendor and took a bottle of water. “Keep the change,” he said.
Then, without reading the label, he pulled out the pills. “It’s not crack,” he muttered. “Probably.” He popped three.
A woman with a cart rolled by and whispered, “The devil’s down the block.”
Felix squinted. “Is he wearing Tommy Hilfiger?” (beat) “No. Suit. Microphone. Just called me trash.”
Then came the holy grail of slap-worthy fools.
Corner of Fifth Avenue. A Fox News reporter, mid-meltdown, eyes wild, suit screaming privilege.
“Obama won’t show his gift certificate because he’s a Muslim!
Vice President Harris is tanking the economy—she’s a nasty, poorly educated Black woman who slept her way to the top!
Somehow gay sex is controlling the weather!
Trump won by a mandate! Democrats are too woke! They’re forcing sex changes on children in public schools!
We need to give education back to the states. And God.”
Felix approached slowly. Calmly.
He set his drink on a nearby trash can like it was a communion offering.
He turned to the nearest camera, adjusted his collar, and—serious as sin—tapped each point:
“Head… toe… wallet… watch.”
It’s go time.
The reporter kept ranting.
“This country needs to go back to—”
SLAP.
The sound cracked through the air like a starter pistol for truth.
The man staggered. Blinked. Looked around like he’d just tasted seasoning for the first time.
His mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “I… I was so loud.”
(beat)
“I can’t believe I was out here preaching the wrong definition of the word woke.
It wasn’t just a hashtag—it was a warning.
It was created by Black communities. It meant: Pay attention. Stay alert. Stay alive.
And I used it like it was a joke. I repeated a right-wing talking point. Like it meant ‘too sensitive.’ Like it meant ‘bad.’
I erased something sacred.
Please. Forgive me.”
He looked directly into the nearest camera.
“Please listen to me. I’m telling the truth for the first time. The New York Times printed the word woke in 1962.
A writer named William Melvin Kelley. It was our word. And I twisted it.”
Felix stepped into frame, eyes locked on the camera and voice low.
“Contact anyone rewriting the word. Tell them—next time, it’s two slaps.”
Siri chimed in, crisp as a courtroom stenographer:
“Confirmed. Compiling list of offenders.”
Then, softly—almost human:
“Hey Felix... it’s Tres, my love.”
Felix leaned toward the still-rolling camera, eyes fierce, voice satin-wrapped steel:
“Bitch, I’m fabulous.”
A woman across the street gasped. “I suddenly speak fluent French!”
A man checking his phone screamed, “My crypto just rebounded! I’m rich again!”
The video went viral before Felix could even finish his drink.
By morning, the Fox News reporter had resigned.
By Friday, he was writing a column for MSNBC titled:
“How One Fabulous Slap Changed My Life Forever: The Felix Fontaine Story.”
'But I forgot to add a chapter saying “Oh, by the way, don’t dismantle American science in the name of Zionism and try to deport Asian girls studying in Ivy League schools who have been in the United States since they were little kids.”'
Pure gold.
It is extraordinary how quickly things have changed, and your book deserves some of the credit. It is important to remember that, though DEI is rapidly being dismantled in the federal government, it is much less clear how much it has been dismantled in the other institutions in society. My guess is that there is still a great deal of work to do.
I think you're overstating the extent to which DEI/woke has been eliminated. At the universities that I am aware of, the DEI apparatus remains expansive and intact. A few titles have been changed and a few files taken offline, but all the same biased search procedures, DEI requirements for courses, DEI in promotion and tenure... all still there alongside more annoying everyday reminders to "include your pronouns!" They just don't trumpet them as loudly as they used to externally.
The key thing here is that personnel is policy. The people being laid off by universities right now are mostly lab techs and support staff. A few places have dismissed DEI staff, but most seem to have quietly moved them into "student affairs" positions. The radical faculty in particular are still there, still in charge, and still providing veto points on any type of reform at the vast majority of schools.
It remains to be seen if a dramatically pared-down DoE and a "fight everything, everywhere, all at once" DoJ can actually elicit major changes nationally, especially given recent unfavorable court rulings on the new "Dear Colleague" letter on DEI.
Yeah. And entertainment hasn't even been touched, so I don't figure things have changed at all there.
Of course, people kind of threw that in the bin when they hyper-focused on Star Wars and never gave enough attention to anything else.
Longtime woke liberal here who enjoys your writing and remains perplexed about what exactly “woke” is (or was) and what great harms were done. My sense is you’d agree our recently woke past was preferable to the autocratic idiocratic slide we’re now on.
Racial quotas. Policing speech. Rights for trans youth. Specific topics like these are worth discussing and debating. Jumping them all together as “woke” loses meaning, if not corrupting it altogether. I consider “DEI” a similarly meaningless term at this point. It’s just a form of virtue signaling, whether one is pro or con.
And I hope that in any case this country can remain on a long arc towards deeper equality, deeper empathy, and more liberty for all. People should be able to self determine and live their life to their fullest, as they see fit. The right seems hellbent on preventing that for anyone who doesn’t conform.
Congrats on being correct on DEI, and being ahead of the curve on it.
Trump’s day 1 policies against DEI were excellent. It’s sadly one of the few policy ideas that I’ve enjoyed about Trump 2.0 thus far.
Richard, this is apropos of nothing, but your criticism of "ideaism" made me think of a review I read a few months ago about the works of a scholar named Bernard Yack, who is basically the "ideaist" par excellence -- I thought this touched on topics you (or your readers) might find interesting: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-longing-for-total-revolution
More generally, I've been archive-binging the Psmiths and basically every blogpost they have is fantastic. Been a while since I've discovered something so good, and I'd imagine the material would appeal to lots of Hananiacs. (Basically just lots and lots of book reviews from a far-right but non-insane perspective, but just exquisite taste in precisely what books they choose to review.)
I read most of their reviews. Yes, they’re excellent. But I haven’t seen that one, will check it out.
I think your institutional lens gets at something essential about how “woke” functions. We seem to agree on quite a bit: that law shapes culture; that DEI was implemented more top-down rather than driven by popular demand; that institutions mostly act in line with incentives; and that the cultural pushback from the left has been surprisingly muted/weak. I agree with you that many on the left haven’t even questioned the origins of these policies, and tend to react defensively when pressed on them, which is obviously hypocritical.
Where I may see things differently (and I’ve only read your articles, not the full book, though it looks interesting—so feel free to correct me) is in how you frame the post-1960s legal regime as an unintended ideological overreach. I would suggest it often functioned as a mechanism of stabilization for institutional, political, and corporate leadership. Much of what’s now been dubbed “wokeness” is ends up being a reframing of class or economic conflict through identity rather than a grassroots movement. Identity-based reforms pose less threat to capital and are easier to track and instrumentalize. DEI was often adopted to reduce legal exposure, manage brand risk, and offer symbolic reformation in place of structural change, particularly after the era you mention.
It also had the political effect of mobilizing parts of the left around causes that tend to alienate poor and working-class whites, even though they’re often subject to the same economic pressures that older forms of left politics were designed to address. Redirecting the impetus for collective action toward identity allowed institutions to absorb and rechannel public frustration into more manageable/less materially disruptive forms.
There are historical precedents for this, such as during and after the Cold War, when a range of actors including CIA-funded cultural organizations and think tanks (among them the Heritage Foundation) actively worked to redirect leftist momentum away from redistributionist politics or other economic reform and toward more symbolic or culturally resonant causes that are easier to divide dialectically. They often placed emphasis on patriotism, meritocracy and identity, which allowed institutions to fragment potential class coalitions while maintaining market dominance. DEI fits this strategy well; it redirects public discontent toward issues that are emotionally salient, but non-threatening on a structural level.
On the other side, I’ve noticed the Right has increasingly relied on anti-wokeness as a unifying framework/Girardian scapegoat mechanism. “Woke” became the abstract enemy onto which conservatives can project a range of anxieties/frustrations, allowing ideological cohesion without necessitating economic critique or infighting. This is one reason people like Christopher Rufo reacted so strongly to intra-right critiques labeling parts of the anti-woke movement such as Christian nationalists as the “woke right.” His objection wasn’t even primarily to the substance of their critique, but specifically the use of the word “woke right” itself in lieu of “alt right” (or other established terms) due to the risk it posed to narrative unity. As Rufo himself put it, internal disagreement is less important than maintaining a unified cultural front in the culture war, even if different factions are being used strategically by others within the group.
Thus, I don’t think the “anti-woke” marks a break with the system that produced DEI, but rather the next phase, a different form of symbolic concession. They will throw the public a bone, so to speak. What’s offered to the public may change, but such gestures remain secondary to broader institutional goals involving securing legitimacy, diffusing unrest and maintaining public alignment needed to pursue other priorities. The gesture’s symbolic content is partly incidental; its main value lies in its capacity to influence perception and gain traction in a managed direction. When that fails, alternative forms are felt out, iterated and reissued. It’s much easier now than ever with algorithmic ranking.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, how this aligns or diverges from how you see it, especially if you think this kind of perspective stretches the institutional angle too far, or if it might overlap with your view in a different way.
> Tim Cook comes and just gives him a solid gold bar in the White House on national television
It was not a solid gold bar, it was a thin gold-plated base for a plaque. Read your own source.
I fixed it. I was going off the Twitter version.
Law is boring, while the religious idea of wokeness is exciting. Wokeness is the promise of something new, or a demonic force to rally against. People love to hate Epstein, for example, because he provides the very easy black-and-white vision of the world that there are pedophiles running everything, and if we just "name them," we can save the world. This is more simplistic and titillating than thinking carefully about an impersonal system of laws, regulations, and incentives. The phenomenon of wokeness, as well as the anti-woke backlash, have both been hysterical.
Katherine Dee's work on fandoms and self-deception is relevant here. Ideologies are like teen boy bands from the 1990s. You could get teenage girls to go out in the streets screaming for NSYNC, and now you can get them to march with BLM. But while these sort of cults of personality have been cyclical since Elvis (perhaps going back further to Vaudeville and the Circus, or the political cult of Washington), what is distinct about wokeness is how a-personal it is. There is no king of queen of wokeness.
In this sense, wokeness does share some aspects with early Protestantism, especially the Congregationalists, which was more focused on doctrine than on cultural heroes. Trump presented the exact opposite tendency. There was a logic to the argument that the excesses of wokeness could only be moderated by an alliance with the personality cult of Trump, but now it has developed its own dogmas around immigration and tariffs, divorced from reality.
...You need to go a bit further into the 'law influences culture' concept Richard, to include analysis of how the judiciary acts. In particular, how the feminization of the legal profession has advanced the subjective at the expense of objective, i.e. "concern" for the tree at the expense of the forest.
About the second point we don't know what the backlash will be yet as it is too early.
I think it's 100% to stick up for yourself (agree nobody else is going to do it), and that your book was ahead of its time!
1960s Civil rights legislation was enacted to address the inequalities between whites and blacks with Affirmative Action its most important manifestation. This was in a nation which was 85 %white, 11 %black with the other racial grouping contained in the other 4% .
Eric Kaufmann has chronicled how in the succeeding decades other groups have been given victimhood status too-Hispanics, Asians, homosexuals and white women who are the biggest beneficiaries from Affirmative action in sheer numerical terms. The incredible distortion that this creates in the US economy is recorded in 2014 stats show that the average black American costs their government $760k over their lifetimes, for Hispanics it was $588k. Inflation would bring that to around 950k and 800k in 2024.Civil rights legislation ain't going to disappear anytime soon.
You've said, in the past, that you regret your vote for Trump. So perhaps there is something that was implicitly in your book that you (by your own lights) did NOT get right: that one ought to vote Republican in part because they will attack woke. Trump came in, and did attack woke, in much the way you suggested. Since you are, in fact, on balance unhappy with the Trump administration, perhaps that suggests that on balance DEI/woke, while bad, wasn't as important as you suggested? Again, going not by my values, but by yours. So even if the individual parts of the book may, in your view, have aged well, the entire message behind the project has not?
Slap Three: The Fox News Prophet of Doom
Felix sniffed the air. “Smell of the day: meat,” he muttered. A hot dog cart. He veered, already regretting it.
The migraine was coming on hard. His third of the day. His temples throbbed in sync with a street performer’s bongo. He was starting to sway—either from the pain or from slapping too many people into their moral awakenings. He’d never rebooted this many egos in one afternoon.
He rattled when he walked—not just from sequins, but from the Excedrin Migraine bottle in his pocket. He sounded like a high-fashion cat toy.
He handed a five to a kind-eyed street vendor and took a bottle of water. “Keep the change,” he said.
Then, without reading the label, he pulled out the pills. “It’s not crack,” he muttered. “Probably.” He popped three.
A woman with a cart rolled by and whispered, “The devil’s down the block.”
Felix squinted. “Is he wearing Tommy Hilfiger?” (beat) “No. Suit. Microphone. Just called me trash.”
Then came the holy grail of slap-worthy fools.
Corner of Fifth Avenue. A Fox News reporter, mid-meltdown, eyes wild, suit screaming privilege.
“Obama won’t show his gift certificate because he’s a Muslim!
Vice President Harris is tanking the economy—she’s a nasty, poorly educated Black woman who slept her way to the top!
Somehow gay sex is controlling the weather!
Trump won by a mandate! Democrats are too woke! They’re forcing sex changes on children in public schools!
We need to give education back to the states. And God.”
Felix approached slowly. Calmly.
He set his drink on a nearby trash can like it was a communion offering.
He turned to the nearest camera, adjusted his collar, and—serious as sin—tapped each point:
“Head… toe… wallet… watch.”
It’s go time.
The reporter kept ranting.
“This country needs to go back to—”
SLAP.
The sound cracked through the air like a starter pistol for truth.
The man staggered. Blinked. Looked around like he’d just tasted seasoning for the first time.
His mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “I… I was so loud.”
(beat)
“I can’t believe I was out here preaching the wrong definition of the word woke.
It wasn’t just a hashtag—it was a warning.
It was created by Black communities. It meant: Pay attention. Stay alert. Stay alive.
And I used it like it was a joke. I repeated a right-wing talking point. Like it meant ‘too sensitive.’ Like it meant ‘bad.’
I erased something sacred.
Please. Forgive me.”
He looked directly into the nearest camera.
“Please listen to me. I’m telling the truth for the first time. The New York Times printed the word woke in 1962.
A writer named William Melvin Kelley. It was our word. And I twisted it.”
Felix stepped into frame, eyes locked on the camera and voice low.
“Contact anyone rewriting the word. Tell them—next time, it’s two slaps.”
Siri chimed in, crisp as a courtroom stenographer:
“Confirmed. Compiling list of offenders.”
Then, softly—almost human:
“Hey Felix... it’s Tres, my love.”
Felix leaned toward the still-rolling camera, eyes fierce, voice satin-wrapped steel:
“Bitch, I’m fabulous.”
A woman across the street gasped. “I suddenly speak fluent French!”
A man checking his phone screamed, “My crypto just rebounded! I’m rich again!”
The video went viral before Felix could even finish his drink.
By morning, the Fox News reporter had resigned.
By Friday, he was writing a column for MSNBC titled:
“How One Fabulous Slap Changed My Life Forever: The Felix Fontaine Story.”
And just like that, a revolution had begun.