The Atlantic: Cancel Culture Is Dead

This was a thought provoking article.

RAMZPAUL predicted the death of Wokeism.

As far back as October 2019, I predicted the Wokelash and the fallout in the Biden presidency in the 2020s. I also predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election.

“The Democrats will return to power in the 2020s, but will preside over an America that is even more intensely polarized and is rapidly balkanizing due to their narrative and electoral strategy. The backlash against Barack Obama will also pale in comparison to the wokelash against the Biden, Sanders or Warren presidency. The Wokelash and the collapse of Conservatism, Inc. will drive millions of disaffected, alienated White Americans into the “far right.”

It is true though.

Jonathan Chait is correct that Wokeism has faded.

In retrospect, we have been through a decade of leftwing social movements that were driven by viral hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo and #handsupdontshoot. Then it stopped.

The Atlantic:

“A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

The beginning and end of any cultural moment is difficult to pin down. But the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. None of the terms or habits will disappear completely; after all, anti-Communist paranoia continued to circulate on the right for decades even after the era of McCarthyism ended in 1954. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of this latest period—the social-media mobbings, the whispered conversations among liberal onlookers too frightened to object—have disappeared from everyday life. The era lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump. …”

It occurs to me now that my biggest 2025 prediction has already come true.

“Behind the noise of Trump’s second term, this trend of the government, culture and economy being captured by disruptive tech barons with enormous fortunes and grand designs – Elon wants to go Mars, destroy the woke virus, others want to harness the power of AI and robots – will be the signal. Jews are on the way down. These people are on the way up. We will look back on the ADL’s failed effort to choke X of advertiser revenue as a milestone in this power shift. …”

The cancel culture mobs stopped because Elon bought Twitter in 2022, turned it into X, changed the algorithm and got rid of the trending hashtags that the Left was using to whip up mobs to go after people. He took their favorite weapon away from them and turned it against them.

Note: In the Gilded Age, Americans got fed up with an earlier iteration of Wokeism that prevailed during Reconstruction. The term “race crank” was coined and was used to shutdown people who were obsessed with race. Dismissing activists as “woke” has the same function in this new era.