Lest They Forget

As the excesses of the Great Awokening circa 2015-2024 fade into the background, people will both forget and deny how bizarre, insane, and destructive it got.

Your wish, trash-panda, is my command. This post is a mostly pictorial documentary walk down woke memory lane.1

Full email can be found here; here are some excerpts:

When I was young, adults were freaked out by the specter of Halloween candy poisoned by lunatics, or spiked with razor blades (despite the absence of a single recorded case of such an event). Now, we’ve grown to fear the sugary candy itself. And this year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween.

I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative)
exercise of implied control over college students.

… it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it.

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?

Erika Christakis was driven out of Yale for this.

Below are protestors harassing her husband Nicholas Christakis over this:

I can relate:

In which a graduate student is subject to a Star Chamber-like interrogation and harangued by professors and a dean for showing a Jordan Peterson video in class. She knew something was up and secretly recorded the meeting and posted it on YouTube. From 2017:

Before Bluesky, most of these folks were on Twitter:

This was the editorial that led to the backlash that forced Bennet out:

Berkeley Law Dean calls for engaging in illegal discrimination and how to hide doing so:

Proposal for themes at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. From memory (perhaps imperfect), it was never implemented when Black intellectuals such as John McWhorter objected:

On the topic of “lenses,” I can’t resist pointing out that if you look through red-tinted glasses, the world appears read. If you look through yellow-tinted glasses, the world appears yellow. If you look through poorly-calibrated corrective lenses, the world will appear blurry. Funny that if you look through a lens that emphasizes power and oppression you will see … power and oppression. Of course, one might consider trying to view the world through lenses that attempt to provide as clear a vision as possible. On this topic:

Found on Twitter in the replies to the above, which triggered a Twitter mobbing:

This 2025 post is about a retraction that occurred in 2020:

The article Schimmick referred to:

Good thing Schimmack seems to have missed this one:

Some quotes:

White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview. Racism is the norm; it is not unusual.

Additionally, the ideologies of objectivity, individualism, and meritocracy are social forces that function powerfully to hold the racial hierarchy in place

Some quotes:

Furthermore, racism is essentially capitalist; capitalism is essentially racist70. To love capitalism is to love racism.

We must deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the racist policymakers and institute policy that is antiracist and anti-capitalist.

A month after being asked to co-chair the committee, I received an email that left me further discomfited. This one, from a concerned faculty member, said that a white student of mine—let’s call him Mason—had tried to lynch a Black student.

I read the email with my mouth agape. The professor who’d written it was someone whose academic work I thought highly of; surely she wouldn’t make such an extreme accusation if it had no basis in reality.

Mason and several other white students had apparently gotten into a dispute with a Black friend they lived with. The white students had asked their Black housemate to leave, and had said they would call the Lewiston police and say he was threatening them if he tried to get his things. According to my colleague, they had thus conspired to “weaponize state power to terrorize or kill” their Black classmate. “It is not an exaggeration to say their actions were an attempted lynching,” she added.

The professor also accused several students who were evidently brought to tears during the unfolding drama of intentionally leveraging their “white womanhood” by crying.

Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor, started a newsletter nearly three years ago that eventually grew into Free Press, positioning the site as a check on what she sees as the media’s “woke” orthodoxy.