Scott’s presentation came from a batch of nearly 500 videos of conferences held by WPATH that I recently obtained. It’s a motherlode of material on pediatric gender care that the secretive activist medical organization had long fought to keep from the public. The tapes, subpoenaed by the Alabama attorney general in response to a federal lawsuit, covered a pivotal period from 2021 to 2023, when pediatric gender medicine first began to face political backlash. In addition to egregious lapses in judgment on the part of WPATH, the videos are a case study in the excesses of peak woke, neatly preserved, as if in a time capsule. 

During a long winter of dyspepsia, I digested well more than 100 hours of the academic faithful checking their privilege and preaching about “centering lived experience.” And I can now report that there are few subcultures more slavishly faithful to the woke religion than WPATH was during the post-Racial Reckoning micro-era. 

According to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s landmark 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, the term woke, in its original, early-20th-century definition, referred to “an awareness of social injustices and a commitment to rectifying them.” Today, it is typically used pejoratively for anything Left-coded that might “seem ridiculous,” as al-Gharbi observed. And not always unjustly: at its peak, the philosophy amounted to a form of egalitarian signaling by cultural elites that purported to serve the needs of the marginalized — mostly by hewing to politically correct positions on gender, sexuality, race and identity issues — but in fact mostly served their own needs for status and legitimacy. 

Suggested reading

The prophet of gender madness

By Sohrab Ahmari

I observed all these tendencies at the WPATH conferences, which were held virtually during Covid times, and then in hotel conference rooms in Montreal and Denver, and featured the titans of transgender medical care. One could only expect such discourse given the cast of characters. There were LGBTQ identities (and allies). There were overly educated cultural elites. There were activists. And there were guilty white people — overwhelmingly and blindingly white people — who sought to compensate for their inadequate melanization through promises to diversify WPATH and promote equity across the land.

These defenders of the marginalized were fluent in the academic-elite lingua franca of critical theory, intersectionality, and social justice, hewing to conformity at the expense of content, common sense, or even their own supposed mission to help gender-distressed children and adolescents. They stayed ahead of what Steven Pinker coined the “euphemism treadmill,” rattling off all the latest identity-politics jargon — deftly observing the imperative to shift from “transgender,” to “gender diverse,” to “gender expansive”; and from “Latino,” to “Latinx,” to “Latine.” They doled out trigger warnings for bread-and-butter medical subjects — to audiences of doctors and psychologists. 

In one session, which concerned the informed-consent model for providing gender surgeries, attendees were instructed to “please feel free to leave or take a break if need be. We want you to prioritize your own well-being above the content that we are sharing here.” 

They succumbed to concept creep, with one presenter defining trauma as “an experience or series of experiences that negatively affect someone’s interactions and experiences of moving through the world” — a definition so diffuse it could apply to anything from the Holocaust to a hangnail. And they undermined their own authority, responsibility, and legitimacy as care providers endowed with doctorates, as they conveyed that their young patients’ narratives were more important than diagnostic and scientific precision and the core principles of medical ethics.

Were there pronoun declarations? But of course. In fact, a WPATH conference is the rare setting where this performance might be useful. However, the vast majority of presenters, sometimes to their own professed chagrin, were not transgender. Most were straight women and gay men; the latter rarely admitted such a jejune and déclassé sexual identity, opting instead for obliquely declaring themselves “a member of the LGBTQ+ community.” 

The presenters didn’t stop with simply professing themselves a they/them. They routinely introduced themselves according to their sexual, racial, and class-based identities, making a point of self-flagellating should their oppression score prove subpar. One typical throat clearing was: “I’m a cisgender white woman who comes from a lot of privilege.” Another team declared: “We are white providers,” who, when caring for patients, took into consideration “the soup we all swim in, which is the dominant white Western ideas of what gender is, can be, should be.” Presenters displayed performative guilt and — with no sense of irony — apologized for their status as central players in a power structure that they were eagerly leveraging to promote the medicalization transgender identity in minors, even as they denounced that system as woefully damaged and damaging. 

Overall, the conference sessions placed a disquieting emphasis on correct-signaling over evidence-based medicine. If the presenters genuinely hoped to win over the public and other medical skeptics and establish gender-transition treatments and surgeries as a settled practice in pediatrics, one might have expected them to observe exacting caution and engage in scientific testing sufficiently rigorous to defend the ethics of providing irreversible, life-changing body alterations to highly distressed and impressionable minors. Alas, no.

Conference attendees were treated, for example, to a short sermon by Florence Ashley (they/them), a Canadian “transfeminine” legal scholar and author of Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body. Ashley, a biological male who claims a loosely designated feminine identity, preached that erecting “gatekeeping” around gender-transition interventions for patients of all ages was “illegitimate by default.” 

There was also a session on experimental medical interventions for patients who identify as nonbinary. Dr. Walter Bouman, a British transgender-care specialist and WPATH leader, acknowledged working in the dark in this particular discipline. “We simply don’t have the evidence,” he admitted. And yet he and other care providers claimed it an imperative to provide mix-and-match sets of sex characteristics based on patients’ demands.

Such blind devotion to patients’ body-modification impulses extended even to minors and their “embodiment goals.” Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a top pediatric gender doctor practicing in California, confessed at the conference in 2023 that determining whether patients are “really trans” is “actually not the discussion I’m interested in participating in.” Instead, she wanted to talk about “giving the very best possible care to trans young people.” Nowhere in this astonishing confession was there room for determining whether a child’s gender confusion could  prove only temporary— and thus there was no consideration of whether the youth might later regret the medical intervention. 

Instead of caution we got hyperbolic warnings about white supremacy. Presenters such as policy wonk Kellan Baker and ACLU litigator Chase Strangio claimed, with no evidence, that objections to pediatric gender medicine, or to biological males participating in girls and women’s sports, were rooted in racist attitudes. Meanwhile, the conference sessions repeatedly called rueful attention to the fact that, despite everyone’s better efforts at recruitment, the organization’s leadership and its members were overwhelmingly white, as were their pediatric patients, as were youths participating in their studies. 

Such laments were paired with commitments to the equitable provision of medical interventions to nonwhite populations. White presenters ritually groveled over their racial or cispatriarchal supremacy. One, Dr. Carl Streed, a WPATH leader — a white gay man and primary-care physician at Boston Medical Center — heartily agreed to an observation that men of his persuasion controlled trans research and should voluntarily “step down” from leadership positions. 

These scenes highlight the intrinsically unstable nature of the woke belief system, which has always displayed contradiction and paradox. For example: race is a mere arbitrary social construct best dismissed and yet should be a source of monomania given that it is the architecture upon which all of society is built. Or this: given the overwhelmingly white makeup of WPATH and the field’s population of minor patients, perhaps pediatric gender medicine itself is fundamentally white. Where is the respect for marginalized cultures, when one of the chief professed goals is to impose what amounts to a glaringly white undertaking onto black and brown children?

More from this author

Plastic surgeons ditch gender ideology

By benjamin ryan

The only black trans woman I saw in all the WPATH videos I observed was Dr. Elle Lett, an activist-oriented statistician-epidemiologist (and insufferable gadfly on social media). Dr. Lett was still in training at the University of Pennsylvania when she gave a ramblingly woke plenary address to the 2021 conference. “Medicine,” she claimed, was “nested in the system of oppression,” and statistical methods “develop[ed] out of eugenics.” She called on attendees to “reject the notion of sample size and validity” in favor of messier science, provided it gave voice to the voiceless. The most mind-scrambling scenes came from sessions in which presenters preached the imperative to provide gender-transition treatment to Native Americans of all ages. 

I have no doubt that the WPATH conference presenters genuinely approach their medical mission with compassion. They routinely and emphatically expressed concern for their pediatric patient population, with apparent sincerity. But the quasi-religious zealotry I observed provides a weak foundation for a medical movement that seeks to care for a population of psychically unwell teenagers by subjecting them to drastic and permanent physical alterations. And it’s hardly possible to dispassionately weigh the risk versus benefits of these medical interventions when an unfalsifiable mode of new-age spirituality is pressing its finger on the scale. 

But a blindness to one’s own hypocrisy has always been the defining feature of the woke movement. So it’s no surprise that these medical radicals have proved incapable of self-correction, and that external political forces have stepped in to smash the precious temple they’ve built. 

There is the time when you can hardly bear to go out, so heavy is the weight of shame that you cringe against walls and creep through the streets. Then you start to behave more normally but develop Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED). The affliction trails you everywhere, whining like an anxious dog. It pees in every corner and gets in your lap any time you have a drink. It barks at kind people trying to help you or licks their hands slavishly. You mustn’t feed it but you do. Sometimes fate hands it a bone. When two friends removed my name from the acknowledgments pages of their prize-winning books, my PTED howled until the neighbors woke up.

You have to get away from it. You have to get on. This year, I toughened up, got off the chair I had been cowering in for all these years, and painted my study yellow. The BBC reached out to interview me for a podcast. I didn’t wince; I am probably a good test case to talk about the culture wars. And then I was asked to take part on a panel, to do a couple of school workshops. I started to feel a little like my old self.

Along with the podcast, which was broadcast this week, I received an apology from my publishers, Pan Macmillan. I didn’t expect that, but I somehow found myself able to sit on my only faintly growling PTED and receive that apology calmly. I genuinely think Joanna Prior, the new CEO, is right to put what happened to me in the past. My grudges must somehow be put there too, or the PTED will dog me for life. What I needed, I have said, is a freer, saner discussion of the past.

So I’m starting again, here in UnHerd with another visit to my sensitivity readers. They seem to be rather fading from public consciousness. In 2021, they were a very hot topic and often all anyone asked me about the furore: writers genuinely feared a new board of censorship. Besides, the essay I wrote back then felt like the last good thing I wrote before I went into darkness. That was the last time I made a lot of people laugh.

More from this author

How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

By Kate Clanchy

Though perhaps even that was unfair of me, a little cheap. The sensitivity readers were poorly paid freelancers and also sitting ducks. They had been set up with Pan Macmillan to solve a problem for them. Having apologized for the “emotional anguish” caused by my book, Macmillan then considered recalling and pulping all the copies in bookshops and giving the proceeds to anti-racism charities. When this seemed too drastic, they settled instead on a new edition of the book, one with the “harm”, that word of 2021, removed. No one in the firm had read the book, though, so they recruited experts to find the harm: sensitivity readers who specialized in racism, ableism and the Middle Eastern diaspora.

It was a huge assignment because it was retrospective. The three readers had to justify the internet response: find something in the book to equal the many claims of eugenics, racism and ableism. They also had to demonstrate their own worth and the point of their new profession. They set off on their journey keenly enough with many scornful points on the first few pages of the manuscript. Then they found themselves in a book which was not only essentially liberal but also absolutely mined, sentence by sentence, anecdote by anecdote, with irony.

Of course, the results were comical. Hyperbole was the only place to go. All praise had to be “fetishizing”; all criticism “demonization”. To compare a small child climbing a tree to a koala had to be “explicit animalization of the other”. Harm had to be found somewhere so one reader decided it was “harmful” for me to call myself a “soft target” because “this state of being a “target” is a real issue that minorities face daily, and being used so flippantly by a white person can wash the importance of that”. Another decided it was “harmful” to say that Scottish children are better than London children at spelling “wh” sounds — where, what — because of their accent. Even at the time the reasoning made me smile.

“The author states outright that… she is indeed comparing the two groups of pupils to assess who is ‘better’… Having it laid out in black and white that yes, your teachers do judge you, and yes, they find you lacking in comparison to others, can really hit people in the gut.”

Suggested Reading

Now the cancel mob cries victim

By Kathleen Stock

Lines such as those were, I thought (pace dear sensitivity readers), soft targets for me, fun for my essay. I believed the underlying ideas of the reads — that words could harm, that books must educate — were temporary notions that would pass and so worth attacking for those reasons.

Reading them now, though, I don’t find it all so funny. I am struck, rather, by the loneliness the reads express, the shadow of the pandemic over them all. Silence, in their view, is better than the wrong person joining the conversation. Stories should be confined to the therapy room, only spoken by one teller, never recounted, never adopted or adapted. Thoughts are types of mental illnesses — a savior complex, an identity crisis. No one can bear to read even the glimmer of a contrary argument. Malign prejudice is everywhere. Those are bleak as well as silly ideas, and yet how strongly they have stuck.

The readers, too, seem anxious to me now, rather than nasty. Or rather, nasty because they are anxious. They had been set an absurd task and were failing at it. The frustration shows in the way one reader becomes increasingly unmoored and incoherent as she progresses through the text, and abandons it halfway through.

Only a single reader made it all the way through the last chapter of my book. There he finds a series of infractions about the repeated use of the word “small” in relation to a Syrian child who has written a very grown-up sounding poem about war. Belittling stereotypes, he finds, “infantilizing” and “animalizing”. Granulation is so easy and shame so cheap. Why not read the poem, just once, and wonder? Besides, “small” is one of the glories of the English language, a word for “little” that we use for knobbly, close, personal things, a word infused with the tenderness we feel for pets and children but which can never be confused with lesser, or petty, a word that never carries scorn. Not to understand that — or to have put up barriers in the mind so you cannot hear it — seems so sad.

I wonder whether that reader still has a job. It’s certainly hard to believe anyone still employs him to write sheets of comments like:

“After initially stating that the radio debate spoke of compulsorary adoption, the end of the passage then, from the author’s voices, ponders whether compulsorary adoption is a tenable answer. (Thus I am merely flagging that this, abhorrent-to-some, mooted step is given potential credence by the author here)” (Sic)

Not because it is nonsense, or even because of the vibe shift, but because, since the advent of ChatGPT, no one writes like that. Which is both better and worse, because daft judgments may be combined with smooth, authoritative prose.

For example, last year, my student B, 25 and ridiculously gifted, sent his first novel off to a literary agent. A few weeks later, he received a surprisingly aggressive rejection letter accompanied by a reader’s report. His novel, the agent said angrily, represented women denigratingly. They all had low career aspirations and bad jobs. After so many years of supporting women in publishing, she wouldn’t be promoting that sort of stuff!

B was distraught. He felt, as he put it, that he was not just a bad writer but a bad person. He was also, justly, bewildered. His novel, set in a poor, post-industrial village, like the one he grew up in, did indeed center on women doing badly paid jobs. But they are not scorned: B’s delicate, ironical, deceptively flat prose opens up a whole landscape of their complex feelings. How can that element — the writing — have been missed? The reader had spent plenty of time on the book — that was evidenced by her lengthy summary. Then we tried putting the novel through ChatGPT and came up with exactly the same lengthy summary.

That was in 2024. AI had already learned to summarize, and the agent’s reader, very possibly a recent graduate, knew how to shame. Maybe by now the operations are combined. Who knows how many of the plethora of AI-powered test readers, which promise to “clean up your creative writing in minutes” and turn it into “a professional text”, have also absorbed sensitivity principles? I’m sure AI now could readily search a book and give certain phrases offense ratings. It would miss context and satire, but so did my sensitivity readers, every time.

Maybe, even now, texts are being morally improved and rewritten by one app and then read and rejected by another on even more delicate moral grounds without any human reading them at all. Maybe that’s what the British literary establishment will spend its last hours doing as their handsome Edwardian edifices burn to the ground and the episode of “Some Kids versus the Sensitivity Three” becomes a tiny footnote in the story of The End of the Book. Not reading but shaming. I wouldn’t be surprised. Except that I believe in B. He is a good writer. His images sing, his every observation and phrase is spry, jolting and surprising. AI will never recognize that, but humans will. B is also a poet, and I sometimes quote him Auden, lines from In Memory of WB Yeats (1939) which the poet, capricious in old age, later removed. They are about Time, which “worships language” and has no morals at all.

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

I can imagine only too easily what my sensitivity readers would have said about that.

I don’t know what Time will make of my writing yet. I’m not as confident as I am for B. I hope soon I’ll be able to inspire him with confidence in the wholehearted way I used to. Not yet, because I am too stiff and too lacking in confidence myself. I think this is the last stage of cancellation: it’s something like scar tissue, numbness with threads of pain.

But it had nothing to do with the sanguine message from the formal panels: that neoliberalism is vastly underrated and that our elites should be trusted to steer the country back on track. The real revelation was that my fellow professional-class 30-somethings haven’t been budged at all by the “vibe shift.” They remain as committed as ever to pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments, identity-based breakout groups, and other hallmarks of “peak woke.” 

This puts my generation at odds with just about everyone else, from the populist Left to the tech Right to normie voters in both parties. For other cohorts, the woke pot boiled over and cooled down by circa 2022. But for educated Millennials, it stayed on simmer. 

It isn’t remotely surprising, for instance, that Democrats opened their annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment last month. As the clip went viral on social media, party strategist James Carville begged, “Please stop this, in the name of a just, merciful God.” Democrats — who were walloped in the swing states by President Trump last year, who alienated voters by pushing the culture war too far Left, and whose brand is crashing in opinion polls — seem practically suicidal in these moments.

More from this author

How crime shattered DC

By Emily Jashinsky

When in 2024 the Trump campaign ran a swing-state ad blitz featuring the devastating line “Kamala is for they/them,” the leading Kamala Harris super PAC found that the spot “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The ad targeted a Harris pledge in 2019 to publicly fund transgender medical care for detained illegal immigrants as the woke fever was rising ahead of the 2020 Democratic primary.  It’s not unusual for primary stances to backfire in a general election, of course, but by 2024, the country’s mood had shifted dramatically. 

An Economist survey published last fall added research to the Trump campaign’s instinct that peak woke had already been reached by general-election season. “The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business,” the magazine wrote last September. “Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22, and has been declining ever since.”

The authors went on: “We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew, and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021.”

Why, then, would Democrats smarting from a loss with some very obvious causes still allow the party to be branded by causes that are partially responsible for tanking the brand? The reason will haunt Democrats long into the future, and it’s why the problem cropped up in the first place. Affluent Millennials, whose early adulthood was rocked by the Great Recession, got addicted to cheap virtue-signal opium as their source of meaning and purpose. Their worldviews are built on this foundation of sand, which is why “woke” isn’t quite sticking with Gen Z, and why it never dominated among older Americans. 

Trump’s rise accelerated the realignment of educated, affluent voters away from Republicans and toward Democrats. This happened just a few years after Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, documented how socioeconomic sorting into “superzip” bubbles was creating vast cultural divides between the rich and the poor. The more people who went to college filtered into high-earning careers, the more they settled in the same neighborhoods, the more they watched the same shows, read the same books, and ate at the same restaurants. 

The sticky cultural progressivism from Ivory Towers carried over from classrooms into board rooms and newsrooms. But that’s the thing about an ideology that insists one comply with an ever more radical set of rules: dissenters are purged to the point where it becomes impossible to assess the political climate because disagreement is dismissed as bigotry. Before you know it, Trump is back in the Oval Office.

At a panel on school choice in Aspen, Tommy Schultz of the American Federation for Children, asked audience members how many went to private school or sent their kids to private school. Most of the festivalgoers in the crowd raised their hands. This, Schultz noted, set them dramatically at odds with the rest of the country. 

Throughout the week, well-meaning, ambitious fellows broke themselves into identity-based chats, posted their pronouns, and cheered for invocations of privilege. I jumped off a shuttle having chatted with the driver about Aspen’s hollowed-out middle class to see a Pride flag on a taco truck and a woman pairing her cowboy hat with Louis Vuitton. The vibe was cowboy chic and, between the Balmain and Goyard, Birkenstocks and Broncos, started to feel like elites wearing the skin suits of the people they’d conquered. In fairness, one panelist in a trade discussion seemed almost ashamed to admit, “I’m part of the neoliberal order!”

All that is to say, it’s clearly true whatever postmodern fever gripped the culture five years ago has broken. Gen Z is diffuse, with no monoculture. Boomers are drowning in Facebook-slop-fueled anger. Affluent millennials, though, are clinging to the ideas that soothed them through the tumult of the Great Recession, the post-9/11 wars, and the fragmenting of their youth by the advent of smartphones. And the problem for Democrats, who face the prospect of infuriating their colleagues and activist class, is that it’s really hard to tell an interest group or employee you’ve indulged for years that they can’t do a land acknowledgment anymore. 

It just goes to show that the Biden-era policies dogging the country now were shaped by a sort of temporary insanity, where even moderate Democrats abandoned long-held beliefs to avoid charges of bigotry or associations with Trumpism.

But there’s a serious danger in attributing Joe Biden’s border chaos more to ideology than cowardice. The Biden administration leaned into immigration as a cultural signifier to rack up virtue signal points and stave off charges of bigotry. The result was a precarious new shadow society of migrants, and few good options to address it.

We know that Biden wasn’t a hardened open-borders ideologue. Nor was his vice president, Kamala Harris, at one point charged with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge (a mission that came to naught). Mainstream Democrats wanted higher levels of immigration, to be sure, but Biden and his more lucid colleagues mostly didn’t expect the border to be flooded like it was after Biden rolled back Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico,” under which would-be asylum seekers were required to file their cases in Mexico, rather than make the trek to the US frontier. The Bidenites believed the costs of their anti-Trump virtue signaling would be worth the benefits.

To put the numbers in perspective, net migration during Biden’s tenure exceeded 8 million people. It was the largest surge in American history, and the most rapid since 1850. That means Biden added the entire population of New York City to the United States in just four years; or two Delawares to the country every single year of his presidency. There are fewer residents in my home state of Wisconsin — which has a population of 6 million — than migrants who moved to America under Biden.

More from this author

Why Trump keeps saving TikTok

By Emily Jashinsky

For Democrats who counted on winning re-election in 2024, this was not the plan. The party’s genuine ideologues were surely pleased, but the Biden administration drastically reduced migration as it became clear that a continued surge would harm the party in 2024. The truth is that many key decision makers in the Biden administration legitimately didn’t understand that loosening restrictions on migration would be such a powerful magnet for people to come to America.

That, of course, reflects gross incompetence. During a 2021 reporting trip to northern Mexico, I asked a group of Haitian migrants who’d mostly come from stable lives in places like Argentina and Chile why they left those countries to sleep on the cartel-infested streets of Matamoros, waiting for a chance to cross. They said they wanted the American Dream.

I relayed that story to a prominent Left-wing politician at the time, who seemed dumbfounded. “Do they know what it’s like to be poor in the United States?” the person wondered.

Those migrants knew exactly what it would be like. WhatsApp messages from friends and relatives who came first had convinced them to fork over hefty fees to cartel smugglers, risk life and limb crossing through passages like the Darien Gap, and then live in the shadows of US society on a hope and a prayer that dubious asylum cases would turn out alright in several years. If not, they could always melt into the background of a sanctuary city.

So what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?

Peak Woke was a strange time. Presidential hopefuls swapped out “Latino” for “Latinx,” Aziz Ansari’s mild sexual exploits became national news, and feminists organized a boycott of Tampax over a joke. The consequences were, of course, more serious. From malicious government censorship to grave media blunders, a chill ultimately settled over politics and culture.

This is why, in 2019, Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund gender transitions for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. It’s why “Scranton Joe” Biden himself supported previously radical trans policies. In Peak Woke, Democrats believed it would be politically worse for them not to back these ideas because interest groups, journalists, and activists were itching to call them bigots.

On immigration, the cynical political calculus of every Democrat running in 2020 was to be positioned as Trump’s antithesis. “Biden Pledges to Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes,” read an NPR headline. “Biden Will Stop the Border Wall and Loosen Immigration Again,” blared Politico. “Immigrants have always made us stronger as a nation — our diversity has always been our greatest strength. Donald Trump doesn’t get that,” tweeted Biden in October 2019.

As the centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, Biden actively sprinted away from his prior positions on illegal immigration. He had to deal with headlines like this one from CNN: “Joe Biden Once Said a Fence Was Needed to Stop ‘Tons’ of Drugs from Mexico” and this one from Politico: “Biden Under Fire for Mass Deportations Under Obama.”

In December of 2019, Vox noted, “Biden has struggled to answer questions in several recent debates about Obama’s more controversial policies on immigration enforcement, which included record-high levels of deportations and were often criticized by activists.”

At the time, in the fevered days of the #AbolishICE movement, now making a comeback on the Left, virtually no immigration enforcement mechanism was considered humane by activists and outside groups. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Joe Biden pledged in 2020, commenting on perhaps the most basic piece of infrastructure imaginable. This became a massive pull factor for newcomers. As a Red Cross worker in Mexico explained to me in 2020, migrants heard Biden was not as “drastic” as Trump, and they were taking their chances accordingly.

Suggested reading

Trump’s deportation bust

By Juan David Rojas

David Leonhardt explained what happened after Biden took office in a groundbreaking retrospective for The New York Times last year. “Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office,” he wrote. “Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach.”

“After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States,” reported Leonhardt. “Some have received temporary legal status while their cases [went] through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.” According to numbers tracked by Syracuse University, the asylum backlog at the end of the Biden administration was nearly 4 million active cases, with the average wait time stretching well more than a year long.

Love Trump or hate him, a surge of 8 million migrants in four years is no easy situation to address. And as the Biden-Harris campaign ultimately discovered, voters demanded that the next president address it, Democratic or Republican. So here we are, with a massive new population of aspiring Americans, who are living in precarious conditions legally and socially, and an economy of employers and consumers ever-more tied to their cheap labor.

It should be obvious that Biden and “career prosecutor” Harris weren’t on an ideological crusade to replace the native population of the United States. But elite Democrats also wanted to win elections above all else. This is why when the vibes were anti-Trump, they did everything they could to counter him, both to avoid the minefield of Peak Woke cancel culture and to rack up virtue points. It’s also why Biden’s policies and rhetoric changed as soon as election year rolled around and the polling looked bad.

Democrats painted themselves into a corner on immigration. They feared the fringe to the detriment of the American majority—and ultimately, to their own party’s detriment. The immigration chaos Americans endure now is a direct consequence of cancel culture or Peak Woke, and the way “responsible” Democrats caved into these forces, afraid to look like they cared too much about overseeing an orderly immigration system.

Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimize their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.

In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.

Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Cape Town tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.

More from this author

Trump reclaims the Jacksonian spirit

By Travis Aaron

Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalize the races; Churchill statues were vandalized. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.

In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.

Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.

The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favor of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.

Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?

The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.

The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.

There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.

More from this author

Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

By Travis Aaron

As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative license that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.

Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.

It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.

But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.

Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.

Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.

Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.

More from this author

How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Travis Aaron

Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.

Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.

Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.

Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.

Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.

In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realize that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.

In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.

All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.

The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.