I still find it hard to come to terms with how my once admired fellow Wokes are no longer Woke as I knew Woke. Now, they just seem to be an angry mob hellbent on random destruction and annihilation. Say one ‘wrong’ word, think one ‘wrong’ thought, do one ‘wrong’ deed, as determined by the new angry Woke mob, and you and your career and your reputation will be exterminated. To be fair, Wokes have always been an angry mob, but not so long ago we weren’t a vicious and randomly destructive angry mob. It’s true that we did some stuff that really aggravated people here and there, but I don’t remember such wanton and uncontrolled savagery accompanying it as it does now.

It’s the fault of the internet, of course, because everything’s the fault of the internet. We older Wokes got mad at people and situations, too, in the archaic pre-internet times, but lacked the means to vent so widely and vitriolically with little to no censure.  A lot of our interaction was face to face, or written, and that tends to make one a little more circumspect about telling another person to choke on one’s dick. Or that you’ll rape them with the business end of a baseball bat with barbed wire on it. Or that you’ll smash their face up so badly that they’ll wish they were dead.  Yep, these are the new Woke, the new Social Justice Warriors, the new “you hurt my feelings”.  These are the Sensitivity Police who, for example, think JK Rowling is a bad woman for not agreeing with all things transgender.  Naturally, JK Rowling being a woman means that she gets savaged a squillion times more than any man would for not agreeing. Fact.

Last time I looked, we were allowed to not agree with everything we got told and heard. It might be annoying to have our opinions, ideologies or philosophies disagreed with, but the freedom to do it was indisputable. Well, I blinked and that freedom disappeared. Now there are many things that are off the agenda for disagreement as decreed by the new Woke, because we have to be sensitive to others. And if we’re aren’t, we’ll get the bash.

Can you imagine how much it grieves an old Woke leftie to find herself starting to agree with the Right?  True, I only agree on some things, and disagree on many others. And some Right-wing groups don’t even bear thinking about. But to go back to JK Rowling, the Right are the only ones not going into a nuclear meltdown because she doesn’t agree with some transgender ideology. Guess what? Even some trans people don’t agree with all the trans ideology. They get piled on, too, because that’s what the new Woke do. Disagree and you’re dead, metaphorically speaking – but the way Woke emotions and tempers and feelings are all over the place like a Jackson Pollock painting, I’m not so sure how long that will stay a mere metaphor.

JK Rowling’s latest book Troubled Blood written under her pen name, Robert Galbraith, got a scathing review from a person at the Daily Telegraph who put a ‘transphobic’ slant on it. This was picked up by other media, who blindly spread it around. The Woke mob started howling for JK’s head. Not that the mob really knew why, apart from hearsay, because that would mean that they might actually have to read the book. They just got fed the trigger words, and away they rocketed into hate orbit. Then along comes right-wing The Spectator and tells another story, because, wouldn’t you know it, a person there had also just reviewed the book¹. The “transphobia” was that there was a man who put on a wig and a woman’s coat as a disguise when approaching one of his victims. This gets a small mention in the whole book.

I will probably always lean left, but I’ve divorced the screaming and destructive Wokes who pass for the Left now. They’re an embarrassment, to put it nicely. I won’t ever be a full-on Rightie, because I personally find too much wrong with their philosophy, but these days I’m finding some of it a much better listen. I’m not averse to a bit of rebellion and disobedience to redress injustice, but when it looks like it does now, I’m out. 

And as for JK Rowling’s new book Troubled Blood – I checked with my local library and to date they have 57 holds on it, and they don’t even have it in yet. They have also increased the number they have on order from one to eighteen books. Bookshops are having to order more, too.

Wonder who won this round?

¹The Spectator’s rebuttal of the Troubled Blood book review.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/j-k-rowling-s-latest-novel-isn-t-transphobic-?fbclid=IwAR3huTx0PFYyjl37DiCb3LBgbBKqdy971vu5UbV0mPlnW4uNSgDpQMqNx2o