ANDREW SULLIVAN: THE SCOLDS ARE IN RETREAT.
Sullivan’s latest piece on Substack is titled “The Vibes They Are A-Shiftin’” and that actually undersells the case he makes that the woke left (or whatever you prefer to call them) appear to be in retreat. He opens by noting that it was only 2 years ago that the world was figuratively and sometimes literally on fire. Activists were demanding police be defunded and Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo were seemingly anointed as our foremost public intellectuals. Jump forward two years and things look very different.
Last year, Eric Adams became mayor of New York City, propelled by minority voters horrified by surging crime and chaos. This past week, DA Chesa Boudin, scion of leftwing terrorists, was ousted by minority voters in San Francisco…
Elite imposition of the new social justice religion — indoctrinating children in the precepts and premises of critical race and gender theory — has also met ferocious backlash as parents began to absorb what their kids were being taught: that America is a uniquely evil country based forever on white supremacy; that your race is the most important thing about you; that biological sex must be replaced by socially constructed genders of near-infinite number; and that all this needs to be taught in kindergarten. Yes, some of this was politically exploited or hyped by the right. But if you think there is no there there in this concern about schooling, you’re dreaming…
The Washington Post this week was convulsed by public infighting — initiated by a reporter, Felicia Sonmez, whose crusade to dismantle the “oppressive systems” she endures at the WaPo went on for a week of public name-calling, vitriol, and victim-mongering…
And yet even in this wokest of woke newspapers, the editor finally had enough. Sonmez was fired yesterday for “misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”…
In the popular culture, the scolds are retreating.
Talk about change: “[P]erhaps the clearest sign yet that the world is finally waking up and turning against rote wokery comes from . . . Starbucks. Remember how Starbucks ostentatiously opened its bathrooms to the general public after a racial incident caused Starbucks to close down for a whole day of racial sensitivity training back in 2018? Well: Starbucks’s C.E.O. Howard Schultz: ‘I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.’”