Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

A small densely inter-connected homophily of political actors who share media platforms & cooperate with think-tanks, campaign groups & ‘educational charities’ wage the 'war on woke'.

#Spiked is #1 & #GBNews the #2 'anti-woke' media outlets.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

Recently, a group of academics and cultural commentators have framed wokeness as a pseudo-religion.

Hayek, in 1973, foreshadowed this by calling social justice a ‘quasi-religious superstition’ that ‘has no meaningful place in a social order organised around a market economy’.

This framing was resurrected by controversial American academic John McWhorter & developed into a full ‘taxonomy’ of ‘woke religion’ by ex-PR Michael Shellenberger, & acadmic Peter Boghossian who "violated ethical guidelines on human-subjects research".

boghossian.substack.com/p/woke-religio…

In 2021, this framing was voiced on UK television by Professor Eric Kaufmann who told his host, Andrew Doyle, on GB News that wokeism involved the ‘sacralization of historically marginalised out [sic] race, sexual and gendered identity groups’.

One of Kaufmann’s collaborators, Professor Matt Goodwin, developed this definition further on Twitter. Subsequently, a community has coalesced around this pseudo-religious definition of wokeism, & within this community the woke are described as a threat to ‘western civilisation’.

From their various platforms, anti-woke campaigners retain the right to adjudicate what is woke & what they allow to be considered normal, thereby policing the speech/behaviours of social justice campaigners. To achieve this, anti-woke actors have to be seen to be moral/rational.

But woke & wokeism are not empirically established concepts. Rather they are discursive constructs with sufficient interpretive flexibility to allow anti-woke campaigners to apply them to any group or practice they wish to discredit.

Anti-woke campaigners use platforms that also espouse the benefits of global warming & fossil fuels, which the Panel on Climate Change says is not just a threat to what anti-woke campaigners claim to be protecting (western civilisation) but humanity & our ecosystem.

Via a denial of structural racism, this community has ended up telling itself that academics identifying artefacts looted from colonies on display in stately homes are ‘extremists’, while record-breaking temperatures in the UK & across the globe is just normal weather.

We begin this explanation by describing how this pseudo-religious frame has become the latest attempt to intellectualise a moral panic about perceived left-wing cultural hegemony.

To document the war on woke, we needed an entry point to start building this anti-woke ‘community’ through its various connections and affiliations to reveal who is involved and measure the depth of their commitment.

We began with two professors of political science, Kaufmann & Goodwin, who have publicly described wokeism as a pseudo-religion.

Then, to identify who else shared their diagnosis of left-wing cultural hegemony, we looked at the events & networks these two academics operate in.

Who else uses a pseudo-religious frame to suggest wokeism is irrational, intolerant & dogmatic?

Who has access to broadcast, print and digital media to discuss ‘the woke’ in this way?

Which media outlets do they use to campaign against wokeness?

What lobbying & campaign groups do they belong to?

Which political parties fund them, which do they belong to, or work for?

What think-tanks do they use for their campaign platforms? Who is financing these institutions?

Can the properties of this community be quantified?

And how do we frame the logics and tropes this community is promoting within its discourses?

We found Professor Goodwin has appeared on #bbcaq, Moral Maze, Newsnight, and Politics Live; Channel 4 News, GB News and Planet Normal.

Goodwin has also written for the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Times, Times Higher Education, Unherd and Spiked.

Goodwin takes issue with wokeness for Unherd, the Mail, Spectator, GB News & regularly on Twitter. He's a speaker at the Battle of Ideas festival, Director of the Centre for UK Prosperity at the Legatum Institute, and on the advisory council of Toby Young's Free Speech Union.

Goodwin has advised the Conservative Party on strategy & supported anti-woke campaigner Kemi Badenoch for PM, calling her ‘one of the most interesting Conservatives in British politics for a very long time’ & supports the Conservatives’ plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Professor Kaufmann has appeared on RT (formerly Russia Today), GB News, and BBC Newsnight. He writes for the National Review and Unherd, contributes to Spiked’s content, speaks at the Battle of Ideas and is also on the advisory council for the Free Speech Union.

Kaufmann is an affiliate of the anti-woke campaign group Counterweight, a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange think-tank & an adjunct fellow at The Manhattan Institute. Goodwin & Kaufmann also gave evidence to the Commons committee on the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill.

We expanded this network of associations, using a form of purposive sampling of those committed to this pseudo-religious frame as the eligibility criteria & key word searches drawn from Goodwin’s definition of woke eg ‘woke’ + ‘pseudo-religion’ or ‘woke + religion + ideology’.

Using this technique, we identified other instances where Goodwin and Kaufmann use this definition as well as other public figures who share a platform with Goodwin and Kaufmann and operationalise the pseudo-religion frame in their outputs.

Via subsequent searches, a dense network of related actors quickly emerged.

For example, Calvin Robinson shares this pseudo-religious frame. He also writes for Spiked, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Spectator and Breitbart.

Robinson is a GB News presenter, a former Policy Exchange fellow & was a guest on Newsnight. He speaks at the Battle of Ideas, stood for the Tory & Brexit Parties, worked for Vote Leave & works for the Reclaim Party & is a founding signatory of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us.

The University of Kent’s Professor Frank Furedi is a former Revolutionary Communist who also writes about wokeness as a dangerous dogma for Spiked and the Daily Mail, has appeared regularly on GB News and used to criticise the woke on RT.