Putting the Woke Away
For the past couple of years, I have talked a lot about containment as a key strategy of power. I defined and outlined what that entails in an article called ‘On Containment’. We used to talk about this as ‘Back to Fresh Prince’, but since I started this substack, as a step towards that general goal, we have discussed a key short-term objective as ‘Putting the Woke Away’. I first outlined what this strategy might look like last summer, in an article called ‘Ron DeSantis: Lessons and Dangers’ and at the end of my now much-viewed speech ‘The Octopus’. I always maintained that this was not guaranteed to happen but would be the smartest play from the Regime, and that they should not be underestimated. I also have always had furious pushback on this. Many people say it is ‘my worst take’. My buddy Auron MacIntyre and I have even had a bet on this: if woke has not been visibly put away by May 2025, he owes me a cigar (I’m asking for a Padron 1926), but if it has noticeably dialled up or even just maintained the level of the past couple of years, I owe him one. The fact I made this bet a month before Pride led many people to be confident that Auron would be sure to win. I have also been concerned that while there are very good signs this is happening in Britain, the USA, and especially the Biden regime, had until recently shown few signs of being sensible, but now finally looks like it is happening, and in Pride month. I will outline some specifics below while explaining my thesis and my three main reasons for believing it (there are actually four, but we don’t need to get into the fourth today).
The basic idea of my thesis is that it is not sustainable for around a third of the population to have lost trust in the institutions of power, and this is especially important for military recruitment. This is my first main reason for the thesis. In 2021, Col. Zachery D. Kearns, submitted a monograph to the School of Advanced Military Studies in which he talked about the need to mend the rift between the globalist elite population and populist Donald Trump voters.
On the first page he writes, ‘The military of the United States requires the support of the population it serves as the basis for its legitimacy.’ Many people, but especially those who feel most alienated from the system – white working-class men, who form the backbone of the front-line soldiers in the American military – identify ‘Woke’ with a regime that hates them. ‘Woke’ messaging has come to be a symbol for the Global American Empire, the Pride flag ever-more coming to stand for the USA, more than the Stars and Stripes.
Interestingly, the American Navy and Airforce took down the Pride flags after just one day of Pride. This was caught by Fox News, among others.
My second main reason for believing that the woke will get put away is simply because I follow and listen to what Tony Blair says, here’s a playlist of me doing that in real time. He has been talking about ‘Putting the Woke Away’ for years, because he knows it fuels populism and wants his own machine, in Keir Starmer’s New Labour 2.0 back directly in power. The examples of Blair signaling an anti-woke shift and of Starmer dialing up ‘conservative rhetoric’ are too numerous to list. I will include some headlines below going back to 2021:
Starmer is currently, aggressively, and swiftly, purging the Labour party of all of the hard left ‘Corbynista’ candidates, who are being suspended, forcefully deselected, and gatekept out of the party, right down to the local level, even when they already hold some power.
Starmer has been giving speeches criticising the Tories from the right, signalling an end to a dependency on mass immigration (he said the phrase ‘mass immigration’), and getting notices that he is now a conservative:
Other than being an extraordinary volte face for both Labour and Starmer himself, why is all this important? It is important because we know it is a direct order by Tony Blair himself, and we know that there are few people in the world more ‘Regime’ than the Dark Lord, who always has his eye on what needs to be done, where and when, in order to maintain power, unlimited power. This strategy by Starmer is not only Blair 101, but also the purest distillation of containment in action you are ever likely to see. Americans should take note, because in recent years, where British politics has gone, American politics has not been far behind. Remember when Trump said in 2016: ‘it’s going to be Brexit times ten’? For some reason, there is a strange symbiosis between London and Washington, which is less strange when one considers that Britain is America’s ‘enforcer’ in Europe, unlike the French who can never fully be trusted due to their own ambitions, or the Germans who are now sad, pathetic vassals reminiscent of Reek from Game of Thrones.
Speaking of the USA, let me turn to my third main reason for believing that the Woke is about to get put away: the regime is soft managerial, that is a regime of foxes rather than lions, and foxes dislike force. They also used several uncharacteristic displays of hard power in the past several years: directly through the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ‘fortification’ of the 2020 US Presidential Election, and indirectly in the ‘mostly peaceful’ BLM protests in the ‘Summer of Love’ during 2020, not to mention the belligerent and dangerously hysterical response to Russia’s engagements in Ukraine. These displays did not come without a cost. They torched cultural, social, and political capital and legitimacy railroading through all these things, to the extent where millions of people noticed.
A few days ago, YouTube updated their terms and conditions and signalled a change in their policy on discussing the 2020 Election.
The second paragraph is remarkable:
We first instituted a provision of our elections misinformation policy focused on the integrity of past US Presidential elections in December 2020, once the states’ safe harbor date for certification had passed. Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm. With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections. This goes into effect today, Friday, June 2. As with any update to our policies, we carefully deliberated this change.
In my years of watching them, I’ve noticed two things about The Regime: first, it doesn’t do subtle; second, it almost never plays 4D Chess. This is to say, that if containment is happening, you’ll know it is happening. What are some signals? The first is the large number of social justice types, whether BLM / anti-white or trans or whatever else, complaining about a large drop-off in their bookings. People do not want their diversity training, reductions in bookings since 2020 in some cases have seen a more than 85% drop off. The Atlantic told the DEI department to get back in its box recently:
The Regime does not do subtle. It’s clear that there’s been a sea-change when it comes to messaging around this. Another sure signal, which a lot of people have pointed out, is that many corporations have not gone big on Pride at all this year. Here are some of the most telling shots:
And perhaps most hilariously of all there’s this tweet of a leftist complaining that they may have lost companies ‘pandering’ to them:
Some may like to paint all this as ‘fear’ after what happened with the boycott of Bud Light, one of the only successful boycotts ever. Incidentally, it was less successful because of ‘people power’ and most successful because conservative elites were more or less fully united on it and because both mainstream and alternative right-wing media kept relentless focus on it, including no less than fifteen videos from my favourite populist, Dr Steve Turley.
All of this seems to suggest that it is proverbially ‘happening’. It seems to me that the Regime are gearing up for a second Trump presidency, and have made peace with the idea that, after all, the Orange Man is just a boomer who can be ‘brought in’ and won’t be a fascist dictator. They also seem to have ditched Joe Biden, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me beyond just facing the obvious facts of the situation. As things stand in the USA, the Blair strategy – which would be Democrats flanking the GOP ‘from the right’ – just isn’t going to work, since the Democrats are very far gone. The best they can hope to do is to field their own populist (let’s say Robert Kennedy Jr.), but I do not think this will happen. Seems to me the Republicans (and now looking likely Trump, rather than DeSantis) will be the ones ‘Putting the Woke Away’, but remember that it is in the name of containment and maintaining their own power. The counter-argument is: well, why would they do that, when they can just pull the same stuff, they did in 2020? The trouble is all that stuff massively fuelled serious and increasingly organised opposition to them, and in the long-run, that means overthrow for any regime, especially if they are not prepared to use real force, and these foxes are not, they always behave in a hysterical and scared way, not in a strong and assured way. On the face of it, this will look like a ‘huge victory’ for us, and many will see it that way; many more will then stop paying attention and go back to their old lives thinking that the job is done. You can see why this is their smartest play.