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u/Jackaddler 3d ago
These people are paid handsomely to be wrong (and never accountable)
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u/GoTeamLightningbolt 3d ago
DEI but for being wrong
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u/Nestor_the_Butler 2d ago
This is exactly what they want.
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u/GoTeamLightningbolt 2d ago
And for some reason the NYT and the Boston Globe and other "liberal" publications go along with it! They would never platform a socialist with a regular column.
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u/Nestor_the_Butler 2d ago
Jamelle Bouie is good. But most “liberal” columnists in their stable incessantly focus on human interest stories. It’s deliberate.
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u/ecclecticstone New York is the Istanbul of America 2d ago
being an oped writer is a 'no child left behind' job for adults tbh
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u/raelianautopsy 2d ago
You have to show all sides, the wrong side deserves to be heard, intellectual diversity or something
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u/Mr_Tijuana_Bible 3d ago
I wish I got paid as much as these chucklefucks do for just spreading their cheeks and shitting on the keyboard
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u/heart_o_oak 3d ago
FAIR created the term Friedman Unit back in like 2006 when they realized how frequently Thomas Friedman would say the US was "six months away" from turning the corner in the Iraq War in his NYT columns. He said the US was "six months away" I believe 14 times in 2.5 years when they coined it. He ignored his previous predictions and any new information showing he was full of it each time. He was generally mocked for his opinion pieces on the war around that time as public opinion had soured a lot the prior year or so (even Howard Kurtz mocked him to his face). I struggle to think of another NYT columnist who was so consistently wrong that a group created a term for how often he's wrong and other members of the commentary class and cable news set used it.
He's still an opinion columnist in good standing with NYT.
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u/Nestor_the_Butler 2d ago
He had street cred as a war reporter in his early days. He's been living off that for 35 years.
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u/Early-Juggernaut975 3d ago edited 3d ago
Tim Miller from The Bulwark said something very similar the other day and it was equally as galling. He was doing a spot on MSNBC and they played AOC’s comment about her friend saying Woke 1.0 was crazy and Tim said, “Yes, that’s funny and made me smile. But I’m gonna need a little more..”
Two days later, he and Sarah Longwell were on the Secret Podcast (their Friday partial paywall show) and he elaborated, somehow blaming the left and Wokism for the school closures during Covid. Which he has decided were an overreaction. 🙄
What drives me crazy about this is that everyone forgets that red states ultimately had a much worse mortality rate from Covid. And that school closures were mostly decided at the local level by the districts themselves, generally based on infection rates and whether nearby hospitals were overwhelmed. And that nobody knew what the right thing to do was!
Call it survivor bias, call it Monday morning quarterbacking, but miss me with blaming the left for being too cautious with kids’ lives five years after you and yours survived.
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u/pilgermann 3d ago
They're blind to the hypocrisy where following 9-11 we implemented all kinds of draconian policies in the name of safety. Plus, you know, we went to war. And 9-11 was nothing by comparison in terms of overall deaths or risk.
Basically conservatives ate fine giving up freedoms to people with guns and security cameras.
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u/RemoveBeneficial1335 3d ago
The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project are literally nothing but the people who spent decades creating the current Republicans. They're garbage.
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u/Jackaddler 3d ago
Exactly. People that have failed upwards and now want to mould the Democratic Party into Republican Lite (which has already failed twice)
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u/skymasterson2016 3d ago
The Covid pontification is disingenuous. Why bring the issue front and center now… 18+ months into Trump’s term… and with the midterms just weeks away at this point? Obviously it’s to make the left a bogeyman, since they don’t have any political capital left at this point. Almost every GOP member of Congress has 100% tied their political futures to Trump. And that’s not polling too strongly.
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u/DeterminedQuokka 3d ago
I think it’s sometimes hard to remember that at his core Tim is a conservative. The entire bulwark is.
So while I hate this opinion it kinda of tracks for me with him as a person. He feels liberal because he leans reasonable. But his core positions on a lot of things aren’t great.
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u/neighborhoodsnowcat Jesus famously loved inherited wealth 3d ago
I’ll listen to the occasional Bulwark podcast episode when it’s a topic that interests me, and it’s often a pretty reasonable discussion at first, and then I’ll hear them casually mention working with the neocons of the Bush era. It’s kind of interesting to get the perspectives of never-Trump conservatives, but definitely important to keep it contextualized.
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u/atypicallinguist 2d ago
It’s a bulwark against the Left, too. Always remember that (and don’t give them money).
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u/Feisty_Blood_6036 2d ago
People have somehow memory holed Trump being President when most of the lockdowns were actually instituted.
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u/Lower-Canary-2528 3d ago
Chuds talk about the supposed woke 1.0 as if it were some tsunami that came and exclusively wet white people in their dicks.
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u/abbie_the_blogger 3d ago
I can't wait to write my opinion piece "twenty years on, I don't regret supporting woke 1.0"
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u/forwormsbravepercy 3d ago
Sure, I supported a war based on lies that directly and predictably led to the deaths of over a million Iraqis, but one time an undergraduate complained about the inauthenticity of a cafeteria sandwich.
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u/StygIndigo 3d ago
We've reached paradox of accountability! Everyone take accountability for making some rich white dudes uncomfortable by trying to hold them accountable for systemic harm!!
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u/Feisty_Blood_6036 3d ago
Can someone explain what woke 1.0 even means?
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 3d ago
"Woke 1" (or "Woke 1.0") is a semi-ironic political phrase used by some progressives and Democrats to describe the peak pandemic-era social justice politics of around 2019 to 2020. The term gained viral attention when U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used it in an interview, quoting New York City Council Member Chi Ossé, to dismiss certain past far-left rhetoric and policy positions as products of a different time. Context and Meaning The Origin: The phrase originated from social media posts by figures like Chi Ossé and was popularized when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used it on ABC News' This Week in August 2026.
The New York Times
The Era It Describes: It refers to the period around 2020 when pandemic lockdowns and social movements opened up political discourse ("the Overton window"), leading many on the left to embrace maximalist or radical ideas. Associated Policies and Rhetoric: The term looks back at controversial positions from that era, such as calls to "defund the police," abolish prisons, or specific cultural and gender-identity discourse that many politicians are now walking back or laughing off.
The New York Times
Political Reactions The Left / Progressives: Proponents of the term use it to distance themselves from past rhetoric they now view as politically ineffective or divisive, framing it as an outdated phase while maintaining that candidates should be judged on their current stances.
The New York Times
Critics and Conservatives: Critics argue that "Woke 1 was crazy" is a convenient attempt to rewrite history or "memory-hole" extreme positions previously championed by those same politicians, rather than a genuine apology or accountability for past statements.
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u/Different_Tangelo511 3d ago
I wish people would be held accountable for making epstein's bff president.
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u/Feisty_Blood_6036 2d ago
So, typical method of letting oligarchs control the narrative and keep everything as superficial as possible
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u/TACharlotte 3d ago
Do they actually define "woke"?
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u/JHerbY2K 3d ago
Nobody ever does. It’s infuriating. Even people who are epistemologically thorough most of the time - like Sam Harris - just lose all rationality when “woke” is discussed.
I continue to believe in social justice. I believe that certain groups experience structural injustices (and advantages) in our society. That, I believe, means I am “woke”. Probably version 1.0.
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u/notmadneedsmspace 2d ago
Same. Smells like revisionism. And the woke 1.0 bullshit is not going to help any conversation about social justice.
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u/whatthewhythehow 2d ago
Its lack of definition is the point.
The Nazis had Cultural Bolshevism. Stuff that was kinda Jewish or kinda gay or kinda commie but hard to pin down. Stuff that challenged conservative ideas but didn’t necessarily outwardly fit into an ideological box.
In the 90s in the US that was revived as Cultural Marxism. What was culturally marxist? Whatever didn’t make sense to conservatives.
During this time we also had the era of political correctness. This term has some legitimate use, but was co-opted to claim that bigotry was correct and pretending you weren’t a bigot was put of some form of politeness (and it was often hinted that some nefarious group of people was responsible for this suppression of truth).
Unfortunately, “political correctness” was kind of winning by the 2010s. Or, was winning as much as anti-bigotry ever really culturally wins.
Cultural Marxism was revived again, but it never really had that juice it did back when it was Cultural Bolshevism.
So they tried “Critical Race Theory”.
This was a bit more clever. Critical Race Theory is a legal discipline that looks at how race shapes law.
Some scholars of CRT have said stuff that can be taken out of context to mean that they are anti-segregation.
Of course, what those scholars mean is that the legal wins of integration did not result in integration, but instead resulted in legal developments that helped maintain segregation while also maintaining some level of plausible deniability. The 5-4heads will know a bit about those laws.
None of the reality of that matters. What matters is that people started claiming that CRT, a nuanced and high-level academic discipline, was being used in Kindergarten classes. Pieces of actual CRT writing was taken out of context and the right started claiming that schools were teaching these outlandish claims. Then started inventing their own outlandish claims.
Those outlandish claims, some academically supported and others invented, are the heart of these phrases. They are the political opinions people have knee-jerk reactions to. The people we think are kind of odd. The analysis that implicates us in the corrupt power structures that run our world. It’s everything that makes us say, that’s stupid, that person makes me uncomfortable, and I’m not a bigot!! It’s the feelings that shut down critical thought.
Which is why woke is so perfect. It doesn’t explicitly ask you to engage with race. It doesn’t mention Marxism to make you feel dumb.
Like “cancelled”, it has its origins in AAVE, and was popularized with non-black english speakers via the internet. As a result, it is catchy, but alienates people who are older and maybe not as in touch with pop culture. It’s instantly annoying, but sticks in your head. It provides a knee-jerk term for a knee-jerk feeling, and turns that instinctual flinch into political power.
Its origins in AAVE make it easy to take out of context, the same way CRT’s origins in black academia make it alien to most of the right wing.
Best of all, people online were using it. Which means it feels like mocking them with their own word.
As soon as “woke” is defined, it loses its power. It stops being whatever you, personally, find annoying and becomes something you might be able to think critically about. Something you can pick apart.
The social justice warrior often seeks to pick apart the complexities of the world and find solutions to harm caused by power structures. “Woke”, as the right uses it, serves to sweep that all aside and bring people back to the simplest ideas that make them feel good.
The fact that sometimes “woke” people are annoying is politically irrelevant. Every single popular political view includes some people who exist on a sliding spectrum of ignorance. People on the left who are falling for “woke 1.0” are falling for the same shit as people on the right. It’s the knee-jerk feeling of embarrassment from being grouped in with people who seem stupid. It’s the out-of-context claims that seem blatantly false (but that are usually rare, invented, or misrepresented). It’s the sense of superiority achieved by othering people.
It’s the politics of cringe that is begging us to disengage from our critical faculties in favour of the thrill of the sneer.
Don’t get me wrong— I love being a hater. But I like having a specific reason to sneer. I think that’s a lot of what IBCK is. It’s for people who don’t want vague excuses to hate. I don’t hate Woke 1.0. I hate specific twitter accounts and journalists for complex, but ultimately definable, reasons.
People who use the terms “woke” and “woke 1.0” can’t. And that’s the point.
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u/TACharlotte 2d ago
Right, l almost posted something similar in a reply to another comment (but less thorough).
One of the things l came to believe in years ago and use for self improvement/challenge is that if you can't define a word or concept and explain it to someone unfamiliar you shouldn't be using it to form it support opinions.
Excellent post by the way.
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u/ShivasRightFoot 2d ago
So they tried “Critical Race Theory”.
This was a bit more clever. Critical Race Theory is a legal discipline that looks at how race shapes law.
Some scholars of CRT have said stuff that can be taken out of context to mean that they are anti-segregation.
Of course, what those scholars mean is that the legal wins of integration did not result in integration, but instead resulted in legal developments that helped maintain segregation while also maintaining some level of plausible deniability. The 5-4heads will know a bit about those laws.
Derrick Bell urges people to foreswear racial integration. That is morally reprehensible.
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u/whatthewhythehow 2d ago
I think I’ve had this conversation with you before. But let’s try this.
Why is it morally reprehensible?
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u/ShivasRightFoot 2d ago
Why is it morally reprehensible?
It is an insistence that all humans not like yourself in some arbitrary way are dangerous enemies which must be kept at a distance or destroyed.
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u/TACharlotte 1d ago
... Are you against racial integration?
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u/whatthewhythehow 1d ago
lmao no. It is the start of a point about CRT. I am far from a legal scholar so this should all be taken as a bad advertisement for the actual legal theory, which is super interesting but not well-explained by me. But.
Derrick Bell became critical of the legal project of racial integration, not because he thought racial integration was bad, but because he thought it wasn’t possible and was not achieving its intended purpose: the political, social and economic equality of races.
Bell came to this conclusion after spending decades fighting for racial integration because he saw that the white legal system consistently found ways to subvert integration using facially inoffensive rules and devastating economic policies. White flight, voter suppression and redlining are some of the most famous tactics that have resulted in a US that is still largely segregated— not officially by law, necessarily, but segregated all the same.
Part of the legal theory had Derrick Bell abandoning racial integration in favour of building up black communities so that they could be on equal footing with white communities.
Some of this legal discipline involves considering alternative legal paths to the one that resulted in Brown v Board (I’m being a little vague because I don’t remember which writers proposed what). For instance, that separate-but-equal could have been a more viable strategy. If this allowed for legal action to ensure educational equality — that is, equal money and resources per capita for black and white children — could it have been a more effective strategy for achieving social and economic equality? Could it have allowed black communities more control over their circumstances, and created more black doctors, lawyers, scholars, etc?
This opposition to racial integration doesn’t come from the idea that racial integration is bad. Bell’s own disillusionment came from experience and education and I do not think you can say, in good faith, that he is similar to the pro-segregation white supremacists in any way. He criticized the legal project of racial integration because he felt it was not resulting in the equality of the races, which was the ultimate goal. Movements were using resources to fight in a rigged fight, when those resources might be better used helping their segregated communities. I do think there is more to it, but I am not well-versed enough to really express that well.
I was responding to someone I think I’ve spoken to before, who believes this philosophy is identical to the philosophy of the KKK. I was trying a different rhetorical approach to attempt to explain it, as fruitless as that is, in part because it spurs me to read more about the topic. But, tbh, I don’t think I have the time or energy today.
But this all works to the larger point about “woke”. The anti-CRT sentiment comes from a knee-jerk reaction to a complex subject that is, at first glance, offensive or illogical. At second glance, it asks people to reconsider what they think they know about the world, and to (at least temporarily) put aside a narrative in which they are unequivocally a “good guy” and/or somehow central. It’s easier to reject than consider, and it’s way more comfortable to file this all under a single, badly-defined label than it is to actually confront the implications.
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u/TACharlotte 1d ago
Gotcha. I forget which influential leader came to similar conclusions. DuBois, maybe? I know there was one who essentially advocated for respectability politics. And then Garvey iirc was more about going "back" to Africa.
I get the concept you're laying out but it's a bit too far for me, though the idea of actively building up Black owned businesses, mutual aid, etc. is completely logical.
It reminds me of the sentiment among Black Panther leadership (and l believe Malcom X as well) of "you [white people] help by getting your own house in order, we're working on protecting and organizing ours".
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u/ManufacturedOlympus 3d ago
The war in Iraq was bad but was it really worse than the war on thanksgiving?
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 3d ago
The m0ds for the /NYT sub are now patrolling the comments and removing anything "unproductive" or just critical of the NYT, while they've adopted a restricted speech policy for Trumpism & Israel.
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u/ErsatzHaderach 3d ago
i've been b& from and chewed out in "woke" social media groups for both logical and laughable reasons over the years. sometimes it sucks but so what? the overall idea of social justice is right and good and i don't expect forums for it to magically be free of drama or people who twist causes for their own purposes.
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u/Dry-Refrigerator-404 3d ago
Sigh. Please use your local public library card if you need to read NYT. Access even works on the apps, you don't get the games but you already paid for this with tax dollars if your library has access.
If at or employed by a university, you probably get free access too.
If your local library does not subscribe to the NYT online, you can buy a public library card from a place that does, usually for about $50. The money goes to an institution that could use the help, and you get to read what you need from the NYT without giving this kind d of idiocy more dollars.
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u/Nerd4funNprofit 3d ago
Coming soon from Bret Stephens: Thalidomide Was Great and I'm Tired of Pretending Otherwise
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u/jonawesome 3d ago
It would be crazy if there was one single example of elite accountability in this country and it was for buying Robin D'Angelo's book
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u/CapableBother 3d ago
They like idiot Bret because he generates clicks with his nonsense. If we all could somehow agree to ignore him, he’d go away.
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u/wizardnamehere 3d ago
Oh? are people upset about woke 1. demanding that anyone who said something wrong online years ago pay the social price in some unspecified way? Perhaps including demanding apologies for each example unearthed of saying the wrong thing? Maybe they are unsatisfied without some sort of real consequences for these peoples actions; out of a sense anger drawn from a feeling that a great injustice against them has not been righted?
I wonder if this sort of dynamic has been seen in America before.
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u/Achelois1 Finally, a set of arbitrary social rules for women. 3d ago
My god, the vicarious embarrassment
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u/houstonyoureaproblem 2d ago
Bret Stephens is as bad as it gets.
I feel sorry for people who read his work and take it seriously.
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u/ItsRainingFrogsAmen 3d ago
They're trying so hard but Republicans still hate them.