The Critic Magazine

Woke: the oldest profession

The “liberal professions” are the very seedbed of liberalism. But their modern hegemony has become one of the principal challenges to liberal democracy

WHAT HAS LED TO THE TRIUMPH OF WOKE? The suddenness and swiftness of the victory mean that we naturally turn for an explanation to the New Media — and to Twitter in particular. It’s Twitter which orchestrates the “pile-on” that delivers summary justice to the heretic. And Twitter which provides the illusion of a virtual public opinion that lends a vestige of legitimacy to the lynching.

Which is why, in her great manifesto against woke, Bari Weiss accused the New York Times of having made “Twitter … its ultimate editor”. More fundamentally, the web, which has imprisoned so much of humanity in an actual Plato’s Cave, has fatally eroded the distinction between truth

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