Memory-Holing "Wokeness"

Introduction to the Memory-Hole Archive

Image by Mariola Grobelska on Unsplash

This is the first essay of a multi-part series. Additional installments will be linked at the bottom as they are published. All of the currently published articles can also be seen here as well.

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If you’re anything like me — that is to say, if you’re among the 94 percent of US adults and 84 percent of voters who are not on the hard left — you’re probably not a big fan of “wokeness.” Some disapprove of that term¹ to refer to the period from 2014 through 2023 in which far-left social justice extremism hijacked large portions of American culture and fueled wide-scale backlashes that have contributed to our current political moment. Of course, those implicated in and described by the “woke” moniker have always rejected any attempt to label them. As the Marxist writer Freddie DeBoer frustatedly wrote in a 2021 headline, “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.” Cultural leftists never did tell any of us the name by which they wanted to be called. That’s just as well, because now they’d rather prefer we all forgot this unfortunate period ever transpired, and they’re not shy about shamelessly gaslighting anyone who invokes it.

The go-to approach is a kind of leftist version of Dayna Craig’s famous 2016 poem “The Narcissist’s Prayer”:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

To invoke the “woke” years in the presence of any cultural progressive is to be machine-gunned with a barrage of lies and falsehoods. Some will look you in the eye and unblinkingly deny that anything amiss went down at all, or spin years of collective insanity and mass psychosis as nothing more than a simple opposition to bigotry. Others will bring up a number of whataboutisms surrounding Donald Trump and the populist right. But to dismiss the problems of the left by reference to the problems of the right is to ignore the physics of politics in a two-party system. For the pendulum to have swung as far to the right as it has, it must first have been cocked far to the left. By the time the fever broke, the cultural left had spent a decade eroding trust in American institutions, damaging the Democratic Party, and arming the right with a fathomless stockpile of political ammunition.

The social-justice left’s dominating, hegemonic grip on the culture has been broken. The “vibes” have indeed shifted. And much of the hard left has publicly retreated from many of their most deranged stances and antics. But they haven’t learned anything. They haven’t truly evolved. Like a cat running into a sliding glass door, they have simply moved on. Now they are discreetly memory-holing the entire affair. And though progressives no longer command the culture, they remain thoroughly in control of most of the avenues of knowledge and information in society. There’s a reason, after all, why many of the sources linked in this series are archived pages, because the originals have been quietly removed, partly in the hope of being forgotten.

To change one’s mind and grow is admirable, but it’s another thing entirely to brush one’s past calamities under the rug and pretend they never happened. What we need is, ironically, a reckoning. What we need is for self-identified leftists, progressives, and Democrats to collectively acknowledge error and pledge to, well, do better. We need to hear those magic three words whose conspicuous absence sank Kamala Harris’s already uphill and otherwise politically moderate 2024 campaign: “I was wrong.”

Harris, like many on the progressive left, tried to pivot away from wokeness but without ever directly and honestly addressing her many outlandish positions from the woke years. The most prominent of which was her public support for government-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison. The incredible success of Trump’s famous “Kamala is for they/them” ad, which hammered Harris over these comments and caused a 2.7-point shift toward Trump, illustrates what happens when people try to simply “move forward” from wokeness without offering any kind of mea culpa.

If the innumerable left-wing overreaches of the past decade are not remembered, acknowledged, and learned from, we risk going down that same road again and perpetuating this cycle in which the political culture violently swings between the far left and far right. To that end, this series will record the excesses of the cultural left from the mid 2010s through the early 2020s, highlighting a large number of prominent incidents, documenting wider patterns of behavior and thought with databases and archives compiled by others, and citing opinion polls and survey data to demonstrate that the woke years cannot be written off as an aberration, a non-issue, or a matter of just “a few bad apples.” Wokeness was institutionalized. Wokeness was systemic. And from cancel culture and the assaults on free expression to racial essentialism, the capture of the education system, feminist illiberalism, radical trans activism, political violence, and a disordered obsession with safety and identity, wokeness was performed, supported, cheered, tolerated, and appeased by the majority of political progressives.

My goal here is to preserve an archive of what went on during this period of American cultural history and to provide a resource anyone can refer to that comprehensively lays out the known facts in one place. Cultural leftists want to help us forget the last 10 years of their indiscretions. They want us to exclusively focus on the illiberalism of right-wing populists² without thinking too deeply about the role the left plays in empowering the right. Most of all, given half a chance and the slightest opening, the cultural left wants to run the summer of 2020 back, only bigger and more permanent. Don’t let them.

The Memory-Hole Archive

Archive I

Archive II

Archive III

Archive IV

Archive V

Archive VI

Archive VII

Archive VIII

Archive IX

Archive X (Forthcoming)

Archive XI (Forthcoming)

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1. I edited a useful article in 2023 that explores the competing and contradictory ways in which “wokeness” is understood.

2. A subject we’ve covered dozens of times, and will continue to. A small sampling:

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/idiocracy-and-the-electrolytes-of

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/for-elon-musk-free-speech-is-a-catchphrase

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/doge-isnt-conservative-its-radical

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/we-all-live-on-4chan-now

https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/floridas-war-on-pride

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/the-qanon-ification-of-the-world

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-your-porn

https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/banning-anne-franks-diary

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/abolishing-the-department-of-education

https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/the-culture-wars-come-for-sex-research