Will People On The Left Rise Up To Put "Woke" To Sleep?
There's all sorts of raging crazy all over the place -- identity politics and progressive puritanism about what can and cannot be said and done...to the point where citing established biological reality is a thought crime worthy of exile:

"When a close friend told her roommates that she believed in biological differences between the sexes, she was forced to change dorms because she had created an uncomfortable environment for one of the students." (!) https://t.co/5746aUOCHX https://t.co/ZDcJtZ4kHJ

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) July 7, 2019

However, amidst all the warped "woke"-ness, there are glimmers of sanity. At Spiked, Fraser Myers writes about the "dirtbag left," as one of its members refers to this rather wee (but hopefully growing) movement:

The phrase was coined by Amber A'Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left.

Frost is a co-host of the hugely successful Chapo Trap House, which offers a funny, irony-laden and often downright vulgar take on contemporary politics from the left. She also writes a column for the Baffler and is a trade unionist.

Newer on the scene is the acerbic and wickedly funny Anna Khachiyan, art critic turned cultural commentator, who co-hosts the podcast Red Scare. Red Scare saves its most biting criticism for 'neoliberal' feminism.

Among the most refreshing things about Frost and Khachiyan is that their politics are resolutely not woke. 'You can tell people that I'm trans', says Khachiyan, with characteristic irreverence, as Frost, Khachiyan and myself sit down to talk at Eastwood in the Lower East Side. 'I'm not trans, but you can say that just for fun.' Their reasons for rejecting wokeness are both pragmatic and political. 'The majority of people are not woke', explains Frost: 'Why would we dismiss the majority of people as hopelessly reactionary?'

Not only that, for Frost, identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are 'a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst'. 'The biggest divide in American society is class and that's it. I'm a class-first person', she tells me. 'You're hearing in the election how much we need to elect a woman or we need to elect a woman of colour. But the most left-wing candidate is an old, white, heterosexual man [Bernie Sanders] and I want him to win... I'm a Bernie bro. I was a Bernie bro in 2016 and I am now.'

...For Khachiyan, 'You can say a lot of bad things about Donald Trump, but you can't say the man is boring'.

'Trump should be an artist, not a politician', she adds. 'He says, "I've never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke", and he loves Diet Coke, that's his drink of choice. I don't know if he's self-aware or not.'

The problem with liberals, she says, is that 'they can't differentiate between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him... He really brings to the fore all these inarticulable taboos. But as a politician, he's not very exceptional.' It is not so much Trump's policies that anger the liberals, but his brashness, his demeanour. Frost adds, by way of example, that Obama also 'threw tear gas at the border'.

And so much of woke-ie-ism seems to be about making the personal political. For example, from Fraser's piece, quoting Khachiyan:

'A lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists'.

...'Antifa have manufactured a threat to have some semblance of an identity. All these people who say they are anti-fascist don't know what it means to be persecuted.'

Meanwhile, another example of where this leads and what's wrong with the thinking (scroll down for the tweet explainer below the attached media):

Esteemed film critic Sasha Stone doesn't like what is happening to film criticism and, as an esteemed film critic, has some thoughts about why. pic.twitter.com/w9yQzkrgRk

— Jesse Crall (@jessecrall) July 6, 2019