The Death of Woke: Stats on Declining Wokeism

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the trajectory of woke culture and its potential impact on society. Drawing from a variety of data sources and cultural observations, they examine whether wokeness is a cyclical phenomenon or a new, enduring force that will shape the future. The hosts discuss the decline in certain "woke" terms in media, the persistence of cancel culture incidents, and the pushback against progressive narratives from major institutions. They also delve into the potential consequences of wokeness becoming entrenched within large bureaucratic organizations, even as it loses popularity among the general public. Malcolm and Simone consider various scenarios for the future, including the consolidation of power by the "woke elite" and the potential for societal unrest.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. A long time ago, a Sal's Park episode came out where they predicted How long woke culture was going to last. It was season 19, episode one. And it was called stunning and brave. And A farmer is predicting the course of woke culture going forwards.

And he says, we have dealt with this before. And based on the last time we had a rise in wokeness, which the last time we had it, it was called the PC movement or the politically correct movement, who are born long after this movement. If you want to see. humor that was lambasting it as a movement, a very good movie to watch.

And I think fairly entertaining is called PCU which is about the deaths of fraternity culture and it being replaced with various activist groups within [00:01:00] college campuses.

It's a whole new ballgame on campus these days, and they call it PC. PC? Politically correct. And it's not just politics, it's everything. It's what you eat, it's what you wear, and it's what you say. And if you don't watch yourself, you can get in a buttload of trouble.

For instance See these girls? Yeah. No you don't. Those are women. You call them girls, and they'll pop your fig. Save the whales! Kay's in the military now! Free Nelson Mandela! They freed him already. What? Those women? Those aren't women, Tom. Those are womenists. You know, I saw the new Madonna video last night.

Un frickin believable. See the one in the middle? The blonde hair? She's looking at me, isn't she? Kind of. What, do you know her or something? Hey, Sam, isn't that the guy that you used to, uh Yeah. You went out with a [00:02:00] white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person. Please. Please. Go talk to her. What's the problem?

Watch this. He's coming over here. Sister, throw him a walk! No, you don't have to do that. Wow. Hi. Uh, is Sam in there? In there? What's that supposed to mean? Yeah, cock man, oppressor. Uh, thank you. You know, this place is kind of insane. Wait till you meet the Causeheads. The what? What do we eat? Red meat! Why don't we eat it? To kill and murder! What do we eat? Red meat! Why don't we eat it? He's Tom, I'm your Causehead.

They find a world threatening issue and stick with it. For about a week. What's up? What up? What happened to the ozone layer? It was last week. Now it's me.

Malcolm Collins: But then that had a pushback to it and it died for a while and then woke as him came. And so Suss Park, I think made the educated prediction that these cycles last about six [00:03:00] years and that we had about 5.

9 left. However, that episode came out in. So we're about four years late on that prediction. This brings me to a question. Is Wokeness just another cycle, like a pendulum? That moves back in force over the course of history, or is wokeness something totally new that we'll only grow or will become more like a subset or religious community within our society.

We've seen peak wokeness already. Okay and if we have seen peak wokeness, what does the future look like? And I will be going over a lot of statistics in this episode.

A lot of them drawing from a blog by David Rizzuto where he wrote an article titled, Is the Great Awakening Really Winding Down?

And I will come to a conclusion that I think is different than the one he'll come to,

Would you like [00:04:00] to know more?

Malcolm Collins: and I'll just summarize the conclusion I'm going to come to, which is, I do think that wokeness is past peak in terms of general population popularity, however, I think that it's structured very differently than old systems of political correctness.

That we are essentially going to see wokeness intensify and exaggerate its effects within large bureaucratic bodies and become more and more obviously a unique and differential, basically moral, cosmological framework that will be seen all over the world. increasingly like a religion of the elite in our society.

And then the rest of us will feel very similar to what it would have felt like being a non Catholic and living under, say, a Catholic monarchy historically.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. I can totally see that.

Malcolm Collins: A, but we'll get to why this will happen in the statistics. So I sent you the article, Simone, if you want to pull it up.[00:05:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah. I have it in front of me right now.

Malcolm Collins: The first graph in the article, which is term frequency in popular US newspapers for the terms racist, and racism. And

Simone Collins: what

Malcolm Collins: we can see is that there was a huge peak in these terms around 2021. Warren. Near the beginning of that and since then it's been declining precipitously.

It's not back to base level again yet, specifically in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And then if you look at you broaden these words, so they have other graphs here that I'll show on the screen. 1 includes. sexism, sexist, and misogyny. On this one, you do not see as much of a decline, which is interesting.

It basically plateaued at an extremely high level and is slowly going down. Homophobia and homophobic has basically just been going up over time, which is interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Transphobia and transphobic have been exploding. It looks like it's

Simone Collins: only just getting started, which [00:06:00] is weird because talking with the trans maxing community, they implied that they felt like we were already post peak trans.

So that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: You can watch our episode on the, how the trans movement changed in 2024, which I think that we are within the general population, but not within the elite religious cast that rules our society and controls most of the media. And that's what this is looking at is media representations of these.

So if we look at Islamophobia and Islamophobic, they have declined precipitously and anti Semitism and anti Semitic declined precipitously and have shot up recently.

Simone Collins: Although I, here's my take on this. So if we just talk about racism, for example, I don't know how much it has to do with concern about racism, actually decreasing part of me thinks a lot of it has to do with the fact that Anyone who wouldn't completely tout the anti racist line in mainstream media already been purged by those initial spikes.

So there simply isn't anything in those main spheres [00:07:00] that can be discussed, it's basically already been burnt. The executions have been made, the books have been burnt, there's nothing left to comment on. I don't know if

Malcolm Collins: that's true.

Simone Collins: Really?