Ever since the Great Awokening began around 10 years ago, there has been a persistent propensity among some to dismiss the culture war as ‘a distraction from real issues’. All the fuss over race, gender and pronouns is irrelevant to everyday concerns, tangible bread-and-butter issues, they say.
This sentiment was epitomised by Sunday Times writer Matthew Syed in May 2023, who wrote in his column that: ‘The culture wars… may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’ To this day, trade unionist, journalist and occasional spiked contributor Paul Embery is subject to hostility from traditional left-wingers who accuse him of losing focus, on account of the time he has spent pointing to the grave consequences of wokeness for working people.
For years, those who have observed the ascendency of woke ideology have warned that this stuff is not merely nonsense but does actually pose a real danger. Yes, hyper-liberalism has had deleterious effects in lofty circles, in academia and literature. But it has also made solid incursions into the real lives of normal people. And it continues to do so, despite the oft-repeated claim that woke is now dead.
Here are some news stories from just the past few days in the UK alone that prove it: the Sentencing Council for England and Wales has restated its intention to create a de facto two-tier criminal-justice system, where ethnic-minority offenders could receive lesser punishment; a recruitment practice in the RAF based on woke principles has left the service facing a pilot shortage; the BBC pays senior managers more if they are female, disabled, LGBT or an ethnic minority.
These are merely the most recent developments. There are other, entrenched and ongoing trends. These include a still untamed trans ideology, which discriminates against women, and a long-standing anti-male mindset in schools, which has left young, poor boys reeling at the bottom of the class.
Woke ideology is costing people their jobs, their education and their livelihoods. A racialised, hyper-liberal ideology has caused Britain and the Western world to become more divided than in living memory. This is what happens when an otherworldly ideology becomes reality, when so many succumb to a cult.
The culture war against ‘woke’ has never been an idle distraction. It could hardly be more necessary.
Why Meghan is so infuriating
The copious coverage given to Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, may strike some as a classic example of ‘distraction’. Why are the media obsessing over this minor royal? I mean, haven’t they got more important things to talk about?
But she really is worth dwelling on. The sad truth is that the Duchess of Sussex’s very public personal life, with all its manifest fakeries, epitomises another grievous, deep and widespread problem today. Her antics are the embodiment of a phenomenon dissected by Jonathan Haidt in his book of last year, The Anxious Generation.
Put briefly, social media, in combination with the proliferation of smartphones with front-facing cameras, is generating profound unhappiness among the vulnerable and impressionable. Youngsters have been thrown into a cruel spiral of comparative competition, in which all participants seek to prove that their lives are more perfect than the next man or woman’s. There are few winners in this undeclared war. It’s one that leaves most participants feeling envious and discontented, convinced that everyone else is far happier than themselves.
Meghan is making matters only worse. Or at least, that is the suspicion. The fact that her show’s rehearsed and curated interactions with celeb friends are blatantly not ‘authentic’ or ‘spontaneous’ only rankles people further. ‘Are you, through your calculating egotism, actually trying to make my children’s lives even more unhappy?’ That’s the proverbial question I would be asking her, were I a parent. No wonder the reviews from other middle-aged types have been so savage.
In a world riddled with jealousy and rancour, Meghan’s principal achievement this year has been to generate more anger and misery.
AI’s woke bias makes translation impossible
There’s been great concern over the years about the ascent of artificial intelligence. The Times newspaper alone has in recent weeks run pieces on a near-daily basis about the dire potential ramifications AI could have for musicians and creative types.
Coincidentally, a couple of weeks back, we had a story about the number of patients being referred to the NHS who don’t speak English. This also generated much alarm. When that story broke, one of those token, dim lefties who’d been invited on to GB News dismissed the reaction as all blather. Nurses, doctors and patients, he said, could always use AI to overcome the language barrier, specifically Google Translate.
Anyone with a knowledge of foreign languages knows this to be bad advice. The immediate problem with Google Translate is that it still doesn’t understand nuance, context and social conventions.
In English, for instance, we no longer have two separate words for ‘you’ in the singular, with one for family, children and friends, and the other for superiors and strangers. As a rule, however, all foreign languages have this distinction. Even British schoolchildren learning French are taught the difference between ‘tu’ and ‘vous’.
But Google Translate doesn’t comprehend this, always translating into the familiar form. Yet a doctor or patient using the wrong – familiar, chummy and potentially insulting – form will be getting off to a very bad start indeed. The medical term ‘patient confidentiality’ exists for a good reason: this relationship is founded on trust and respect.
Google Translate also mirrors the political bias that’s built into Google’s other programmes. Google Gemini’s AI-generated recreation of the Nazis and Vikings as black last year exposed most comically this all-too-human problem. Look up any noun in any Romance language on Google Translate and it will give you the feminine form first and the masculine second. But this is simply not how Latinate languages work, where the masculine is the default, predominant form.
Google Translate commits this error for the same reason my Lonely Planet: Italian Phrasebook 2025 Day-to-Day Calendar also wantonly misleads on matters of gender. For 18 January, the entry reads: ‘Vado matta per questo piatto.’ Then on 19 February: ‘Sono stata vaccinata.’ The sentences mean ‘I go mad for this dish’ and ‘I’ve been vaccinated’ respectively – but only if said by a female, as the ‘-a’ endings denote. I would look a fool if I repeated these words in Italy.
If publications in English want to use ‘she’ or ‘her’ as default impersonal pronouns, that’s up to them. It wouldn’t be ungrammatical. But deliberately distorting foreign languages for political motives is different: it is factually and morally wrong.
