Sometime in the last year we hit peak woke, the summit of stupidity for this pathetic and disgusting ideology of communist race/gender/whatever obsessions. The election of Donald Trump pounded another nail into the PC coffin, although the ghoul is still thrashing about trying to break free. But the purveyors of this dreck are going to fight to keep it alive, but there’s no way they’re going to resuscitate it. People are sick of this nonsense and, right now, we’re experiencing the tail end of wokeness as this idiocy plays out. We’re seeing the last stand of this grotesque cultural phenomenon in academia, politics, and especially Hollywood. If this is the hill wokeism want to die on, fine – as long as it dies.
And dying it is. Donald Trump’s famous “He’s for you, she’s for they/them” ad, which took a stand against bizarre trans idiocy, was just the start, and boy, are they mad about it. Oh no, Donald Trump and all of America are transphobes! OK? What else you got? Go ahead and throw us in that briar patch; the voters are all in there already. The American people have spoken, and what they said was, “Shut up, weirdos.” When the man pretending to be a woman who was elected to Congress from Delaware, of course, decided he wanted to hang out in the women’s restroom, he knew that was going to make a stink. He wanted to be a martyr to the cause. Instead, he got told, “No,” and looked like an idiot as well as a mentally ill person.
The change is happening out there in popular culture, too. On TV, you can now occasionally see an ad that doesn’t look like a meeting of the UN General Assembly or New Year’s Eve the Castro District. I married a female-identifying birthing person across ethnic lines – my wife would be Latinx if “Latinx” wasn’t a nonsense classification invented by idiots and repeated by drunken leftist wine women – but every single couple isn’t absolutely diverse. For the last couple of years, TV ads insisted that they were to the point where it became a punchline. That wasn’t representation – that wasn’t to show that some people do marry across racial and ethnic lines, which is a true statement. It was performative finger-wagging designed to show you that you are bad because they imagined that you couldn’t conceive of it happening. You are unenlightened, and their job is to enlighten you by making sure that the doctor in the ad pushing eczema medicine is a gay Māori Muslim with a limp.
It was the same thing on TV and in the movies. They used to complain about the token minority cast member. Now, everybody’s a token. It is all a statement, not that these are the most talented actors and actresses but that you are a bad person and we’re going to represent every classification besides Romneyites all the time to demonstrate that to you. Take that, racists, sexists, and whatevers!
It’s annoying because these moral illiterates have nothing to teach us. This is not education. It’s not even indoctrination. It’s an accusation. You normal Americans clearly don’t believe a black woman could be a judge, so suddenly, every judge in every show is a black woman. And as annoying as it is to be treated like this by Hollywood, as if they have the moral standing to improve us, it’s also unfair. There are some black women judges. My mom was a woman judge, albeit not black, so it’s not crazy to have a black woman judge. But when everybody’s a black woman judge, it’s an insult to black women because it denies that they can achieve through their own merit. Instead, it has to be handed to them by a bunch of screenwriters who are today largely obnoxious white women with the Ivy League degrees. The white savior complex exists, and it’s basically leftists being condescending to everyone else – especially minorities.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Nobody cares what race Denzel Washington is. Nobody cared what race Carl Weathers was. They are or were just awesome. It’s deeply insulting, not just to the viewers who the cultural producers obviously believe are knuckle-dragging bigots, but to the actors themselves. When you see a black elf show up in the terrible Lord of the Rings series, you know why he’s there. He’s there as a statement about how J.R.R. Tolkien and you both need to learn a lesson in tolerance. But then, maybe a black actor could be an awesome elf. It’s just that it’s hard to get your mind past the insult of being called effectively called a “bigot” by the producers. That’s what they’re doing, though they’ll deny it. They’ll say it’s inclusion. But it’s not. They will preen over their stunt casting and then call you a racist when you notice their stunt casting.
But this is slowly declining as people get tired of this stuff. We’re still seeing some of the fallout from peak woke as the backlog of PC garbage gets released. Look at that new Disney Snow White movie with that obnoxious Rachel Zegler chick who likes to go online and talk about how much she hates her audience. I bet you the audience is going to respond in kind. Charitably, she’s not a beauty. Wokeness required changing beauty standards – no, we were not consulted. That’s why they have foisted Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham and Zendaya on us, and why modern video came heroines look like Andrea Dworkin fugly non-binary sibling. We need to be weened away from our troglodyte cis-sexist beauty standards. Nah. We’re laughing at it. Gal Gadot, as the evil queen, looks at the mirror and asks, “Who is the fairest one of all?” and we’re supposed to believe the mirror is going to answer, “Oh, it’s Rachel Zegler and not you, Gal Gadot?” One can only suspend so much disbelief.
And even more obnoxiously, the makers decided they weren’t going to casts dwarfs as the seven dwarfs because that would be insulting to dwarfs. Instead, they first created a bunch of non-dwarf characters – again, multi-ethnic, and I’m surprised one wasn’t in a wheelchair or in drag. They looked ridiculous and drew massive online mockery, so the makers edited them out and inserted CGI dwarfs, which also looked ridiculous. But here’s the thing – what about all the dwarf actors who need work? A Snow White remake is these guys’ time to shine. But none of them got a gig because wokeness demanded that none of them get a job because to employee dwarf would be dwarfism or some nonsense. So, not only is the movie artistically inferior, but a bunch of hard-working actors who could’ve used the job got passed over simply so a bunch of liberals could feel better about themselves for doing it. I hate this stuff so much.
Even if you were not insulted by what the producers obviously think of you, woke makes for bad art. There’s a new series about detective Alex Cross from the very popular books on one of the streaming services. I think it’s called Cross, but I didn’t watch it long enough to really know. Right at the beginning, this black Washington, DC, detective has to interrogate an outrageous racist white guy. He’s apparently murdered his wife and for some reason, he’s written as insulting all the black characters with cliched white supremacy jive. One of the characters mentions that they see four or five of these racist killers a year. OK, in Washington, DC, you probably don’t see four or five white supremacist murderers in a century. OK, white supremacist murderers are not the homicide problem in Washington, DC. And then Alex Cross goes to talk to him. Cop interrogation scenes can be amazing – remember LA Confidential? But this one is a woke joke. The big table-turning is that Alex Cross, who I am told is actually clever and interesting in the books, notices that the guy quoted MacBeth, and somehow this proves he’s guilty. Huh? Oh, and then he threatens to throw the prisoner in the Washington, DC, city jail to be murdered by black prisoners if he doesn’t confess. Not exactly a genius detective on any level, though that’s what Alex Cross is supposed to be. It’s not interesting. It’s not good. It’s insulting and stupid.
There’s a lot of this woke garbage on streaming services, and that’s a big reason why they are struggling. Nobody wants to see this crap. We want to see real drama with cool characters. We don’t want to see tired strawmen taken down by woke Mary Sue heroes/heroines/heroxes. And we know it’s possible to do that because we used to do that. Remember the 80s and the 90s? There was no wokeness. We didn’t care who the actor was in real life. And they didn’t avoid racial issues. Go check out 1982’s 48 Hours, which has a more interesting, smarter, and entertaining take on race relations than any of the oppression operas we see today. The cultural timing is right for the final rejection of wokeness, and the first Tinseltown folks who figure out what the audience really wants will make a mint.
My super-secret email address is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com
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