Comment by freetime2
5 days ago
Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion:
> Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes.
I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left.
> and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
> it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left
He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
Not to mention marking any mention of "cis" as hate speech. This is not a recognised slur, it is only treated as such on Musk's whim, because he personally dislikes it.
You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.