"For academics playing word games, this is fun. For gangs of 'woke' students — or Times employees, who have managed to 'cancel' a series of the paper’s top writers recently — it can produce a feeling of enormous power and self-importance."

"But if you’re Macron or any sensible European observer, seeing a United States in which playing the national anthem or displaying the flag is deemed 'offensive' and 'problematic,' in which professors are suspended or threatened for quoting Supreme Court opinions verbatim when they contain unapproved language and which has seen months of urban riots tearing apart some of America’s biggest cities, how could you not say 'no thanks'? By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of woke leftism in the United States have been poisonous. No honest observer could claim that our campuses are friendlier, our cities healthier or our institutions more productive as a result of its introduction. The defenders of woke theory say that France is becoming more diverse, and that’s why it needs more of the overt race-consciousness and blame-assignment that their theory provides. But, of course, France’s increased diversity is precisely why it’s right to shun a philosophy of race that is affirmatively based on racial name-calling, division and guilt-mongering."

Writes Glenn Reynolds in "The French are absolutely right to say ‘no thanks’ to US woke-ism" (NY Post).