The book is "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).
The column is "Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It." Excerpt:
The column is "Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It." Excerpt:
There is much about that febrile moment worth satirizing, including the white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable implosion of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles dissects both in the book's best sections.... But “Morning After the Revolution” is undermined by Bowles’s lazy mockery and insupportable generalizations....
I note that Goldberg doesn't provide any support for calling Robin DiAngelo "risible." Is that not also lazy mockery? What did Robin DiAngelo — once vaunted in the New York Times — do to deserve this casual brush-off? She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?
There's also this from Goldberg:
[M]y biggest disagreement with Bowles lies in her insistence that the movement she’s critiquing has triumphed. She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,” as well as the tech sector and academia. This week [on a podcast]... Bowles said, “The revolution didn’t end because it lost. It ended because it won.”
It didn’t, though.... Even if it could be sanctimonious and grating, I fear we’ll come to miss the progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency....
Ha ha ha. You can't miss it if it won't go away. Stop mourning! Trump seems to be coming back. Goldberg knows this. She ends her column with the kind of metaphor that if used by Trump, he'd be soundly denounced:
America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever.
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Goldberg knows “worthless” and she knows it intimately.
She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,”
When State Street and Larry Fink use formerly passive investment as a tool to impose the social credit score…well, yes, that’s what happens…
You wonder if a drop from "vaunted" to "risible" is worse than most falls from grace. It's amazing how quick people turn on someone when the reservation wanders away from them.
But Net Zero has won. And all our electric rates will triple over the next two decades. Why? The federal income tax credits via the IRA has created a giant capex rush to build unreliable solar and wind.
We end up like Germany unless this Net Zero foolishness isn’t stopped.
I’d be surprised if Trump won given the ability of the Dems to cheat. And even if Trump wins, destroying the Deep State is impossible. Vivek had the best idea. Abolish the FBI and Dept. of Energy and layoff 50% of all federal government employees.
The new wokeness is old school Republicans realizing they’ve been duped by the Blob into supporting all kinds of wars and woes.
Eminently gratifying to see wokeness imploding because it is based on lies about the natural law.
Plus high five to those of you who, like me, never invested one minute of news reading to that obvious charlatan.
America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever.
That's what happens when you take a fake vaccine, honey.
Next thing you know, she'll be saying that the worst thing about Trump is his insufferable taunting and ridiculing........
Everything old is new again !
Goldberg doesn't provide any support for calling Robin DiAngelo "risible." Is that not also lazy mockery?
Lack of self-awareness coupled with an unscrupulous willingness to rewrite history to serve the needs of the moment. Oceania has always been at war with critical studies.
I spell it evil
Wokeness is dying, and Goldberg is stuck in the bargaining stage.
The statement that DiAngelo is now "risible" makes me chuckle. Must be true.
How many hit pieces has the NYT has run trying to dismiss this book by (a former) one of their own tribe? What is the total number of lazy verbose hit pieces the NYT will run attacking Bowles' book? What is their sudden beef with DiAngelo?
(I heard an interesting interview yesterday that Dennis Prager did with Bowles on Wednesday. I think you can listen to the podcast at his website pragertopia.com)
Perhaps she was always risible?
Perhaps those who rushed to celebrate her were, themselves, risible?
Perhaps those who celebrated her will self-reflect and acknowledge all the things they now see as problematic?
Perhaps....not.
DiAngelo is the one laughing...all the way to the bank.
Iman, devastating first comment. Very true too.
Nothing funnier that White Leftists and their BS causes.
If the NYT hadn't been all in for Biden and at least challenged him in a manner similar to all the previous times Biden ran for President; then inflation would be in check, Russia might not be fighting Ukraine, and Trump would be in his final months as President. Alas, the NYT backed the wrong treatments for Covid and Trump, leaving us all weaker than we were before.
Trump is not the root problem. Trump is a symptom of the problem. The root problem is pride - pride from the "top" looking down, and pride from the "bottom" looking up. Both "sides" have it in abundance.
And when pride and hubris take hold of everything, which is what we're seeing in the West, soon comes Nemesis.
That's what happens when you take a fake vaccine, honey.
Very astute Christopher. The Left reacted to the fake Trump they had invented instead of dealing with the actual man and his actual ideas and policies. You capture that in your witticism. We still see the same "long DONALD" TDS around here too.
I love this place, especially on days like this.
Question--"What did Robin DiAngelo — once vaunted in the New York Times — do to deserve this casual brush-off? She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?"
Answer--Got it in one. With that, Michelle Goldberg (a figure of fun around here) starts to enter the realm of Strange New Respect. Robin DiAngelo was always worthless--an empty bag of tricks intended to put a certain sort of white person on the defensive through artificial guilt-mongering. White fragility? It was and is the phoniest thing going.
Take a look at that list of "white" values from yesterday's soap opera: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word, a right to comfort, individualism, one right way, and objectivity. It is a prescription for success in life.
Fascinating metaphor, the body and disease. But totally incoherent:
"America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever."
This idea of society as a "body" never works. In this case, juxtaposing "America" to Trump as a "novel pathogen" is idiotic. Trump has half of "America" on his side. Is half of "America" a pathogen also? That appears to be what she thinks. Her metaphor tries to separate Trump from "America." Well, Robin DiAngelo and Michelle Goldberg together may be "exhausted," but perhaps that's because America's "immune system" is starting to work well again.
Does anyone have the receipts on what Michelle Goldberg said about DiAngelo back when White Fragility was all the rage amongst suburban women's book clubs?
Wokeism is bound to fail simply because once people get a taste of it they find it distasteful
Like Althouse said: “The cold dish that is the best revenge is not a calibrated diet dish.“
Alinsky #6 : "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
Maybe blacks aren’t embracing it.
Goldberg is treating her writing job as though she is making an inadvertent confession in the privacy of her Manhattan psychoanalyst.
I recall Goldberg from Bloggingheads. Vacuous.
Long Donald. Heh.
I managed to get around the paywall to read the comments. The first 20 readers' picks are unanimously antiwoke. !!
What did Robin DiAngelo — once vaunted in the New York Times — do to deserve this casual brush-off? She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?
To Bowles' point, DiAngelo and the Left won, and her ideas are deeply embedded in western academia, governments and corporations. So, yes, she is worth less now to the Progressive Movement.
Goldberg is following the basic Left playbook:
We're not changing anything
We are changing it, and it's for the better
The failure of what we supported was "inevitable" so why dwell on it?
Long time readers will remember Althouse's unparalleled takedown of Goldberg on Blogging Heads, in which they compared Obama's latest literary venture and Sarah Palin's autobiography.
Althouse had mischief in her eyes.
@Mike (MJB Wolf) ... thanks for the kind words. I was actually thinking of FJB's fake 'moderate/adults back in charge' schtick but TDS, especially 'Long TDS', works even better. They couldn't quit him for the three years it wasn't clear he would be back in the game, and it's still not clear the PTB know how to cope.
As Jonathan points out, the metaphor makes little sense as she uses it. Once you've survived a novel pathogen, your immune system should know how to deal with it. If you succumb to the disease after a second infection it's because the disease mutated to avoid your immune system or the rest of your body is not able to support your immune system, not because your immune system was 'exhausted'.
Lest we forget how truly bereft of ideas such journalists are, how truly risible:
"Be it resolved, don't trust the mainstream media."
Bowles tells Prager he is the inspiration for her book because the idea came when she was assigned (and did) an interview with Dennis Prager for NYT on PragerU. She wasn't "critical enough" in first draft so they forced her to meet with the "disinformation experts" at the Times to get "more insight" for her article. She now regrets adding the crap from the SPLC (said about PragerU) that the "experts" insisted her article needed. It led to her resignation from her "dream job."
What did Robin DiAngelo — once vaunted in the New York Times — do to deserve this casual brush-off? She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?
Do you believe that DiAngelo isn't risible?
The left went from calling people they hate vermin to calling them germs. That gives them the perfect reason to wipe their enemies out.
By the way, she has a deep enchanting laugh-giggle. She often sounds to me like Tulsi Gabbard. A lot. I really like listening* to her talk and react to Dennis's questions.
*It does require a subscription, it turns out. My earlier supposition was in error. Oops.
This is why the NYTimes is essential reading to a certain class: you have to keep up with the latest styles, who's in who's out, in le monde Progressive. Di Angelo has gone from NYT best-seller to risible, where have you been?
Those caught up in the liberal tradition of open debate, rationalism, objective reporting sooner or later find they have no place in this Mean Girls world, as witness James Bennet, Bari Weiss and now Nellie Bowles.
Althouse. You should look at Lionel Shiver’s latest book. “Mania” in which the Mental Parity movement has taken hold. No one deemed smarter than the next, the word stupid banished. Swiftian satire.
I note that Goldberg doesn't provide any support for calling Robin DiAngelo "risible." Is that not also lazy mockery? What did Robin DiAngelo — once vaunted in the New York Times — do to deserve this casual brush-off? She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?
DiAngelo was a tool. She is an evil racist and sexist. She was a leader in the maoist wokeness movement.
But now yes she is worthless to them because everyone hates her. Everyone but stupid white single women that is. She gave stupid white women power to call everyone else racist and sexist for a little while and they still love her for it.
She inspired the white single woman's battle against their own mediocrity. But the fact that they were mediocre losers is in the long run an insurmountable problem. But they all get trophies and college degrees.
'She was everywhere and now she's... what? Worthless?'
Yes.
Yes she is.
Wholeness isn’t dying. It is entering its final phase: nazism.
Yah. I feel you but... here is the thing. DeAngelo's intellectual predecessors in the Frankfurt School in the 1950's and '60s and '70s we're just as despised and mocked by the media and polls as DeAngelo and her ilk are becoming today. However remember though that The Frankfurters ended up winning. A long slog perhaps, but they won. Let that sink in before you indulge your schadenfreude fantasies.
"Risible" is one of those words that says "trying too hard." It should be used with extreme care, especially when "laughable" is available.
Robin D'Angelo was ALWAYS worthless, a corporate-shill scam-artist* who somehow convinced a multitude of self-righteous white women to drop all pretense to critical thinking due to the "fierce urgency" of the groupthink-of-the-moment.
But--as I said in 2020 and is still true--a couple hundred pages of unsupported assertions does not a "compelling argument" make.
*See also Kendi, Ibram X.
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