Yes, Butler's use of her formidable brainpower is a classic illustration of what George Orwell meant when he said that "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
September 27, 2019, at the Lincoln Theater (historically Black), Washington, DC. That is the date and location of the Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ibrahim X. Kendi event, which is the lead image for this post.
That Coates/Kendi triumphalist moment in September 2019, on highly favorable terrain, is what Steve Sailer uses to symbolize the mid(?)-2010s-to-early-2020s Peak Wokeness era. Interesting how that is before the 2020 blow-up.
.
The Coates/Kendi Sept 2019 event on a longer timeline:
_________
The Coates/Kendi (Sept 2019) event was:
- 7 years, 7 months after the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida (Feb 2012).
- 6 years, 11 months after Obama was re-elected (Nov 2012).
- 4 years, 3 months after Trump declared his intention to run for president (June 2015), anti-Wokeness forces eventually coming to champion him (despite his extremely poor character, laziness, and lack of principle; the embrace of a desperate people); and 2 years, 11 months after Trump was elected (Nov 2016).
- (0 year-mark in this timeline: the Coates/Kendi event of late-Sept 2019.)
- 0 years, 4-5 months before the Covid Panic got going (ca. late-Jan and Feb 2020);
- 0 years, 8 months before the George Floyd protests began (late-May 2020), which really inaugurated the core-period of true, manic-level Peak Wokeness, which clearly piggybacked on the Lockdowns immediately preceding it and on digitization of culture (allowing anti-White memes to spread, creating energies for a social mania).
- 1 year, 1 month before Biden elected amid disputed election following avalanche of mail-in ballots allowed by twin social-manias of Covid and Wokeness. (Nov 2020).
- 5 years, 1 month before Trump elected second time, by around which time people already spoke of an anti-Wokeness Vibe Shift. (Nov 2024)
- 5 years, 10 months before this time of writing, before Steve Sailer ends up using the moment to illustrate the idea of the "Wokeness Era." (Aug 2025)
Jan 25, 2013: Steve Sailer's first-ever mention of "Ta-Nehisi Coates." (6 years, 8 months before the Coates/Kendi event memorialized here as the past-specter of Peak Wokeness).
Sailer mentioned Coates in print, in main blog-posts and columns, many dozens of times between that Jan 2013 mention and the end of 2015 alone. The frequency of Coates-mentions was especially strong around the summer of 2015.
Coates was one of the biggest Sailerian reference-points of the mid-2010s. "Genius T. Coates" is how Steve took to calling the pro-Black but inconveniently-pro-Palestinian Wokeness-intellectual, after Coates was awarded the MacArhtur Genius grant in Sept 2015. That Sailer identified him as a big deal before the Genius grant counts as another victory for Sailer.
The intelligent left-wing men in academia knew that they had to defer to "minorities" in order not to run the risk of being targeted by virtue of having the wrong identity. So they largely kept their heads down for the past decade or so. There are/were some clever Marxists who published with Verso etc. Many of them are/were part of the post-68 older generation (Negri, Balibar, Bifo) and the younger ones - those involved in the Historical Materialism journal, for example - have remained relatively obscure, because working on value theory, class etc. is now coded as reactionary, so again, there's a lot of public deference and performative mentioning of identitarian and progressive figures, not because they have anything interesting to say, but because this is the penance that white men must pay to non-white non-men as the price of continuing to survive at all in the academy.
Are "conversations with ChatGPT" a good source for controversial truths (such as the intellectual origins of anti-Western, anti-white-male Wokeness)?
The problem seems to be implicitly taking the LLM-chatbots as oracles of truth, rather than the mundane word-guessing-'n'-matching game which is what the LLM-word-bots are.
The truth is: the intellectual-social impetus and energies for Wokeness are much more 'white' than this ChatGPT list thinks ("thinks"). The public-facing names, promoted for show, are much less white. It's a potemkin list.
Who were the Big Brains running things behind the scenes? And if they were so smart, why did they promote such stupid front people that they managed to get Donald Trump re-elected?
10/7 and its aftermath got Trump reelected. Things like America's Top Public Intellectual TNC siding with Hamas because massacred Jews reminded him of what whites deserve created a few swing votes. Not enough to make me feel OK about America's future, but enough for Trump to win.
Immigration and wokeness drove Trump's re-election, not October 7. Enough black and latino men swung for Trump after contemplating another 4 years of liberal women lecturing their sons and nephews about gender identity.
Immigration and wokeness didn't move the needle for Big Tech. There were lots of Big Tech defections that led to Trump carrying all the swing states. So - Mark Zuckerberg decided no longer to drive up the votes in Democrat areas of swing states (as he did in 2020). Elon Musk bought Twitter and refashioned it to Dem detriment. Andreesen - a big Big Tech investor - switched. Many others did too.
Actually, both current wars - Gaza/Hezbollah/AnsarAllah/Iran AND Ukraine - drove the Big Tech switch. The fact for example that all of the West together could not provide enough military material for the Ukrainians raised doubts about good governance throughout the West. Not in MSM media, but amongst the Big Tech...
Big Tech may have money but you have to show actual vote counts, and that was black and latino men who are utterly indifferent to the Middle East or Ukraine.
The whole idea of money is that it chases people who are good at convincing voters but who need "buyable channels" to do their work. And one doesn't convince people repeatedly by lying.
Hail can speak for himself, obviously, but I think his point is not that some white Big Brains were pulling the strings behind the scenes, but that to the extent there is actual theory behind wokeness, it was developed prior to the cultural phenomenon called "wokeness" by people like the ones you list: Foucault, Gould, Lewontin, Fish. Their theories are fraudulent of course, but they are at least theories that can be engaged as such.
The people ChatGPT lists, by contrast, are mostly grifters, mountebanks, and grandstanders, who are not trying to explain facts but just to extend the Grift. To be fair, you asked ChatGPT for "intellectual proponents", so ChatGPT is not wrong produce the list it did because wokeness has no real theory other than "white man bad", which they can't state too plainly if they want to maintain the fiction of being serious intellectuals., when all they really do is spray a word-salad behind which cover their administrative and governance counterparts can continue to advance.
P.S. When ChatGPT says "I can’t help with that", it doesn't mean that there is no information it could provide, but rather it means that it has been programmed not to provide an answer that might be favorable to white men, which is how it reads your request, so it just says it can't help, which is correct: it is literally programmed not help with such requests.
Was your request for "great white mathematicians" or "great mathematicians"?
I wonder what non-whites a "great mathematician" list could be salted with.
Maybe ChatGPT could have inserted a plug for an anonymous ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian, but by Federal Government standards, those guys would technically still be "white".
A future ChatGPT iteration might have a plug for a recent Asian polymath or two.
Incidentally, here are the top nine great mathematicians (of any background) from Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment" database:
Euler, Leonhard
Newton, Isaac
Euclid of Alexandria
Gauss, Carl
Fermat, Pierre de
Leibniz, Gottfried
Descartes, René
Cantor, Georg
Pascal, Blaise
They are all white men, and 5/9 the same ones—if not the same order—as ChatGPT's list. Three (Galois, Hilbert, Neumann) of the other four appear further down in Murray's inventory. Wiles is too recent for Murray's method.
The first non-European in Murray's inventory is Khwarizmi at #43, but as a Persian, he's still white.
The Indian, Aryabhata I, appears at #62, but given the whole Indo-European thing, his whiteness is debatable.
The first plainly non-white mathematician, medieval Chinaman Chu Shih-chieh, appears at #153.
The first non-man (aka woman), German Jewish genius Emmy Noether, appears at #94.
Anyway, long story short, per Murray, you have to discount the first 93 greatest mathematicians to find a non-man, and discount the first 152 mathematicians to find a definitive non-Westerner.
Sure, but for that it can simply read wikipedia. Which is still OK when dealing with mathematics (unlike when dealing with Israel).
Anyway, I am missing people like LaPlace, LaGrange, Cauchy, DiRichlet, Riemann, Markov and Kolmogorov. Lobachevsky? Also, Noether is big name in Algebra and Theoretical Physics (conservation laws).
The usual answers are Khwarizmi or Kajari (justifiably for the former, more dubiously for the latter), but those guys are Persian (also white, technically).
Tim Wise is actually a good representative of what I think Steve is asking for: a white (and/or Jewish) male responsible for promoting wokeness. Wise is not a theorist, and barely an intellectual at all, but more of an anti-white busybody who flew all over the country marketing anti-whiteness as something respectable and legal.
Interestingly, as the Great Awokening got underway, Wise kind of fell into the background. I can't recall hearing much from him since then. Whether this is because the logic of white-man-bad finally applied to him too, or because he simply became fatigued by his grueling schedule, I don't know.
While he is no doubt an irritant so long as he continues to draw breath, for some reason his influence seems to have declined.
A Google Trends analysis shows his salad days as 2004-2016. After the Trumpening, he went into a pronounced decline. Despite a momentary spike during the 2020 Floyd riots, he has basically flatlined this decade.
For whatever reason—less effort by him, less receptivity from the public—he just doesn't have the public profile he used to.
The socialist left post-2012 tended to adopt leaders like Bernie Sanders (b. 1941), Jeremy Corbyn (b. 1949) and Jean-Luc Melenchon (b. 1951) who came of age before the first wave of political correctness.
ChatGPT will provide biased answers for two reasons:
- biased training data. Wikipedia and Reddit are both big sources for training LLMs. The fact is that most of the public internet is leftist because conservatives ceded the territory long ago. The LLMs innocently reflect this bias.
- guardrails: once they are trained, vendors can then explicitly steer models via fine-tuning (LoRA adapters, etc), and extensive system prompts behind the scenes: “You are an antiracist assistant…”
Musk’s Grok is far less heavy handed in the latter category, but can’t avoid being influenced by the former.
I believe that the fact that left-wing men had to adopt a self-denying ordinance was of material importance to Trump’s re-election. It led to Dems adopting purity spiral policies and being unable to focus on election-winning basics (cost of living). Notable that white men like Ezra Klein are now reasserting their policy-forming chops.
This is another good example of how insane the left's politics are. What is basically a tribal conflict thousands of miles away whose outcome doesn't really affect anyone in the US's life is rapidly becoming the key moral litmus test in progressive politics.
Obviously this is partly due to the fact that mass immigration means we have a lot of recent arrivals or 1st gen immigrants for whom this *is* very important due to their ethnic/religious background, and they all gravitated towards anti-Western domestic politics and were often given prominent platforms and even leftist whites are supposed to show deference to them.
The left has always had an anti-Western element as seen through the prominence of various Marxist/communist intellectuals for the last 100 years, but at some point they moved from the fringe to becoming the driving force of their politics. Basically all of their big issues - mass immigration, DEI, trans - can be seen as an assault on our historic civilization and the core groups responsible for it.
> "Were There Any Really Smart Woke Intellectuals?"
Taking ChatGPT's list as dispositive, no.
> "And were any of them white men?"
Again taking ChatGPT's list as dispositive, no.
But quoting my other reply to you,
"to the extent there is actual theory behind wokeness, it was developed prior to the cultural phenomenon called 'wokeness' by people like the ones you list: Foucault, Gould, Lewontin, Fish."
So in reality, yes, there were several white men, mostly Jewish, but you already know them and have engaged with their theories at some length.
P.S. Also quoting my other reply to you,
"When ChatGPT says 'I can’t help with that', it doesn't mean that there is no information it could provide, but rather it means that it has been programmed not to provide an answer that might be favorable to white men, which is how it reads your request, so it just says it can't help, which is correct: it is literally programmed not help with such requests."
If you want to persist in this line of inquiry, you might be better off asking Grok or other LLM that has not been so ruthlessly inoculated with political correctness if you want actual answers, though ChatGPT's answer might more accurately reflect the zeitgeist: that no endorsement of white men as white men is permitted.
Well, if you are looking for the intellectual fathers of wokeness, they're in the 20th century, and not all of them Jewish (e.g., Foucault).
As discussed, the 21st century's Great Awokening was less an intellectual movement than simply a politico-cultural grift exploiting the regulatory openings of the 20th century's "civil rights" innovations. Richard Hanania, whom I otherwise hesitate to recommend, was correct in saying that wokeness is just the consequence of civil rights law.
But if you are looking for Jewish men who provided rhetorical cover for the 21st century Great Awokening, you can probably find a big list if you filter pre-Elon blue-check Twitter for woke male Jews, which will likely be a bunch of journalists, activists, and academics.
I don't think he's looking for the forebears of wokeness. He's asking for the smart people who are working on wokeness now--the managers and CEOs of the wokeness factories.
If he is looking for managers and CEOs of "wokeness factories" among males, he may miss them since so much of wokeness is female-led (e.g., Robin "White Fragility" DiAngelo—a name as yet unmentioned here).
Incidentally, this may be why wokeness is notably lacking in intellectual heft: so much of it is about female feelings rather than male logic.
The post-2010s woke progressive movement is obviously less Jewish in character than the 1960s-70s Left.
This is problematic for the "groyper" right, who need to keep their antiquated anti-Jewish grift alive. That's why you'll see them reaching ever further into the past to justify their beliefs, like those New York Times op-eds about redlining and Emmett Till.
I sort of agree, but the 21st century has been notably intellectually sterile, so it's not just Jewish intellectualism that has fallen back, it is all intellectualism generally.
I carry no special brief for "groypers", but in their defense, anyone who wants to trace intellectual roots has to go back at least to the 20th century, since there aren't any intellectual roots in the 21st century...
...yet.
The only semi-exceptions I can think of are BAP-esque "vitalism" (which of course actually traces to 19th century Nietzsche), and "Islamic radicalism", which might more accurately be called "Islamic originalism" and therefore trace back to 7th century Mohammed.
If it's true that the 2010s-20s have been "intellectually sterile," I'd propose it's ironically because of the Internet and digitization of a great deal of life, thought, and 'discourse.'
The main trends of digitalized life are all against thinking. Ideas require(d) an intensity of concentration and seriousness of mind, one which came natural with the man-against-world analog world.
The monastery-like atmosphere of the library and engagement with texts; against the constant screeching agitation of always-online life, the stupid-factory of twitter, and the rest. The tyranny of Wikipedia and Google-Search and so forth, and know LLM-bots that feed back similar info to you. This all runs against intellectual adventure, for better and worse.
People on the internet still engage the same mental muscle and habit that past intellectuals did; they just focus on answering the fundamental and very personal question: How can I become more attractive?
I'd argue that has always been the subtext of masturbatory intellectualism (as opposed to the useful kind, science, math, history)
Remember, when talking about population data, one has to attribute the difference in the means to something. And claiming that the different academic, professional, or person life differences between blacks and whites is all genetics but the differences between men and women is all cultural does not really work.
A good test of is woke really over would be can the Dems run two white men in what should be the highly winnable year of 2028? (My bet would be on a man and a moderate midwestern white woman.)
The intellectual bell curve says it all. When the mean IQ of a population is lower the outlier high intellegence is lower. The issue with woke is that they demand that we all totally ignore that the smartest among them barely meet midwit status. This is a successful strategy for them. Producing books, papers and pronouncements that appeal to other midwits. Now I am solidly in the midwit IQ range myself but have always recognised those smarter than me. A legacy of growing up in a household with a father at least 10 points higher IQ than myself is that I tend to discount the ideas of those midwits I judge to be no smarter than myself and no more insightful or worth studying. It sounds like racism to say that I have never met a black person smarter than myself but it's true. I can tell when people are smarter than me but not by how much. I can usually quantify how much less smart or less educated another person is than myself pretty easily. I have met guite a few African-Americans that were my intellectual equals but none that were smarter whereas I have met a handful of European-Americans that obviously were so. My state has never had much of an Asian presence before the mid 70's so I never had to compete with or work for enough of them to meet my intellectual superiors among their numbers. So I am an obvious intellectual snob, unimpressed with the ideas of other midwits, which seems to include ALL of the woke popular writers. Many of whom seem to struggle to acheive midwittery.
You don't need a difference in means. It's sufficient to have a difference in standard deviation which would result in different thickness of right tail. Larry Summers was cancelled for this insight and thus lost the Harvard presidency lol
While statistics is not my long suit, can you even have a difference in the "tails" without a difference in the mean? My understanding is that when the means are only a standard deviation apart, the standard deviations from them are pretty close. 100 is considered to be 1SD from 85 just as 85 is 1SD from 100.
Yes, of course you can have a difference in the tails simply due to different dispersion coefficients (that translate to SDs). It's statistics 101. It's also what is being argued for some male vs female differences. So if you choose a threshold below the average mean, in such a situation a higher percentage of a population with a LOWER SD will pass.
I know that is the "conventional wisdom". But I have my doubts. More than half of college students are now women. Since women are just like men, college is just like it was fifty years ago. Right?
One can have different tails when using normal statistics on distributions that are not that close to normally distributed. Remember, the mean or median income is much close to one end of the tail, zero, than to the other end of the tail, billions.
What is most striking to me over the last 15 years or so are is how hard basically everyone on the left goes in on whatever the current thing is - everyone falls into line and there is essentially no heterodoxy. Intersectionality/wokeness, de-policing/minimizing criminal penalties, mass immigration, trans, COVID, etc. All of these sprung forth, were loudly and uncritically promoted by academia, the media, various issue based non-profits, and politicians.
Even today after these issues cost them the presidency and Orange Hitler is back in charge, for the most part they are still defending deeply unpopular issues. To a large extent this is probably because of the left’s minoritarian fetish - an almost instinctive attraction to trying to force society to accept the demands of social outliers, which is of course a hostility to norms and the majority of the public.
It also goes along with the left having never really having an endpoint on these subjects. It’s just constantly pushing the boundary until forced to stop, and aside from their terrible ideas this is the most dangerous thing about the modern left. At no point as these various movements developed a head of steam did anyone from within the tribe publicly question the wisdom of them or the direction it was taking society.
I recall more examples of prominent or “mainstream” people associated with the Left, or Center-Left, distancing themselves from Wokeness projects and tropes.
See, e.g., Gavin Newsom. CNN and MSNBC likewise are relatively quiet on the topics.
What I’ve noticed is some Wokeness advocates saying they are under attack from overwhelming forces of anti-Wokeness which are exaggerating what Wokeness was and over-inflating it. (Which is probably true in many individual cases.)
On the contrary. Wokism as a political thing may be damping down. But wokism as a religion is, if anything, accelerating. In the religion's glossy magazines and think pieces, they're doubling and tripling down on trans, climate hysteria, Palestine, etc.
> "how hard basically everyone on the left goes in on whatever the current thing is"
Could it be because the NPC meme is, essentially, real: that leftists really do have no ability to think independently, so they rely on mental scripts, which run perpetually, unaffected by reality?
Yeah, I do think there is a lot of truth to it as we've all had numerous experiences of interacting with someone that is high IQ but uncritically buys into the party line, especially on DEI and trans stuff lately. When you actually have the chance to have a conversation and introduce factual information usually its obvious that a) their position at no point involved even basic knowledge of the issue at hand and b) they really, really don't want to internalize new information that would force a re-evaluation of their politics and morals.
At the end of the day, a lot of their politics is *solely* about signaling and there is essentially zero considered thought behind it. This can persist even when they personally experience the downsides of their politics or it's pointed out they definitely don't walk the talk, like the prototypical progressive who flees the city for a conservative suburb "for the schools" as soon as they start having kids.
I think much of it comes down to the revulsion of occasionally admitting they were duped by those they trusted or that those evil, racist non-Democrats are correct from time to time.
Also, being a racist or seen as racist is by far the worst thing they can be (unless the racism is directed at White people). This leads otherwise intelligent people down absurd paths of circular logic and willful ignorance about many topics that may only be tangentially related to race.
> When you have a conversation and introduce factual information, it's obvious that a) their position at no point involved even basic knowledge of the issue at hand and b) they really, really don't want to internalize new information that would force a re-evaluation of their politics and morals.
I've recently held three conversations with family that followed this script. The latest started with endorsements of mainstream Woke doctrines and ended with a puzzled look, "Why do you care so much about this stuff?"
Thinking indepently correlates with a schizoid personality.
No, the main difference between left and right is novelty vs tradition. Tradition feeds into common sense, so usually tradition is right. From time to time - as with geocentricity in the 15th-17th century it is however wrong.
Judith Butler is not an idiot, so there's that.
Yes, Butler's use of her formidable brainpower is a classic illustration of what George Orwell meant when he said that "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
I mean obviously not but she does take a single ten cent idea and wraps it in hundreds of pages of twenty dollar words
She created an entirely new language, that is no mean feat. Unfortunately no one besides her understands it.
Historical note:
September 27, 2019, at the Lincoln Theater (historically Black), Washington, DC. That is the date and location of the Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ibrahim X. Kendi event, which is the lead image for this post.
That Coates/Kendi triumphalist moment in September 2019, on highly favorable terrain, is what Steve Sailer uses to symbolize the mid(?)-2010s-to-early-2020s Peak Wokeness era. Interesting how that is before the 2020 blow-up.
.
The Coates/Kendi Sept 2019 event on a longer timeline:
_________
The Coates/Kendi (Sept 2019) event was:
- 7 years, 7 months after the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida (Feb 2012).
- 6 years, 11 months after Obama was re-elected (Nov 2012).
[EDIT: Jan 2013: Sailer's first mention of Ta-Nehisi Coates; see: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/were-there-any-really-smart-woke/comment/144651651 )
- 4 years, 3 months after Trump declared his intention to run for president (June 2015), anti-Wokeness forces eventually coming to champion him (despite his extremely poor character, laziness, and lack of principle; the embrace of a desperate people); and 2 years, 11 months after Trump was elected (Nov 2016).
- (0 year-mark in this timeline: the Coates/Kendi event of late-Sept 2019.)
- 0 years, 4-5 months before the Covid Panic got going (ca. late-Jan and Feb 2020);
- 0 years, 8 months before the George Floyd protests began (late-May 2020), which really inaugurated the core-period of true, manic-level Peak Wokeness, which clearly piggybacked on the Lockdowns immediately preceding it and on digitization of culture (allowing anti-White memes to spread, creating energies for a social mania).
- 1 year, 1 month before Biden elected amid disputed election following avalanche of mail-in ballots allowed by twin social-manias of Covid and Wokeness. (Nov 2020).
- 5 years, 1 month before Trump elected second time, by around which time people already spoke of an anti-Wokeness Vibe Shift. (Nov 2024)
- 5 years, 10 months before this time of writing, before Steve Sailer ends up using the moment to illustrate the idea of the "Wokeness Era." (Aug 2025)
The numerology is profound, such complexity demonstrates superior analytic power.
Addendum:
Jan 25, 2013: Steve Sailer's first-ever mention of "Ta-Nehisi Coates." (6 years, 8 months before the Coates/Kendi event memorialized here as the past-specter of Peak Wokeness).
Sailer mentioned Coates in print, in main blog-posts and columns, many dozens of times between that Jan 2013 mention and the end of 2015 alone. The frequency of Coates-mentions was especially strong around the summer of 2015.
Coates was one of the biggest Sailerian reference-points of the mid-2010s. "Genius T. Coates" is how Steve took to calling the pro-Black but inconveniently-pro-Palestinian Wokeness-intellectual, after Coates was awarded the MacArhtur Genius grant in Sept 2015. That Sailer identified him as a big deal before the Genius grant counts as another victory for Sailer.
The intelligent left-wing men in academia knew that they had to defer to "minorities" in order not to run the risk of being targeted by virtue of having the wrong identity. So they largely kept their heads down for the past decade or so. There are/were some clever Marxists who published with Verso etc. Many of them are/were part of the post-68 older generation (Negri, Balibar, Bifo) and the younger ones - those involved in the Historical Materialism journal, for example - have remained relatively obscure, because working on value theory, class etc. is now coded as reactionary, so again, there's a lot of public deference and performative mentioning of identitarian and progressive figures, not because they have anything interesting to say, but because this is the penance that white men must pay to non-white non-men as the price of continuing to survive at all in the academy.
Their heads are still down.
Sorry forgot Will Stancil.
Nina did specify *intelligent* left wing men.
Are "conversations with ChatGPT" a good source for controversial truths (such as the intellectual origins of anti-Western, anti-white-male Wokeness)?
The problem seems to be implicitly taking the LLM-chatbots as oracles of truth, rather than the mundane word-guessing-'n'-matching game which is what the LLM-word-bots are.
The truth is: the intellectual-social impetus and energies for Wokeness are much more 'white' than this ChatGPT list thinks ("thinks"). The public-facing names, promoted for show, are much less white. It's a potemkin list.
Who were the Big Brains running things behind the scenes? And if they were so smart, why did they promote such stupid front people that they managed to get Donald Trump re-elected?
10/7 and its aftermath got Trump reelected. Things like America's Top Public Intellectual TNC siding with Hamas because massacred Jews reminded him of what whites deserve created a few swing votes. Not enough to make me feel OK about America's future, but enough for Trump to win.
Immigration and wokeness drove Trump's re-election, not October 7. Enough black and latino men swung for Trump after contemplating another 4 years of liberal women lecturing their sons and nephews about gender identity.
Immigration and wokeness didn't move the needle for Big Tech. There were lots of Big Tech defections that led to Trump carrying all the swing states. So - Mark Zuckerberg decided no longer to drive up the votes in Democrat areas of swing states (as he did in 2020). Elon Musk bought Twitter and refashioned it to Dem detriment. Andreesen - a big Big Tech investor - switched. Many others did too.
Actually, both current wars - Gaza/Hezbollah/AnsarAllah/Iran AND Ukraine - drove the Big Tech switch. The fact for example that all of the West together could not provide enough military material for the Ukrainians raised doubts about good governance throughout the West. Not in MSM media, but amongst the Big Tech...
Big Tech may have money but you have to show actual vote counts, and that was black and latino men who are utterly indifferent to the Middle East or Ukraine.
The whole idea of money is that it chases people who are good at convincing voters but who need "buyable channels" to do their work. And one doesn't convince people repeatedly by lying.
Isn't it pretty to think so?
Hail can speak for himself, obviously, but I think his point is not that some white Big Brains were pulling the strings behind the scenes, but that to the extent there is actual theory behind wokeness, it was developed prior to the cultural phenomenon called "wokeness" by people like the ones you list: Foucault, Gould, Lewontin, Fish. Their theories are fraudulent of course, but they are at least theories that can be engaged as such.
The people ChatGPT lists, by contrast, are mostly grifters, mountebanks, and grandstanders, who are not trying to explain facts but just to extend the Grift. To be fair, you asked ChatGPT for "intellectual proponents", so ChatGPT is not wrong produce the list it did because wokeness has no real theory other than "white man bad", which they can't state too plainly if they want to maintain the fiction of being serious intellectuals., when all they really do is spray a word-salad behind which cover their administrative and governance counterparts can continue to advance.
P.S. When ChatGPT says "I can’t help with that", it doesn't mean that there is no information it could provide, but rather it means that it has been programmed not to provide an answer that might be favorable to white men, which is how it reads your request, so it just says it can't help, which is correct: it is literally programmed not help with such requests.
Interestingly, ChatGPT responded with an extremely reasonable list when I asked it to list top mathematicians who were white men.
But woke intellectuals who were white men is verboten.
Great white male mathematicians according to ChatGPT's not bad list:
Euclid (c. 300 BCE, Greek) — “Father of Geometry,” author of Elements.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727, English) — Developed calculus (independently of Leibniz), laws of motion, and universal gravitation.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716, German) — Co-inventor of calculus, contributions to binary numbers and logic.
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783, Swiss) — Prolific in nearly every branch of mathematics; introduced much modern notation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855, German) — “Prince of Mathematicians,” major work in number theory, statistics, astronomy, and analysis.
Évariste Galois (1811–1832, French) — Founder of group theory.
David Hilbert (1862–1943, German) — Influential in geometry, logic, and mathematical foundations; famous for “Hilbert’s Problems.”
John von Neumann (1903–1957, Hungarian-American) — Work in game theory, quantum mechanics, computer science, and mathematics.
Andrew Wiles (b. 1953, British) — Proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in the 1990s.
Was your request for "great white mathematicians" or "great mathematicians"?
I wonder what non-whites a "great mathematician" list could be salted with.
Maybe ChatGPT could have inserted a plug for an anonymous ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian, but by Federal Government standards, those guys would technically still be "white".
A future ChatGPT iteration might have a plug for a recent Asian polymath or two.
Incidentally, here are the top nine great mathematicians (of any background) from Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment" database:
Euler, Leonhard
Newton, Isaac
Euclid of Alexandria
Gauss, Carl
Fermat, Pierre de
Leibniz, Gottfried
Descartes, René
Cantor, Georg
Pascal, Blaise
They are all white men, and 5/9 the same ones—if not the same order—as ChatGPT's list. Three (Galois, Hilbert, Neumann) of the other four appear further down in Murray's inventory. Wiles is too recent for Murray's method.
The first non-European in Murray's inventory is Khwarizmi at #43, but as a Persian, he's still white.
The Indian, Aryabhata I, appears at #62, but given the whole Indo-European thing, his whiteness is debatable.
The first plainly non-white mathematician, medieval Chinaman Chu Shih-chieh, appears at #153.
The first non-man (aka woman), German Jewish genius Emmy Noether, appears at #94.
Anyway, long story short, per Murray, you have to discount the first 93 greatest mathematicians to find a non-man, and discount the first 152 mathematicians to find a definitive non-Westerner.
Sure, but for that it can simply read wikipedia. Which is still OK when dealing with mathematics (unlike when dealing with Israel).
Anyway, I am missing people like LaPlace, LaGrange, Cauchy, DiRichlet, Riemann, Markov and Kolmogorov. Lobachevsky? Also, Noether is big name in Algebra and Theoretical Physics (conservation laws).
Who else is it going to propose?
George Washington Carver?
Sometimes, there's no alternative to white men.
Arabs from 1,000 years ago.
Arabs are white by Federal Government definition.
Anyway, which Arabs?
The usual answers are Khwarizmi or Kajari (justifiably for the former, more dubiously for the latter), but those guys are Persian (also white, technically).
Don't confuse Islam with Arab.
I asked Grok and it came back with Tim Wise. So yeah, they got nothing.
Tim Wise is actually a good representative of what I think Steve is asking for: a white (and/or Jewish) male responsible for promoting wokeness. Wise is not a theorist, and barely an intellectual at all, but more of an anti-white busybody who flew all over the country marketing anti-whiteness as something respectable and legal.
Interestingly, as the Great Awokening got underway, Wise kind of fell into the background. I can't recall hearing much from him since then. Whether this is because the logic of white-man-bad finally applied to him too, or because he simply became fatigued by his grueling schedule, I don't know.
He’s very angry online. I’m sure he’s still able to do a significant amount of damage to what he sets his sights on though.
Thanks for the update.
While he is no doubt an irritant so long as he continues to draw breath, for some reason his influence seems to have declined.
A Google Trends analysis shows his salad days as 2004-2016. After the Trumpening, he went into a pronounced decline. Despite a momentary spike during the 2020 Floyd riots, he has basically flatlined this decade.
For whatever reason—less effort by him, less receptivity from the public—he just doesn't have the public profile he used to.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F04zr20&hl=en-US
The socialist left post-2012 tended to adopt leaders like Bernie Sanders (b. 1941), Jeremy Corbyn (b. 1949) and Jean-Luc Melenchon (b. 1951) who came of age before the first wave of political correctness.
ChatGPT will provide biased answers for two reasons:
- biased training data. Wikipedia and Reddit are both big sources for training LLMs. The fact is that most of the public internet is leftist because conservatives ceded the territory long ago. The LLMs innocently reflect this bias.
- guardrails: once they are trained, vendors can then explicitly steer models via fine-tuning (LoRA adapters, etc), and extensive system prompts behind the scenes: “You are an antiracist assistant…”
Musk’s Grok is far less heavy handed in the latter category, but can’t avoid being influenced by the former.
"Were There Any Really Smart Woke Intellectuals?"
No. They have all been great fools. I doubt any of the truly woke even qualifies as an "intellectual".
Steven Jay Gould?
Gould was anti IQ although I don't know if that made him woke per se. Also, he has been dead for 20 years now
The term "deceased" after a couple of those names is the best news I've had so far today.
Most of the people above absolutely salivate over Foucault (particularly Butler), and he himself was a white man.
I believe that the fact that left-wing men had to adopt a self-denying ordinance was of material importance to Trump’s re-election. It led to Dems adopting purity spiral policies and being unable to focus on election-winning basics (cost of living). Notable that white men like Ezra Klein are now reasserting their policy-forming chops.
The other handicap is Palestine, so Josh Shapiro isn't getting nominated.
This is another good example of how insane the left's politics are. What is basically a tribal conflict thousands of miles away whose outcome doesn't really affect anyone in the US's life is rapidly becoming the key moral litmus test in progressive politics.
Obviously this is partly due to the fact that mass immigration means we have a lot of recent arrivals or 1st gen immigrants for whom this *is* very important due to their ethnic/religious background, and they all gravitated towards anti-Western domestic politics and were often given prominent platforms and even leftist whites are supposed to show deference to them.
The left has always had an anti-Western element as seen through the prominence of various Marxist/communist intellectuals for the last 100 years, but at some point they moved from the fringe to becoming the driving force of their politics. Basically all of their big issues - mass immigration, DEI, trans - can be seen as an assault on our historic civilization and the core groups responsible for it.
Coates and Kendi aren't especially smart except in contrast to their demographic as a whole.
> "Were There Any Really Smart Woke Intellectuals?"
Taking ChatGPT's list as dispositive, no.
> "And were any of them white men?"
Again taking ChatGPT's list as dispositive, no.
But quoting my other reply to you,
"to the extent there is actual theory behind wokeness, it was developed prior to the cultural phenomenon called 'wokeness' by people like the ones you list: Foucault, Gould, Lewontin, Fish."
So in reality, yes, there were several white men, mostly Jewish, but you already know them and have engaged with their theories at some length.
P.S. Also quoting my other reply to you,
"When ChatGPT says 'I can’t help with that', it doesn't mean that there is no information it could provide, but rather it means that it has been programmed not to provide an answer that might be favorable to white men, which is how it reads your request, so it just says it can't help, which is correct: it is literally programmed not help with such requests."
If you want to persist in this line of inquiry, you might be better off asking Grok or other LLM that has not been so ruthlessly inoculated with political correctness if you want actual answers, though ChatGPT's answer might more accurately reflect the zeitgeist: that no endorsement of white men as white men is permitted.
"So in reality, yes, there were several white men, mostly Jewish, but you already know them and have engaged with their theories at some length."
Who are the Jewish male intellectuals of the 21st Century that made the Great Awokening happen?
Well, if you are looking for the intellectual fathers of wokeness, they're in the 20th century, and not all of them Jewish (e.g., Foucault).
As discussed, the 21st century's Great Awokening was less an intellectual movement than simply a politico-cultural grift exploiting the regulatory openings of the 20th century's "civil rights" innovations. Richard Hanania, whom I otherwise hesitate to recommend, was correct in saying that wokeness is just the consequence of civil rights law.
But if you are looking for Jewish men who provided rhetorical cover for the 21st century Great Awokening, you can probably find a big list if you filter pre-Elon blue-check Twitter for woke male Jews, which will likely be a bunch of journalists, activists, and academics.
I don't think he's looking for the forebears of wokeness. He's asking for the smart people who are working on wokeness now--the managers and CEOs of the wokeness factories.
Only Steve knows what Steve is asking for, IMHO.
If he is looking for managers and CEOs of "wokeness factories" among males, he may miss them since so much of wokeness is female-led (e.g., Robin "White Fragility" DiAngelo—a name as yet unmentioned here).
Incidentally, this may be why wokeness is notably lacking in intellectual heft: so much of it is about female feelings rather than male logic.
Yep. Wokeness (as we who are not involved call it) is a lot of corporatese style word vomit to make feelings appear to be moral reasoning.
The post-2010s woke progressive movement is obviously less Jewish in character than the 1960s-70s Left.
This is problematic for the "groyper" right, who need to keep their antiquated anti-Jewish grift alive. That's why you'll see them reaching ever further into the past to justify their beliefs, like those New York Times op-eds about redlining and Emmett Till.
Right. Jews were pretty dominant among the conventional wisdom until ten or twelve years ago, and then ...
I sort of agree, but the 21st century has been notably intellectually sterile, so it's not just Jewish intellectualism that has fallen back, it is all intellectualism generally.
I carry no special brief for "groypers", but in their defense, anyone who wants to trace intellectual roots has to go back at least to the 20th century, since there aren't any intellectual roots in the 21st century...
...yet.
The only semi-exceptions I can think of are BAP-esque "vitalism" (which of course actually traces to 19th century Nietzsche), and "Islamic radicalism", which might more accurately be called "Islamic originalism" and therefore trace back to 7th century Mohammed.
If it's true that the 2010s-20s have been "intellectually sterile," I'd propose it's ironically because of the Internet and digitization of a great deal of life, thought, and 'discourse.'
The main trends of digitalized life are all against thinking. Ideas require(d) an intensity of concentration and seriousness of mind, one which came natural with the man-against-world analog world.
The monastery-like atmosphere of the library and engagement with texts; against the constant screeching agitation of always-online life, the stupid-factory of twitter, and the rest. The tyranny of Wikipedia and Google-Search and so forth, and know LLM-bots that feed back similar info to you. This all runs against intellectual adventure, for better and worse.
The Great Filter approaches.
People on the internet still engage the same mental muscle and habit that past intellectuals did; they just focus on answering the fundamental and very personal question: How can I become more attractive?
I'd argue that has always been the subtext of masturbatory intellectualism (as opposed to the useful kind, science, math, history)
I'm certainly sympathetic to the technology-makes-us-dumber argument. And not just internet technology, but going back at least to the steam engine.
But the problem is that such evidence as there is goes both ways.
I guess the prerequisite is that we first have to define "intellectual adventure" and how we measure it.
David Axelrod by retiring in 2012?
Not 21st century, but Noel Ignatiev and his Race Traitor magazine do bear mentioning. Deeply unpleasant fellow.
“Intersectional Feminist Theory”, “Critical Race Theory”, “Systemic Racism”, yadda yadda yadda.
Fancified names for simplistic thinking. Unlikely to keep really smart people occupied for more than a few minutes.
They also require an absence of historical awareness or familiarity with a variety of different cultures.
Remember, when talking about population data, one has to attribute the difference in the means to something. And claiming that the different academic, professional, or person life differences between blacks and whites is all genetics but the differences between men and women is all cultural does not really work.
Not even an Asian man or an Ashkenazi?
A good test of is woke really over would be can the Dems run two white men in what should be the highly winnable year of 2028? (My bet would be on a man and a moderate midwestern white woman.)
Newsom + Klobuchar/Whitmer ?
Will Gavin Newsom self-destruct in the primaries over his Patrick Bateman-like inability to relate to Iowa farmers?
The intellectual bell curve says it all. When the mean IQ of a population is lower the outlier high intellegence is lower. The issue with woke is that they demand that we all totally ignore that the smartest among them barely meet midwit status. This is a successful strategy for them. Producing books, papers and pronouncements that appeal to other midwits. Now I am solidly in the midwit IQ range myself but have always recognised those smarter than me. A legacy of growing up in a household with a father at least 10 points higher IQ than myself is that I tend to discount the ideas of those midwits I judge to be no smarter than myself and no more insightful or worth studying. It sounds like racism to say that I have never met a black person smarter than myself but it's true. I can tell when people are smarter than me but not by how much. I can usually quantify how much less smart or less educated another person is than myself pretty easily. I have met guite a few African-Americans that were my intellectual equals but none that were smarter whereas I have met a handful of European-Americans that obviously were so. My state has never had much of an Asian presence before the mid 70's so I never had to compete with or work for enough of them to meet my intellectual superiors among their numbers. So I am an obvious intellectual snob, unimpressed with the ideas of other midwits, which seems to include ALL of the woke popular writers. Many of whom seem to struggle to acheive midwittery.
> "Following me is the quickest way to get blocked."
Who can resist that come-on? Lol.
Just don't follow me (I never post, just comment)
"22 subscribers" seem to have bucked your request.
They've all been blocked. Now you are as well
You don't need a difference in means. It's sufficient to have a difference in standard deviation which would result in different thickness of right tail. Larry Summers was cancelled for this insight and thus lost the Harvard presidency lol
While statistics is not my long suit, can you even have a difference in the "tails" without a difference in the mean? My understanding is that when the means are only a standard deviation apart, the standard deviations from them are pretty close. 100 is considered to be 1SD from 85 just as 85 is 1SD from 100.
Yes, of course you can have a difference in the tails simply due to different dispersion coefficients (that translate to SDs). It's statistics 101. It's also what is being argued for some male vs female differences. So if you choose a threshold below the average mean, in such a situation a higher percentage of a population with a LOWER SD will pass.
When you are arguing with a roomful of women, you may want to pretend there is no difference in the means. Not that it did Summers any good.
Women have a different curve. More in the middle and less in the tails. Fewer geniuses as well as fewer idiots.
I know that is the "conventional wisdom". But I have my doubts. More than half of college students are now women. Since women are just like men, college is just like it was fifty years ago. Right?
One can have different tails when using normal statistics on distributions that are not that close to normally distributed. Remember, the mean or median income is much close to one end of the tail, zero, than to the other end of the tail, billions.
What is most striking to me over the last 15 years or so are is how hard basically everyone on the left goes in on whatever the current thing is - everyone falls into line and there is essentially no heterodoxy. Intersectionality/wokeness, de-policing/minimizing criminal penalties, mass immigration, trans, COVID, etc. All of these sprung forth, were loudly and uncritically promoted by academia, the media, various issue based non-profits, and politicians.
Even today after these issues cost them the presidency and Orange Hitler is back in charge, for the most part they are still defending deeply unpopular issues. To a large extent this is probably because of the left’s minoritarian fetish - an almost instinctive attraction to trying to force society to accept the demands of social outliers, which is of course a hostility to norms and the majority of the public.
It also goes along with the left having never really having an endpoint on these subjects. It’s just constantly pushing the boundary until forced to stop, and aside from their terrible ideas this is the most dangerous thing about the modern left. At no point as these various movements developed a head of steam did anyone from within the tribe publicly question the wisdom of them or the direction it was taking society.
"for the most part they are still defending deeply unpopular issues"
I see them mostly silent on these things. If there is a defense, it's not a very active one.
Seems to me there are still plenty of examples of people on the left publicly defending DEI, trans, and immigration.
I recall more examples of prominent or “mainstream” people associated with the Left, or Center-Left, distancing themselves from Wokeness projects and tropes.
See, e.g., Gavin Newsom. CNN and MSNBC likewise are relatively quiet on the topics.
What I’ve noticed is some Wokeness advocates saying they are under attack from overwhelming forces of anti-Wokeness which are exaggerating what Wokeness was and over-inflating it. (Which is probably true in many individual cases.)
On the contrary. Wokism as a political thing may be damping down. But wokism as a religion is, if anything, accelerating. In the religion's glossy magazines and think pieces, they're doubling and tripling down on trans, climate hysteria, Palestine, etc.
> "how hard basically everyone on the left goes in on whatever the current thing is"
Could it be because the NPC meme is, essentially, real: that leftists really do have no ability to think independently, so they rely on mental scripts, which run perpetually, unaffected by reality?
Yeah, I do think there is a lot of truth to it as we've all had numerous experiences of interacting with someone that is high IQ but uncritically buys into the party line, especially on DEI and trans stuff lately. When you actually have the chance to have a conversation and introduce factual information usually its obvious that a) their position at no point involved even basic knowledge of the issue at hand and b) they really, really don't want to internalize new information that would force a re-evaluation of their politics and morals.
At the end of the day, a lot of their politics is *solely* about signaling and there is essentially zero considered thought behind it. This can persist even when they personally experience the downsides of their politics or it's pointed out they definitely don't walk the talk, like the prototypical progressive who flees the city for a conservative suburb "for the schools" as soon as they start having kids.
I think much of it comes down to the revulsion of occasionally admitting they were duped by those they trusted or that those evil, racist non-Democrats are correct from time to time.
Also, being a racist or seen as racist is by far the worst thing they can be (unless the racism is directed at White people). This leads otherwise intelligent people down absurd paths of circular logic and willful ignorance about many topics that may only be tangentially related to race.
> When you have a conversation and introduce factual information, it's obvious that a) their position at no point involved even basic knowledge of the issue at hand and b) they really, really don't want to internalize new information that would force a re-evaluation of their politics and morals.
I've recently held three conversations with family that followed this script. The latest started with endorsements of mainstream Woke doctrines and ended with a puzzled look, "Why do you care so much about this stuff?"
I walked my mom through the trans thing and she looked like she was going to throw up when it was all over. Naturally she voted for Harris anyway.
Thinking indepently correlates with a schizoid personality.
No, the main difference between left and right is novelty vs tradition. Tradition feeds into common sense, so usually tradition is right. From time to time - as with geocentricity in the 15th-17th century it is however wrong.
Schizophrenia correlates with lower IQ tho?