Wokeness Runs Home

eyes versus ears, continued

The woke-industrial complex is in decline, and a worthwhile discussion has begun about what comes next: “the new phase of wokeness.” I propose an answer, but first let’s define the problem.

Frances Widdowson is a cantankerous career academic, an evidence-first Canadian scholar who doesn’t suffer fools. Her personal disregard for sanctimonious performativity has gotten her in some trouble, and now she’s a former professor, though her termination was found to be improper. A few months ago, the CBC interviewed her for a story about how mean she is, because Widdowson has questioned the much-chanted sacred story about the dead children at Kamloops.

If you don’t know the Kamloops story, an anthropologist used ground-penetrating radar to supposedly identify the location of a secret burial ground for 215 dead children near the site of the long-defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School, uncovering evidence of what has been constantly called a hidden genocide. But no human remains have ever been recovered at the site, and the radar evidence of disturbed earth aligns well with the path of an old septic trench. More detailed background here.

Widdowson recorded the entire interview, so we can hear the inner workings of the sausage factory.

Throughout the discussion, CBC reporter Jordan Tucker, speaking with the obligatory vocal fry and upspeak, keeps warning Widdowson to stop shouting at her, which Widdowson obviously isn’t doing, and to watch her tone. She’s presumptively pre-outraged by the existence of a Very Bad Person, conducting an outrage-performance in the form of asking questions.

But then Widdowson flips the script. You can hear this excerpted two-minute high point here. Tucker argues that government officials say there are bodies buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops, so is Widdowson somehow making the outrageous claim that government officials might be wrong? “Are all those different governments lying? Are all those different people just not telling the truth, or they’re going along with these stories imagined by people, by indigenous people?”

Government says, but still Widdowson doesn’t concede. You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is. “How is it that all these government officials have been so connived?” Tucker asks, obviously flabbergasted.

Widdowson responds with an argument about evidence, and about the standards of evidence for the claim. What do we know? What have we seen? What would we need to see to prove a claim of this type? Who has the burden of proof?

And then: “As a journalist, are you satisfied with the evidence?”

The response to this question — just past the 1:30 mark in the excerpted video linked above — is remarkably telling. It produces, first, a short silence, and then a long burst of stammering and high-pitched incredulity: “I am. Of course I am.”

Widdowson, sharpening the direct question: “You think there’s 215 children buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops?”

Listen to Tucker’s shaking voice. This question is a threat. It makes her extremely nervous. “I think that, at this point, there has been enough documentation, there have been enough — there’s enough social and archaeological consensus to say that, to say that, we can just believe indigenous people, and move on with trying to do our best by them as a society.”

So two people are arguing about truth. What is true? How can we know what is true? One person keeps asking what is the evidence. The other person keeps deflecting to identity, authority, and social status. The government says so, there is social consensus, “believe indigenous people.” No human remains have been found, but there are human remains, because government officials and indigenous people say so, and other people with the status to matter say that they agree. Truth is consensus. Defaulting to evidence is cruel. Why would you do such a horrible thing?

• What’s the evidence?

• Are you refusing to submit to the narrative consensus?

• Yes, what’s the evidence?

• (shocked gasping and trembling voice)

This is the mechanism of woke narrative control: It has been said that this is true. The people who say it possess authority — they are officials — or they possess privileged identities. It is now disinformation to say that government plus indigenous people might not be correct, and an act of dangerous extremism to mention questions of evidence.

We’ve just lived through a whooooole lot of this. Vladimir Putin INSTALLED Trump as president, Trump colluded, mRNA injections stop all infections forever with no side effects, it’s a warm and caring act of kindness to castrate young boys so they can become girls, SHUT UP. These consensus-focused fake truths were enforced. Alex Berenson lost his Twitter account for a tweet that said, brace yourself for shock and horror, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission.”

And then Alex Berenson got his Twitter account back.

They have lost the mechanisms of enforcement through state-corporate coordination, and they’ve lost the social shock of disproportionate attack language. Normal people shrug at the three-millionth iteration of YOU’RE BEING A BIGOT for a statement that has nothing to do with bigotry, as this week’s SYDNEY SWEENEY IS SELLING PANTS THAT’S BEING LITERALLY ADOLF HITLER tells us. Democrats warned that the BBB and the rescission bill would immediately slaughter at least 14 million people, and all the children would die. Then Republicans passed both bills. OHHHHH YOU’RE MURDERING EVERYBODY worked for a while, but the country got a serious case of alarm fatigue. This is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outra— wait, where’s everybody going?

The era of narrative enforcement is over.

So. “The new phase of wokeness.” We begin to get some hints with this:

Against a deep loss of trust, an erosion of uncontested compliance, and a collapse of narrative authority, we’re going to see a retreat to the Alamo of coercion: “The AAP advocates for the elimination of nonmedical exemptions from immunizations as contrary to optimal individual and public health.” If you’re not going to listen to us anymore, we’re just going to make you do what we say. The New York Times, on the same day that the AAP released its demand for medical coercion, warned that doctors have lost their uniform and unquestioned authority, because “the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. were the medical Mount Olympus, the towering pillars of medical authority,” but then came ORANGE MAN. He took our towering pillars, and now we’re just people who have to make an argument like everyone else. We need towering pillars of authority!

That’s the pivot that’s coming: the retreat to authority, the desperate effort to rebuild institutional monoliths that can’t be questioned and must be obeyed. It will backfire and die an ugly death, and the turn to medical coercion caused the loss of trust that now, being read as cultural illness, produces anguished demands for a return to coercion. But it’s the only medicine the sick people know. Frances Widdowson is still asking about evidence after she’s been told that government officials and indigenous people have announced the thing that is to be regarded as truth. How can we force her to stop?