BUST UP THOSE EPISTEMICALLY CLOSED HOTHOUSES.

Normals have good reason to despise the faux-sophisticates, and eventually the faux epistemic closure undermines the sophistication.  Perhaps, rather than woke being a mind virus, Lionel Shriver understands it better, as a fungal infection.

This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won’t be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete’s foot comes right back? One American election won’t do the trick. There are simply too many people with a vested interest in wokery, because ‘decolonising the curriculum’, say, is their job. Many a current museum director was hired expressly to ensure that an art collection doesn’t acquire work by white people. Numerous black female hires – who may tick two boxes in a kind of diversity ‘buy one, get one free’, but who are sometimes conspicuously under-qualified, such as ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay – owe their appointments to that fungal way of thinking, and they won’t all go quietly. America’s entire Democratic Party is steeped in this brain rot, and Kamala still came within 1.5 percentage points of winning the popular vote. On both sides of the Atlantic, universities, the judicial system, NGOs, the legal and medical professions, the news media, cultural institutions, theatre, publishing, film: they’ve all been putrefied by the zombie fungus.

What it takes, though, is for sufficiently many people to notice that cultural vanguards, whether they're ruining literature or architecture, or making a hash of managing the government, are doing a bad job.

I’ve never doubted that our level-headed and unindoctrinated contingent – however beleaguered, persecuted and shockingly few in number – has always been destined to win, because lunacy eventually collapses from its own contradictions. It’s only ever been a question of how much longer we have to put up with this staggering bullshit.

As for the present juncture, I have a theory. Let’s remember the nature of the opposition. Wokesters are conformists. They didn’t invent their wretched ideas; they’re reading from a common hymn sheet. That’s why they all use the same words and subscribe to the exact same roster of convictions, no matter how preposterous: these people aren’t original thinkers. But they imagine they’re at the cutting edge. Being ‘progressive’ means they’re in the vanguard. See, they think woke makes them modern. They think woke makes them hip.

Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are all moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly ‘people living with obesity’. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve ‘turned the page’ and ‘we’re not going back’.

Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered), you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.

There's truth to that, and yet, dear reader, be careful.

So they won’t spout lingo like ‘cisgender’ if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about ‘white privilege’ is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy / neurodiversity / heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.

You're more likely to see the vanguardists banding together, avoiding the most trivial form of sectarianism, when they perceive themselves as out of fashion.  The best thing to do with the purveyors of inclusive euphemism, for example, might be to shun them.  That might be sufficient to get the preference cascade moving in a new direction.