How to write a column about the ‘woke’ ‘intolerant left’
Iain Martin actually wrote one called 'Let's reject the intolerance of woke warriors' just yesterday.
Quote Orwell. Do it early and do it often. Ignore ‘Down And Out In Paris And London’, ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’, ‘Homage To Catalonia’, and ‘The Lion And The Unicorn’. None of those are as well read or well red as ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Animal Farm’. Those are the ones you want. Don’t worry too much about content or context. All we want to achieve here is to imply that The Left — we’ll be referring to everyone from wet liberals to hardcore communists as The Left here — is Big Brother with better shoes, stormtroopers with outstanding store credit at Urban Outfitters.
Talk about ‘groupthink’. Orwell didn’t actually use this term in Ninety Eighty-Four, but no one is going to check, and none of these snowflake leftists has read any books because of trigger warnings or whatever so they’ll not pick you up on it. What are the chances they’ve heard of William H Whyte Jr. or Irving Janis?
Say something broadly unpleasant about trans people. It’s fine to say things about trans people because all newspaper columnists are allowed to be horrible about them. If you don’t fancy ‘wading into that debate’ then you could be snide about gipsies.
Pretend that leftwing people using their free speech to criticise other people’s free speech, and the ancient right of protest, are in fact new and dangerous things. Also imply that even though you have a column in a national newspaper it is, in fact, you who are being silenced.
Go even further and point to your membership of some worthy group like PEN or Index on Censorship as proof that you are from the ‘real’ left and that your employment at a newspaper owned by the same proprietor who bankrolls tabloid hate sheets is totally fine. No one tells you what to write.
Throw in something about how universities are now controlled by the woke left Stasi fascists. Imply heavily, but do not say outright, that you can’t even say you’re white these days without risking 1,000 years in the reeducation camps.
At no point should you note that there is a right-wing government in power, with a huge majority, or that the left has been forced back to the fringes in the main opposition party. One way of avoiding this is to falsely compare the right’s political power with the left’s cultural power and act like they have the same effect.
Use the phrase “going woke means going broke”, it’s stupid but lots of broken glass chewing people on Twitter will love it. Call yourself ‘a classical liberal’ and pretend you are not in fact so conservative that you’ve considered buying Margaret Thatcher y-fronts. If you’re really feeling daring throw in the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ because, after all, a government minister did it and she faced no consequences for dog-whistling antisemitism so loud that a pack of racist wolves now follows her around the place at all times.
Finished? Great. Now just rewrite and repeat it often. Profit is guaranteed.