The failure of the woke narrative

 Stephen L. Miller:

Two dimensions collided last week, the real world and woke Twitter.

Khiara Bridges, a law professor at UC Berkeley, found out how using woke terminology usually reserved for a private classroom or an online mob works in an open forum where you can’t simply shut students down or press the “block” button. When asked by Senator John Cornyn whether she believes a baby has value even a day before birth, she responded, “I believe a person with the capacity for pregnancy has value.” When Cornyn responded, “No, I’m talking about the baby,” she reiterated, “I’m talking about the person with a capacity for pregnancy,” and declared in front of Congress that she was “answering a more interesting question to me.” How convenient for her.

When Bridges was then pressed by Senator Josh Hawley to clarify whether she meant women, she retreated to one of the woke’s favorite lines of defense by declaring that Hawley’s line of questioning was “transphobic” and “it opens up trans people to violence.”

On Twitter, the progressive left promptly called it a win for Bridges. Yet then something unexpected happened. Several more moderate journalists sounded the warning that the hearing did not go the way their woke colleagues thought it did.

Megan McArdle at the Washington Post was the first to sound the alarm, writing, “Unlike a Rorschach test, however, this one has a right answer, and the progressives have it wrong. Moreover, the fact that they can’t see just how badly this exchange went for their side shows what a big mistake it was to let academia and media institutions turn into left-wing monocultures.” This went over on Twitter about as well as expected.

CNN host and analyst Fareed Zakaria then warned at the Washington Post that the Democratic Party was heading for ruin by obsessing over things like pronouns. Zakaria said that instead, “Democrats need to become the party of building things.” He’s right, but in the insular world of Twitter, it didn’t matter. The Post changed the headline of the piece, caving to an outraged hoard of wokesters, which in turn, kind of proved Zakaria’s point.
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I think Bridges was wrong in her response on two points.  Just because someone does not accept that people can claim to be a different gender does not mean they fear trans people.  They just do not accept their definition of their gender.  Nor does it necessarily lead to violence.  People are free to pretend to be another gender, but they are not free to force everyone to agree with their pretensions.