Opinion From the Center

As a part of President Donald Trump’s “war on wokeness,” certain words may be banned from scientific research, infringing on free speech. The National Science Foundation, a federal agency, has flagged papers for review that contain words like “women,” “biases,” “barrier,” “diverse,” “institutional” “inclusion,” “trauma,” and more. The Washington Post (Lean Left bias) has reported, “Previously published health documents have been expunged from public-facing websites… In one instance, a case study of a patient with endometriosis was taken down because the final paragraph said ‘it is important to note that endometriosis can occur in trans and non-gender-conforming people.’”

Personally, I am not a fan of the majority of DEI policies because equity has often come at the cost of equality. DEI often has a chilling effect on conservative speech. I’m a fan of free speech and want to live in an environment where liberals and conservatives can speak their minds and make each other better. I thought my fellow classical liberals were also — yet they’re curiously silent about Trump’s censorship. Instead, many once-principled advocates for free speech are taking a victory lap over the death of DEI. 

This isn’t merely a product of the recent rightward vibe shift driven by Trump’s victory. Influencers and new media institutions that claim to be nuanced and uphold classical liberal values have been slipping toward “anti-wokeness” for a while, abandoning their principles for audience appeal.

I worry if they continue on this path we will be caught in an endless woke versus anti-woke culture war. 

A few years ago, when people asked about my politics, the easiest way to say it was I was a Free Press (Lean Right) reader. (Note that AllSides used to rate The Free Press as Center until September 2024.) Politically, I put myself in the camp of figures like Bari Weiss (Center), Peter Boghossian (Center), Coleman Hughes, Batya Ungar-Sargon and the like. There are more I could name in this “heterodox” writers community, but the common thread is a shared concern about free speech, cancel culture, “wokeness”, and the ideological capture of institutions. 

Free Press holiday party (The Free Press/ Instagram)

These are figures who previously inhabited a secular liberal disposition, not conservative or right-wing culture warriors. They’re people who are generally pro-choice, pro-immigration (limited), pro-LGBTQ+ for adults, and believers in the strength of diversity (just not in the form of mandated policies). I felt a part of this cohort as it was just getting its footing. Having now become a distinct tribe, it’s descending into groupthink, as all tribes do, and I’ve again been left “politically homeless.”

Ever since the term “anti-woke” began appearing in the lexicon, I’ve disliked it and encouraged my community of heterodox thinkers not to identify with it. It’s always better to stand for something than be “anti-” something. This political phenomenon was evidenced most recently by the election of President Donald Trump, who defeated a Democratic coalition that rallied around almost exclusively a shared dislike for Trump. I believed my tribe advocated for classically liberal principles — free speech, freedom of religion, checks and balances, the right to protest, and slow progress toward equality, values which neither major party seems to stand for unless it’s politically convenient. Solely standing against the excesses of the left would be just as reactionary and counterproductive as the activists we criticize.

By standing for values instead of against them, we can continue to stand for them even after the political pendulum swings away from “wokeism.” Unfortunately, most of the writers and thinkers in this space didn’t heed my warning, and fell into “anti-wokeism.”

Anti-Woke Bias Overtakes Liberal Values: Case Studies

Does Peter Boghossian Have a Philosophy or an Agenda?

The first time I recognized my own disillusionment with this heterodox tribe was when I met former Portland State philosophy professor Peter Boghossian in 2022. He had kicked off a college tour where he essentially prototyped his now-popular spectrum street epistemology game. He put out a post asking if any student organizations would be willing to host him on campus. As a fan of his work, I eagerly reached out and was shocked that his team responded considering my school in central Ohio had less than 3,000 students. Before the street epistemology game, he showed a video about “cutting out the cancer of wokeness.” Then we played street epistemology, where he provided a prompt and the participants stepped to the strongly agree, agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree lines, and he asked about why they held that position. He posed prompts like “racial justice is the predominant goal of the university,” which no one agreed with, for the record. 

Me with Dr. Boghossian (Peter Boghossian/ YouTube)

Me with Dr. Boghossian (Peter Boghossian/ YouTube)

In talking to people after the event, several enjoyed it, but others pointed out that he seemed to come in with an agenda, seeking particular answers. It was almost like, rather than being genuinely interested in what the students had to say, he was there to prove “Look, the students are woke!” Even on a fairly liberal campus, it was still Ohio, and therefore the responses were relatively moderate. Initially, I didn’t see a problem with his prompts because I too was immersed in similar online commentary. However, I eventually saw what the participants were saying and came to agree with them. 

Me with Dr. Boghossian (Peter Boghossian/ YouTube)

I remember going to dinner with Boghossian and his team after the event. One of the team members was swiping through a dating app and began showing everyone at the table a profile of a transgender woman. He expressed bitterly that he was tired of reporting people on the app who were “pretending to be women.” Everyone seemed to nod in agreement, laughing, but I was uncomfortable. I didn’t see why he couldn’t just swipe no and move on. Everyone on the dating app is an adult, and I thought we were the tribe advocating for adults to have freedom. I thought we advocated for tolerance and not being easily offended. 

Many anti-woke figures have seemingly become obsessed with questions around gender, believing their perspective on gender is the true one. As I see it, it's fine to advocate for your position, but it’s not fine to advocate for other opinions to be censored or to restrict adults from making their own medical decisions. 

Almost a year later, Boghossian’s non-profit hosted a video contest for videos illustrating the “absurdity of wokeness.” I remember wondering — who is this serving? Making fun of someone’s beliefs will not change their minds.

So, I was no longer a fan of Boghossian’s style, but I still believed other writers were doing good work reporting on ideological capture and cancel culture while standing up for their own values. 

The Free Press’ Wartime Ideology 

I noticed The Free Press slipping from their mission post-October 7th. The Free Press bills itself as curious, honest, and fiercely independent, high-quality journalism. “We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative,” its “About Page” (retrieved Feb. 13, 2024) says. Yet, the publication is also fiercely Zionist, as became evident the minute the war broke out in Gaza. I don’t have a problem with a publication having a Zionist bias if they own up to it, but The Free Press so clearly took a multi-sided war and misconstrued it in service of an ideological narrative, which is exactly what it claims not to do. 

I thought Israel might be their only blindspot, but as time passed I felt like they were seeking out stories about “woke” hypocrisy to such a degree it was no longer reflecting reality. In one example, Abigail Shrier penned a piece about pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. She pointed out the left had criticized free speech as harmful, especially on campuses, but now they claimed free speech as their right. 

As it turns out, I penned a similar piece the day before Shrier, in which I criticized the left for that exact thing. I equally criticized the right, which had advocated for free speech on campuses, who now called for peaceful pro-Palestine protesters to be arrested for antisemitism (What happened to offensive speech is free speech?). Shrier neglected to mention this angle in her piece — perhaps an honest mistake, but more likely because it clashes with the brand of The Free Press as critics of the left. 

FAIR for Whom?

Another organization that has sprung up in the heterodox space is The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (Center). It describes itself, in part, as advocating for a “pro-human culture based on our shared values of universal equality, fairness, understanding, and common humanity.” Its board features popular heterodox thinkers Jonathan Haidt (Center), Wilfred Reilly, Michael Shellenberger (Center), Eric Smith, Andrew Sullivan (Center), and others. 

In June, FAIR published a piece called Don’t Judge a Book by its Author in which the writer spoke about a local bookstore canceling their event because they authored a book about a character faking a transgender identity when they themselves are not transgender. The writer opened a lawsuit against the bookstore for discriminating against him for being cisgender. It seems most commenters agree that it is equal and fair to sue the bookstore for discrimination. 

I disagree. If we claim to advocate for tolerance, I think a privately owned business should be allowed to cancel an event for any reason, even if I vehemently disagree with their reasoning. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t stand up against discrimination — I believe we should — but that maybe there are better ways than suing a locally-owned bookstore for not wanting to spotlight an author who might offend its customers. Aggressive litigation seems directly at odds with promoting viewpoint diversity and dialogue across differences. The FAIR author seems to think some differences in opinion qualify as discriminatory and therefore warrant retribution. Gee, sounds similar to that woke “cancel culture” mindset they are purporting to be against!

Culture Warriors on Campus

One final example. In 2018, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published The Coddling of the American Mind. The book laid out three great untruths it claims “wokeness” teaches: you must strive to avoid bad experiences at all costs, you must always trust your emotions over reason, and the world is a black-and-white battle between good people and bad people without any middle ground. I enjoyed the book and thought it was a sharp and nuanced assessment of Gen Z culture.

In 2023, “Coddling” was turned into a documentary by Ted Balaker. While the documentary had a lot of truth in it, I think it also exaggerated the problem on college campuses by using only the most dramatic footage from major protests at elite campuses. 

IMDB

I had just graduated college, so I was intimately familiar with the microaggression trainings referenced in the documentary. But there were no crazy protests with people throwing things on my campus. I don’t expect the documentary to solely focus on quiet campuses like mine, but I do think it stripped out the nuance and carefully laid claims from the Coddling book by implying most if not all campuses are dominated by extreme ideological agendas. The film only featured students who rejected “woke” culture, none with a skeptical view of the book’s claims or neutral expertise. I can’t blame those who walked out of the theater thinking the portrayal of campuses rang a bit false or overdone.

Finding What’s Been Lost

The most common thesis behind why Gen Z is prone to embracing “woke” cancel culture and viewing free speech as harmful is that we have gotten comfortable, soft, and coddled compared to older generations. Shrier wrote the heterodox book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up and the Coddling of the American Mind Substack, run by the director of the documentary, Balaker, has featured pieces from writers critiquing psychotherapy language like "neurodiverse" seeping into professional spaces and schools. “Kids need to learn the essential life skill of ignoring their emotions entirely,” one piece argued. This mindset, I think, illuminates why the heterodox have lost their way. 

The great untruth, “you must always trust your emotions over reason” was supposed to be tempered with the truth that we are all prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias, but instead, the truth was boiled down by some to “emotions should not be indulged.” 

It’s easy to look at a woke student, damaged by words, and denigrate them as too soft, too emotional. Classical liberal values emerged from the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason. One could be forgiven for thinking the solution is to be more reasonable; that is, to use reason rather than emotion as a guide. And I agree that emotions are not an accurate reflection of reality — but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them entirely, or even that we can. 

There’s a common metaphor in psychology about a rider atop an elephant. The elephant is your emotions and the rider is reason. The rider falsely believes he is in control but cannot actually direct the elephant. When you ignore your emotions, your elephant is still moving — you just aren’t aware of your lack of control. Your emotions will take you wherever they like, and you can either try to be more aware of their influence or blindly assume you’re rational.

Atomic Habits/ letsthinkaboutit.com

You may think you’re in control of your ideological beliefs, but you aren’t. If you deny the fact that you have an ideology, you won’t see the fact that you, the anti-woke ideologue, are the same as the woke ideologues. The only solution is to become aware we all are subject to emotional reasoning and not forget the third untruth: life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

So-called woke people are not evil. We are not in a war to wrestle institutions from the hands of ideological capture. We are — at least I thought — trying to build institutions that work for all of us, trying to live up to the principles the nation was founded on. 

I won't pretend I'm not driven by emotions, personal experience, and tribalism. Like anyone, I jump to conclusions about some news stories before getting the whole picture based on my personal ideological framework. 

I try, even if I'm not always successful, to be humble enough to listen to my critics and learn when I'm wrong. I try to make sure I'm constructing new ideas and solutions as much if not more than I critique others. I'm interested in seeing problems clearly and working to fix them, not in merely opposing those I disagree with. 

Others should adopt this pragmatic mindset too — it’s how we survive with our country and our sanity intact. 

Written by Bridging Coordinator and Media Analyst Clare Ashcraft (Center bias).

Reviewed by Evan Wagner, News Editor and Product Manager (Lean Left bias); Malayna J. Bizier, News Analyst and Social Media Editor (Right bias) and Andy Gorel, News Editor and Bias Analyst (Center bias).