Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Don’t like wokeness? What do you have to hide? Wokes interrogate critics of wokeness by asking what it is that wokeness has inhibited them from doing. The implication is that they want to do bad things, like shout racial slurs, and would be doing it right now even if it wasn’t for wokeness. To be a leftist is to see the world as being in a state of fundamental conflict between opposing forces. Leftist politics, violent or non-violent, totalitarian or libertarian, become the only hope of redemption for mankind from the forces of capitalism, nationalism, the patriarchy, and whatever other evils are added to the menu. This battle for the human soul requires the total triumph of the Left over everything else. And thus also total control over everyone and everything to root out all these many human evils. What wokes see as liberation, critics of wokeness see as total tyranny. To understand why these two groups see wokeness so differently requires also understanding the leftist mentality an...

There is a remarkable moment in the latest unremarkable woke cash grab of a book of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The single most successful black nationalist memoirist of modern times had taken a trip to Africa, only to discover that he knows nothing about it, and to Israel, to “discover” that he already knows all about it from reading New York Times articles. And that Israel is racist. Coates got famous for being able to find racism everywhere, including when a white woman pushed past his son in a Manhattan movie theater elevator. “I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son,” Coates whined in Between the World and Me . “There was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body… I came home shook.” The poet of black fragility had filled his Pulitzer Prize finalist book with odes to the exploitation of “black bodies” (primarily his own) by the white people lurking in elevators everywhere. Even the firefighters and police officers who peri...

Agatha Christie, an elderly lady from Devon, had plenty of blood on her hands, all of it fictional. But none of the killers in her many books and short stories are nearly as monstrous or obsessed as the censorious wokes who have been coming after the deceased author for decades. The latest episode in the long-running saga takes place not on a luxurious train speeding through Yugoslavia or on the Nile, but at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) which had performed Christie’s play, “And Then There Were None.” “And Then There Were None” is a natural fit for a high school setting. With lots of different balanced roles and one-note characters who reveal a hidden side, it’s a training wheels production for students learning the basics of performing a character and acting on stage. It’s also fun. Ten people. One island. And a killer. There’s a reason why “And Then There Were None” has remained popular and Hollywood keeps ripping it off for movies like 2022’s ‘...

On January 18th, the latest attempt in over 50 years by the United States to return to the moon burned up over the Pacific Ocean. A day later, Japan’s lunar lander made it to the moon. In 2023, India landed its robot lander on the moon in a mission that only cost $75 million, while in 2020, China became the third nation, after America and the USSR, to return lunar samples. So why is the United States still struggling to manage something that every other country seems to be able to do and that American engineers used to be able to pull off with slide rules? The Apollo computer used memory made of wire ropes woven by women in the garment industry. Back then we picked the best and the brightest who had the “right stuff”. Now the right stuff consists of checking DEI boxes. “NASA is embracing inclusion”, the space agency announced , “and is pursuing a set of missions that will shatter the highest of glass ceilings: landing the first woman and person of color on the Moon. While the first Mo...

“Do you expect me to talk?” No, I expect you to go woke.” Earlier this year word came that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which controls the rights to the deceased author’s novels, hired sensitivity readers to go through his books and purge anything that might offend sensitive woke souls. The newly republished novels warn that, “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.” Now that old Bond is dead, a new woke Bond can safely rise. Even though Ian Fleming has been dead since 1964, the estate turned to other authors to prime the giant money pump. Initially new Bond novels were written by prestigious writers like Kingsley Amis or former military men like John Gardner, but in more recent years turned the books over to wokes. The latest of these come from Kim Sherwood, a University of Edinburgh lecturer who is interested in “women’s stories” and was authorized to write a feminist James Bond trilogy. How do ...

Walking into the children’s section of a public library, I spotted a copy of ‘Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice’’. Published in 2020, it’s almost a cultural artifact because ‘woke’ has gone from a hip term for leftism to a battered conservative punching bag in the culture war. ‘Woke’, the term, peaked in 2020. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and appeared as a category on Jeopardy. Next year, Essence magazine announced its list of ‘Woke 100 Women’. In 2020, Disney’s Hulu aired ‘Woke’:, a tedious series about a college activist. By 2023, wokeness has come to mean leftist extremism. It’s most often used by Republicans and hardly ever by Democrats who act baffled at the idea that there was ever such a thing as wokeness. Much like ‘Defund the Police’, a set of sounds that once defined lefty culture, has been flushed down the memory hole and everyone is pretending they never heard of it. In Seattle, the home of wokeness, “race and equity experts” say it’s “time to ...

Target projects over $1 billion in losses due in large part to shoplifting. And that is its own fault. Target CEO Brian Cornell responded to the BLM race riots with a memo claiming that, “the murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.” Much of that pain was directed at robbing Target. After a massive wave of arson and looting, targeted its own chain stores, Target doubled down on its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy. The Target Foundation was one of the signatories of the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice statement attacking the criminal justice system. Target committed to racial quotas for its workforce and forced diversity and inclusion training on employees. Kiera Fernandez, Target’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion executive, warned that employees had to go along with the DEI agenda “to be a part of this company.” Meanwhile people were being stabbed and s...

The Supreme Court may be on the verge of ending the last vestige of systemic racism. Affirmative action faces its acid test in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. At stake is the system of racial discrimination imposed on Asian and white students by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. How could the Biden administration possibly justify racial discrimination in college admissions? National security. In the Biden era, a woke military brass insists that everything is national security, from critical race theory to abortion , except actually winning wars. Letting colleges racially discriminate against Asian and white students is “vitally important to our nation’s military,” according to Biden’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “Our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of a diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer. So it is a critical ...

Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” all have one publisher in common. Bertelsmann, the German giant, which formerly used to put out “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”, has become the leading publisher and distributor of some of the most famous and influential racist woke books. Americans are unaware of the role that the Ex-Nazi company plays in poisoning our discourse with racism and wokeness because it operates under the cover of the names of the American and English book publishers that it gobbled up. Americans don’t see the Bertelsmann brand, instead they see Random House, whose current state would make Bennett Cerf turn in his grave, and Penguin Books, along with other familiar names like Doubleday, Ballantine, Knopf, Schocken, now tragically owned by an ex-Nazi company, Crown, Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books and so many others. Bertelsmann has conquered and gutted Ame...