Last Week in Review - 15 January 2023

On the Turning of the Cultural Tide, Having High Hopes for the Rising Generation, Laughing at Wokesters, and Cultivating New and Better Habits

Greetings and salutations, fellow earthlings! Hopefully the new year is off to a great start for all of you. From where I stand (or sit or lie down, depending on the time of day), we are only two weeks in, and 2023 is already shaping up to be a great year.

Weekly Review 15 January 2023 (Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash)

The Cultural Tide Is Turning

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the cultural tide is turning, and that it has been for several months now, though we’re just now finally beginning to feel it in a big way. The tsunami of wokeness, after crashing ashore during the 2010s and cresting during the planned-demic and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” summer of 2020, is now rapidly receding, and ever more “normies” are seeing the wreckage it has left behind and recognizing wokeness, along with all its neo-Marxist ideological underpinnings, for what it is: a purely destructive force that is opposed to human biology and well-being. To borrow a phrase from Trump, this is huge.

We will have a cultural revolution in this country, but it will not be led by the Maoist wokesters. The communists made their long march through the institutions and completely captured almost all of the big ones, but in the process, they destroyed those institutions to the point that almost no one sees them as legitimate or beneficial; thus, the wokesters are now victims of their own success. Increasing numbers of regular people have either set about building new institutions themselves, or they are fully supporting anyone else who is trying to do so.

If you have your ear to the ground, you can hear the seismic shift in the cultural zeitgeist. And what is really exciting is this: we have front-row seats to watch history being made, and more importantly, we all get to participate in making it.

If you spend much time on Substack, you will encounter some interesting heterodox thinkers with some useful insights and fascinating ideas. Whatever the Left Bank in Paris was to the writers of the Lost Generation in the 1920s, Substack has become for the countercultural writers of the 2020s. Or you could compare it to the Beatnik¹ literary scene of the 1950s: they were at the vanguard of a cultural revolution that didn’t hit the mainstream until the 1960s. Whatever historical era you wish to compare ours to, this is the pattern that we will see playing out: ideas and concepts being raised in essays and comment threads on today’s Substack articles will be hitting the mainstream in a big way a few years from now. And we get to see it happen in real time and be a part of it.