Michael Shellenberger’s article at Public. “We Are Only Now Starting To Recover From The Madness
Its political power has broken, but Wokeism is still ruining the culture.” Excerpt:
“Complete intolerance became almost a religion,” wrote [actress Justine] Bateman, “and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”
Hollywood is not only one of the most status-obsessed neighborhoods in the world, it is also one of the most Woke. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Pictures mandated racial quotas. CBS required that 50% of its writers’ rooms be non-white. And a culture of fear of saying the wrong thing spread.
“This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who dd not want to follow the crowd,” wrote Bateman, “and has their own ideas about what they needed to do.”
At this point, Bateman circles back to the demands of the SAG actors union, which protested studios efforts to replace them with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future. When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement.”
What Bateman is saying is that Wokeism had so destroyed cultural innovation in Hollywood that many of its leaders, executives, and creative geniuses had become resigned to AI taking over the role of real humans.
Bateman isn’t alone in her assessment. “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” the writer and director of HBO’s “The White Lotus” told fellow Gen Xers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik of The Free Press. “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma.”
Bateman put her finger on the essential status-obsessed nature of Wokeism, which had been taken up most vigorously by Millennials but enabled by the “Me” generation of Baby Boomer liberals.
