Forgiving Wokedom’s Red Guards Is Necessary

To err is human, to forgive divine

I don’t see how AI is going to create $1 trillion in new revenue [to repay the tech behemoths’ investments] but I can see how it might cut $1 trillion in expenses. You just need fewer people, right? Assuming a wage of $100,000, that’s a destruction of 10 million jobs in the US, where 150 million people work. Let’s say 50 per cent of industry is somewhat immune – pipe fitters, chiropractors etc – that means you need to find 10 million jobs among 75 million people. That’s a 16 per cent destruction in employment across what are traditionally higher paying jobs; media, banking, consulting, legal, medical, pharmaceuticals… If you lose 16 per cent employment in certain industries over 24 to 36 months, that’s a total collapse in the employment dynamics of certain industries.
Scott Galloway, The Prof G Pod, 9/9/25

The sound of the world’s tiniest violin has rung out across America as those on the Left have lamented those on the Right cancelling people in the wake of the Kirk assassination.

Here are some of my favourite hot takes.

Ed West: The new religion has been spread and enforced by a mixture of legal enforcement and social pressure, the former coming in the form of civil rights laws outlined by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement, which placed a hand on the scales of politics in the workplace. It also became established through a form of social shaming that has come to be named ‘cancel culture’, the use of public humiliation and punishment-firings as a means of ideological conformity.

Nate Silver: Much of what you see on the right is undoubtedly driven by a desire for revenge against the left’s excesses. I can even sympathize, to a degree: the political environment of 2020, the peak period of progressive cancel culture, was legitimately crazy. It can be easy to forget how minor some of the transgressions were that led to efforts to ostracize people or worse. And revenge almost always trumps all other political and emotional incentives. If there’s some truth you feel like you’re not allowed to speak to, that can build up a reservoir of resentment that can fuel grievance for years… What did y’all think cancellation meant? Did you not realize the very tools and techniques you championed could be turned against you? Do you even have the object permanence of a goldfish?

Noah Smith: Since the mid-2010s, progressives on social media had tried to ruin the reputation and careers of people who said things they considered racist, transphobic, or otherwise problematic. Social media platforms were successfully pressured to “deplatform” various figures on the right... Some rightists were even cut off from bank accounts and other essential services.

Progressives argued that… if private companies took away your bank account or kicked you off of the country’s main social media platforms, that was merely social ostracism, not a violation of any freedom. Conservatives retorted that if private companies have the ability to make modern life unlivable for people whose speech they don’t like, that takes away their freedom of speech. I agree with the conservatives on this one; government is not the only organization that has the power to restrict freedom.

Richard Hanania: As it turns out, a culture that empowers tens or hundreds of thousands of busybodies, many of them with influential jobs in areas like journalism or the legal profession, can be a lot more oppressive than one in which the president picks out a few random individuals and institutions and seeks to personally destroy them. There are a lot of aggressive MAGAs out there… [but they aren’t] part of the knowledge class with the ability to shape the wider culture.

James M.: Progressive values are superior because they will improve society, and they will improve society because they are superior… They learned these things in college, after all, and most of the successful people around them seem to believe the same. All those who disagree are distant, unfamiliar, strange, and so it’s not surprising that they’re easily othered and regarded as morally and intellectually deficient (even in the wake of policy failure after policy failure, which have badly discredited the pretensions of the managerial elite).

Freddie deBoer: Free speech, for example, is a left-wing virtue; it’s not my fault that a lot of people who identify as left-wing lost that basic wisdom in their manic efforts to appear to be One of the Good Ones. And as I’ve also pointed out a thousand times, “a socialist critiques identity politics” is a dog-bites-man story, the opposite of contrarianism. Socialists have been critiquing identity politics forever. And ultimately the point is always the same… left-of-center messaging is stuck in a quagmire of abstruse vocabulary and alienating cultural practices… Liberals have dismissed freedom of speech as a reactionary concept and now find themselves, as all petty censors eventually do, on the wrong side of the speech code. Their past willingness to abandon core principles for the sake of in-group status makes their current outrage seem hypocritical and partisan [my emphasis].

Ross Douthat: There are echoes of the 1960s and 1970s in the recent experience of American progressivism. A belief in a nearly inevitable leftward arc of history, a guaranteed multiracial Democratic majority, giving way to the repeated shocks of the populist era. A period of extraordinary cultural influence, of revolutionary zeal joined to institutional power [my emphasis], that peaked in 2020 and 2021 and has been dissolving ever since.

I could quote many other recent Substack posts, but I think you get the idea.

Having gotten rolling drunk on near-unchecked cultural power for a decade, progressives are now enduring merely the first stages of what’s likely to be a long and painful hangover.

Talkin’ ’bout my generation
Everyone – including me, most of the time – defaults to focusing on the class aspect of the now white-hot kulturkampf.

However, it’s also worth looking at the generational aspect. Both the Boomers and their Millennial offspring were driven by a utopianism that ultimately led to some dark places. In contrast, the intervening generations – Gen X and, so it seems, Gen Z – are more inclined to clear-eyed pragmatism.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, obviously.

Nonetheless, I’ve long been struck by how those happy few, those band of brothers (and, less commonly, sisters) who had the balls to call out what’s now gently referred to as ‘progressive overreach’ in real time, were Gen Xers. Think Dave Chappelle, Glenn Greenwald, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, J.K. Rowling, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi.

In contrast, the woke mobs – the publishing staff wanting books left unpublished, the
Spotify snowflakes wanting Rogan booted, those James Damore-banishing Google employees, the early-career journalists determined to end the career of any senior colleague who expressed an unorthodox opinion – or merely allowed someone else to – skewed heavily Millennial.

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do
After spending much of the last three years complaining bitterly about the moral vanity of the progressive left and the policy failures of the managerial elite –uncontrolled/barely controlled mass migration, asymmetric multiculturalism, the trans mania, not to mention sins of omission, such as an aggressive uninterest in distributional matters – I can’t believe I’m writing this.

But everyone from the much-swelled ranks of disaffected leftists to right-wing populists needs to take inspiration from Erika Kirk and extend forgiveness.

As galling as it will be, those who’ve suffered through a long decade of Robespierrean progressivism must soon offer absolution to the statue toppling, knee taking, tone policing, LGBTIQAP2S+-identifying, pronoun providing, land acknowledgement-reciting, ‘In this house we believe’ poster-hanging, black-square posting, trigger warning-requiring, cultural appropriation-apprehending, safe-space seeking, Star Wars-franchise-ruining, toxic masculinity-condemning, whiteness-excoriating, modern-day Red Guards.

Why wokery was catnip for the young people
Let me, begrudgingly, mount a case for the defence.

1) Young people are stupid. Old people often are too, but they at least have some hard-won life experience and are accordingly a little less prone to self-pleasuring Manichaeism. If you were young and ideologically foolish once yourself, perhaps you can see your way clear to extending some grace to your juniors.

2) The digitally native Millennials (born 1981-1996) were blindsided by a one-two digital punch of universal phone ownership and, soon thereafter, near-universal social media use.

In a way digital migrant Gen Xers and Boomers simply weren’t.

This is a whole separate Musing, but participating in social media makes performative virtue signalling much more tempting and, arguably, unavoidable. After all, if everyone has posted a Palestinian flag underneath their profile pic, and you haven’t, what’s to stop some opportunist in your online social circles seeking to boost their status by ‘calling out’ your failure to be a good ally?

3) The Millennials got a particularly dispiriting economic deal. Granted, every generation since the Boomers has, but Millennials got it significantly worse than their plentiful Gen X critics.

Sure, it’s been far from beer and skittles for us Xers. However, a goodly proportion of us ultimately managed to secure a fulfilling and/or reasonably paid job, get married, have children, and maybe even get a foot on the property ladder.

But those milestones of adult life – which were challenging but still often feasible for Xers and par for the course for Boomers – have drifted ever further out of reach for Millennials. If you were in their shoes, you too might have been tempted to generate some all-too-rare career opportunities by demanding your senior colleagues be purged for wrongthink.

Still not inclined to forgive and forget?

Let me conclude by appealing to your economic self-interest.

Uniting in the face of a common enemy
One of the more regrettable aspects of the last 45 years, and especially the 2014-2022 period, was that cultural Marxism almost entirely displaced the old-school economic variety.

Neoliberalism (i.e. the social hyperliberalism so beloved of the professional-managerial class Left coupled with the free-market fundamentalism of the pre-Trump Right) has proved disastrous for the working and lower-middle classes across the Anglosphere and Western Europe.

Long before ChatGPT dropped, it was also having negative impacts on many of those who would’ve once been considered definitionally middle-class – that is, the university educated. Or as they are more commonly known nowadays, downwardly mobile graduates.

At this juncture, it’s unarguable that AI is impacting the labour market.

Many smart people are warning that it will soon start disrupting it much more profoundly, likely causing a descent from mere oligarchy to outright techno-feudalism.

Or as AI doomer Mo Gawdat memorably puts it, looming AI-driven mass automation means that, “Unless you’re in the top 0.1 per cent, you’re a peasant. There is no middle class.”

If there was ever a time when societies needed a sane and vigorous Left capable of advocating for the interests of the 99.9 per cent, this is surely it.