Who Said You Couldn't Say That?
Thoughts on the anti-woke ascendency
A few weeks ago, the Financial Times ran a story about how, after a period of at least paying lip service to diversity and social justice, major companies are ditching DEI initiatives and anything that could be perceived as “woke.” Conservatism, and sucking up to Donald Trump, is now in style. You may have seen it, or you may have seen a screenshot of the line that made it viral (italics mine):
Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
I was thinking about that quote when I read the recent cover story from New York Magazine1 by Brock Colyar about a crew of callous young people who were in D.C. to celebrate Trump’s inauguration. These are podcasters and influencers and publicists and crypto advocates, on the margins of fame and at the tip of the spear of the conservative movement. To give you an idea of the crowd, one young woman calls Matt Gaetz “truly one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” which is something only someone who lives in Florida could say.
“This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity,” Colyar writes. One young Democrat-turned-Trumpite tells them, “I hate watching the things I say.” A former Bernie Sanders supporter “wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded.’” It seems that what Barack Obama’s election was for Black people, Trump’s 2024 win is for Americans who want to sing along to the original lyrics of “Let's Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas.
What’s interesting here is the all the talk about how these people aren’t “allowed” to say certain things. Who was stopping them? After all, the Joe Biden administration wouldn’t arrest you if you walked down the street saying “retarded faggot” over and over again. If these folx feel a sense of liberation, it isn’t because the country’s legal and political machinery is now on their side. It’s more that Trump’s victory, for them, is proof of the much-discussed “vibe shift,” a rightwing societal swing that follows the last decade of progressive cultural dominance.
On a certain level, I understand where Colyar’s subjects are coming from. I got into the media industry at the hinge point of the last vibe shift, in the early 2010s. Social media was a new thing, and we were all learning in real time what “going viral” meant. All of a sudden, a paragraph or an image could be lifted out of its original context and spread around the world, in the process pissing thousands of people off, which of course would just cause it to spread faster and further. Before “getting cancelled” became a term, I saw firsthand how online controversies could blindside writers, editors, brand managers, and public figures. It’s no wonder that gradually, we all became a little bit more cautious about what we put on the web. It's disorienting to have a hundred strangers become angry at you, and in that new era of Facebook and Twitter, a hundred strangers now got mad at dozens of things every day.
Larger publications and institutions, surveying this new landscape where every move could set off a tripwire of outrage, adapted by trying to find safe ways to post. When I started at Vice in 2010, my first job as an intern was to phone up convents all over New York City in an attempt to find nuns who would let Terry Richardson, the king of the hipster scumbags, photograph them in their habits. By 2016, when Vice’s Instagram account put up a “Fuck Trump” post, it was self-censoring the word “fuck.”
At the same time, corporations began catering to the progressive sensibilities of their millennial customers and workers through diversity and sustainability efforts. In many cases, these were just meaningless gestures and often disconnected from any sort of left-wing politics; even Raytheon now celebrates Pride. As an employee, if you disagreed with this stuff or even just found it pointless and cringe, you probably didn’t want to kick up a fuss and potentially end up in some kind of weird HR situation. Workplaces and online spaces both shifted — however superficially — to the left.
This era had its positives. A lot of artists and writers of color earned justified recognition that might previously have been denied them; the culture as a whole began to take rape accusations more seriously2. But there were undeniable downsides to this new vibe as well. A lot of people were shrugging through a lot of DEI trainings they privately thought were silly, a lot of institutions were posting transparently phony affirmations of progressivism. Free speech, as a concept, began to be regarded with skepticism by many on the left. In some quarters, there was an inordinate focus on what words we should use, and what should be considered offensive. If you wrote or made art, you likely noticed that the bounds of what counted as “uncontroversial” kept shrinking, and fewer institutions had any appetite for controversy. Maybe you censored yourself a bit in order to fit in with the new climate. Maybe when you did this, it felt like someone else — the libs? The PMC? The NPCs? The DNC? — was censoring you.
Those little Trumplets from the New York story did figure out something: A lot of those supposed restrictions on speech don’t have any real power. Political correctness is not a wall, but a door you can choose to walk through, provided you’re willing to make some people mad. And sometimes, making a few enemies can lead to finding a larger audience — plenty of figures who walked away from progressive media are much more successful now that they’re free to be “heterodox.”3 A similar dynamic may be playing out in corporate America, per that Financial Times article, as C-suites realize that fewer people really wanted that DEI stuff than was previously thought.
Importantly, these right-wing influencers celebrating the inauguration seem mostly to be self-employed, and therefore don’t have the public relations or advertising concerns that lead media companies to be cautious. This independence confers the ability to be more provocative, or outright offensive, than someone who has to answer to an editor, and whose editor has to answer to a manager, and so on up the chain.
But even these free speech warriors can’t always say what they really think, because some of them are Nazis. Bryce Hall, an MMA fighter Colyar describes as “downing shot after shot of tequila” at an inauguration party, said this week that Adolf Hitler was a “good guy” and subsequently lost at least one sponsor. The language police, it seems, are still on the case.
Maybe many people regard DEI initiatives and trainings with indifference bordering on annoyance. Are they going to be on board with the right’s attempts to blame everything on DEI? On the Trump White House’s rambling claims that the recent midair collision above D.C. is connected to DEI programs? (Some of which, incidentally, started during the first Trump administration.)
Progressives have discovered that you can’t wrench the country’s politics to the left by trying to police the discourse. Conservatives may find, similarly, that winning an election does not transform American culture into an anything-goes right-wing playground. Or more simply: If you’re an asshole you’re an asshole, no matter who the president is.
Disclosure: I work for Vox Media, which owns New York.
Not entirely seriously, since the country did elect an accused rapist as president, twice.
Matt Yglesias, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan — you can probably think of some more names yourself, they’re all over Substack.