Audience Capture and the Anti-Woke Movement | TaraElla Clips

This is an excerpt from The Problem with the Anti-Woke Movement Right Now by TaraElla.

As I often say, tribalist peer pressure is the most dangerous thing in this world, and we need to be able to resist it if we are to have a healthy cultural and political discourse. However, this is often easier said than done, especially for those whose living depend on like-minded people paying to read their work. Perhaps those whose income isn't dependent on their audience in this way, like myself, need to work extra hard to counter this.

An additional problem is, your audience does not always stay the same either. What you need to remember is that, they too can be exposed to biased reporting from various media sources, and their own Overton Window could be unconsciously shifting as a result. In the world of anti-woke media, this situation is particularly of concern, given the unevenness of the playing field. Much of anti-woke media, like most other English-speaking news media, is either based in America or has heavy American involvement, and is therefore inevitably connected to certain parts of American politics. In the current American political landscape, forces aligned with the Republican Party are much more likely to want to invest in setting up anti-woke media outlets, given that wokeism actually divides the base of the Democratic Party due to demographics. It is simply a matter of political self-interest. This means the most well-funded anti-woke media outlets tend to be Republican-aligned, with Democratic-aligned anti-woke media being almost non-existent, even though there are many anti-woke Democrats out there. This situation, in and of itself, creates a strongly uneven Overton Window, where there is an overall effect of ideas and voices from the Right being treated more generously than those from the Left, in the anti-woke world.

To be the lone liberal anti-woke voice pushing back against Republican-aligned anti-wokeism requires principles and bravery, principles and bravery that unfortunately many commentators don't have. Personally speaking, I started opposing wokeism because of my commitment to the Moral Libertarian principle of Equal Moral Agency for every individual, which required me to take a strong stance against postmodern activists' challenge towards free speech norms in many parts of Western society. I guess the fact that I entered anti-wokeism on the basis of principle means that my work has been less affected by tribalist forces.