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Yes - this is exactly how I felt about the "Wokeness" essay. I am constantly afraid that PG is gonna fall down the same strongly right rabbit hole so many of his colleagues have, and he hasn't so far, so seeing the title of the essay was worrying.

When I read it though, I realized he was just using "wokeness" to mean the dogmatic surface level understanding of the subject (IE, not that he was being surface level, but he's talking about people who engage with equality/identity issues in a surface level way). It's kind of a strawman idea, but people like that exist and are annoying. It makes me wonder how many people who are really centrists hate wokeness because they think the most annoying wing of it is representative of the whole movement.

Reading PGs article, I get the sense of someone who doesn't fully understand the thing he's criticising, so makes me hopeful he can learn. But again, I'm always a little afraid that the legit criticizisms of his article will get drowned out by people who reinforce what he says in it.

PG feel down that rabbit hole years ago. He was one of the very first people posting aggressively about "free speech on campus" in the 2012ish era. It was obvious to everyone I knew at the time that "free speech on campus" was right wing propaganda to platform hate speech, with folks like Milo and Ann Coulter. Where we are today with Trump, and his marginalization of immigrants and LGBTQ+, came directly from that.

Does PG know he did this? Hard to say. But he's still platforming right wing views for his centre-right-but-thinks-theyre-left audience.