 Some have called an act of literary vandalism. I like that. So this is an article called An Act of Literary Vandalism, where the publisher, not because of anybody demanding it, not because of the government forcing them, not because of any act, the publisher, who owns the copyright of the books. And according to current law, has every right to edit them, change them. Has taken the books of Robert Dahl. You might know, I know Robert Dahl primarily from Matilda. I think Matilda is the main book of Robert Dahls that I have read. He's a little bit too absurdist and a little bit too vulgar for my vulgar and ugly for my taste in children's literature. These are not books I particularly encourage my kids to read. You know, they're kind of fun and interesting, but they're also ugly. They emphasize ugliness. So I guess to some extent, I canceled Robert Dahl a long time ago, because I don't really roll on, rolled Dahl a while ago, because I didn't really enjoy it, except Matilda. I thought Matilda was really, really funny and quirky and interesting. But what Dahl is known for are characters who are quirky and different. He describes them often as fat and ugly, and all kinds of colorful descriptions. The action is often depressing. His books don't necessarily have happy endings. And ugly things and grotesque stuff happens to people. In his story, you don't like that? Don't read Robert Dahl. Rolla Dahl. Just Dahl. I'm just calling Dahl because everything else is clearly too difficult. Anyway, what the publisher decided to do is the publisher has decided to soften him and to make him more, quote, appropriate for the 21st century and for woke culture. So for example, in Augustus Group, one of the characters in his books, is no longer fat because to call somebody fat is just inconsiderate and not nice and why point that out? And it's just not politically correct. It's not woke. Mr. Twit is no longer fearfully ugly. Fearfully ugly, not just ugly, fearfully ugly because again, that's just not right. The Oompa Loompas have gone gender neutral in the new editions of the books. This is the publisher Puffin. And they have basically taken all the books and they've assigned special woke sensitivity readers. Literally, they call them sensitivity readers. And these sensitivities readers have gone through the books and have marked all the passages that they have found potentially offensive to some potential child, adult, I don't know. These sensitivity readers, sometimes, they're called inclusive minds. I don't know what the hell that means. Which is a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children's literature. So these are people who specialize in destroying children's literature for the sake of woke culture. So the company is reissued all of Dahl's books with these new writings. Let me read you a few examples of what they've done. So in the original, the 2001 edition, this is the witches, not Robert. Dahl wrote, don't be foolish, my grandmother said. You can't go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens. The new one says, don't be foolish, my grandmother said. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs. And there is certainly nothing wrong with it. So the idea is, in the book, I think, witches wear gloves and wigs. And so now, it doesn't want to suggest that every woman out there has a wig, so they make it explicit. Dahl would never write a sentence like there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. That is not a Dahl sentence. That is completely out of character of his books. Another example from the witches. Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman, God, that's awful. That is a stereotype of a woman. You can't have that. So the new edition says, even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business. Another one from Matilda. She went on olden days sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rupert Kipling. So these are all authors. Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Rupert Kipling. Now, of course, Joseph Conrad and Rupert Kipling are not PC anymore. They're not OK. You can't refer to them. They're both authors from the imperial past of Britain. They both have, can be interpreted as being racist. Not acceptable anymore. So the new version is. Now, of course, this is Matilda reading books and going on trips because, you know, adventures through novels. I mean, that's a beautiful sentiment, right? In the new novel, it says she went to the 19th century estates with Jane Austen. That sounds so boring. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway is still OK. You can all read Ernest Hemingway and still be OK. Don't worry. And California, with John Steinbeck, instead of India with Rupert Kipling. So again, all the references to physical appearance have been edited. The word fat has been removed. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, now he's only described as enormous, not as a ball of dough. Ball of dough is out, right? In the same story, the Oompa Loompas are not tiny titchy or no higher than my knee, but merely small. I mean, how dull of a language. I mean, doll is known for this kind of tiny titchy, no higher than my knee, you know, small. How dull is that beyond anything else? They were once small men. Now the Oompa Loompas are small people because we can't gender define them. I mean, who knows? Maybe they've chosen not to be men since then. Boys and girls now have been turned into children. No boys and girls. And the Cloud Men in James and the Peach have become Cloud People. And Fantastic Mr. Fox's Three Sons have become Three Daughters. And then you've got whole sections that were never written, that they've added. They've added. So this is kind of a corporation, a publisher, not on any pressure as far as we know. Nobody wrote to them and said, I mean, maybe some people wrote to them, but not on any heavy pressure to do anything, decided of its own decision supposedly to maximize audience, to complete a neuter, as they call it. What do they call it? Literary vandalism, to commit literary vandalism against Dahl by rewriting these books. It's just stupid and horrible and offensive and ridiculous, and you could go on and on and on. There is real evidence, I think. And you can actually see some graphs and numbers. And it's not definitive, and it's still a question of book as a theme. And I've said this on other shows. It really does seem that this wokeness thing has peaked. I mean, indeed, this Dahl rewriting of Dahl's book has irked not only conservatives. Indeed, conservatives are some of the quieter voices with regard to Dahl. And it's not just kind of the Barry Weiss center left. You're seeing even some of the people who consider themselves woke, part of the academic movement that led us to the place of woke that exists today, even they are criticizing it. I think this is one of the first examples where we're seeing even people on the left that in the past have just gone with anything, saying, wait a minute, maybe this is too far. Maybe this is too much. Maybe we've crossed. We might have approached peak woke. Now, peak woke is measured by certain things. I think two things are going on here. One, we've probably reached peak of absurdity. We've probably reached peak of just number of offenses and number of incidents and the number of publications and the number of books. The flip side of that is that some of the most damaging things that woke have brought into our life, into our management, into the way we run our businesses. Much of that has been normalized. I don't think DEI standards at businesses for hiring are going away, although, as I'll tell you in a minute, DEI departments in many tech companies are shrinking significantly. I think I've talked about these DEI statements that faculty, new faculty at University of California have to make if they're going to get a job. I don't think that's going away anytime soon, but I have a feeling that a lot of departments are going to wake them less, less than others. And it seems like there's kind of a new permanent level of these institutions and this attitude this now is going to be in society. But the real nuttiness is probably piqued and over with. I think maybe a good representation of that is the resignation of the prime minister or the first minister, I don't know how they call it. I think they call it the first minister of Scotland. The fact that even in Scotland, as left-wing as it is, as social as it is, as crazy as it is, their whole attitude towards the whole issue of trans was so absurd and so ridiculous and so over the top that basically their first minister had to resign over it just a few days ago. But I actually have an article out there by a guy named Musa El-Gabi, who is an academic and he has just documented the fact that by many measures, by almost every measure that is quantifiable, the whole woke issue piqued last year, two years ago in 2021. Now let's start just with a little bit of background on the whole social justice woke issue. This really came about, really started to see a shift towards heightened identity politics, primarily focused on sexual race, gender, heightened sense of social justice, primarily in areas like tech, finance, education, journalism, art, entertainment, design, consulting, and primarily led and driven through the universities. We started to see that in about 2011. We started to see the shift. I think the first real movements of the 2011 and then it continued with the post-Trump resistant movement and it culminated, I think, with BLM in 2020 and everything happened after BLM. So the first thing you can see is post 2011 you see dramatically heightened protest movement, active protest. And it's higher if you were a professional class than others that now are dedicated to the idea of protesting all the so-called social injustices that are going on. And really, protests in the name of social justice, in the name of DEI, in the name of Wokeness, really piqued with BLM. They've never achieved a BLM level post-BLM. Now there hasn't been an event that stimulated, but that was really the peak. It also was the peak of, I would say, the peak of acceptance in American culture of the whole woke agenda. I think when BLM started, people saw the pictures of George Floyd murder. People were very upset. And people who weren't typically far left and would typically throw the whole even Occupy Wall Street or even any of the other big time leftist agenda. People really responded to George Floyd and responded with reflection and a lot of honest support for whatever positive element there was within BLM. I think a lot of people were convinced there was systemic racism and there was the potential of racism in police departments. And right or wrong, I think many of them were honest and they demonstrated. But then as the demonstration turned into riots and the riots continued and continued and continued. And as data came out about maybe America is not as racist as some people think it is, a lot of people turned away from BLM. And I think really, I think the beginning of the end of the beginning of the descent of the whole movement starts with the BLM protests. It was the peak, and since then it's been in decline. And the big part of the decline is people being disenchanted with it. And people walked away, I think, and walked away from the whole work movement. But it took time. It took the absurdities of wokeness to really come to the forefront. During the same period of time, 2011 to 2022, there was a significant unrest within the economy, within institutions in finance, in journalism, in tech, in social media. There were significant campaigns to get people fired. Every year you heard stories about people getting fired because of opinions they expressed that were not quote politically correct based on the latest woke thing. And when institutions were called upon, hey, why did you do this? Why did you, they would issue apologies. They would, on contentious political issues, organizations and institutions and corporations took strong stands, which they hadn't historically. Corporations donated enormous amounts of money to activist organizations, and all of them, almost all of them expanded their DAI initiatives. And in terms of output, in terms of what was printed and newspaper and television, what was said in books and academic scholarship, issues of discrimination based on race, gender, trans issues, all of these issues, you see from 2011, upticks in publication and talking about it in repeated certain woke terms, all accelerated through that. And you see this even before Donald Trump was elected and then accelerated once Donald Trump was elected. The entertainment business became more and more woke and you saw more and more movies and TV series that pandered to the woke crowd. You saw more and more cancellation campaigns against actors, producers, writers who didn't fit into the mold exactly. So there was this massive trend from 2011 really to 2021, where all of this happened. And people, if you look at liberals, liberals, or left people who identify as liberals or democratic, they moved far left on these issues. And this became a real big issue indeed. It was so bad that to some extent, it became, these woke issues became dominantly issues of white leftists. And to a large extent, they alienated, non-whites, they alienated less educated, they let it affluent because the real woke people were rich, were well educated and they tended to be white. But after 10 years of this acceleration, and again, a lot of these statistics coming out of this article called The Great Awakening is Winding Down by Musa Al-Gabi. You can find him, he's got a sub-stack like everybody. And he makes the argument that this is peak now, that this unrest is gone. If you look at the number of scholars under fire, the number of scholars that are being attacked, the number of scholars that are being threatened. So if you look at incidents where students are targeting scholars or petitions against professors or sanctions against professors, or most dramatic where professors have been terminated, all of those peaked in 2020 or 2021. 2022 is a down year by every single one of those measures. Indeed, I think a good example of this is the uproar in Hamelin College about the showing of the painting of Muhammad. Yes, Hamelin College landed up firing the professor. But you know what? Almost everybody left, right, and center objected. The art department, the art department, about as left as you can get, probably, at the University of Minnesota, objected. Other universities objected. The teacher who was fired was hired by another university in Minnesota with Muslim students in that university, and yet they were hired. So there's a real shift. I think if that incident happened two years earlier, they would have fired the professor, everybody would have supported them, and they would be quiet. But the fact is, in this case, even the New York Times came out against it, multiple publications came out against it. Again, that unanimity of wokeness, that unanimity of ideas from the left to a large extent that has disappeared, that has gone away. If you look at data that looks at cancer culture incidents from 2010 to 2022, by all measures, it peaked in 2020. Again, some peaked in 2021, but by 2022 they were all down. Indeed, they're down to 2019 levels, in some cases even below 2019 levels. They're certainly not back to 2010. That's not, and they're never going back. There's some new normal that is going to be established, but they're definitely done. If you look at scholarships, publications focused on bias and discrimination from 2000 to 2022, been going up and up and up and up and up, and then they peaked in 2020, and they've been coming down slowly. Slowly, they're still high, still way too many publications that publish about bias, but then nowhere near as sexy of a topic as viewed, as crucial as a topic as they were before. Even in the media, if you look at just media, news media, publications, and TV, and stuff like that, well, I think this is just, you know, this is print media. If you look at the frequency of the use of the term racist, racists, racism. Again, it was pretty flat until about 2020, sorry, 2010. Almost no, I mean, there was always discussion about racist, racist, racism, but 2010, it just goes like that. It just goes through the roof. Peaks at 2020, collapses in 2021, goes down again in 2022. And, you know, in places like the Wall Street Journal, it's almost back to 2010 levels. Places like the New York Times, it's back to like 2015, 2016 levels. In the Washington Post, it's back to 2015, maybe 2016, 17 levels. Every single one of the major publications, it's down significantly. So I've told you, I thought, wokeness is peak, but this guy is giving us data, which is cool. If you look at search terms on cable news, cable news discourse about diversity, equity, harm, racism, sexism, white privilege, all of them down, peaked in 2021, down in 2022. Now, again, this could all reverse. This could be a false alarm. Other aspects of this, here's a story which I found interesting. The New York Times was recently, and I'm reading from the article, The New York Times was recently targeted by GLAAD. This is one of the, I guess, pro-trans groups. In an open letter signed by dozens of celebrities and thought leaders, primarily for publishing stories about transgender issues that included perspectives of people who did not simply celebrate and affirm progressive activists' preferred narrative. So they were attacked. The New York Times is attacked by all these celebrities and even writers at the New York Times that they're not pro-trans enough, that they're trying to be objective in presenting non-pro-trans views at the same time. So here's what happened. Like in the past, The New York Times would have said, sorry, we'll fix it, fire a few reporters that wrote those stories and hired new people. But this time, instead of an apology and instead of saying they'll do better or firing people, benching people, reassigning people, instead of all that, they wrote the following. Quote, we've received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the other co-signers of the letter seal coverage, but at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and the Times' journalistic mission are different. Wow. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate, and reflect the experience's ideas and debates in society to help readers understand them. Our reporting did just that and we're proud of it. That's pretty cool. That's a good response. Now, you could question whether The New York Times lives up its own standards and you should, but the fact that they stood up to GLAAD, the fact that they reaffirmed their commitment to such reporting and that they would not be just a mouthpiece for leftist advocates is pretty impressive. Now, it even gets even better, I think, because contemporary demanding greater conformance with progressive activists, the narrative of progressive activists on transgender issues. And this was The New York Times' response, quote. It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to influence our journalism. In this case, however, members of staff and contributors to The Times joined their effort. Their protest letter included direct attacks on several colleagues, singling them out of policy. We do not welcome and will not tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests organized by agris advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues in our social media and other public forums. Wow. Two years ago, you would have not seen that from The New York Times. Two years ago, I could have told you stories of the exact opposite happening in The New York Times. Times, they are changing. It's just, I mean, it's mind-boggling that The New York Times wrote that. And you're seeing it across the board. And if you look at opinions of Americans, liberals, leftists, they have moderated as well. They moved away from the more radical position. So here's a question that, here's a statement that people were asked whether they view it positively or negatively. Do they disagree with it, basically? Do they disagree with it? Here's this, and work their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favor. So in the past, among white liberals, 40% disagreed in 2012. That went up to almost, disagreement with this is down among blacks, among Hispanics, even among white conservatives, but their numbers were never very high to begin with. But in every measure, the idea that blacks should do the same without any special favors is more popular now than it was two years ago. Again, small movements, slightly, from 80% to 60% is not slightly. God. Again, these could reverse themselves. It's a small popularity of a lot of these leftist ideas has become, is declining, is declining. The vibes have shifted, it's definitely shifted. Let's see. And we're seeing it in corporate America as well. I think I told you last time that when you look at the big tech layoffs that have happened over the last few months, many of them now, companies are changing their attitudes towards DEI and towards woke, take Netflix. Work as possible. But then, when workers at Netflix attempted to cancel Dave Chappelle in late 2021, the company didn't support them. They didn't apologize. They didn't cancel Dave Chappelle. And in the country. Executives issued a memo informing protesting employees that if they weren't open to publishing content they'd disagree with, they should quit. When they did layoffs, a lot of the employees, the complainant about the Dave Chappelle thing were fired. At Disney, had PR controversies around Disney in Florida but they had, they made all these movies that were super woke and super everything that did very, very badly in the box office. Guess what happened last year? They fired their CEO. Bob Chappelle was fired. Ex-CEO Bob Iger came in, immediately was more conciliatory towards the whole culture wars. Acknowledge that Disney and its employees have maybe different values that much of America promised to try to accommodate the values of a wider spectrum of Americans. Disney had seemed to supposedly making efforts to have a broader reach and appeal to a broader segment of the audience. I mean, across the board, employers seemed to feel less social pressure to conspicuously conform with demands. Again, I'm reading from this article. I'm made in the name of social justice. Instead, executive seems to feel increasing social permission to marginalize, censor or purge employee activists in order to shore up their own authority and enhance the bottom line. Now, again, and has now become entrenched in corporate America, some version of it, but I think the excess of workness, the worst of workness, the craziness, I think that's peaked, and I think that's in decline. And I think we're getting some semblance of normalcy and reasonable inness, reasonable inness, yes. And I, for one, am encouraged and think that times are better, right, times are better. Now, I think a lot of people out there don't like that message. I think there is an entire industry based on and I try a emotional connection based on the idea that the world is falling apart, that the world is horrible and terrible, that all the trends are going against us and we need to fight everybody and everything because the world is horrible and wokeness is all over the place. I think a message that says things might be getting better is not a popular message. I don't think I'm going to add any subscribers as a consequence of this. I don't think, I think quite the contrary. I think the end of America, the end of the world is much more appealing, it seems, to people. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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