Wokeness Didn't Die, It Moved to TikTok

And Instagram

I recently wrote about the unfuck America tour’s insane implosion. This tour was created to combat conservative ideology, but accidentally became a massive impediment to Democratic success. After one of the organizers was accused of a microaggression, the most influential left-wing Gen-Z activists rushed to throw her and the entire tour under the bus. Though the organizer hadn’t behaved badly at all, she was treated as if she’d endorsed Hitler, and permanently shunned by many members of the tour. This episode was the height of left-wing censoriousness and insanity, demonstrating that many on the left will anathematize you for nonexistent sins, so long as you don’t speak like an HR lady.

All across the internet—on podcasts, YouTube, and blogs—there seem to be broad agreement that this episode was insane. Zee, the organizer thrown under the bus, while castigated by her friends, was seen by almost everyone else as the one blameless person in the affair. Even people who are left of center agreed that the recent unfuck America affair was insane and demented.

But there was one place that seemed to approve of the actions of the cancelers. That place is, unfortunately, where many young people spend almost all of their time. It was TikTok.

While the comments on my article have been uniformly in agreement with my conclusions, the same was not true of Zee on TikTok. On Zee’s most recent video, the most liked comment was:

There’s an enormous amount of issues with the “left”. Including not taking accountability for microaggressions and racism. Those are still valid issues to question other people over.

(Pedant note: it should be “there are an enormous number of issues.”

On the video before that, which has nothing to do with the recent drama, the most liked comment is:

Babe this doubling tripling down is never gonna work. If we want to help stop the division, we all have to be honest with ourselves when it comes to hurting marginalized ppl.

Another of the most popular comments was:

Why have you yet to make any type of statement or apology?

Answer: because she has nothing to apologize for!

On other platforms—YouTube, Substack, even Reddit—there seems to be widespread support for Zee. On Tiktok, and presumably Instagram, however, the consensus view is the opposite. People rush to throw her under the bus.

During 2020, at the height of left-wing insanity, the greatest insanity came from the social media apps used primarily by young people. I remember seeing person after person posting about the immorality of arresting rioters on Instagram. When October 7th occurred, I saw large numbers of people posting about how the mass slaughter that ensued was a form of legitimate resistance fighting. More than one person posted the following screenshot:

Wokeness was most pernicious when it percolated upward to influence institutions. If a bunch of young people believe that the police should be defunded, that’s much less bad than if the police actually get defunded. But most of it came from the bottom up, from young people sharing messages on social media. While it majorly affected the world, it was first and foremost an online phenomenon.

TikTok is hugely influential. About a billion people use it monthly, and those who use it spend on average an hour a day on the app. About half of Gen-Zers have discussed activism issues with family and friends because of TikTok, and about 44% have signed petitions they found on TikTok. As Taylor Lorenz notes, “according to Pew Research, TikTok has the most progressive news influencer ecosystem.”

It’s unfortunately difficult to prove my thesis. Wokeness is a notoriously tricky term to define—as a result, it’s hard to measure objectively. But if one spends time on social media, it is clear that what I say is true. While most of the rest of the world has abandoned the uniquely pernicious tenets of left-wing insanity that significantly contributed to Harris’s defeat, on TikTok and Instagram, such insanity is still alive and well.

This is not, of course, to say that woke ideology exists nowhere outside of TikTok. Certainly one can find it in various bits of Twitter, YouTube, and even real life. But it does not have the same kind of institutional support that it does on TikTok. It is no longer the dominant and hegemonic ideology that it was in 2020 and remains on much of social media for young people.

This in part explains why young people shifted right. Young people are not watching CNN or David Pakman, finding them appalling, and shifting left. They’re seeing insane left wing people on TikTok—the sorts of people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok—who say that owning dogs and ordering soup are racist. They see people on TikTok who are very much like the insufferable ghouls at the center of the unfuck America scandal.

In other words, young people are moving right and becoming more polarized because they’re being constantly bombarded with messages from exactly the sorts of people who engender polarization. These people do not reside where older people will find them—they reside on TikTok.

Certainly there has been a decline in wokeness from its 2020 peak. But this does not mean it is gone. Lots of people thought that Trump was gone after 2020. We all know how that turned out!