Tablet: The left's praise of terrorism has red-pilled me.

[As] a man in his 20s, it was only natural that I found myself firmly situated within the progressive left.

Really? You think it's normal for actual men to unquestioning swear allegiance to the party of pussies?

I never once questioned my political home. Guided by my Jewish values, during the George Floyd tragedy and the racial reckoning that followed, I wholeheartedly embraced anti-racism initiatives. I read Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and I even took on the role of facilitating international dialogues on collective sense-making and healing. I strove to be a good "white ally." Truly, I did.

Then came a flexion point: During a 2021 Bay Area psychotherapy training, in a "processing session" around race, a woman vulnerably shared her firsthand experience with a horrific act of antisemitic hatred. To my astonishment, the two facilitators, both white women, chastised her--yes, chastised--stressing the session's emphasis on anti-Black racism.

It's astonishing to me what astonishes other people.

This episode unveiled a disconcerting bias in this community that routinely minimized antisemitism, to the point it was no longer considered "legitimate" racism. The young Jewish woman who'd shared was cowed into silence....

At that moment, it became clear to me that "wokeness," or whatever term we may use to describe the new progressive social justice ideology, didn't seem fully compatible with the perspective I had developed in a family that was very liberal because of our lineage of Holocaust survivors.

Since then, I've struggled to find my political footing while maintaining a commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice. I started noticing the sinister shadow of postmodern progressivism everywhere: a seeming insistence on "pluralism" that, in practice, often lacks genuine embodiment and quickly devolves into its own form of dogmatic and reductive tribalism.

I began to feel as though I had been baited into an a priori virtuous worldview that, in a twisted way, sows more division than it does healing; more concerned, as it is, with retribution than reconciliation.

You don't say. You don't say.

Despite these misgivings, this "man" continued to believe in the left.

Until 10/7.

[M]any celebrated--yes, celebrated--these attacks as a form of "anti-colonialist resistance." Memes circulated, like the now infamous Chicago #BLM paratrooper, that quite literally glorified an unimaginable slaughtering...

The straw that broke my proverbial "progressive" back occurred last Thursday, when students at a high school in the Bay Area, my home for the last 15 years, were seen chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." They marched in the hallways of a public school ringing the jihadist rallying call that implicitly calls for the erasure of the State of Israel. And all those who live within it.

...

Zooming out, it has become clear to me, and devoid of the Israeli-Palestinian context, there's a dark reality: Our Western culture is riddled with ambient antisemitism.

Wait until he finds out about anti-white bigotry.

Before 10/7, Kristin Tate wrote piece wondering if wokeness was coming to an end.

If there is a great legacy from the presidency of Barack Obama, it is the birth of the "Great Awokening" that began in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. After a number of claims of unjust police actions, the left-wing "woke" movement exploded and appeared to reach a crescendo during the presidency of Donald Trump in 2020.

Now, more than three years later, after tearful marches, fiery riots and innumerable acts of public penance by government agencies, colleges and large corporations, the Great Awokening appears to be slowing down and may be headed for collapse.

You've probably noticed wokeness declining firsthand. During 2020 and 2021, brands ranging from Lilly Pulitzer to Target to Bath and Body Works created and heavily marketed all kinds of rainbow items to celebrate Pride month. Americans' inboxes were practically bursting with impassioned emails from clothing brands, tech companies and restaurants to let everyone know that they were fully on board with the LGBTQ+ and Black Lives Matter agendas.

Things unfolded differently this year. Brands that had posted Pride month messages in 2022, such as Lego and Miller Lite, were silent. Even the Navy deleted Pride-related messaging from Instagram and Twitter.

So what changed?

Perhaps we have TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney to thank....

Wokeness isn't receding only on store shelves and in marketing materials -- it is also slowing down in corporate boardrooms. NPR recently reported on the decline of corporate funding for company diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) departments. In 2020, large corporations climbed over each other to announce seven- and eight-figure grants and endowments for racial justice causes. Between July 2020 and July 2021, the number of DEI positions nationwide nearly doubled. Now, that funding has slowed to a trickle. One-third of DEI professionals lost their jobs in 2022. A more recent survey found a decline in DEI job postings of more than 38% since last summer. NPR noted that similar programs may see a decline because of the Supreme Court decision earlier this year to end affirmative action in college admissions.

While many on the left will blame Republicans for pushing to clip DEI programs, it is clear that the cultural pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction. In 2017, during the formative stage of the Great Awokening, 44% of Americans believed that gender could be changed, with 54% believing that it is determined permanently at birth. By May of last year, those figures had changed to 38% and 60%, respectively. The same Pew poll found that 38% of adults believe that society has "gone too far" in accepting transgenderism, compared to 36% who say it has not gone "far enough," with 23% believing it has "been about right."

...

While a number of factors are pushing public sentiment in this new direction, the most significant may be that the wokesters pushed their agendas too far, too fast. At first, many Americans were happy to go along with some of the left's social initiatives, in some instances to signal virtues of kindness and acceptance. But now they are backing away from radicalism disguised as "tolerance."

Below, leftwing podcaster Ethan Klein is surprised that the hardcore leftwing "decolonialist" audience he's cultivated, get this, hates Jews.

He chose this path when he teamed up with a pro-terrorist extremist named Hasan Piker.

But you guys -- the alligator said he'd eat me last!!!