I thought feminist glaciology had taken the case, but I had yet to discover black feminist thought from gay whales.

Whenever you think academic wokeness jumps the sharks, it actually queers it. Courtesy of Naresh Krishnamoorti, if this isn’t a new depth, it’s certainly a new depth when measured in sea level.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us.”

Still not sold?

“Gumbs’s narrative moves seamlessly between dolphins born in captivity and Black political prisoners giving birth behind bars, between the migratory patterns of dolphins and the Atlantic slave trade. An absolutely unique read!”

I know, you’re thinking to yourself, “Sure, Daniel, this sounds crazy but we live in an age where there’s a man in a wig who’s a fake admiral and a former nuke secretary who liked to wear dog collars and steal womens’ luggage. Do better!”

But give it a chance. Here’s an excerpt.

“I identify as a mammal. I identify as a black woman ascending with and shaped by a whole group of people who were transubstantiated into property and kidnapped across an ocean. And, like many of us, I am simply attracted to the wonder of marine life.”

And so, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who identifies both as a mammal and a black woman, picked up a copy of the Audobon Guide and the Smithsonian Handbook, and was “confronted with the colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriarchalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill me– the net I am already caught in, so to speak.”

“What I found was the languages of deviance and denigration (for example, the term ‘vagrant juveniles’ used to describe hooded seals), awkwardly binary assignments of biological sex, and a strange criminalization of mammals that escaped the gaze of biologists showed up in what would call itself the ‘neutral’ scientific language of marine guidebooks.”

And after posting about her ‘deep thoughts’ on social media about how whales are non-binary and sharks are criminalized, Alexis she wrote a “different kind of guidebook for our movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals”.

“If there was ever a time to humbly submit to the mentorship of marine mammals, it is now.”

This isn’t really about this stupid nonsense. It’s about the death of comedy.

We had these leftist crazies in the eighties and the nineties, and when they, like Karen Finley, tried this stuff, they were laughed off the stage. People refused to take them seriously. Then under the tutelage of folks like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, comedy was canceled, and what was left was clapter and SNL high-school talent show skits about how Republicans suck.

And that created a safe space for…. “If there was ever a time to humbly submit to the mentorship of marine mammals, it is now.”

The thing about Communist dictatorships is no one is allowed to laugh or even enter a state of mind in which the regime’s most absurd things are mockable.

No one is allowed to even think about mocking their assigned, “I identify as a mammal” reading. At least not in public.

They say dolphins have a sense of humor, wokes don’t. They can’t afford one.