Suddenly the road to wokeness is full of obstacles, making 2025 a very happy new year indeed

That enchanting background music is the sound of wokeness crashing into reality. It’s the sound of wokeness being smashed to tiny pieces upon jagged rocks.

As we get older, New Year’s celebrations become unavoidably routine and procedural.

(Except for anyone trying to celebrate the New Year in Sydney, where we are subject to the charmingly unpredictable and dictatorial whims of our friendly Rail, Train and Bus Union. But that’s another story.)

What should make this New Year’s period particularly wonderful, however, almost like the New Year’s parties of our childhoods, is the enchanting background music.

Listen carefully, and you can hear it above the canned supermarket Christmas songs that every summer must drive dozens of Woolworths and Coles employees to acts of self-harm.

That enchanting background music is the sound of wokeness crashing into reality. It’s the sound of wokeness being smashed to tiny pieces upon jagged rocks. It’s the sound of wokeness getting so wrung out that even Taylor Swift’s finest lip-synching engineers couldn’t wrestle it back into tune.

Author and Journalist Lionel Shriver has called time on wokeness.

There’s also the sound of glee as woke is taken down. “It’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over,” writes British-American journalist Lionel Shriver in an appropriately joyful Spiked essay.

“That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out … that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.”

All true. “Sane people,” Shriver summarises, “do seem to have gained the upper hand right now.” Also true, and one significant reason why may be found in her choice of adjective.

Benedict Stevens performs yet another Welcome to Country at an AFL match between Melbourne and Fremantle. Picture: Fox Footy

Woke is falling because it is insane and therefore unable to work within a real world with real people, real biology and real economic and societal pressures.

People trying to straight-line their lives have become exhausted by all the woke speed bumps and chicanes: ticking pronoun boxes, tolerating eternal Welcome to Country observances, agreeing that blokes can get pregnant, believing soccer is real and so on.

That stuff is expensive. We put up with woke when we could afford it, both in terms of money and time. But luxury belief systems always have a use-by date.

US actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman – male readers, especially, will remember her as Mallory in the ’80s sitcom Family Ties – suffered under wokeness. Being a free-thinker in the conformist entertainment realm, suffering was unavoidable.

“I’m glad that mob mentality momentum is over, because the last eight years, and most acutely the last four, were unbearable,” Bateman told conservative interviewer Megyn Kelly in a recent podcast.

“I never want to go through anything like that again in my life,” Bateman continued. “I’m 58, and it was absolutely awful. To say that people can’t ask questions, can’t say what they think, or can’t request research on something – it was just like the revenge of the hall monitors.

“It was the Debbie Downers, the party poopers.”

Sadly, some of the planet’s most aggressive Debbie Downers were and are active in Australia. Even prior to Covid, we were a global Karen capital.

One fascinating characteristic common to Karens and other practitioners of woke: their displays of distress are almost always fake.

Now 58, Justine Bateman (left), who starred alongside Michael J Fox in Family Ties, has voiced her vehement opposition to wokeness.

I upset some proto-Karens back in 2014 by running a poll to name our peak feminist frightbats. Or at least they claimed to be upset, wailing about me calling them “Australia’s left-wing ladies’ auxiliary” and other harmless terms.

Then followed a several-day online, print and television campaign to run me out of town. But it was all bogus. They weren’t genuinely perturbed. They just wanted me fired.

To prove this, I ran exactly the same poll one year later. Knowing that an identical outrage fakery festival would only be a waste of time, my frightbats this time fell silent.

An immensely more serious example of pretend wokeness was committed by Western university students. You’ll remember how uni students a few years ago claimed to be so delicate and easily offended that they needed “safe spaces” and other precautionary bubble treatments.

Well, what a load of crap that was. As soon as October 7 happened, when hundreds of kids their own age were raped, butchered, kidnapped and tortured by subhuman monsters, our precious little uni children emerged from their safe spaces to express support for … the monsters.

Woke began to die at the same time it rejoiced in death. We now await history’s verdict. “Will this era’s edges blur, until in retrospect ‘cancel culture’ is remembered as rather cute?” asks Shriver.

“Or will the reign of woke instead take its place alongside Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s showtrials, and Pol Pot’s killing fields, as a lower-fatality example of a whole society losing its collective mind?”

The second example, hopefully. A culture of lies deserves the truth. Please enjoy a sweet Christmas and a beautiful New Year.