The woke era: a video retrospective

Some highs and lows of the culture war.

There is little doubt that historians of the future are going to look back on the ‘woke’ era with utter bafflement. How is it that intelligent people were suddenly caught up in this identity-obsessed hysteria? Why did they forget that free speech mattered? Or that human beings cannot change sex? Or that judging people by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character was a bad thing?

The lunacy was so intense that these same historians will probably have to be persuaded that any of it happened at all. So I thought it would be helpful to compile some of the more ludicrous and shocking video clips from this recent culture war. A kind of digital time capsule, if you will, for the sceptics of the future.

Woke may not have ended, but with any luck we are over the worst of it. With that in mind, here are my top twenty snapshots of this bonkers period of our history. Enjoy!

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20. The homophobic horses

During the woke era, numerous pedestrian crossings were repainted with the ‘Progress Pride’ design, in spite of disability rights campaigners pointing out that the rainbow colours caused huge problems for the partially-sighted and their guide dogs. Police horses also found walking across the coloured stripes confusing and disturbing. Instead of getting rid of these eyesores, the Metropolitan Police in London gave the animals special training to prevent them from being spooked. Here are a pair of horses brazenly expressing their homophobia.

19. The no-no square

In Finland, Oulu city council established a €2.5 million project to address the rising cases of sexual assaults by migrants. It was called ‘Safe Oulu’, and this was the official dance.

18. Gay conversion therapy goes mainstream

In 2022, Channel 4 aired an episode of Teen First Dates in which a seventeen-year-old boy who had recently come out as gay was set up on a blind date with another boy. In truth, the producers had arranged for him to meet a girl who identified as male. It was one of the most awkward, unethical and homophobic displays ever broadcast on mainstream television. The producers seemed to be saying: ‘So you’ve come out as gay? We’ll see about that…’

Gay conversion was even becoming popular in the gay press. Homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan, which is why for a few years the government offered financial support for trans surgery that would ‘heterosexualise’ gay people. The magazine Pink News welcomed this policy, declaring in January 2020 that ‘Pakistan just said trans rights’, seemingly oblivious to the anti-gay reasoning behind the decision.

17. The abolition of history

Culture warriors have always been quick to rewrite history according to how they would prefer it to have been, whether that means demolishing statues and landmarks, insisting on inaccurately ‘diverse’ casting for historical dramas, or simply denying the inconvenient facts of the past. In August 2020, Democratic representative LaShawn K. Ford joined a group of community leaders calling for the abolition of history classes in schools and the removal of history books. Current curriculum practices, he claimed, ‘lead to white privilege and a racist society’.

16. The alphabet soup

It began as LGB. Then it expanded to become LGBT. These days it’s mostly LGBTQIA+, but other variations have emerged such as LGBTQ2SIA and LGBTQQIP2SAA. Here is former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proving that he’s just as confused as the rest of us…

Oh, and here’s Trudeau in blackface, just for the hell of it…

15. Queers for Palestine

When I first saw the campaign group calling itself ‘Queers for Palestine’, I assumed it was a satirical joke. But here they are, at a protest in London in April 2025, chanting: ‘One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights’. I wonder whether Hamas would agree?

14. Problematic allies

The naivety of LGBTQIA+ campaigners when it comes to the tenets of Islam is remarkable. Here is a far-left activist berating the campaigner Billboard Chris for his supposed ‘anti-trans’ views. He solicits support from two young Muslim women. As you can imagine, they didn’t react as he expected…

And here’s another example, where a Muslim woman screams abuse at a passing Pride parade.

13. ‘Progressive’ racism

Throughout their culture war, woke academics tried to redefine ‘racism’ in such a way that even not being racist was seen as a ‘mask for racism’ (in the words of Ibram X. Kendi). Or how about this by Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters (2020), who argued that to be ‘not racist’ was ‘a form of discursive racist violence’.

The religiosity of the woke movement was evident throughout the Black Lives Matter hysteria. It reached such a fever pitch that a group of white people in Houston, Texas were filmed kneeling to their black neighbours to beg forgiveness on behalf of all their race.

And here’s a BLM activist being racist in the name of anti-racism…

12. Pronoun lunacy

Asking for pronouns became a kind of purity test in the woke era, with politicians eager to declare them to show fealty to the creed. It got to the point where even the man running for Prime Minister of the UK was declaring his pronouns…

And here’s Vice President Kamala Harris taking it a step further…

11. Student meltdown

In November 2015, Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale University, emailed the student body to question the wisdom of a proposed ban on offensive Halloween costumes. In response, students gathered outside her home and wrote various menacing statements in chalk such as ‘We know where you live’. When the master of the college Nicholas Christakis, husband to Erika, agreed to meet them in the courtyard, he was surrounded, verbally abused, and even instructed not to smile or make any gestures. A video of the confrontation went viral in which one young woman is seen screaming abuse directly at Christakis. In the video you can hear her peers clicking their fingers approvingly, because applause is a potential ‘trigger’.

10. “You ain’t black”

In May 2020, then Vice President Joe Biden was invited to appear on Charlamagne tha God’s podcast. As the interview drew to a close, Biden told his host: ‘if you’ve got a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’.

This gaffe was almost as revealing as when Biden claimed that ‘poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids’. Watching him realising what he had said and squirming his way out of it makes for uncomfortable viewing…

9. Humza Yousaf’s own goal

During a speech delivered in Parliament on 10 June 2020, then First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf complained about the high proportion of white people in senior government positions. When Yousaf’s new hate speech law came into effect, it was this speech that received the most complaints to police for its racist content.

8. Childhood indoctrination

The gender madness reached such a peak that schools were adapting their policies to punish those who did not subscribe to this niche pseudo-religious belief system. This kind of thing became quite normal…

The BBC played its part, producing an educational film aimed at nine- to twelve-year-olds called Identity – Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities, which claimed that there are ‘over 100 gender identities’.

7. Male breastfeeding

We should have known something was wrong when the NHS started using the term ‘chestfeeders’ for new mothers. But in February 2024, the BBC interviewed Kate Luxion, a ‘lactation consultant trainee’, who claimed – unchallenged – that drug-induced milk from trans-identified males was ‘at least, if not higher, quality’ than breast milk from mothers.

6. Politicians forget about biology

It wasn’t just crazy activists who were treating biology with such indifference. Throughout the woke era, our elected leaders pretended to forget that there are differences between men and women. During a radio interview on LBC with Keir Starmer, the host Nick Ferrari asked whether a woman could have a penis. Starmer’s stammering response (and the fear behind his eyes) told us everything.

I could provide endless video clips of political figures unable to answer the question ‘what is a woman?’ But to show how high up this nonsense had reached, here’s the effort of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Oh, and here’s the shadow minister for women and equalities claiming that children are born ‘without a sex’…

5. Thought police

Another feature of the woke era was the recurrent arrests of UK citizens for exercising their right to free speech. Viral videos of police arresting people for ‘offensive’ words become commonplace. To take one example out of hundreds…

4. Misogyny becomes ‘progressive’

Violently misogynistic rhetoric is frequently to be found in woke circles. Women’s rights campaigners have grown accustomed to threats of rape and death from those who claim to be ‘on the right side of history’. Here are some men turning up to protest against a ‘Let Women Speak’ event. Evidently, they didn’t approve of the premise.

And to give just one other example, here’s a clip from the ‘London Trans+ Pride’ march in July 2023, at which an ex-convict who identifies as a woman took to the stage and openly called for violence.

3. Everyone is a nazi

The promiscuous misuse of terms such as ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ became so normalised in the woke era that the words lost all their meaning. When Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden on 27 October 2024, MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart described the event as ‘particularly chilling, because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally’.

For a Nazi rally, it was incredibly diverse…

2. Osama Bin Laden gets some new fans

In November 2023, clips of young people celebrating the virtues of terrorist maniac Osama Bin Laden became the latest viral sensation. This was because they had discovered his ‘Letter to America’ (published in the Guardian in 2002). In this letter, he wrote: ‘The Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense’. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t look out of place in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

1. The sanctification of drag

There are many incredible examples of drag being elevated to the very top of the victim hierarchy, but this one is my favourite. In September 2023, a Protestant church in Dallas, Texas, hosted a celebratory service to bless a muster of drag queens. Around a dozen men in lavish gowns and gargoylish make-up were seen perched on the altar, as the congregation were led in a liturgical prayer, a strange blend of pseudo-religious cant and social justice boilerplate. This really had to be seen to be believed.

Obviously, this list is by no means definitive. Please let me know which gems I’ve missed in the comments!

And to end on some light relief, here’s the best cat in the world…