A friend alerted me to an interesting TED-like talk last month by Musa al Gharbi, author of the new book ‘We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.’ The event was hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance and co-sponsored by MIT’s Heterodox Academy Campus Community, MIT Concourse, and MIT Students for Open Discourse. … 

I haven’t read Gharbi’s book nor viewed the entire YouTube video of the talk. But I’m generally sympathetic to criticisms of wokeness, as actually practiced by the left and not as portrayed by the right. As a moderate liberal, I think the heavy influence of the academic left’s identity-politics and wokeness has severely hurt the Democratic Party, alienating millions of moderate voters and creating political openings currently being exploited by MAGA reactionaries. So anything that politically weakens that academic left, I’m for. …