Another Classical Liberal escapes the dead clammy clasp of Wokeism

Tara Henley is an experienced Canadian journalist who recently resigned from her career at the CBC.  In a public letter she explained why.

For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade.

People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”

Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?

When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.

Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

I find this observation interesting about the CBC's move to the radical left and Woke ideology simultaneous with a hungry pursuit of click-bait journalism.  

It seems not dissimilar to what happened some years ago, when The Atlantic abandoned its mainstream appeal in pursuit of a digital currency.  The Atlantic was purchased by David G. Bradley, They moved from their historic headquarters in Boston to Washington and explicitly began measuring journalistic success based on the number of eyeballs on an article.  And they became seriously Woke.  Four things in the same time five year time-frame:  Change of ownership; Move from Boston to Washington, D.C.; Adoption of a click-based business model; and Adoption of Woke ideology.  

Which events caused what outcomes?  Some time during that period some Atlantic journalist wrote an article or two about the impact of changing from a general readership orientation to a number of clicks style of journalism.  

Back to Henley.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.

To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.

It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment.

It is to consent to the idea that a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful. That the big issues of our time are all already settled.

It is to capitulate to certainty, to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity. To keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat.

Sound familiar?  To be Woke is to be profoundly unserious, to be the perpetual child, to ever be subject of the Id and Ego with no Superego in sight.  

The French, always somewhat prone to authoritarians despite their culture, dallied with all the elements of Wokeism from the 1960s to the 1990s and then discarded them.  Postmodernism, Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Multiculturalism, they played with them all.  And then substantially discarded those ideas because they simply have no purchase on reality.  They are unaffordable nonsensical abstractions.

Our academics swooned and snapped up the ideological left overs from the French Philosophical table, never actually considering them with out usual pragmatism.  And here we are Academia, Education and Mainstream Media (MSM) all ensnared in the clammy embrace of a zombie ideology with no benefits to anyone productive.  

Which is why, I think, we are seeing so many people who consider themselves of the Left to be fleeing rightwards.  Not because autocracy, theocracy, or corporatism has any appeal but because the Right is now the last refuge of old style Classical Liberalism where there is a belief in and support for human universalism, natural rights, rule of law equality before the law, due process, property rights, free markets in goods and ideas, etc.  Henley and her ilk such as Taibbi, Greenwald, the Heterodox Academy, even Sullivan may have been center-left but they are all, as far as I can tell, Classical Liberals.

And there is a home for Classical Liberals among the Right leaning side of the nation and an aversion, as Henley describes, on the Left.  

The Republican Party used to the home of plutocrats, industrialist and the wealthy.  The Democrats was the home of Classical Liberals and were the party of the working man.  For complex and unclear to me reasons, that has inverted over the past thirty years.  Classical Liberals are welcome and at home in the Republican Party and not in the Democrat Party.  An unexpected evolution, but there you are.

 Tara Henley's new Substack is here.