IF IT AIN'T WOKE DON'T FIX IT:

The worst part is that the CRT moral panic has produced illiberal laws that, if upheld, would make it hard, perhaps impossible, for teachers to teach the complex history of these ideas. Instead our history books are likely to remain filled with harmful fictions, like the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War and various forms of American moral exceptionalism.

Traldi miss-locates responsibility for current challenges around defining and discussing concepts like "wokeness" and "CRT." He and I agree that the current situation isn't really about CRT in the technical sense, so the question is, why has it been taken up as this colloquial catchall? Traldi correctly notes that CRT is just the latest in a long line of catchall terms, each trying to paint the social justice movement as philosophically and methodologically extreme, and in conflict with the previous period of social justice activism--the Civil Rights movement--that most now claim to lovingly endorse. Yet he suggests that it is persnickety academics who are forcing this endless parade of scary terms, and not the duplicity of anti-woke activists jumping from an incoherent term ("postmodern neo-Marxism"), to a term closely associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories ("cultural Marxism"), to an overgeneralized though real phenomenon ("wokeness").

Traldi claims that the woke strategy is "no name will do we just need to discuss the problem of its name first, forever," and that the woke use this trick to avoid engaging substantive criticisms. But this obscures why the names involved in these moral panics are endlessly moving targets. It's not because the individuals driving the moral panics are responding to good faith criticism from academics. There's scant evidence of that (as Traldi knows, given his experience critiquing the anti-woke book Cynical Theories).

Keeping the target moving keeps the panic fresh and tests out different emotional manipulators, as was the case with preceding moral panics. Here is Chris Rufo, one of the most prominent promotors of the CRT moral panic, giving the game away

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0622fd91-968b-4c62-99b5-c520ed48cdc8_624x184.png

This level of bad faith should be front and center in any discussion of our current epistemic crisis...

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