In honor of Columbus Day, also variously known as Indigenous People’s Day, National Culture War Day, and Pre-Halloween, let’s spend some time making some bold predictions to come back to a year later and see if they pan out.
We talk quite a bit about Woke Indoctrination Mechanics and Woke OS Updates on HWFO, and while high view, retrospective looks in the woke analysis space are interesting, and can make you sound smart, the entire point of analysis in any field is to use the analytical framework to make predictions of future events. “This is why X happened” is cool and interesting, but it is far less useful than “X will happen, and here’s why.”
Nobody likes making predictions, because when you predict something, you might be wrong, and nobody likes being wrong. But if you believe in your analytical framework you should be able to stand by it and use it to make predictions that are accurate and robust. This is a very difficult task in societal analysis unless you’re Harry Seldon, because societies are very stochastic in nature, but HWFO is ready to make a bold one right now.
Latinx is Done
As explained in our Woke Update Mechanics article, the Woke have developed an online system to deploy operational updates to “what constitutes decent human behavior” on the feed. This update mechanic is fundamental to their new pseudo-religion, and constitutes its most truly unique and differentiating feature from old world religions. The Woke deprecate behavioral indoctrinations they deem problematic, replace them with others, and then sometimes even excommunicate (cancel) those among their ranks who were exhibiting behavior from the prior behavioral operating system. Dolezal. 37 genders. Go back and review if you like.
Latinx is a Wokeism that developed because the Woke for many years had a closer connection to the transgender community and the postmodernist academic tradition than they did to the Latin community. The Woke pretend to care about folks from central and south America because they are largely poorer and have darker skin, but they basically don’t know any of them, because the Latin folks here in the USA are too busy working for a living to care about Wokeist nonsense. College attendance rates among Latin American folks are comparatively low, and Wokeist folks are predominantly either children of rich college educated white folks or non-white folks who got into college on an unstated quota program. The closest a Portland Antifa member has come to a working-class Mexican immigrant is very likely to be the dude who reroofed their dad’s house. Which means they have no point of reference about Latin culture, even though they claim to be the ultimate arbiters of cultural protectionism.
There are no universals, of course, but I’d be willing to bet good money that your average Antifa plumber, should such a thing exist at all, only says the word “latinx” around his Antifa buddies, and not around his coworkers. The proof on this is in the pudding. Only 24% of Latinos in the USA have ever heard of “latinx,” and an even lower ratio (3%) prefer to be called that. They find it demeaning. And they’re particularly sensitive because that the term is promulgated by a bunch of lazy white progressives speaking for them. As the Woke have continued to overplay their supply lines in the 2020+ culture war, they’ve taken Latinx out of the halls of academia and into the structure of blue-collar America, and the Latinos are trashing them for it.
Let’s unpack that number for a second. For every Latin person who uses the term “Latinx,” there are around seven Latin folks who have heard the term and hate it, and an additional twenty five who’ve never heard the term at all.
The Woke get trashed in different areas, but the unique thing about the Latinos trashing Latinx is they’re using Woke language to do the trashing, and the criticisms of Latinx fit right within the Woke Discourse better than a lot of other attacks against Wokeism. They’re twofold:
One: Latinx is cultural appropriation.
It’s a bunch of progressive academic white folks stealing their language and changing it to fit their progressive agenda, without permission. To be fair it’s unclear who exactly the Woke should ask permission for such an appropriation, but that’s true with all accusations of cultural appropriation, so the criticism fits exactly. It’s using Woke analysis against the Woke. The Woke could respond that the term originated in Puerto Rico in 2015, but that’s about like saying “Elvis is allowed to play the blues because he had some black friends.” A very non-woke rebuttal.
Two: Latinx is lingual colonization.
“You white people don’t have any land left to steal so now you’re stealing our language.” The Woke could retort that (A) the Spanish and Portuguese are white, and (B) the original language of the native South Americans was not Spanish or Portuguese, but the Woke can’t take that route because that’s the same sort of route other people on the pro-colonization side of the culture war use in our annual Columbus Day arguments. Again, a very non-woke rebuttal.
The important thing to note here, is that the Woke do have two legitimate rebuttals to the Latin community revolting against Latinx, but those legitimate rebuttals are not in their tool kit. Using them in The Discourse opens those tools up to be used elsewhere, eroding the two overall parallel paradigms of “cultural appropriation” and “colonization,” and those paradigms are more important to Woke Dogma than “Latinx” is.
The Stage
We can use the Dolezal Update as a guideline to predict what’s likely to happen next with the Woke and Latinx. The Woke used to believe that anyone could self-identify as any race. They still believe this for gender, but they deprecated it for race because not doing so would have caused them to lose the black community from their coalition. Through the mechanics of distributed internet groupthink (a.k.a. “discourse”) self-identifying as black became a deprecated belief, and Rachel Dolezal got cancelled amid a shitstorm from the black community. And this happened in 2015, when Wokeness was on the rise.
The Woke overran their culture war supply lines in 2020. We can know this because comedians are now allowed to criticize them, whereas they were not allowed to in prior years. Consider the following graphic:
If you have not seen The Closer, it is a masterful work of comedy and culture war, where Dave turns all the Wokeisms against the Woke, bludgeons them with his “lived experience,” accurately predicts the “you’re punching down” critique, and flips that critique on its head with a tremendous mic drop. Whether you like the special or not is 100% predictive of whether you’re Woke or Non Woke. Wokes will hate Dave Chapelle for the same reasons Christians hated George Carlin, because the same mechanics are at play.
The quick take on this image is that reviewers are out of touch with the public about dominant narratives, both with regards to Wokeness and the dominant ideology’s reaction to Covid-19, but there’s more interesting information buried in this comparison. Not only is the audience score for Dave Chappelle’s blatantly anti-Woke comedy screed overwhelmingly positive, reviewers are afraid to review it. They flocked to review Fauci, and are scared to even touch The Closer. In 2018 or 2019, Netflix would have pulled the special under a Twitter mob fusillade, but in 2021 Netflix is making money from it, even under the threat of a Woke employee walkout. This is the canary in the coal mine for the Woke, and sets the stage for Latinx.
The Prediction
At some point in 2021 or early 2022, prominent Wokes within academia or central nodes within the online groupthink network will begin to discuss how “Latinx is problematic,” because it whitewashes a marginalized culture. They’re going to do this partly because the analysis makes sense within the Woke mindset, and partly because they don’t want to lose the Latin community as they continue to lose ground in the culture war. At some point Contrapoints or a similarly influential Woke podium will declare Latinx dead, and eschewing its use will become fashionable in the central nodes of the Woke social media sphere. The fashion of ending Latinx’s use will spread through the network as a Wokeness OS update, and it will become fully deprecated within six months after the update gets issued through the network. And two years after the deprecation, the Woke will forget they ever even used the term via the same collective amnesia they applied to 37 genders.
I'd go further and bet that the mainstream will be gender-critical in 10 years (maybe even in 5), whether or not it will still be dominated by the left. Trans activists have built several positions on ridiculously shaky ground, and at least one of them is already giving in (the safety record of child transitions). (I'd personally have hoped that "misgendering is literal murder" would be laughed out of the room first, but the mainstream cares less about free speech than it does about children's health. Either way, once they start losing on one front, the rest will soon collapse along.) And Labor's losses in Britain will eventually convince any American left-wing political strategists -- all five of them -- that the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth, and they should instead focus fully on memeing a race war into reality (something that, at least, has a tradition on their side).
Of course, the old Keynes quote about irrational markets is still standing. Although with substack, you can get some payouts on your short before they come due :)
funny enough, when the shitstorm first hit on Chappelle’s special, Netflix did indeed pull it. It was brought back quickly as soon as the Streisand Effect kicked in once the initial articles calling for his cancellation came out.