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The Woke Left is Crashing. Here’s How We Know It

By Dean Brooks

January 9, 2025

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Donald Trump’s latest election victory has been called ‘the end of wokeness’. Most of us would agree that there has been a broad cultural struggle throughout the Western world against wokeness. But how would we know if this was the end? How do we measure cultural change?

It is natural to explain current events in philosophical terms, to say why an idea becomes popular. For example, why did the left shift after the fall of the USSR from an economic focus (socialism) to a focus on race and gender (wokeism)? Oceans of ink have been spilled on that question.

However, the details of how an idea becomes (and later ceases to be) popular also matter a great deal. Much can be accomplished by looking at statistical patterns.

 

Statistical Patterns

For the past several decades, interest has grown in decline curves governed by the maximum entropy principle. Such declines have several distinct modes of operation. The first and most striking is a very smooth, predictable, and nonlinear change in one variable (measuring some sort of performance) while another system variable (usually measuring system or population size) increases.

Thus, for example, the Wright-Henderson cost decline curve, discovered in the 1930s, which predicts that with each doubling of total production volume (of cars, airplanes, washing machines, toilet paper rolls, or nearly any kind of good), the unit cost will drop by 20 percent. This is a scale-invariant, “log-log” relationship. Amazingly, it doesn’t matter how simple or complex the item is. When you’ve built a thousand of them, the unit cost will be X, and when you’ve built two thousand, it will have fallen on average to around 0.8X.

In recent years it has become clear that the Wright-Henderson curve was like the tip of the iceberg. These scale-invariant curves are everywhere. The measured variable can be almost anything: customer loyalty, online commenting activity, metabolic activity per unit of organism weight, traffic accidents per capita, epidemic disease morbidity and mortality, tithing as a function of church size, advertising revenues per subscriber, political regime stability, and so on. The decline in the measured variable will then not only be “log-log,” but will often tend toward the same specific 20 percent drop per doubling that Wright and Henderson observed in unit costs. The growth rate for a human fetus, for example, slows in percentage terms as the fetus increases in size, according to the 20 percent rule.

 

Here, for example, we see the rate at which viewers either “liked” or commented on a 2007 music video. Over a period of six weeks, the percentage of viewers who liked or commented fell to just 1 percent of its initial level. It did so in an amazingly smooth and predictable fashion, such that an informed observer could predict a difference between morning and afternoon behavior on any given day.

Another, somewhat less precise “log-log” rule applies during crashes, whether these are economic, political, or cultural. During the 2007-08 financial crash, we saw an exponential increase in the scale of the disaster, month by month. The initial bankruptcies, the first pebbles in the avalanche, took place among small and especially over-extended enterprises, such as banks in Cyprus and Iceland. But then bigger lenders like New Century Financial, and major money-center banks like Lehman Brothers, also began needing rescue. Not long after that, quasi-public institutions like AIG and Sallie Mae were declared insolvent. Finally even some major governments seemed to hover on the edge of collapse. Not surprisingly, the bailouts and abrupt regulatory interventions (justified or not) kept pace with this expanding torrent of bankruptcies.

Scale-invariant curves are everywhere [and] reveal a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of randomness.

Rapid, short-term expansion in scale is a feature that transcends specific subject matter. It is built into the process of social change. When we look at the 1989 Tienanmen Square uprising in China, or the “color revolutions” of the 1990s, we see the same process. The crisis manifested first in smaller institutions, and then in larger ones. The protests started with particularly defiant social groups, but expanded (sometimes in a matter of days, sometimes in weeks) to every demographic. This pattern repeated yet again during the 2009 Green protests in Iran, and the 2011 Arab Spring.

I explored the nature of these curves in my 2022 book The Decline Effect: The Hidden Probability Law Controlling Markets, Politics, Culture, Religion, Epidemics and War. I suggest that they reveal a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of randomness. These curves are especially fruitful for libertarian enthusiasts of “spontaneous order”.

 

The Crash of Wokeism

Though it has rarely been discussed either on the left or the right, I contend that the neo-Marxist “long march through the institutions” suffered even in its earliest days from just this sort of gradual decline. Critical theory started out in the 1950s as shockingly original and daringly transgressive—the route to fame and success for a string of writers like Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. But decade by decade, it inevitably became more mundane, jargon-laden, and tedious—as well as fragmented into mutually hostile factions. In my theory, increasing cultural entropy of a very concrete and measurable kind was the genesis of dozens of fragile niche enterprises like critical nutrition theory and “feminist glaciology”.

As the number of neo-Marxist academics and bureaucrats relentlessly grew, the battles intensified between (for example) between the growing queer-theory faction and the earlier trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The per capita rewards of espousing critical theory, in whatever particular form, just as relentlessly shrank. Neo-Marxism developed into a constellation of beliefs that grad students in the humanities wearily took up sides within, in pursuit of ever-shrinking rewards as measured by citations, grant money, or professional esteem. Public enthusiasm likewise fell.

The peak year for the popularity of critical theory seems to have been 2015.

It was thus inevitable that at some point, as the rewards sank to an unsustainable level, the long march would falter to a halt. Neo-Marxism would hit its peak. And then, very much like the mortgage bond market in 2007 and countless other social phenomena throughout history, wokeness would experience a brutal crash.

Pundits on the right have welcomed the recent crisis on the left and have pointed to specific flaws in leftist thought that contributed to it. Yet however much one may applaud, we cannot explain the chaos of the last few years in strictly ideological terms. Many features of the crash were not ideological in origin. They were mathematical.

The peak year for the popularity of critical theory seems to have been 2015. For example: In June 2015, MTV launched a YouTube documentary series, ‘Decoded,’ starring Franchesca Ramsay, that tackled social justice issues in easy-to-digest segments of about five minutes apiece. The series eked out an initial like/dislike ratio of 1:1, but soon spiraled downward. By late 2015 the ratio was 1:2, and by the summer of 2016 it was 1:3, while viewership had fallen by half. Similar things happened during this period to Buzzfeed, Vox, Vice, MSNBC, and CNN, among many others. When the subject was health, the economy, science, or entertainment, their videos maintained a fairly consistent like/dislike ratio of between 10:1 and 50:1. But when their channels talked about race or gender inequality—and especially if they talked about structural racism or sexism—the ratio crashed down closer to 1:1, even dipping below it. Viewers stayed away, and made their displeasure known.

What made Decoded especially vulnerable to collapse was that its entire purpose had been to talk about these issues. There was no relief for viewers. Some videos were particularly strident (“STOP Blaming Affirmative Action for Your College Rejection”) or weirdly tone-deaf (“If You Farted Every Time You Were Racist”). However, it was their audience that had changed, far more than their content. By late 2016, the like/dislike ratio was a dismal 1:10, the view counts had shrunk by 80 percent, and production was suspended. Other racial-progressive websites and YouTube channels (NewsBroke, WeAreMitu) saw similarly steep declines at this point.

Another major channel that suffered a calamitous drop in viewers during this same period was Feminist Frequency, run by Anita Sarkeesian. In 2013–15, Sarkeesian’s videos on male privilege and structural sexism in video games averaged about a million views apiece. Sarkeesian put up these respectable numbers despite being widely disliked and relentlessly harassed by male gamers, as part of the Gamergate controversy. Combined with frequent mainstream news coverage, this made Sarkeesian the most visible and well-known third-wave feminist pundit. She was the subject of more Google searches than Judith Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, or Andrea Dworkin, and was one of the few third-wavers ever to appear on late-night talk shows. Time magazine put her on their 100 Most Influential list for 2015.

The more that male gamers denounced her as a shrill ideologue—or worse, an outright con artist—the more she was embraced by gaming industry executives as a subject-matter expert, and celebrated by the left as a brave culture hero who was enduring the worst that 4chan could throw at her. But then in 2016, amid the tumult of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Sarkeesian’s average per video dropped to 140,000 views. In 2017, it fell again to 70,000, and by late 2018 her videos were getting no more than 15,000 to 50,000 views apiece. In a short time, she went from being polarizing and notorious, to simply being ignored (by left and right alike). In 2019, citing fundraising problems, Sarkeesian laid off her employees and stopped making videos.

 

Public Loss of Confidence in the Institutions

There was a visibly growing gap between institutional values and those of the public. University presses continued to churn out hundreds of new Gender Studies titles each year. Meanwhile, as one measure of the unpopularity of the label ‘feminist,’ consider the fifty most-watched English-language YouTube videos in late 2016 with ‘feminism’ in their titles. Of these, only six were pro-feminist. Some anti-feminist pieces were serious, such as Karen Straughan’s “Feminism and the Disposable Male.” Most had mocking titles like “Crazy Feminist Gets Arrested” or “Feminist Cringe Compilation #6.”

During these same years, 2016-18, the six best-known third-wave feminist news and opinion websites (Feministing, The Establishment, FeministCurrent, TheFWord, Everyday Feminism, and Jezebel) all saw major declines in traffic, between 30 and 70 percent apiece. FeministCurrent ceased operation in late 2018, and overall traffic continued to decline for the rest. Given that ad revenues and clickthrough rates (CTR) had been falling everywhere in recent years (along yet another log-log curve), even sites with steady or growing traffic struggled to be profitable. With its traffic plunging in tempo with its CTRs, Everyday Feminism hovered on the verge of insolvency and made several emergency appeals for donations. The Establishment folded in April 2019; Feministing closed in December 2019; Jezebel was also sold off for the second time that same year, at an undisclosed price.

These sites did not share a monolithic worldview. For example, FeministCurrent was the creation of Meghan Murphy, who, while a radical feminist, was also well-known for her criticism of transgender ideology. Murphy was banned from Twitter for ‘transphobic’ tweets around the same time that her blog folded up. Meanwhile the others took a more pro-trans editorial stance. However, they were much alike in their general language choices. They all condemned the violence of capitalist patriarchy and championed the marginalized in broadly late-Marxist style. It is hard to explain their collective collapse in any other way than as women abruptly losing interest in all such ideas, whether queer or trans-exclusionary.

The ‘Young Turks’ progressive YouTube media group TYT provides another example of this process. Between early 2016 and early 2018, their monthly viewership fell by half. Management chose to shut down several smaller channels, and layoffs reduced staff by about 20 percent, but their editorial outlook did not change, and the bleeding continued. By mid-2019, viewership had fallen 70 percent compared with early 2016. (See the graph above.)

TYT did maintain a positive like/dislike ratio between 10:1 and 20:1 for many topics. However, when we focus on videos with ‘racism’ in the title, they occupy four categories:

    (1) In the rarest category (just three videos), TYT allowed an interview subject to be quoted as saying they were sick of talk about racism from all sides. This included an indignant Southern man condemning both white nationalists and ‘black haters’; and Bernie Sanders supporters complaining about the Democratic National Committee slandering them as racist. These videos each received a solid like/dislike ratio of at least 20:1.

    (2) The largest category consisted of videos where a celebrity, TV personality, store owner, university student, or other random individual, was caught on video making a racist remark, or faced backlash for racially insensitive tweets. Often these were drunken or impulsive acts, quickly followed by an apology. This category of what we might call ‘racist cringe’ attracted about the same number of views per video as TYT’s current-events and lifestyle pieces got in general. However, they earned a more modest average like/dislike ratio of just 4.4 to 1.

    (3) The next largest category contained videos about racism (implicit or explicit) by individuals with ties to government. These included election campaign staff from both parties, President Trump, federal agency officials, city officials, Congressmen, prosecutors, police, and so on. These videos averaged about half as many views as a typical TYT video, and a still lower like/dislike ratio of 3.8 to 1.

    (4) The final and most revealing category was videos in which TYT editorialized about structural racism, or described entire social groups as being inherently (if subconsciously) racist. These included Brexit voters, Republicans, Red Sox fans, police, white people, Pewdiepie fans, and so on. Such videos drew well-below-average total views, and an abysmal like/dislike ratio of 1.3 to 1. Data like these suggest that the Young Turks fell out of step with their audience regarding racism. Viewers defected in search of someone who better reflected their values.

This theory is confirmed by TYT’s rivalry with conservative comedian Steven Crowder. After the 2016 presidential election, Crowder ran a video entitled “Trump Won Because ‘Racism’? NO, YOU IDIOT!!” In it, he called out TYT founder Cenk Uygur, listing grievances that swing voters had against the Democrats. He ended in exasperation: “[S]top acting like the only possible motivating factor that you can fathom here is racism.”

Crowder’s video attracted three million views and a like/dislike ratio of 12:1. This was as many views as all of TYT’s structural-racism videos combined. Many commenters specifically remarked how dissatisfied with TYT they were. By comparison, TYT’s own election-day video earned about 500,000 views with a like/dislike ratio below 1:2. Crowder made more videos mocking TYT that earned him millions of additional views. In 2015, he had been a newcomer, with fewer than a million views per month. But by mid-2019, he had drawn even with TYT, at 30–35 million views per month.

Viewers defected in search of someone who better reflected their values.

Another progressive enterprise that collapsed like TYT was NowThis World, whose views fell from more than 13 million monthly to about four million. NowThis videos with ‘racism’ in the title were rejected so completely that many got fewer than a thousand views apiece. Another prominent casualty was Salon.com, which had routinely run articles titled “White Men Must Be Stopped” and “How the Media Centers Whiteness.” Their traffic fell by two-thirds, shedding tens of millions of monthly visits, and the site was sold for a pittance in 2019. During 2017–18, ThinkProgress.org also lost half its audience and laid off staff, finally shutting down in 2019. Yet another high-profile casualty was Mic.com, which had branded itself as crusading for social justice. It had been valued at $100 million a few years earlier, but in 2018 it laid off its editorial staff and sold its online assets for a mere $5 million.

The crash of ratings at CNN and MSNBC is well known, but the collapse of public confidence in legacy media was similar everywhere. In Australia, Britain, and Canada, the public broadcasters ABC, BBC, and CBC all veered toward the woke left and suffered catastrophic damage to their credibility, much like CNN or MSNBC. This was a global cultural bubble, and one concept that we especially need to pay attention to during bubbles, is capitulation.

 

Zigging When They Should Have Zagged

As a market bubble approaches its peak, late-arriving investors necessarily wind up buying in on worse and worse terms, and then suffering especially badly when the trend reverses. This cycle of rewards for early adopters, followed by punishment for late adopters, also happens in a cultural bubble. Why did the sports channel ESPN, for example, become so vocal about social justice themes, just when its audience and revenues were starting to slide? In part, it was because of Anita Sarkeesian’s notoriety in 2013–15, which had made talking about privilege and marginalization seem like the coming thing.

ESPN was not alone in its bad timing. Numerous niche institutions like MTV, the Oscars, the Emmys, Cracked.com or Rolling Stone, that had all maintained an apolitical stance for decades, managed to jump on the social justice trend at what turned out to have been the worst possible moment. Each then saw its audience share shrink, or even plummet. Right-leaning pundits noticed this phenomenon and referred to it as ‘Get woke, go broke.’

The same thing happened to the National Football League, whose stance on the 2016 ‘take a knee’ controversy led to lower ticket sales in that season, and the next three as well. In 2018 Gillette inserted a toxic-masculinity theme into a razor commercial that promptly set a record for dislikes on YouTube. Parent company Procter & Gamble reported a $5 billion loss that quarter, in large measure due to $8 billion in lost razor sales. Chastened, Gillette quietly announced in 2019 that its new advertising theme would be ‘heroic masculinity.’ This event, taken in context with many less well-known cases, led to another slogan on the right: ‘Don’t buy things you need from people who hate you.’

Numerous niche institutions…managed to jump on the social justice trend at what turned out to have been the worst possible moment.

In 2020, NASCAR, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball all went in heavily for ceremonials in support of Black Lives Matter, similar to the ‘take a knee’ ritual that the NFL had adopted in 2017. Despite pent-up public demand for sports content after months of lockdown, all suffered serious audience declines. MLB viewership fell as much as 30 percent. Partly as a result of a hate crime hoax involving black driver Bubba Wallace, NASCAR had its worst season in 22 years. Wallace was openly booed by the crowd when he was introduced at a July All-Star race—and they were the minority who had at least paid for a ticket. NBA TV viewer numbers dipped to 1.6 million compared with 2.8 million for the same period in 2019, and then fell still further during the playoffs. In every case, the punishment meted out by audiences was harsher than it had been for the NFL in 2017 (and the NFL’s numbers dropped again as well). Meanwhile sports that chose to remain politically neutral, like golf, posted robust ratings. Surveys showed that 90 percent of audiences now disliked or resented the woke content.

A boycott against conservative pundit Tucker Carlson did cause some advertisers to withdraw, and one staff writer was forced to resign because of racist tweets. However, the boycott brought no benefit to Carlson’s left-leaning rivals, whose numbers continued to drop. During that same period, Carlson’s nightly audience (already the biggest in cable news) grew by 30 percent, to an all-time industry record of more than 4.5 million. There was a similar shift away from left-leaning late-night comedians, making right-leaning Greg Gutfeld the most popular in that category. Most surprising was the news that more Democrats aged 18–49 were watching Fox News, the network of Carlson and Gutfeld, than were watching any individual left-leaning network.

During these years, there was a reinforcing cycle of ill-considered repression followed by spiralling desertions. For example, when the crowdfunding platform Patreon purged Carl Benjamin (‘Sargon of Akkad’) for alleged racism, thousands of creators promptly abandoned them, and their previously smooth exponential growth (following the standard 20 percent curve) abruptly ceased. Something similar happened when Twitter began attaching warning labels to tweets by President Trump and suppressing tweets from other sources that contained damaging information about Democrats. The immediate result was that Twitter rival Parler surged by 500,000 new users in three days, and by millions over the following months. Parler would later be briefly purged by its Big Tech peers, but this too only intensified public mistrust. Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News in 2023, but within weeks had formed his own independent network with numbers rivalling his Fox News slot.

The sheer scale of the cultural upheaval deserves an entire book, and not merely a brief essay or a few chapters. For example, in 2016, Teen Vogue had taken an openly political stance, attacking Donald Trump and promoting critical race theory. The magazine’s media peers responded with approving retweets, blog posts, and media mentions, echoing Teen Vogue and adding to the intimidation. However, there was no control lever available to force a captive audience (like middle schoolers) to actually consume this new woke content. More often there was a simple out: just stop buying Teen Vogue. Faced with rapidly shrinking sales, Teen Vogue pressed on with its woke editorial stance, but scaled back from monthly to quarterly publication at the end of that year. It then abandoned its print edition altogether at the end of 2017. In 2018, Teen Vogue tweeted (in a fit of defiant self-loathing) that private property should be abolished. Their online traffic meanwhile fell by half, shedding another four million unique visits per year. By 2021, the remaining staff had turned on one another, with senior editors ousted for alleged racism.

 

Where Did the Formerly-Woke Go?

Something must be said here about where the no-longer-woke audience went. This period saw the rise of pundits like Bret Weinstein, Lindsay Shepherd, Tom Walker (‘Jonathan Pie’), Dave Rubin, Cassie Jaye, Andrew Doyle, Carl Benjamin (‘Sargon of Akkad’), Laci Green, June Lapine (‘Shoe0nhead’), Jordan Shanks (‘friendlyjordies’), Arielle Scarcella, Karlyn Borysenko, Keith and Kevin Hodge, and Candace Owens. These were formerly left-leaning figures who soared in popularity as critics of the Marxist-humanist ‘everything’ left. They defected in all directions, to conservatism, classical liberalism, and old-school (pre-woke) leftism. As a group, in 2019 and 2020 they attracted close to two hundred million monthly video views and continued to gain ground in 2021–22. Another disillusioned former Vice contributor, Tim Pool, started an independent channel critical of the identitarian left that soared to a hundred million monthly views all on its own.

While they differed tremendously in their values, this group found their new roles in large part because the left became dysfunctional. The key point from a statistical perspective is that this was a collapse, rather than the rise of a new ideology. The audience moved away from the woke left, but not necessarily toward any single alternative. For example, TYT lost 70 million monthly views, but their chief rival and critic Stephen Crowder only gained about 30 million. The dramatic gains at Fox News were not equal to the collective losses at NBC, CBS, ABC, and so on.

Again, the key to understanding such events is to look at their mathematical structure. The scale of the culture crash grew exponentially between 2016 and 2020, from hundreds of thousands of readers abandoning third-wave feminist websites, to millions of readers deserting more center-left websites like Salon and Mic, and then to tens of millions of viewers boycotting sports and entertainment channels.

There has been a gradual realization on the progressive left that…their audience is not conming back.

The repressive backlash grew exponentially as well, keeping pace with the defections and increasing their scale. In 2017, a handful of explicit white supremacists like Jared Taylor and the Nordic Resistance lost their comparatively tiny social media accounts. In 2018–19 the purges grew to larger (million-subscriber) and more centrist accounts like Stefan Molyneux, Dave Cullen, and ExMuslimTV.

The 2020 election was arguably the peak—not of defections, which have continued—but of open repression. The WalkAway movement, run by ex-Democrats fed up with the party’s corruption and wokeness, had grown exponentially in 2017–20, but faced a severe crisis during the 2020 election. Founder Brandon Straka was sentenced to three months of house arrest for being present at the Capitol on January 6th, and the WalkAway Facebook page with 500,000 members was removed.

Twitter and the other social media giants famously blocked publication of fraud allegations, as well as stories about the Hunter Biden laptop. Shortly after the election, Twitter banned Trump altogether—at one blow nullifying the choices of 88 million people—and terminated as many as 100,000 other, mostly right-leaning, pro-Trump accounts. The public reaction was predictable: A record 25 million signed up for Twitter’s biggest rival, Telegram, that same week. The old saying seems apt here: “The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it.”

Since 2020, and especially since the 2024 election, there has been a gradual realization on the progressive left that these changes are permanent. Repression has failed and their audience is not coming back. Thus, for example, in 2023–24, the co-hosts at TYT, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, bowed to the reality of cultural change (and their shrinking media footprint, which had fallen from 100 million views per month to fewer than 20 million). In 2023, Ana denounced the “defund the police” movement and the increasingly unfashionable practice of replacing “woman” with “person with a uterus”. After the 2024 election, Cenk likewise declared himself a left-leaning populist who had more in common with MAGA than with corrupt establishment Democrats.

Despite these local episodes of enlightenment, however, the crash remains poorly understood on both the left and the right.

 

Is the Political Right Winning?

On the right, we see talk about “the unstoppable rise of a new conservative age” and a tidal wave of “retraditionalization.” This misreads the data. There has been a trend of influencers moving back toward religion in recent years, as for example Jordan Peterson aligning himself with the Daily Wire in 2022, or the conversion and baptism of Russell Brand in April 2024. Bible sales in 2024 were reportedly up 22 percent over 2023. However, such short-run gains have shown themselves to be fragile. After the 9/11 attacks, church attendance in the U.S. rose significantly; but by 2002, it was back to pre-attack levels. U.S. households owning a Bible have fallen substantially in the past two decades, along with the percentage of Americans professing to be Christians. The current revival, though real enough, will probably not reverse the long-run trend.

On the left, we see similar confusion along with a general demoralization. Some ex-Democrats are echoing the right’s hopeful talk about their party being “dead” or “in complete collapse”. However, it is far from a complete collapse, as many Democrats remain unaware even now just how important the critical theory wave was, in academia and other institutions throughout the West. A very common complaint, made for example by the much-admired Jon Stewart, is that the Democrats did not run on a woke platform in 2024. This focus on the content of campaign ads misses the underlying state of intense mistrust for all left-leaning institutions, from Gillette to Teen Vogue. It misses the fact that the political outcome in 2024 was a consequence of dramatic cultural change.

The political outcome in 2024 was a consequence of dramatic cultural change.

My point to readers of Savvy Street, then, is simple. This is a moment in history where a mathematical approach, and not just an ideological one, shows its value most clearly. Arguing that wokeness is morally bad or logically incoherent, while correct, can only accomplish so much. By contrast, pointing out the mathematically familiar way in which wokeism collapsed—much like a market crash—is likely to accomplish much more. People can see that collapses and other such decline effects, for better or worse, follow a measurable and inevitable pattern.

The math itself is neutral. But when the developing pattern portends better times ahead, we obtain a welcome boost in morale as well as a deeper insight into what is going on. I urge the Savvy Street community to join me in studying the math and adding it to our intellectual and persuasive toolkit.

 

 

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