Civics: Meghan Daum’s merciless take on modern feminism, woke-ness and cancel culture

Rosa Brooks:

Part memoir and part jeremiad, “The Problem with Everything” is replete with examples of what Daum views as intolerant, self-righteous woke-ness: She highlights the young-adult fiction authors forced to withdraw their books “when social media mobs attacked them” for purported “racial insensitivity” or cultural appropriation, for instance, and the “self-congratulatory reverence” displayed by white liberal admirers of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the “unofficial paterfamilias of the wokescenti.” Commenting on the controversies surrounding Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Daum writes that although she found Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault “moving, compelling and entirely credible,” she was “less moved by the sloganeering that rose up around them.” The “Believe Survivors” trope, she argues, draws no distinction between violent rape and lesser forms of male creepiness (groping, leering), and sacrifices due process for the accused to outraged assertions of male sinfulness.