If you want to know what's really going on in the world - and perhaps more pertinently, what's to come - obviously, the last thing you would do is watch the news. The news is nothing but an unsavoury smorgasbord of propaganda, illusions, and lies (and that's just the weather...). I don't think I've tuned into it since about 1997, when it used to impertinently come on right after Neighbours.
A visual medium which is incredibly revealing, however, is - not Neighbours, but - film.
The silver screen and its star-studded productions represent an exceptionally lucrative industry (high-profile actors and other movie executives being some of the most well-paid professionals in the world), and there's a good reason for that: films are one of the key weapons in the ruling classes' arsenal of shaping society.
Whenever a big social sea-change is on the horizon, we always see it in films first, a classic example being 2011's 'Contagion'. As soon as I saw this film, I realised, this is a warning: they're going to stage a pandemic and use it to brutally remove our freedoms whilst pushing a dangerous vaccine.
Not only did they do just that, but then-health secretary, Matt Hancock (a particularly bad actor), confirmed the UK's pandemic response had been based on the fictional feature.
Prominent, big-budget films - especially ones that are picked up by the streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon Prime - are rarely just meaningless, frivolous entertainment. They are almost always key parts of the narrative structure, guiding and shaping our perceptions and expectations, and priming us for what's to come.
With that in mind, I was very interested in the story arcs of two recent films I watched, 'American Fiction' and 'Submission'.
Both are set on university campuses, and both feature a male protagonist professor who clashes with a woke female student. On the surface, this may seem a common cinema trope - stuffy old reactionary male comes into conflict with cool woke young liberal, who ultimately ends up triumphing and showing him the error of his ways.
What caught my attention about these two films, however, was that was not how the story was woven. Instead, the woke students are painted as the villains - variously hysterical, pretentious, manipulative, and even sociopathic - whilst the more conservative males are seen as the far more sympathetic characters and the voices of reason.
The film 'American Fiction' opens with the (black) male protagonist, Monk, teaching a literature class.
"Okay, who wants to start?" He asks, and the camera immediately pans to a very overweight (white) girl with green hair.
"Yes, Brittany, kick it off," says Monk.
"I don't have a thought on the reading," she replies. "I just think that word on the board is wrong."
The camera pans to the board, where we see is written, "The Artificial Nigger", Flannery O'Connor (a short story written in the 1950s referring to statues popular in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States).
"Well, I think it still has two Gs in it, last I checked," says Monk wryly.
The class chuckles.
"It's not funny," protests the green-haired one stoutly. "We shouldn't have to stare at the N-word all day."
"Uh, listen," retorts the professor. "This is a class on the literature of the American south. You're going to encounter some archaic thoughts, coarse language, but we're all adults here, and I think we can understand it in the context in which it's written."
"Well, I just find that word really offensive," pouts the student.
"With all due respect, Brittany," sighs the professor. "I got over it, I'm pretty sure you can too."
At this point, the scorned student stands up and storms out of the class.
This is a very seminal shift in film-making and storytelling, because right away, it's telling us, "the woke are not the heroes. They're fragile, inarticulate and ill-educated. They're also fat and unattractive." (Until very recently, woke characters would uniformly be portrayed in films as cool and pretty.)
The professor, meanwhile, is presented to us as a thoughtful, reasonable and eloquent man, who is also not overweight and has normally-coloured hair.
The film 'Submission' has similar themes. While it features the rather tired old trope of an older, married professor falling for one of his younger, gifted students, this film again has a twist: the student is depicted as the villain, who repeatedly lies to and manipulates her teacher (it is strongly insinuated that she invents a family suicide), in order to advance her own career ambitions.
Although we understand the professor is no saint and should not have transgressed certain boundaries, it is clear that our sympathies are meant to lie with him, especially when the ever-more extensive lies of his student ultimately cost him both his family and his career, whilst she is able to capitalise on the situation to score a book deal.
The message of both films is clear: "wokery", of the sort that thrives on college campuses, has turned many young people into monsters - entitled, dogmatic, and pathologically self-involved.
Probably few readers of this site would disagree with that summation. But the point is, why is that the message being promulgated (why this, why now?) when, for so long, Hollywood and its denizens have so championed and cheerled for woke, ultra-liberal causes?
I think it is because - as I have explored several times - we are on the precipice of a huge cultural shift, from the ultra-liberal lunacy we have now, to precisely the opposite, and therefore films - as is their key and central role as seminal cultural change agents - are setting the stage for what is to come.
"Wokery" as a concept can be entirely accredited to universities - they are the environments where it was created and where it most thrives - and, as such, it is now a very common story (touched on in the film 'Submission' regarding the protagonist's daughter) for a normal teenager to go off to university, and come back thoroughly "wokified".
Indeed, I told the story of a young man I knew, from a good, stable background and with absolutely no signs of "gender confusion", who went off to university and came back announcing he was now a woman called Maci. All 6'7" of him.
Universities have become sinister dark oases which both spawn and greatly amplify mental health disorders (indeed, listening in on student conversations these days suggests sharing details of mental health diagnoses and prescription medications has become the new "what did you do for your A-levels?").
In the real world, these traits, obviously, would be disadvantages, but campus culture maintain a bizarre psycho-social totem pole, where students openly compete to be the most victimised and oppressed, meaning the most disordered individuals can attract a lot of kudos and power.
The question is, then, what would happen to these dysfunctional people if the fake and fragile academic ecosystem that creates and sustains them, collapsed?
You would be forgiven for not noticing, given all the other dire and diabolical catastrophes raging literally everywhere at the moment (we can't even sell bridges any more, as even they're collapsing), but universities are currently at a crisis point. The artificially inflated bubble of more "education, education, education", as Mr. B. Liar emphasised, is about to well and truly burst, with multiple institutions - including some very renowned and long-standing ones - very close to going bust.
The situation can be roughly encapsulated as: the government froze tuition fees in 2017, but universities' own costs haven't frozen and keep going up and up, so they are increasingly reliant on foreign students, whose fees are not capped, to remain solvent. However, foreign students are typically not interested in studying what they perceive as frivolous, arty-farty subjects like English, History, Drama, and David Beckham Studies (yes, it's a thing...), they want to study science, law, and business. So, increasingly, the arts, humanities and social science departments of universities are having to make huge, often brutal, cuts.
Indeed, the plans for mass redundancies at Goldsmiths, University of London, have been called a “horrifying act of cultural and social vandalism” and the “biggest assault on jobs at any UK university in recent years”.
Entire modules and degree programmes are being “deleted”, with cuts affecting 11 of the 19 departments due to be implemented by September 2024.
Departments affected include anthropology, English and creative writing, history, music, psychology, sociology, theatre and performance and visual cultures.
In other words, all the courses beloved of the woke. It's not a coincidence that both professors in the aforementioned films, dealing with "woke monsters", were English professors. You simply don't get the wokerati studying Maths or International Business (which in itself should be enough to see applications for these courses soar...).
So what will happen to the woke if their natural habitat and indigenous culture, arts departments of universities, dramatically decline?
Currently, a staggering 40% of universities are set to go into the red this year, and there is no reason to think this situation will reverse: instead, it is likely to rapidly accelerate.
Extrapolating from current trends, the most likely future for higher education appears to be: lower performing institutions will close altogether, whilst higher performing ones will remain, but with a vastly contracted course base, primarily consisting of the real money-spinners that attract wealthy foreign students (STEM, law, business).
The idea of studying something like English or Art at university will likely become something only available at a tiny number of top institutions, mostly inhabited by the moneyed elite.
And with no (or very few) academic departments left focusing on such things as the cis psychology of Shakespeare, or representation of non-binary vegans in 13th century Peruvian art - and subsequently churning their dogmas and diktats out into the rest of the world - the cultural tone of the UK will shift dramatically.
As we've seen, all this "woke" stuff comes exclusively out of universities: it could never have been created in the real world, because it simply isn't compatible with reality. I lived on a university campus for 19 years, with a family history going back much longer, and so feel reasonably well-qualified to say - as many advantages as such environments certainly have - they're not real. They're bubbles - but very powerful bubbles that forcefully shape the national conversation.
Burst that bubble - a process that is currently underway - and then what happens?
I think the films referenced in this article are showing us that, very quickly, "woke" is going to become extremely unfashionable, to the extent people with those views will become anachronisms and even pariahs, who will (and this is the key point) be singularly unable to cope with sudden social change.
What 'American Fiction' was depicting was how brittle and fragile these people are: that, confronted with the slightest view that challenges them, they are unable to engage or adapt, but instead, completely fall apart - they "storm out", either figuratively or literally.
Imagine, then, that if they can't cope with a word on a blackboard in a literature class, how they would cope, for instance, with a vast cultural revolution hurling their entire society into ultra-conservatism?
There are many reasons to suspect such a thing is on the cards: historically, societies operate like pendulums, and when they've gone so far one way, tend to swing back the other (sometimes dramatically, as per the 1979 Iranian revolution).
We have also been given very prominent predictive programming telling us to expect such a shift, namely, The Handmaid's Tale - one of the most watched and talked about dramas of recent years (and one of the first things the new regime of Gilead did was purge the universities).
Additionally, we are currently shipping thousands of military-aged men, primarily from ultra-conservative countries, into our towns and cities, who - rather obviously at this point - appear to be some sort of sitting army, awaiting orders.
Not incidentally, a large, luxury block of flats down the road from me, ostensibly designed for students, at the last minute turfed all the about-to-arrive students out and declared the development was to be used for "asylum seekers".
Despite the widespread protestations of local residents and even the local council, the Home Office has announced that 670 single males aged 18+ will be moving into this development in May.
Even the Home Office's own own cover story for why they're doing this - that it's cheaper than keeping migrants in hotels - doesn't add up, as it's actually far more expensive.
So we have to ask the question, as I have, as to why new alleged "student accommodation" is popping up everywhere, when universities themselves are contracting and collapsing.
It seems to be at least in part to house these men (and they are always all men) who may very well be tasked with policing and enforcing some sort of dramatic cultural shift.
A cultural shift that large swathes of the population - the university-moulded censorious and perennially offended woke - simply will not be able to respond to in any sane or helpful way.
These are people who threaten suicide if they are "misgendered" (e.g., correctly gendered). They want to study literature at university, but then need trigger warnings on the books. They have no real talents or abilities, so just weaponise "wokery" to get what they want.
They weren't born like this, of course, and a lot of them weren't like it as they grew up and in their earlier teens. University has done it to them and this is entirely by design.
This cohort of young people has been intentionally created by the enemies of our society in order to neutralise us and make us easy to overthrow. Usually, when a culture is invaded, it is the young who fight back - both physically and culturally. They have the stamina, energy, and drive to respond to the threat and defend their society.
But this drive has been intentionally drained out of them by the poisonous indoctrinating regime of universities. The Woke have been cruelly created to be the way they are - to despise everything about their own culture and to have no desire or capacity to defend it - by devious social architects who infiltrated all the universities starting in the 1960s, to bring us to the point we are now.
To make sure hordes of young people - any culture's first line of defence - are too weak, flabby, solipsistic, and inflexible to deal effectively with any threat to, or change in, their circumstances.
We know that the overlords desire to drastically reduce the population, if not by outright killing people, then by making them so ineffectual that they don't represent any threat. One very effective way of doing this is to plunge people into a crisis they can't handle - see: Covid. So many people who'd previously thought of themselves as strong-minded, autonomous, and even rebellious, immediately fell into line when they were scared and didn't know what to do. So-called "liberals" were some of the most conformist of all.
Hence, a real cultural threat (rather than a pretend plague) would see the ultra-liberal, the woke, crumble instantly. These are people who believe they've already encountered "far-right extremists" because someone in their college class once said there are only two genders, but of course, they haven't encountered any such people at all. There are effectively no actual "far-right extremists" in any visible section of UK society - but there are certainly plenty in other countries, countries which believe in such things as punishing homosexuality with death, and premarital sex with public beatings...
And these are the countries many of the "asylum seekers" currently taking over the nation's student accommodation are coming from.
The binary opposite of the non-binary, if you will.
A real cultural clash is coming, and the woke are going to brutally lose. Not because their ideas are ridiculous, although obviously they are: but because they as people are so (they have been made to be so) rigid and inflexible - and that ultimately is the death knell for everything.
The cruel irony is that 'woke' presents itself to its adherents as the ultimate in free thinking and open-mindedness - want to be a cat? Hey, you can be a cat! - but in reality, is an austere and unforgiving dogma with no leeway or margin for nuance. It only imposes and corrals ("if you say you're a cat, you are and nobody can EVER challenge you!"). It cannot adapt to new information, consider different points of view, or respond appropriately to change.
That is why it has had to resort to utterly absurd, Orwellian "hate crime laws" - and that is why, ultimately, it is doomed: because those who survive in the face of crises don't do so because they are the strongest or most intelligent, but rather, because (as we learned so well through Covid) they are the most adaptable to change.
Those of us who were able to negotiate our way through the last four years without submitting to injections or other medical tyranny, and without kowtowing to irrationality or fear, were able to do this because we were able to adapt to the dramatically altered circumstances we found ourselves in, and respond accordingly. We were the ones who needed to change in order to survive, and we did.
The imploding universities, however, have dictated to tens of thousands of students over decades that it is not they, but the rest of the world, that needs to change. That it must adapt to them, not the other way around, and if it does not, they may figuratively (or literally) storm out.
Yet as these artificial university environments, and their corresponding tentacles into wider society, continue to rapidly disintegrate, many who have fallen for this cynical social engineering are going to have a "rude awokening". They are going to realise it is in fact they who urgently need to learn how to adapt to change if they are to have a future.
And if they really can't contemplate the imperative nature of flexible thinking and adapting to change when the very essence of Western civilisation itself is at stake, well, perhaps they could, at the very least, consider changing their hair...
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I so agree with your article Miri. A former friend entered university at 55 to take fine arts and exited with a BFA and exclaiming she realized she was a closet feminist. The class clapped for that achievement (not the BFA). All of a sudden she looked like a man (without the green hair). Her art of choice was installation art and sent me photos of the monstrosities that she created. One being a chain link fence with glitter glued to it. And of course, "art students" are being fed and have to "study" Marina Abramowitch (such a cool, great artist they think). I literally could not stomach any more of it and gladly parted ways after 17 years of (fake) friendship.
Another great piece 👏🏼 It’s a shame you can’t bet on your predictions as I think you’d become very wealthy!
You mentioned Iran & it got me thinking that the useful idiot “intellectuals” who backed the revolution were first against the wall….