Are We Ready for the Woke Demolition?

Might not get to that point. Roy Price at Price Point gives us the following. Woke is the New Disco: Hollywood and the Harris Campaign

Roy Price founded Amazon Video and Studios. The shows he produced won any number of awards. He has some things to say about entertainment.

For those of you not old enough to remember, Disco went from ruling the radio airways, to being the target of the Disco Demolition^‡. The change didn't come overnight, but it happened fairly quickly.

For the past seven years, every prospective film and television project has gone through an ideological filter before two or three Standards and Practices apparatchiks massage it further into conformity. This aligns all projects (with rare exceptions) with a subset of Americans and alienates the rest, which is not ideal for a business trying to be popular and make money. Consider the audience Hollywood has chosen to disdain and ignore: half the country's voters, 40% of Americans who own guns, another 40% who attend church monthly, and the 74% who live outside the West Coast, New York or New England. Add to this the roughly 50% of Americans who are male. This isn't just a demographic miscalculation – it's an industry-wide blind spot that precisely mirrors the Harris campaign's fatal error. Both Hollywood and Harris speak to an America that exists mainly in Hollywood HR departments, Columbia’s faculty lounge, and at CNN and MSNBC. America is changing the channel on all that.

The name calling. The lawfare. The "Trump is a fascist." The 11th hour accusations from decades ago. The endless parade of celebrities. None of it worked.

No one outside the bubble believed that Trump or the whole GOP was “fascist,” a “Nazi” or “literally Hitler.” One hundred percent of the time devoted to that name calling eroded credibility and was time wasted (especially while the left coddled anti-semitic protestors who actually were pretty close to being “literally Hitler”).

The prediction is that we are on the cusp of the anti-woke era. I'm not sure I believe that, but I do believe that we've seen peak woke. It remains to be seen how long the true believers try to hold on. (Just look at the Twitter/X rants of Rob Reiner - an example not chosen at random - or his experience on Bluesky.)

Anyway, go read the whole thing.

‡ The Disco Demolition night took place in July of 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, home to the Chicago White Sox. It was organized by Chicago DJ Steve Dahl at WLUP. During the break between games of a double header, a crate filled with disco records was blown up. Since a lot of people were there to only see the explosion, and didn't care about the games, a "riot" ensued. (I wasn't there, but I submit, based on the news coverage, that it was "mostly peaceful.") The field was damaged by the explosion, and the people rushing onto the field. The White Sox had to forfeit the 2nd game to the Detroit Tigers.

From the Wiki - always a suspect source.

The popularity of disco declined significantly in late 1979 and 1980. Many disco artists carried on, but record companies began labeling their recordings as dance music. Dahl stated in a 2004 interview that by 1979 disco was "probably on its way out. But I think Disco Demolition Night hastened its demise." According to Frank, "the Disco Demolition triggered a nationwide expression of anger against disco that caused disco to recede quickly from the American cultural landscape". Episode 3 of the 2024 PBS series Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution notes that disco's popularity had already entered a general decline due in part to the public's negative perception of the scene's elitism and excesses, with many radio stations in the process of changing back from a Disco to a Rock format.