The Anti-Woke Culture Police Have Some Weird New Obsessions.

Apparently we’re in a vibe shift. Last week, Jaguar, the British car company, put out an inoffensive if baffling advert featuring a pouty models of various ages, hues and genders disconsolately splashing paint on each other. In response, the totally normal post-election manosphere lost its utter mind.

On every social media platform whose owners have personally benefited from the coming American regime change, desperate men in search of new scapegoats are predicting doom for Jaguar on the basis that the clip featured ethnic diversity, because everyone’s a brand expert now. Personally, I quite like the ad, although I’m aware that I’m not the target market, being the sort of person who takes public transport to the goth club of a weekend.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but ‘short film in which not every actor is a white male’ is hardly a SCUM manifesto-level piece of pop-culture subversion, and itcertainly doesn’t deserve the unhinged hysteria from the ‘woke is broke crowd’- unless, of course, that’s exactly what the company was going for. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I ever had an opinion about Jaguar - probably when the late John Prescott was still in government and had two. Clever advertisers know how to exploit trends for attention. I’d say they filled the brief here.

Among the other recent totally proportional targets of the new Anti-Woke culture police are…..an orchestral conductor who had the sheer audacity to do her job whilst also being a woman, and the new Steve McQueen film, ‘Blitz’, which, well, has a Black person in it.

Sooner or later it will dawn on these based and redpilled keyboard berserkers that the problem with winning an election and pumping the government full of your goons is that you do not then also get to be the counterculture. Let me explain that again a little slower: you can’t be the status quo and rail courageously against it. Unless you work in a Russian troll farm, you’ve got to choose.

I understand that in the moral thunderdome of the manosphere, theatre kids are a sort of final boss, but they don’t actually run any modern state. Except maybe Iceland. But if you find yourself, mere days into your great big shiny vibe shift, having conniptions over a twenty-second car ad, you may wish to reexamine your own vaunted commitment to free speech.

Likewise, if you consider rolling around in imagined liberal tears the height of political praxis, I’m going to gently suggest that you are not, in fact, the daring vigilante you imagine yourself to be. I know that it’s nice to think that dull, conventional defense of your own comfort zonemakes you some sort of folk hero. The trouble is that you can get so carried away believing you’re Mel Gibson in Braveheart that you don’t notice when you’re just regular old offscreen Mel Gibson, sloppy-drunk and rambling about sluts and Jews. Quit yer whining, Brandon. You’re not a rebel. You never were.

I haven’t been paying attention to what’s happened to Jaguar’s stock prices, for the simple reason that I don’t care. I was not aware that we had delegated responsibility for our moral and aesthetic position entirely to the market. Team Anti-Woke has not historically selected its stans purely on the basis of mainstream popularity, but maybe it would prefer to do so. Coming up with your own ideas is exhausting. Trust me on that one -I write for a living. And there’s nothing wrong with making art that sells, but profit alone is not a metric for good art. Trust me on that one, too - I write for television.

If a man’s sense of equanimity is so fragile that he will meltdown on a glimpse of an advert that does not cater to him specifically, I wouldn’t trust him behind the wheel of a large sports car, let alone the great offices of state. And if your entire movement is based on sneering at other people and whipping up reactive resentment, if you can’t be bothered to take the risk of actually make anything of your own, then it’s beyond time to hand over the keys to the counter culture.

I plan on driving it like I stole it.