The other tactic the woke like to use is to claim the right are the ones fighting the culture wars and pretend they are not involved. Owen Jones in particular likes this approach.
Essentially:
The left: “We are going to take these statues down because they offend us.”
The right: “No, they are part of our history and they should stay up.”
Owen Jones: “Look at the right fighting a culture war to distract from the serious matter of who paid for Boris Johnson’s curtains.”

Tom Holland makes a good point about the culture wars being yet another civil war within Christianity, but they certainly exist – just say “Australia Day” to an Australian, if you want to open the wounds.
I started at university in 1970, and Australia being a few years behind the U.S and U.K. things were still pretty traditional and scholarly. People like Germaine Greer were writing popular books. Then there was the odd progressive lecturer or two writing more theoretical books about feminism, racisim, sexuality, which was OK.
The problem started when there were whole departments of those academics teaching lots of students. Because to be employed as an academic you usually have to keep publishing stuff, and across the western world there are thousands of those academics having to publish a vast amount of stuff year after year – they’re not discovering new documents or particles, they can only keep pushing ‘theory’ to new boundaries, which necessarily have to be ever more extreme, and then it’s taught as university sanctioned scholarship!

The Guardian is RELENTLESSLY negative – about pretty much everything. Over the last 10 years it has got markedly worse. It was always sanctimonious but it at least tried to incorporate a broader spectrum of ideas and didn’t wrap itself in the flag of liberal victimhood. (I even remember when it occasionally published ‘positive’ stories – which seems a very long time ago now). It equates victimhood with virtue to the point that, having found itself facing criticism for starting the culture wars, it pretends to be the victim of a culture war started by the right.
Any objectivity has vanished. Any hope has been dashed that a Guardian editorial might ever assess a policy on its merits, and stop judging a policy, an action, a statement based solely on who has espoused it and what tribe they belong to. Whether that be a political tribe or any of the other boxes into which “Liberals” seek to place us in their ‘hierarchy of victim-status’.
Their ongoing narrative is wholly at odds with reality. The Guardian – in fact, the Liberal-Left generally – has a dystopian worldview and narrative predicated on catastrophism – it seems almost as though they are willing such a future into existence.
The Liberal media (The Guardian alongside its on-air version, the BBC) routinely paints this country as intolerant and xenophobic – whilst the reality is that this country is probably the most tolerant and the least xenophobic in the world – certainly in Europe.
They want to promote the idea that “vicious” austerity is a Tory policy. Yet if they were honest they’d admit that pre-Corbyn Labour had actually promised to cut harder and deeper than the Tories. Again and again we are sold a narrative that is not an honest reflection of reality.
The Left talks of a rise in crime when it is falling. They point to social issues, financial concerns, climate concerns, and ratchet up the hyperbole at every turn – all of it negative.
They claim to want a meritocratic education system whilst decrying Grammar schools as elitist for selecting by aptitude – whilst educating their own children privately, thus selecting by wealth!
The Left rails against a lack of diversity in Govt, yet when we get the most ethnically diverse cabinet in our history they still paint it as a negative. Suddenly they’re aghast to find there are BAME Tories!
The Guardian proudly trumpets “Comment is free… but facts are sacred”. Yet facts are so routinely ignored in favour of their preferred narrative that I wonder how the Editors still put out CP Scott’s dictum every day with a straight face.
They seem determined to prove we are mean and uncaring as a nation – though by every sensible metric we are nothing of the sort. They demonstrate an almost gleeful wish to convince everyone that the “country has gone to the dogs” – in a manner more akin to a 1980s right wing cabbie than a supposedly quality newspaper. For each anecdotal instance of intolerance that gets proclaimed as “proof” of widespread bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc there are a million other instances of just everyday acceptance of people – regardless of ethnicity, sexuality or nationality – that aren’t worthy of anecdote simply because they are so everyday.
They rail against the bigoted and the intolerant yet which tribe is it that reveals itself to be the most intolerant? – why, the “Liberal” Left.
How many times a day do we see someone who is arguing against the Guardian polemic du jour being told to “Go back to the Daily Mail”? Xenophobes and racists feel they have a right to tell people they consider “Outsiders” to “Go back where you came from”. The reaction to Trump saying something similar was almost universal condemnation.
Most people would, I hope, think that intolerant and morally unjustified.
But the more intellectually insecure Guardian readers calling for anyone who thinks differently to “Go back to the Mail” seems a reaction that comes from a similar place. Fear of the ‘other’ and a wish to see the ‘purity’ of their territory unsullied by people who look and think differently.
This is where the current progressive left seems to come unstuck, simply down to their absolute belief that their point of view is intrinsically virtuous, thus everyone who thinks differently to them must be wrong. And not merely wrong, but somehow “Evil”. It seems to blind them to the possibility that other, perfectly decent and thoughtful people might, quite justifiably, think differently to them. I think this is the fundamental cause of the pessimism that permeates almost all left-leaning discourse.
The liberal-left decries inequality of opportunity and income disparity as the two main evils that are fracturing society. But I’d suggest that Identity politics is a far more pernicious way to separate us.
Identity politics is the very antithesis of the principles of universalism – it suggests what differentiates us is more important than what we have in common. Surely we should treasure more what we share as members of a diverse community rather than seek to silo people and segregate that community into ghettos based on our racial identities, sexual orientation, age, gender or creed?
How do people who claim to speak for progressive attitudes justify shifting the argument from Martin Luther King’s dream to see a future where people are judged according to their character rather than the colour of their skin to point where they are calling for PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE? To abandon that call for universalism in favour of separatism is surely a retrograde step? That point seems so incontestable to me that I am utterly baffled how “progressives” can think their present strategy is furthering the cause of equality.
They seem to further confuse their own arguments by, on the one hand, insisting that race or gender is merely a social construct – whilst at the same time insisting that belonging to whichever (socially constructed) group automatically confers on them special privileges of victimhood. It makes no sense whatsoever – yet challenge such obvious illogic and you’ll be told you have no right to your opinion precisely because you don’t belong to that approved victim group.
Being told what groups we belong to and that our identity is defined by our group and dependent on that group drives a wedge between people who would previously have felt kinship with one another. It is hard to retain solidarity with your community when parts of that community are being taught that it is ‘right’ to mistrust the motives of another. Identity politics means I can’t “really” understand you, I can’t really empathise with your lived experience, I’m not allowed to because I am not trans, I’m not a woman, or I am not black, I am not gay, I am not a Muslim.
If I think I do understand you, or if I volunteer an opinion then I’m mansplaining, I’m arrogantly assuming that my opinion is valid even though I don’t have the lived experience of suffering abuse by belonging to the right victim group.
These people seem desperate to signal their virtue by denouncing those who would pigeonhole people whilst, almost in the same breath, constructing a fairly sturdy pigeonhole and stuffing it with a well-fed pigeon.
When will they realise that this absurd and hypocritical id-pol agenda is killing a once thought-provoking newspaper?

Culture war is the method of advancing neo-Marxism, which is method of tearing down the pillars of European civilisation, which is a method of destroying the European race. Its two principal philosophical grounding – Critical Theory and Deconstructionism – were themselves not worldviews, which classical Marxism might be described as, but life-boats for the classical Marxist worldview once that was seen to have failed, ie, only five years after the Russian Revolution in the former case.

The culture wars exist, and I have the PTSD to prove it.

The concept of White Guilt/Privilege is a red herring in a long ongoing spiritual war.
Most of the ‘woke’ criticism, Social Justice campaigning and permanent grievance against (a) the West and (b) white people as such, are indirect ways for the totalitarian nihilists in our midst to demoralise and destroy such civilization as we possess in the Occidental world.
Our civilization is imperfect, of course. How could it not be, in a world where most human beings have not decided – as they should have done – to become divine creatures, celestial in outlook, motivation and goodness; which voluntary enrolment in that transformation has been from the beginning God’s hope and plan for our species.
But the civilization we have, as Dr Adekoya points out in his essay, is less imperfect than most of the alternatives actually operating in the rest of the globe.
Over the centuries in the Russian Empire, in China, in most of Africa (Arab and sub-Saharan both), in very much of Latin America, the Destroyers have long since attained their goal = sclerotic societies where political truth is not spoken aloud, and where people face constantly a grim choice: either be honest, and in that case tortured and (if you persist) killed; or toe the line of the local dictatorship and survive – but in the shrunken form of a man or woman or child who has opted for lifesaving Cowardice.
That is the central point and deepest goal of Totalitarianism: to degrade humankind spiritually (which is also to say ethically and emotionally).
The Destroyers aren’t really interested in killing everybody. When they go in for mass murder it is simply to terrorise the rest into subservience.
Spiritual degradation is what they want: the achievement of a human race which is purged of courage and truthfulness, and at bottom knows itself for Cowardly.

Discombobulation is a tried and tested technique to try to bamboozle your opponents – its called ‘gaslighting’ in the new parlance of the woke – the ugly ironic aspect is it is the woke who do most of the gaslighting, most of the obsfucation, bullying, cancelling and curtailing of free expression – you have to laugh at the cognitive gymnastics of the worthy that their truths are self evident and therefore as a result cannot accept or countenance any alternate perspectives! the behaviour of fools.

When people have the luxury of debating first-world problems, we’re left with things like “birthing people” and appropriation. Never mind that no place has surpassed the West in terms of welcoming people from other cultures, it’s clearly a crime against society when white women have a burrito truck or a schoolgirl wears a kimono. These people are insane, and they are given oxygen by the very people who should be adult enough to be skeptical.
Students demonstrate their disdain for Israel with signs like “Queers for Palestinians” without a hint of self-awareness. Because it’s not about the Israelis and Palestinians for them; it’s about a type of performance art that ignores logical consistency. Same with privilege. Has any white kid at a prestigious university given up his/her spot to a more deserving minority? Of course, not; and they never will for obvious reasons.

Surely the big problem here is talking about ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ as if they’re individuals, rather than crudely drawn collections of individual actors/commentators.
Of course both sides seem to make contradictory statements and espouse incoherent ideologies – you’re treating numerous different individuals as a single, collective subject.