The woke ‘Cathedral’ is finally falling

Is the “Cathedral” about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the twenty-first century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But we can enlarge the definition to include nearly all the West’s high-status institutions and professions. One of the mysteries of the Cathedral, he says, is that the people in these power centers seem to be members of the same cult-like religious movement — the Great Awokening, Wokus Dei — even though there’s no Holy See responsible for its official doctrine. Indeed, there doesn’t appear to be any central organizing body at all. Yet the members of the Cathedral all march in lockstep as if they can hear some drummer that’s inaudible to the rest of us.

Their message discipline is particularly baffling because the official dogma that they faithfully trot out keeps changing. One minute they’re cancelling their social and intellectual inferiors for not using the term “BAME” to describe ethnic minorities; the next they’re insisting everyone refer to them as members of the “global majority.” No “memo” is circulated to inform them of this update, yet they all seem to get it. They’re like Soviet-era communists without the Politburo.

To complete the puzzle — and this is my observation — they don’t seem to be aware that their opinions are being handed to them by some invisible party manager. On the contrary, they think of themselves as rational free-thinkers, guided by reason and evidence, who’ve all spontaneously arrived at the same conclusions. Paradoxically, this movement hangs together only because its members are in denial about the fact they’re in the grip of a religious mania. That’s why the woke mind virus is so good at replicating itself: each person exposed to it is unaware they’ve become infected. To those inside the Cathedral, the cross and the altar are invisible.

At least, they have been until now. In the past few months, large cracks have begun to appear in the Cathedral walls. Indeed, it seems to be collapsing in the same way Hemingway said people go bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The catalyst was Donald Trump’s unexpectedly large victory, which seemed to sap the woke citadels of their aura of invincibility. Almost overnight, MSNBC’s primetime audience fell by a staggering 53 percent, while CNN’s fell by 47 percent. Suddenly, more people were tuning in to watch shows on the Food Network than they were to watch the stars of the liberal-left media like Joy Reid, who described Kamala Harris’s campaign on election night as “flawless.” Reid was fired last week.

Donald Trump’s large victory seemed to sap the woke citadels of their aura of invincibility 

The perception that power is draining away from our woke overlords has now been confirmed by the brutal reality of Elon Musk hitting them in their wallets. In the past few weeks we’ve learned that the Cathedral has been reliant on handouts from the US government, whether it’s the million-dollar contract given to the charity run by Rory Stewart’s wife or the half-million pounds awarded to Stonewall over the past three years. Incredibly, even some of the most prominent legacy media organizations were sucking on the teat of the US taxpayer, including the BBC’s charitable arm, Reuters and the Associated Press.

You’d expect the Cathedral to be able to withstand these attacks — after all, it survived Trump’s victory in 2016 and George Soros, Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar are still writing checks. But it’s collapsing nevertheless because these setbacks have contributed to a wider impression that the zeitgeist has moved on. Regurgitating the orthodoxies of the woke church used to be a way of signaling you were a member of the Brahmin elite, but since November they’re no longer high-status opinions. It was the social status automatically conferred on members of the Cathedral that played the role of the coordinating “invisible hand.” Its members’ almost supernatural ability to know which opinions would signal their superiority meant they didn’t need to be told what line to toe. It was communicated via osmosis.

Now, the illusion that their most passionately held beliefs are based on pure logic or “the Science” is being shattered. The cross and the altar have become visible; they can finally see the walls of the Cathedral just as they’re beginning to fall down. In my more charitable moments, I hope they escape before they’re buried beneath the rubble. But at other times…