The Week in Woke

Zohran Mamdani's mother, a "famous director," lobbied hard to get Gal Gadot disinvited from the Oscars because she's a Jew.

The 2025 Oscars ceremony has drawn renewed attention to New York City mayoral candidate and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, thanks in part to his mother's alleged role in a campaign to have Israeli actress Gal Gadot barred from the Academy Awards.

Mira Nair, Mamdani's mother and acclaimed director of Monsoon Wedding, was one of the signatories of a letter demanding that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disinvite Gadot from presenting at the Oscars. The letter, signed by 21 Academy members and more than 75 other filmmakers, condemned Gadot's "vocal and unwavering support" for Israel's military and described her presence as "deeply offensive."

The letter falsely claimed Israel's actions in Gaza were a "genocide," and accused Gadot of using her celebrity to "endorse violence against innocent civilians." It went on to pressure the Academy to remove Gadot from the ceremony -- a move critics say targets her based solely on her Israeli identity. "This is a moment to choose integrity over complicity," the letter stated. "The Oscars should be a space for artists who uplift humanity, not those who justify its destruction."

A source familiar with the matter told Page Six, "They spent a few hours trying to get Gal removed from the Oscars. It was disgusting." This isn't the first time Nair has aligned herself with anti-Israel activism. In 2013, she joined a cultural boycott and refused to attend a film festival in Haifa.

Mamdani's father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia University professor and chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda. He has also drawn scrutiny for anti-Israel comments. In a 2014 speech at Columbia, Mahmood argued that "the longtime security of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine requires the dismantling of the Jewish state," and stated that "Jews can have a homeland in historic Palestine, but not a state."

There's a "publishing scene" in LA -- they read books in LA? I thought they only read coverages of scripts -- and apparently it's getting "anti-woke," according to woke propaganda rag Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone doesn't like this revolt against censorship.

Inside the 'Anti-Woke' Literary Scene Growing in L.A.

They felt excluded by "millennial moral censorship" -- but is their work pushing boundaries, or just pushing buttons?

Matt Pegas neatly arranges stacks of books atop the red tablecloth at the reception table in the front yard of the house party. Surrounding the books is a tableau of candles, rose petals, a tarot deck, and packets of wildflower seeds, which guests are encouraged to take home and plant. Midnight will mark the spring equinox, and the pagan decor is meant to celebrate a rebirth, because, they say, after years of being tacitly driven underground, the "anti-woke" arts scene in Los Angeles is ready to blossom in full view.

"We have been in hibernation. We have been in the cold. We've been hiding. Now we're out in the open," says party organizer and emcee Adem Luz Rienspects, clad in a white linen shirt and pants.

The function, held in a single-family home in L.A.'s Lincoln Heights, is, at a glance, your standard collection of Eastside scenesters -- nebbish guys in glasses; handsome bros in black leather jackets; guys with long Seventies rocker hair; doughy, bearded guys in ball caps, accompanied by women several magnitudes hotter than them; a man in a tweedy three-piece suit; a woman who's a dead ringer for Naomi Watts. Several women wear lacy white dresses and flower crowns, in accordance with the theme. The requisite amounts of woo woo and pretension. Nearly everyone is white.

"Nearly everyone" is white in a majority white country. What a crisis. I'm so sorry this is happening to you.

Say, what's the racial composition of Rolling Stone's editorial staff, I wonder...?

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More generally, the event is an act of defiance against "wokeness," which, these critics say, has for too long stifled free expression, at the expense of creating quality art.

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"There's a massive cultural pushback against millennial moral censorship," Chris Zeisscheig, a former porn performer turned indie novelist, tells me while watching the party crowd with removed awe.

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The backlash in historically liberal cultural circles has been deemed the Vibe Shift, a term coined by Substack writer Sean Monahan in 2021, and later adopted by the mainstream press, to describe the growing number of young people rejecting the "woke" identity-based politics largely embraced by the contemporary Left. Wokeness first rose to prominence during the Obama years and went mainstream after the gender reckoning of #MeToo, the racial awakening of Black Lives Matter, and the anti-Trump Resistance of his first term.

For a while, woke had a positive connotation -- co-opted from Black communities, it had come to mean being awoken to the historical wrongs perpetrated against women and people of color. At first, this was a welcome development, a long overdue correction to the racial and gender inequities in artistic endeavors. But after a while, a backlash started brewing, one that felt wokeness was overly censorious and punitive of anyone who dared challenge identitarian political ideals. To them, woke became synonymous with Cancel Culture, people being publicly shunned for their political views, and in some cases losing their career opportunities and social connections over them. To be woke, they believed, was to be scolding and off-putting. That anti-woke movement exploded into public view in recent years, culminating with Trump's re-election last fall.

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In this way, the alt-lit scene is part of the cyclical nature of pop culture. A school of thought (woke) takes hold, becomes popular among a certain set of creatively-minded young people, becomes so popular that it becomes uncool, only to be replaced by a counter movement (anti-woke), restarting the process. What is transgressive, indie and anti-woke today will one day be normie, derivative, and cringe.

The woke backlash is a manifestation of the horseshoe theory of politics, which posits that the poles of the political spectrum are more alike than different, Pegas says. "The post-Trump Right and the post-Bernie Left merged around creative disaffection somewhere around 2020, 2021," he tells me before his reading. "Culturally, it's about getting rid of woke and the censorship therein."

The left isn't just plotting a fake, Deep-State-organized color revolution for America.

They're also begging foreign countries to intervene in American politics and pursue a policy of regime change, warns Jonathan Turley.

'Hit Us, Please' -- America's Left Issues a 'Broken Arrow' Signal to Europe

"Broken arrow" is arguably the most chilling and desperate order that an American military commander can issue. When faced with an enemy about to overrun a surrounded force, a commander uses it to call in an air or artillery strike on his own position.

This month, many on the American left are issuing their own "broken arrow" signals, including calling on globalist allies to hit the U.S. with sanctions and other measures. They are seeking to achieve through sanctions what they could not achieve through elections.

The most recent such call came from commentator Elie Mystal on "The Joy Reid Show" this week.

"Our country needs to be sanctioned," he said. "We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point, and I'm not even going to say that we've only been a menace for the past three or four months."

Mystal's call was hardly a surprise for those familiar with his writings. A regular commentator on MSNBC, he previously called the Constitution "trash" and urged not just the abolition of the U.S. Senate but also of "all voter registration laws."

Yet, he is not alone in signaling that his position is being overrun by his fellow citizens.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter with a pledge to dismantle its censorship system, former Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called upon Europe to use its infamous Digital Services Act to force him to censor fellow Americans.

Nina Jankowicz, the former head of Biden's infamous Disinformation Governance Board, appeared recently before the European Parliament. She called upon the 27 EU countries to fight against the U.S., which she described as a global threat.

To the delight of globalists, she declared, "Before I describe the details of Russia's recent online influence campaigns, I would like to call upon you to stand firm against another autocracy: The United States of America."

This year, I spoke in Berlin at the World Forum and was surprised to see many Americans joining European leaders in support of the forum's slogan, "A New World Order with European Values." Attended by figures such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, the conference heralded Europe as key to countering the threat posed by the U.S.

Others denounced America as the world's villain with boycotts and protests during Fourth of July celebrations. One leading influencer declared that "this country is beyond f**ked" and encouraged citizens to "walk away from the illusion that they built" around this country.

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Yet the fact is, this country is not being "overrun." Those are fellow citizens who are calling for these policy changes and rejecting far-left policies. Just as many in Europe are calling on the EU to block far-right democratic victories, many in this country are advocating for the trashing of the Constitution or transnational interventions to reverse political voting trends.

The fact is, the far left is not truly surrounded. They have simply retreated into smaller and smaller echo chambers rather than engage the rest of the country on these issues. Viewed from within the protected spaces of MSNBC or BlueSky, you can feel surrounded, but it remains a type of self-isolation. It is like watching wagons frantically circling on the plains without a hostile in sight. The problem is that most of America has moved on.

In the end, the calls for a globalist intervention are a final desperate call of America's self-isolated left.

CNN's woke, corrupt "medical reporter" Sanjay Gupta pushed masking and social distancing and shutdowns during covid, but now pretends he was skeptical of these measures all along.

Update to the earlier story of Gavin Newsom screaming about Trump's raid on the illegal pot farm that employs illegal aliens and children: Gavin Newsom wasn't just protecting illegals.

He was doing donor service. One of his political donors owns the pot farm.

Of course. We should have seen that coming.

The Bee:

The Austin Fire Department delayed sending swimmers to the areas expecting floods.

The fire chief in Austin, Texas has been accused of not deploying firefighters to help those who were being impacted by flooding that took place in Kerrville County on July 4. Austin Fire Chief Joel G. Baker is accused of issuing a standing order "on June 6 that prevented Austin firefighters from deploying to assist those working to rescue people during the catastrophic 4th of July flooding in Central Texas," per the Austin Monitor.

Baker was accused by the Austin Firefighters Association (AFA) of refusing to deploy the firefighters to Kerr County to aid those impacted by flash floods. The AFA said that it was "absolutely outrageous" and an "egregious dereliction of duty" for him to deny the deployment of the firefighters. The AFA President Bob Nicks has called for his removal and a vote of no confidence will be held online from July 15-17.

Austin's Fire Department chief says DEI, not saving lives or deploying swimmers to save flood victims, is the number-one priority.

London has fallen.

LA residents honored the Spirit of '76 by patriotically conducting Boston Tea Party style raids on jewelry stores. Diversity is very much our strength.

Leftwing women are all ugly hags. Or dudes.

It's hard to believe, but the woke gay dilettante Barack Obama can't build a library. It's one of the many things he's bad at, including keeping his awful wife in line.

This clip is everything.

Sheriff speaks plainly.

JD Vance: The left has no unifying ideology that its Pride Parade Perverts and Jihadist Terror-supporters agree with. All that unites them is hatred of normal Americans.

Pussy femmy Hollywood half-wit Jason Bateman suggests that people need to start going after Trump supporters, and that someone -- maybe the government, it's hard to say who he means -- needs to give Trump supporters a "talking to."

Teaching America's youth.

'I exposed myself to the [...] chapter leader for the local Moms for Liberty'

The Pennsylvania transgender coach who had been canned for inappropriate conduct, was rehired, but ultimately resigned over a porn video showing him smoking meth, recently admitted he was the one who had sent the incriminating video.

David Yates (pictured), who coached tennis at Gettysburg High School and switched to the name "Sasha" in 2022, was not rehired following a pair of incidents which included him allegedly "stripping down to bra and panties" in the girls' locker room.

Note that, as usual, the fetishistic male chooses a "kewl" fake name like the ones you might see in a Young Adult "novel."

Never a Debbie or Bettie or Susan among them.

But Yates later reapplied for the position, and had the backing of many who claimed he'd been let go due to "transphobia." A district solicitor reportedly recommended Yates be rehired so as to avoid a possible lawsuit.

And so, Yates returned as tennis coach after the school board voted 6-2 to (re)hire him.

But months later, Yates resigned after a pornographic video of him smoking meth was emailed to board member Michelle Smyers. Oddly at the time, Smyers also received a text message from Yates' number which said "I have information about Sasha Yates that you need to know."

A subsequent text from Yates informed Smyers that he planned to resign.

The texts appear to make sense now; a recent report by Reduxx notes Yates admitted to emailing the video to Smyers himself in a "'sissy' fetish forum":

"[In] October 2024, I met up with a guy from Grindr and went to his motel room. Was filmed getting spun and being f*cked by raw bbc. The video was sent to a member of the board at the school I worked at. That was my 'coming out' as a meth whore and I was fired," Yates posted on May 22.

"What I've never admitted is that yes, the video was sent from someone else's email address, but I actually wrote the email and hit the send button. I exposed myself to the member of the school board who is the chapter leader for the local Moms for Liberty. She has been trying to fire me for the last 2 year and this gave her everything she needed to legitimately fire me," he added.

"Since this happened I have not been able to find employment. I apply for jobs but don't even get an interview." ...

When asked whether he regretted his decision, Yates said, "There are parts of it that I might do a little differently, but the end result would be the same."

In his "sissy" forum profile, Yates notes his interests are "gangbangs, female domination, rape fantasies," and something called "poz breeding" -- a fetish for possibly contracting HIV from unprotected sex.

Schools aren't for educating students. Schools now exist purely as pervert funhouses for autogynephiles and sex criminals to show off their gender role-play to little kids.

Michelle Obama ($75m worth) and Julia Louis Dreyfus ($250m worth) complain about how difficult life is for American women pic.twitter.com/4WV5BMKgbM

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 10, 2025

Chelsea Clinton took the time to think the grifter organization that keeps her paid and outfitted with a chauffeur and town car for doing so much to help the flood victims in Texas.

I doubt it.

Just endless, fathomless corruption:

posted by Ace at 06:15 PM

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