by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci

A new Machiavelli's column begins this week, devoted to the gimmicks of the woke world. Indeed, after the latest Disney flops (from Marvel movies and series to the centennial cartoon Wish) and CEO Bob Iger's mea culpa about productions too focused on messages and not enough on quality there was a misperception that wokeism was withdrawing.

Wrong thinking, because the news coming in from around the world (including Italy) is not at all reassuring: the brave new world continues unperturbed in the deconstruction of our civilization.

Not to let our guard down, then, here is the column that you wouldn't want to read (and that we wouldn't want to have to write).

United States - "Supremacist Whoever Reads"

It is known by now, for the goodthinking Wokeists of intersectional anti-racism everything is inherently racist and a symptom of frailty and white supremacy. Just as last year a British counterterrorism agency told how reading Orwell, Tolkien, Lewis and watching The Bridge on the River Kwai were the first signs of white-supremacist terrorist radicalism. We now learn from a conservative radio station in Seattle that the problem of literature and white supremacy is even more serious and radical. Among the nine characteristics that distinguish white supremacism (in addition to objectivity, ranked 1st) we learn that ranked 9th is an appreciation of literature and the written word.

770KTTH radio network reports that the “worship of the Written Word” is white supremacy because it is “an erasure of the wide range of ways we communicate with each other. Damn books, they genocided the tom-tom!

Spain - Carnival parade with children dressed up as cross-dressers

Absolutely disturbing images come from the carnival parade (and not from a Pride which is not yet in season) in Torrevieja, southern Spain. Emerging on X and spreaded by several sites, they show primary school children in fishnet stockings, garter belts, X-shaped nipple covers, flapper wigs and Pride flags performing in a well-orchestrated dance march. We avoid further comment, maybe it was just some Vox supporter's spin to criminalize future Prides.

UK - Who gives a damn about criminality, we have diversity

While "knife offenses," knife attacks (now a genuine local specialty) are up slightly in the 2022/2023 period compared to 2021/2022 with 12,786 versus 11,122 (though without reaching the 2019/20 record 15. 928) (Source: Statista) and teenage homicides in the U.K. capital for 2023 reached 22 victims (up from 14 in 2022, still better than the negative record of 30 victims in 2021) (Source: BBC) the City of London decided on yet another inclusive woke-washing initiative: dedicating some lines of the overground, the surface trains that run alongside the subway and were not identified as individual lines unlike the Underground, to celebrate the recent culture of the British capital.

The £6.3 million rebrading will thus celebrate the suffragettes, the women's national soccer team, freedom, the textile industry (!?), Mildmay Hospital (crucial during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s), and the Windrush Generation, or the migration of Afro-Caribbeans starting in the late 1940s that did so much to enrich the British capital.

The Standard reports that "Susan Hall, the Tory mayoral candidate, said: “1,000 people have been killed under his mayoralty and Sadiq Khan is only interested in this virtue-signalling nonsense. The only surprise is that he hasn’t named one of them the Sadiq line".

Italy / 1 - Laughing will make you cry

And even the retrogressive and obscurantist Boot is trying to get busy so as not to fall behind in the brave new world.

In Milan, Bocconi University is suspending for six months three students guilty of salacious and goliardic comments about genderfluid toilets introduced in the university. The three unfortunate goliards in times of rigorism will not even be allowed to sit for exams, effectively losing half an academic year (and associated tuition). However, in the infinite rectitude of the rector, they will be able to commute the sentence to 200 hours of volunteer forced work.

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Meanwhile, the university's reprimand immediately got one of the offending criminals to self-deport - the Corriere della Sera reports- while Bocconi's website had to suspend comments because of the haters. Among them a lot of intolerable free speech advocates.

Italy / 2 - The Wokeist of the Opera

Some controversy even in Turin over Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera at the Teatro Regio. Maestro Riccardo Muti kept the point by keeping the n-word - yes, "negroes" - in Somma's opera libretto. Some might object already, in Italian until a few years ago, the n-word was the correct one and not racist at all. It became so only to ape American political correctness. Again, the phrase is strong here: the booklet reads "of the impure blood of Negroes," so hats off for keeping the point. Of course, after changing the ending of Carmen at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2018 the Verdian wokewashing in this case would have been truly minimal.

After all, we discover from Repubblica, Mozart's Don Giovanni is an exaltation of the "predatory nature of patriarchy."

Italy / 3 - The Genderless Parent strikes back

Finally, the usual "parent #1 and #2" vs. "mother and father" controversy regarding ID cards. The Rome appeals court rejects the 2019 Salvini decree, then minister of the Interior, which provided for the wording "mother or father," so it's back to the 2019 situation. What does woke have to do with it in this case, since it had always been so in the past? It has to do with the fact that the action was brought by the Rainbow Families Association.

A margine è evidente che questo tipo di azioni di bandiera, come quella del 2019, pur restando utili sul piano prettamente simbolico della comunicazione, finiscono per rimanere completamente velleitarie in assenza di una strategia di contenimento intorno alla fenomenologia woke, vista la capacità del fronte wokeista di aggirare o perfino sovvertire le singole mosse conservatrici attraverso azioni pianificate e coordinate fra poteri dello Stato, associazioni, intellettuali e – all’occorrenza – piazze.

And this is only the beginning.

See you next week.

Redattore del blog del Centro Studi Machiavelli "Belfablog", Emanuele Mastrangelo è stato redattore capo di "Storia in Rete" dal 2006. Cartografo storico-militare, è autore di vari libri (con Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa dellacancel cultureche sta distruggendo la nostra storia and Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).

An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).