by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci
After the necessary hiatus in organizing the two Machiavelli events, La forza terrestre e la sfida dell’innovazione and the 2° Convegno Machiavelli Cultura, your much-loved wokeshit bulletin is back. Because wokism is like the body hair on a woman's legs: even though you'd like to forget it exists, it keeps growing and then you end up with wool socks under a little red organza dress in the middle of June.
Australia: here is the Ministry for Male Behavior Change
No, dear friends, this is not a clicbait headline. It is the true truth: the news comes from Australia where a "Men’s Behavior Change parliamentary secretary" has been established in the parliament of the federal state of Victoria, a kind of minister without portfolio, necessary according to the state's prime minister for the "national crisis" of domestic violence. They talk of nothing less than a "national crisis," and to shore up this theorem they pile up a few random bodies: among the cases cited by CNN is the Bondi Junction stabbing in Sydney, New South Wales, in April 2024. The spree killer, Joel Cauchi, was a homeless man with mental problems and was killed by police. As five of the six victims were women it has been speculated that it was the madman's intentions to target women as such (of the sixth, male, who cares).
For now, the minister without portfolio to male behavior change remains a local initiative, but we will certainly see it replicated soon.
USA: Behold, the true face of wokeism
Speaking of insane stabbers in the public square, from the United States, Ohio, comes a case about which there is really no laughing matter. Victim, a three-year-old boy, stabbed to death. A case that shows how jurisprudence is now the cause (deliberate? Unintentional?) of an anarcho-tyranny climate. The defendant in the crime (of whom there are several videos of her wandering around a mall with a knife without anyone objecting perhaps so as not to upset minorities as a result of intersectionality principles: she is in fact black and overweight), appeared contemptuously and sneeringly in court. The woman had just been released three days earlier for psychiatric consultation. Her mocking smile at the brutal and gratuitous murder of a child shocked America. But for that poor boy slaughtered by a raving mad on the loose, no one proposed to kneel.
USA: Straight pride? Fired on the spot
Let's return to the woke tragicomedy with a story that also comes from Ohio: an employee of a local TV station, WFMJ TV, in charge of communications, was fired because he dared to post a " Celebrate Straight Pride" cartoon on Facebook during Holy Pride Month. The abominable meme showed an old 1950s advertising image featuring a married couple (straight, of course). The employee was promptly sacked.
Netherlands: Gullit's wig is racism
But let's get to the spic and span of wokeshit and trivia. A group of fans of the Dutch national team showed up in the stands masquerading as Ruud Gullit, golden ball and great AC Milan athlete at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the pride of Dutch soccer. Fans were promptly accused of blackface and Gullit himself had to be bothered to defend them, saying he was honored by the tribute.
Rome: mass transit sucks but at least it's rainbow
As is well known, Rome's public transportation service, between objective problems and tipical inefficiencies, is quite poor. But fortunately, the Gualtieri administration has finally decided to catch up with other major European cities. The A line of the metro - the one that passes through the Vatican - will now be provided with a rainbow train decorated inside and out in the colors of "pride". So now finally at least on the subject of queerness Rome beats Milan, which is limited to the rainbow flag on the walls of the Porta Venezia metro station. The budget of the initiative is unknown, which will surely cheer up the ever-happy Roman commuters, and console them with a reduced-timetable metro (it closes at 9 p.m.), with quite a few stations closed for works and many others without elevators or escalators. And above all, of the breezy ticket increase expected in the fall.
UK: let's remove some statues, it doesn't hurt
Good old cancel culture is back in practice in Scotland, with statues to be removed in Glasgow. The proposal is to debark 11 monuments in order to "rethink public space" and to carry out restorations, and of course not necessarily that all 11 statues will be returned to their rightful place. At risk are John Moore, reformer of the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars and also admired by Bonaparte, and Colin Campbell, architect of the "Thin Red Line" at Balaclava, on which the Russian advance was halted during the Crimean War. Two heroes who made the United Kingdom what it is. They were not directly involved in the slave market, but since they are representatives of the British arms on whose tip colonialism and imperialism advanced, when in doubt better get them out of the way.
But Wales wants to do even more, and according to the Telegraph this is the most woke region in Europe thanks to Labour. In the plan to "decolonize" the museums of Wales will pursue an
"authentic and decolonised account of the past, one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of ethnic minority communities”. And “tell stories through the lens of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’s experiences".
And since also to be decolonized are museums that tell of coal mines, such as the National Coal Museum, where the real social injustices are the brutal working conditions of Welsh miners we expect that to make it "more inclusive" it will be explained that those dirty white, straight miners provided the fuel for British colonialism.
Ecovandals on the attack
Meanwhile, Just Stop Oil initiatives continue, with "activists" using a fire extinguisher to throw orange powder at the Stonehenge megalithic site on the eve of the Summer Solstice. Similarly in Rome, the Burn Everything collective carried out a vandalism with red paint on the Spanish Steps. Some activists had already been stopped the day before, reports Fanpage, which also tells how hot water pressure washers were needed to remove the paint. Red paint symbolizing the blood of so-called "feminicides." Interesting is the name of the collective, with the subtitle performative fire as we learn from their Instagram page, and which seems to be a sort of permutation of the "destroy everything" taken from Cristina Torres Cáceres' 2011 poem "If Tomorrow I Don't Come Back" (which went viral on social media after Giulia Cecchettin's murder) grafted with the classic feminist theme: "tremble, tremble the witches are back."
Increasingly underappreciated initiatives, although there is no shortage of spin trying to revive the phenomenon of vandalism as political action. This is done indirectly by The Post in an article that from the second paragraph tries to explain how today's cases are in continuity with a historical process. The Post wrote: "But the defacement of works of art, however exceptional, is not a 'new' or recent gesture in human history: it is probably at least as old as art itself, indeed." Vexata quaestio. On the subject we have already written, and it would suffice to see how the phenomenon has become more frequent in recent years.
And finally, a video is circulating virally on the web with a group of unidentified eco-retards trying to stop traffic by stretching a rope across a freeway. The mindless ones don't think that if a two-wheeled centaur passes by they could behead him, yet they encounter instant karma: the arrival of a speeding pickup truck dragging rope with an activist attached. Who before the rope breaks makes a good flight, probably losing arm tendon function as well.
Italy: no Dante, we are New Italians!
After thunder comes rain. In the most classic case of the Overton Window, after a few years since the first controversies about Dante being "anti-Semitic," "homophobic," and "Islamophobic" triggered by the Gherush92 Association in 2012, someone who heeded these solemn humbugs has finally come out. In Treviso, two foreign eighth-grade students (a Buddhist and a Muslim) were exempted by their teacher from studying Dante. According to the news as reported by ANSA, the issue allegedly arose because the teacher in question would have preferred to ask parents for written consent since it was a work with a "religious background." The Ministry's reaction was immediate, so much so that the teacher went on sick leave to close the matter. It must be said that the spare tire in Dante's stead was none other than Boccaccio. Perhaps for an observant Islamic family, some salacious Boccaccioan novella would have been better suited to the Divine Comedy?
USA - Woe to say ISIS is terrorists....
And this confirms that Italy remains a retrograde and bigoted country. Not unlike New Jersey where a school apologized for defining ISIS in a test as "a terrorist organization that commits acts of violence, destroys cultural artifacts, and encourages loss of life in order to achieve its goal of global rule under strict Islamic Sharia law." By Jove! An online group of Muslim activists complained, and the school issued a letter of apology. The local news, to date undenied, was picked up by several social pages and the New York Post.
Canada - "He said uterus!"
Dear readers, get comfortable because this one is long to explain. From the Fact Checking section of the Lead Stories website we learn with horror that the Canadian Cancer Society would not apologize to trans and non-binary activists for referring to "cervix uteri." Indeed, the abominable misdemeanor consists in not using exclusively the non-binary term of "front hole" (if you wish, there is also the term "bonus hole").
The Canadian Cancer Society website posted a page entitled As a trans man or non-binary person assigned female at birth, do I need to get screened for cervical cancer?. That is, with Patience of Job we have to explain to individuals confused about their sexual apparatuses that it is not enough for a male (genes: XY) to dress as a woman to have a cancer-prone cervix, and it is not enough for a female (genes XX) to believe herself to be male to not have a cancer-prone cervix.
Good Heavens!
After the page was published, a disclaimer had been added at the bottom that read as follows:
We recognize that many trans men and non-binary people may have mixed feelings about or feel distanced from words like “cervix”. You may prefer other words, such as “front hole”. We recognize the limitations of the words we’ve used while also acknowledging the need for simplicity. Another reason we use words like “cervix” is to normalize the reality that men can have these body parts too.
First, if something needs to be normalized it means that normal is not normal. Second, go trust a doctor who claims that "men can have those body parts too," given that anyone who got a passing grade in middle school biology knows that men do not have the female sexual apparatus, otherwise they would be females or teratological cases. But, happy Canadians, happy everyone.
In any case, the page has been reworded by putting "front hole" in the third sentence of the second paragraph: "Anyone with a cervix can get cervical cancer. The cervix is at the top of the vagina. Some trans men may call the vagina the front hole". However, the fact remains most serious: those non-inclusive and discriminating oncologists did not apologize.
However, the fact checkers' article is instructive because it explains how front hole is an authoritatively and academically accepted term because the article by one J. Sevelius, "There's no pamphlet for the kind of sex I have": HIV-related risk factors and protective behaviors among transgender men who have sex with nontransgender men. (J Assoc Nurses AIDS Care. 2009 Sep-Oct;20(5):398-410. doi: 10.1016/j.jana.2009.06.001. PMID: 19732698; PMCID: PMC2785444), explains that trans men prefer the term "front hole." In short, Big Science says so, so trust it.
The whole debate to undo biological sexual dimorphism is interesting, but reality is always knocking at the door and sooner or later it gives the bill. Cancers don't give a damn about your gender identity, dear my marzipan person of gender identity and performance.
One cannot miss at this point investigative journalist Francesca Totolo's hilarious comment about a guy in women's makeup who proudly claims to have had his "first period": "as a trans woman I am experiencing my first menstrual bleeding." "This trans man claims to be on his period: if I were him, I'd pay a visit to the andrologist right away," Totolo comments. Man, listen to her, she's definitely better than a Canadian doctor...
Bonus track
At the tail end, two pieces of good news on the braking of the woke invasion. Athlete Lia Thomas (don't let the name fool you: he's a male) famous for being the first trans athlete to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top series for women's freestyle, was first banned from competing in the women's categories and lost her legal appeal to compete as a woman at the Paris Olympics.
Meanwhile, on May 29, the British government's Department of Health and Social Care expanded the suspension of puberty blockers to include the private sector by imposing a three-month moratorium. In practice, the issue is postponed until after the U.K. elections. Sunak's Conservatives have tried, image-wise, to curb the woke phenomenon, but apart from the minor transitions issue, the initiatives have appeared rather half-hearted. And certainly the Tories remain underdogs.
Editor of the Centro Studi Machiavelli “Belfablog,” Emanuele Mastrangelo is editor-in-chief of “CulturaIdentità” and has been editor-in-chief of “Storia in Rete” since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e 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).
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