So the purge of right-wingers is complete

At its core, the argument against PC and wokeness has always boiled down to white men having expectations set for them instead of setting the expectations. It's not about what constitutes wokeness, it's about morons like UA thinking they're being brutally oppressed into obedience. If the GOP and MAGA decided everyone should be really sensitive about Black culture and history, that wouldn't be PC or woke. That would just be the right thing to do, as determined by the people who've historically set these kinds of norms.

Which is how we wound up with Trump II.

Fifteen years ago Storm the literal white supremacist was a top poster.
As for pragmatic centrists on this board? @Ten Lubak , @Lanzman , @T.R , just off the top of my head.
Federal Groomer was either a troll personality or a full-fledged psychopath of the J6 rioter type.

It doesn't have to be brutal oppression to be worth opposing. Beyond "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose," the amount of demands you may place on other individuals is ZERO.

"Both sides" works when it is presenting different solutions to solve a common problem.

It doesn't work when one side thinks an issue is a problem and the other thinks it is a solution.

Correct. Most of the white men who have benefited from systemic inequality don't seem to realize that their will has been imposed on everyone else, so they perceive people trying to regain equity as invading their space and putting requirements on them. The whiteness, the male centric attitude is genuine ignorance, they don't even realize they're doing it, because the temperature has been made for their comfort so long they can't remember when it wasn't until recently, where others are trying to make their own conditions livable, and so the privilege these white men have held is being eroded to make room for the people who have been oppressed and marginalized because of it, and so they see it as imposition.

True, and so I will clarify it by saying when I use the term "both sides" in this context, I mean the notion that, for example, some people think trans folks should exist, while others think they shouldn't.

Isn't there a saying that equality looks like oppression to the privileged?

Yes there is, and I figure it's generally true. People who have been given an advantage over everyone else based on unearned criteria (being white, being male) believe they are being discriminated against when others also seek to have equity.

libertarians?

"to be concerned about woke excess"

There are not enough facepalms in all of human history

Yup.

A lot of those who "stood on principle" are now shocked - shocked! - that the reactionaries meant what they said

And a lor of the "can't be bothered" crowd are about to be...bothered.

And Jesus *wants* us to be that kind of woke, to be awake to the injustices and oppression that go on around us, and even call them out or fight against them if that's where our work lies.

When I think of "woke excess" I think of a stereotypical Tumblr user screaming about someone using the wrong pronouns like they're Hitler. You know, actual SJWs, who vent a lot of steam but are mainly just wasting their own time and energy on relative trifles. I really don't know what sort of "woke excess" there is to be worth guarding against. Nobody's going to have both the power and desire to demand all the white straight people get sex changes and live in a 3rd world hovel to see how the Other Half lives.

Evangelical Christianity doesn't like that Jesus anymore. He's way too forgiving and compassionate. They've chosen Donald Trump, whom we would see to be the Golden Calf, to be their new Messiah.

made this few years back...

As one harmless example of this, as a Bold and the Beautiful fan, the show's subreddit is one of the very few fans spaces online where people who aren't delusional Steffy Forrester fans can give constructive criticism about the writing for this character without getting harassed or banned but at least once a week, we get a poster there whining that we're delusional Hope Logan apologists (Hope being her rival) for said criticism. And I have to ask what the point of this is when they've already won the stan war on Twitter, Bluesky and every major soap forum.

As someone who has spent time on Tumblr, such people are laughingstocks even over there.

But even if I thought such people (who are more often than not misguided but well meaning children with more time on their hands than experience in their brains) were the majority of leftists? They are nowhere near any power. Fretting about what is at worst a terminally online brat who will outgrow the phase in three years being taken seriously on this is like worrying about a legitimate Communist holding political office in the United States.

My car will speak fluent Esperanto before either such thing happens.

Speaking of that, I remember you having to cut a whole lotta useful idiots off on Facebook in 2016 in the Louisiana trans community, have you seen any of them wake up to the fact that Trump was in fact serious and Pence wasn't just there for show?

100% accurate and very prescient.

Exactly. It's like these people can't tolerate the idea that their (in this case subjective) opinion might not be the gold standard and everyone needs to hear them constantly or else they're being unfairly discriminated against, and it's just so much silliness.

Abuse of the power it provides. So long as no one uses it in bad faith, it’s fine. But not everyone does.

Example: someone I know (straight, white woman) was working in a top 20 (by size) school district in early 2019-2020 in upper middle management (so, you may correctly surmise, very into DEI and being woke, and with a lot of black students in a lot of schools). Very diverse workforce. Everyone got along fine with everyone. She had a direct report who was black and always going on about she wanted to be a mom. The person I know got pregnant, and after a couple months of fawning, the subordinate got clearly jealous. Everyone could see she was just jealous and ignored it. Then George Floyd happened, and the person I know went on maternity leave. When she got back, the jealous lady had rallied the office around her using woke language, saying things like how it wasn’t okay that the person I know was white and a bunch of her reports were black, it was too much like a master-slave relationship, and how no white person should be making decisions that affect majority-black schools, etc. And it worked. Her responsibilities were taken away, a transfer to another team was held up and eventually taken away by their DEI-coded complaints. This all days after getting back from maternity leave. One of the black men told her privately he felt like he had to go along with this, even though he knew she hadn’t actually done anything wrong and the other woman was still clearly doing this because of her insecurity about not having a child. In the end, her career stalled, she quit, and the office she was working in effectively shut down, which led to the district losing out on hundreds of thousands in aid for those majority black schools.

So if you can’t imagine what “woke excess” looks like, imagine harder.

The thing about that is that there is no good thing in all of human behavior that some shitty human is abusing and misusing to destructive ends. We can't decide what's good for society based on anecdotes of abuse because if we did so we'd have to stop doing anything at all.

I absolutely agree that the abusive bitch should have gotten some comeuppance and in any praiseworthy worldview there has to be space for saying "doesn't mean you get to be an asshole" - but inevitably, the assholes appear.

The assholes getting government backing because they’re too afraid of the alternative is another level of really not good.

thing is though, that (if possible) a white person shouldn't be making decisions for a majority black service community.

one of the things my agency has been having to correct is a lack of diversity in senior management. The master/slave thing might be hyperbolic, but it's hard to escape the 'white savior' imagery.

I'm kind of confused here... it was your friend who's career stalled, or the person who supposedly wasn't up to the task?

She wasn’t, not really. Her job was largely making requests for and ministerial distribution of aid. More concrete decisions involved buy in from above and below, involving black people on both sides of her level. Inclusion should not mean segregation.

The former. She’s now out of public education entirely. I have no idea what happened to the latter. I only know the office hasn’t distributed any aid or made any decisions since the former left.

Interesting. I manage a staff that's almost exclusively Black New Americans. I've been wondering if they feel a little uncomfortable about that. But while I definitely think it’s something to be mindful of, it's true that inclusion should not equal segregation. It wouldn’t be practical or desirable to have whites only managing white groups, or Asians managing only Asian groups, etc.

Depends what you're doing, as I think it's more about matching the clientele you serve rather than the work team's structure.

Still, that's a ways away from setting policy (even if it's generally good policy).