Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy.

One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture's pathologies. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. People might think they're being "rebellious" or anti-establishmentarian by believing it, and furthermore that they're upholding noble values of free speech against authoritarian censoring leftists (as the reactionary right thinks today). Doesn't it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language?

Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation.

He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic's "offensive" speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? When it comes to curbing speech," Finkelstein says, "experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.Who is to say your definition of "socially harmful" is, in all cases, the right one, or that your application of it is always right? Academia insists on politeness, decorum, "neutral" language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others' language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel "radical" by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one's scholarship (which Finkelstein didn't when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz's lies).

The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say. Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change. Yes, whites are a homogeneous master-class: the billionaires and the working class, they're all equally guilty, they're all oppressors.With I'll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the "left" of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. The mob's desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this.

On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn't name): "Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush. Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one's head, clothes on one's back, and food on one's table.facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say. The last chapter of I'll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context?