Zach Goldberg strikes again. Goldberg, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done the fabulous n-grams we have featured from time to time showing the rise of woke jargon in mainstream media “news” stories. His latest dive into the data shows something curious—the upswing in media wokery coincides with the end of the “Occupy Wall Street” moment about ten years back. Occupy Wall Street was not as big a nuisance as the “Just Stop Oil” and Extinction Rebellion folks who block roads and vandalize art museums, and in fact was rather pathetic. (I wandered through an Occupy encampment in DC back when they were giving us a free preview of the mass urban homelessness of today, and it all seemed pretty ramshackle and unserious.) Is this inflection point a mere coincidence, or did Occupy Wall Street trigger something after all?
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