Author David Rieff warns against dancing on the grave of wokeness: ‘Woke is not dead’By Rikki Schlott
Published Dec. 29, 2025
David Rieff is a fixture of New York’s woke literary scene, but he’s not afraid to break with the pack.
“I don’t think I’d ever made a secret of my disdain for the woke takeover of the humanities and the arts, not just in universities, but museums, philanthropy, all the rest of it,” Rieff told The Post. “If there’s one thing that the liberal left does that is really beyond disingenuous, it’s claiming that this [woke] takeover hasn’t happened.”
Rieff, an essayist and former war correspondent, told The Post that he worries his fellow opponents of wokeness are celebrating its end prematurely.
“All these people talk about the woke tide having peaked, but I’m afraid I agree with people like Chris Rufo on this,” he said. “I don’t think it’s peaked at all. I think it’s too deeply embedded institutionally.”
Rieff defines wokeness as “moral and social hypochondria” in his 2024 book “Desire and Fate” on the issue, and he sees it as a corrosive ideology on our institutions, particularly universities and cultural centers.
“I can’t think of a world more monolithic in terms of its opinion sets, its cultural assumptions, its politics, than the humanities,” he said. “But it’s not just the university humanities departments. It’s every major museum on the planet, all the major philanthropies… They’ve all been underwriting all this absolute junk science, junk thought, junk culture.”
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/29/us-news/son-of-susan-sontag-warns-against-dancing-on-the-grave-of-wokeness-woke-is-not-dead/
