Former President Obama made news this week when he came out against cancel culture. “There is this sense sometimes of ‘the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough,'” Obama said. Politicians and pundits from all sides applauded those comments including Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and Ann Coulter. Even Sarah Silverman and John Cleese backed him up:

A few thoughts about Obama's wise comments on 'woke' Woke persons think in binary terms : either something is this, which is good, or it is the opposite, which is bad This is a rotten description of reality, where MOST things are arranged on a spectrum — John Cleese (@JohnCleese) October 30, 2019

But given the world we live in a rebuttal from some woke corner of the internet seemed inevitable. You’ll be shocked to learn it was published today at the NY Times:

His eagerness to dismiss one part of what happens when young people stand up for what they believe in as “casting stones” is a reminder of a largely generational divide about whether it’s impolite to speak out in favor of the most vulnerable among us and the world we’d like to live in. While there’s some debate about which generation Mr. Obama belongs to, he’s solidly in the older camp. Boomers and Gen-Xers, along with a handful of younger people with more regressive views, have been agitated by the way many young Americans — and especially young people of color — use social media, the only platform many of us have, to talk about the causes we care about. But they are going to have to get over it… Being outspoken about climate change, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBTQ inclusivity and gun control — and critical of those who stand in the way of progress on these issues — is work that’s been left to us.

Have you noticed that woke activists all refer to their annoying hobby as “the work.” That seems pretty grandiose for people who aren’t doing much beyond rounding up heretics on the internet and jumping on the bandwagon whenever they are told someone has said a bad word.

What people of Obama’s generation don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — about the ways in which younger people use the internet to make our values known, is that we’re not bullies going after people with “different opinions” for sport. Rather, we’re trying to push back against the bullies — influential people who have real potential to cause harm, or have already caused it. At the very least, we can speak up to send a message to vulnerable people that the bullies’ bigoted or backward views aren’t the only ones out there.

If all they did was speak up, no one would care. What they actually do is shout down, i.e. try to limit other people’s ability to speak. That’s not pushing back against the bully that’s becoming the bully. Those far-left kids walking around with baseball bats on the campus of Evergreen State College, they were also saving people from bullies, or so they claimed. In reality, they were just caught up in the drama of their own manufactured crisis.

There’s a lot more of this in the piece, so if you’re a glutton for punishment feel free to read it. The bottom line is that 58-year-old Obama is apparently too old to understand something that didn’t exist when he was elected president a little more than a decade ago. Whatever you think of Obama, he’s not wrong about this. It’s just not that hard to understand. Lots of people engage in self-serving nonsense to make themselves feel important but few of them are as smug and obnoxious about it as the Great Awokening cultists.