Sadly, with a new president beginning his new war on woke, the woke-bashing knee-jerkers are more emboldened than ever.
It’s funny – in an exhausting way – how the right-wing press, having stayed suspiciously silent on Prince Harry’s landmark legal victory over Murdoch’s media empire, couldn’t wait to pounce on the much more minor story of his supposed ‘woke’ speech and dig at Donald Trump.
Last weekend, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attended the seventh edition of the Invictus Games in Canada, an event Harry founded in 2014 to honour wounded, injured, and sick military personnel. Yet, instead of focusing on the purpose of the Games, the celebration of veterans, the media jumped on a minor detail from Harry’s opening speech.
Speaking in front of 40,000 people, Prince Harry said: “This moment when there is no shortage of crises, no absence of uncertainty, no lack of weak moral character in the world, the values you embody—the way you carry yourselves—not only at the Invictus Games, but each and every day… your courage, your resilience, your humanity… illuminate a path forward for us all. And for that, we thank you.”
To put it in context, Trump recently dismissed the idea of deporting Harry following revelations from the prince’s memoir about his past drug use, and called Meghan “terrible.”
Yet, the press spun Harry’s speech as a ‘woke’ attack on Trump. The Daily Mail’s ‘exclusive’ was centred on an Invictus Games insider – a volunteer at the event – who called the speech a ‘woke’ distraction from the important work of the Games. The anonymous source complained that Harry’s speech, which honoured veterans, undermined their service, claiming the real issue was his ‘woke’ agenda.
The usual suspects, from GB News to the Express, eagerly jumped on the ridiculous non-story. Headlines screamed: “Harry and Megham savaged for ‘overshadowing’ Invictus Games veterans after Trump jibe,” and “Invictus Games insiders reject Prince Harry’s ‘woke’ agenda in clear message.”
But perhaps no-one summed up this pathetic obsession with ‘woke’ Harry and Meghan quite as badly as Amanda Platell. Platell, a columnist for the Daily Mail and former editor of the Sunday Express, demanded to know: “Who is Harry to lecture anyone on ‘weak moral character’?”
Her indignation reached a new low as she accused Harry of “utterly tin-eared” behaviour for daring to speak about moral character in front of the Games’ audience. This, Platell claimed, was “appalling” because Harry had the audacity to respond to Trump’s derogatory remarks about his wife. According to Platell, if Harry and Meghan didn’t recognise how “deeply inappropriate” his words were, it was their problem, a problem that “brings into question not just Harry’s own character, but whether the couple have a moral compass at all.”
Sadly, with a new president beginning his new war on woke, the woke-bashing knee-jerkers are more emboldened than ever. And, ironically, it was the veterans who really suffered with this story, as the right-wing media’s efforts to undermine Harry’s speech with tired jabs about ‘wokeness’ only reveals their own failure to engage with the true essence of what the Invictus Games represent.
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