Almost everybody has a Woke Breaking Point. A point of Peak Woke. Or, at least, they should.
There should always be a line that, once crossed, signifies to someone that the ostensibly good or noble thing they currently support has soured or, as the case may be, gone completely bad. We all know the history of the twentieth century (or, so I delude myself into believing). Certain features of the Woke ideology, even if only on its extreme fringe, show shocking potential for being a totalitarian nightmare unfolding before our eyes, especially because so many good and decent people so vigorously (and viciously) support it all of a sudden. Even the rapidity with which it is spreading is disorienting, and thus alarming.
I realized the importance of establishing a “Woke breaking point” the other night while discussing the bizarre defenses of our current era with a brilliant friend. We were talking about the people in our lives who have hit their Woke breaking points and those who haven’t. It struck me that many of the people in my life who remain sympathetic or outright denialist about the excesses of the Woke (Critical Social Justice) movement haven’t grappled with the possibility that it isn’t quite the noble and necessary cause that it sells itself to be.
What I realized is how very helpful it is for people, rather than becoming confrontational, to encourage their Woke-sympathetic friends to start identifying and naming what their non-negotiable lines will be. People’s lines will—and should—vary, but as things get increasingly extreme, they will also get crossed more and more certainly. Knowing the line has been crossed, however, takes knowing there is a line and where it is.
The question to pose, then, is simple enough: What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?
Why should you ask this? Two reasons, given how out of hand the movement already is. First, people should be asked to grapple with the idea that things could possibly go too far, or even that they already have. Second, in circumstances like these threaten to be, everyone should stake out at least some tentative line that their current principles won’t let them cross, and they need to do this before they’ve already crossed it and been forced to defend that which they currently find indefensible.
This simple act of getting people to commit to their principles before they let them slip is of tremendous importance and use because of how we process our moral reasoning. We do this by post-hoc rationalization, meaning that we lawyer ourselves into believing we acted morally after act, which often means after we’ve already crossed the line. Drawing a clear line ahead of time, especially in a social context where accountability weighs in, makes it that much easier to see the line, bright and clear, and that much harder to cross first and rationalize after.
To get real about this, you shouldn’t expect this conversation to go well. It might, of course, depending on the relationship, but it’s very likely to be received defensively or with an assumption that you’ve lost your mind. So here’s some advice: Don’t expect it to go well. Don’t expect them to come around. Don’t expect them to take you seriously. Just get the question out there where they have to think about it.
You also don’t have to push the issue, and you shouldn’t. If you meet resistance, it’s best not to argue or damage your relationship, and you should know you won’t have to. There’s no need to force it. You can ask the question and then just leave them with it. The question will bother them basically forever if they refuse to play, and let it. Let it do its work. It’s far more important for them to grapple with than it is for you to get an answer to.
Then again, they might want to explore and engage. That’s even better.
My friend and I discussed some of the breaking points that were crossed for us and for people we know. For me, it was something between seeing unfair witchhunt-like haranguing applied to public figures I respected (falsely accusing them of racism and sexism), the subversive manipulation of language, and, especially, the brazen attacks on science coming from both the activist and scholarly communities around Critical Social Justice. This happened for me a few years ago. For my friend, it was the undeniable real racism and blatant double-standards at the heart of much of the Woke activist enterprise. For some of our friends, the public defense of riots in Woke language—like “whiteness is property,” so it’s okay to burn down a business—was a bridge too far. For others, it was being bullied into allyship that’s never good enough. For so many more, it’s just the outright racism.
Of course, I also hear from people citing the tearing down of statues (including George Washington’s), people losing their jobs, people being afraid to lose their jobs, “Shut down STEM,” people’s relationships falling apart (including otherwise healthy interracial marriages, in particular), and a wide variety of other clear signals that things have gone too far with this moral panic and the bad ideas rising to prominence within it. For more and more people, these need to stop.
So, the question for you is: What is (or was) your Woke breaking point? The question for your friends is the same. I’d love to hear them. Post them in the comments. Where did they cross the line for you?
Even though the conversation won’t go well, don’t be afraid to ask about this directly, because this is important. Get specific if you need to. Ask: Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Abraham Lincoln? Martin Luther King, Jr.? Whose? What freedom has to be stripped? Due process of law? Speech? The right not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment?
Ask: When is enough, enough? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? How many people have to lose their livelihoods? How overt does the racism have to become? How many people have to humiliate themselves in “Antiracist” Struggle Sessions? Who has to be doxxed? Destroyed? Beaten up? Killed? Does it take a public lynching? Or would it take horrors we believed we left behind in the darker chapters of the twentieth century? Where is the uncrossable line between here and there?
The questions have to be asked. They’re something we have had the genuine privilege of not having to ask ourselves in a long time, and it seems like we’ve forgotten. Now, they have to be asked.
For one friend of mine, the line is at “real violence,” whatever that means in the present era. Perhaps it’s the kind the media isn’t spinning excuses for, maybe it means with firearms (it seems not to include the skyrocketing violent crime rates, though). At least it’s a line. At least he’s thinking about it. Another, a scholar, said the obvious perversion of his own academic field would be his last straw. It’s a bit fuzzy, but at least it’s a line and one that seems to fall far short of violence. Violence, he even said, wouldn’t be acceptable, and he’s already very uneasy with the property damage and the general mayhem. At least he’s thinking about it.
But, maybe it has to hit closer to home. Ask: Where is the line? Would it have to be personal? Do they have to be personally denounced a racist? Subjected to an “Antiracist” Struggle Session? Fire? Would it take destroying the thing they love? Their family? Their kids? Their job or career? Their hobby? Their life’s passion? What is it? What’s too far? We have to start asking, and it hardly matters if their breaking point is something selfish. People need to grapple with this. Even if all they can think about is themselves or their closest friends and family, at least they’re thinking about it.
For a close friend of mine, who is quite Woke still but not at all “all in,” we had to go quite far to find an absolute line. He has one. Should I, or other people he’s close to and knows don’t deserve it, get doxxed or start receiving credible death threats for standing up to Wokeness, that will apparently do it (does anybody deserve this, though?). Seems a little extreme to me that my own life would have to be on the line before he’d think surely this is getting out of hand, but at least he has a line. At least he’s thinking about it.
The people you ask should be able to find a Woke breaking point and name it, though, and if not, they need to be pressed on that point. That’s serious. They need to be asked: what does it mean that you can’t imagine this going too far? Maybe it spurs no reflection. The “right side of history” is, after all, quite the Greater Good, but even this is something they need to face up to, if it’s the case. Maybe that, at least, would get them thinking about it.
Again, the goal of this intervention isn’t to get anyone to change their minds. It isn’t even to get them to believe something horrible might be happening, is likely to happen later, or is even plausible in the current situation. It’s only about getting them to engage with their principles now before the machinations of motivated reasoning lead them, eventually, to excuse what they would, as of now, see as inexcusable—at least until it happens.
263 comments
I don’t think I had a line that was crossed. I was not political when I was young and first started voting. I registered Democrat, but it was more or less a coin toss decision – just pick one so you can register.
Eventually, I became disenchanted with both Democrats and Republicans. I saw them both as corrupt beyond redemption. So I started voting Libertarian and joined a local Libertarian group. Then I realized the Libertarians spend more time fighting amongst themselves over minutia than they do trying to get elected.
When the Left’s influence in the Democrat Party became overwhelming, I saw that what they wanted was the destruction of free markets, Western Culture and the USA. That made my choice easy: MAGA. The RINOs are of no use. There’s no point in meeting people half way when they want you dead. And the Left LITERALLY wants you dead if you are not in lock step with them.
Back in the 90s I dabbled in various esoteric cults (occultism) and I was pulled into the Socialist cult with its cultural Marxist, post modern updates etc.
It was at that time more “old school” in its feel. But I was actually pulled into Marxism explicitly and directly via the gnosticism/Hermeticism route! The gnostic/Marxian operative was a very charismatic older woman from Florida who infiltrated the main cult I was with.
I’d say that the spark was 9/11 (islam) and a bit later: feminism. I pursued those two topics intellectually and was increasingly finding that the Leftist, Chomskyite explanations just weren’t explaining or predicting things properly.
And then the feminists … I could not put my finger on it, but I just felt it was *wrong* somehow. Feminism offended my sense of logic, responsibility and search for the truth.
Overall I had developed that nagging feeling that whatever Leftism had to say on these topics they weren’t explaining or predicting things very well. Insert proper Spock quote here…
What cured me on the islam thing was simply listening to conservative and Christian/religious voices such as Bill Whittle, Ezra Levant, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, David of Apologetics17, Robert Spencer, Bill Warner, and many many others. Those were new, diverse inputs to my mind’s diet, and over time I found their explanations to be more credible and fact-based.
I was sorta vaccinated against feminism by Camille Paglia’s “Vamps and Tramps” already in the 90s, but later Christina Hoff Sommers really did a great job with her book “Who Stole Feminism?”, which for the first time put a big, fat finger on exactly what is wrong with feminism. Shoddy, lying academic work combined with absolutely questionable morals pretty much sum up my grievances against feminism.
So basically I did most of the work some 10-20 years ago, so when the Socialists and the Politically Correct on the 90’s became the Regressive Left in the 00’s I had largely put it behind me, and when the Regressive Left became the Woke I just recognized it as them going the next step, and into overdrive.
My red line as it is today: do not corrupt the perception of reality itself, do not ask me to accept this boil on reality, and do not ask me to pretend it’s real.
Most recently I’m articulating my moral red lines more clearly. For some reason it appears the radical Left ends up supporting the most immoral things. So questions of morality mean a lot too.
I read a lot of post modern theory/philosophy in the late 60s and 70s. I thought it was just plain comically silly but when I made the connection between Marxism and post modrrinism I thought it was just insanely evil. At some point within the last 5 or 6 years I started reading CSJ theory and when I did I realized I was seeing the same post modernism I rejected in the 70s put into action. I’m not sure of exactly when I went hard over anti-woke, maybe it was when I realized that no “extreme progressive” was willing to have a conversation or discussion…and I remembered Popper’s paradox of intolerance…
I had to finally quit my Unitarian church because it chose antiracism over free speech.
If I wasn’t actively woke, I was deemed a racist. Insane!
As soon as I heard of woke it was associated for me with BLM. And BLM was associated for me with the riots of 2020. Burning down businesses, rioting in general, looting, etc. is never justified in my mind. But the movement lost all potential for respect from me when it proclaimed that it was against the traditional family and family values, as well as for abortion. These are non-negotiables. So, if what BLM really wanted was racial justice or reconciliation through open conversation and reasonable give-and-take, or just getting “white people” to shut up and listen, they lost me with that agenda. From there, it just got worse with the blatant double standards, the open racism against white people and even Asians and Latinos, the cancel culture, and the refusal to debate. The persecution of people standing up for rights that have been sacred in the West for centuries (the right to protect your own property and life, free speech). Even the fact that the leaders of BLM and the politicians supporting it don’t really care about black people but are just using them and actually hurting them a lot. What James Lindsay has been doing has opened my eyes even further to the evil of “woke,” CRT, the underlying neo-Marxism, Hegelianism, and how it has roots in and carries on the tradition of esoteric cult religions.
I was pretty woke back in the 90s. I read a feminist book that really bashed this book called Iron John and I believed what I read. I was seeing a fellow at the time and when he told me how much he liked the book, I thought very poorly of him. I ended up reading the book thinking I was going to find out just how sexist this guy was. Nope. I loved the book and realized recently I haven’t read anything feminist since. Mostly wasn’t involved with politics other than local food movement, natural health, and homeschooling community.
About 2015, my daughter kept bringing me things that upset her in the cancel culture world. I thought the millennials would grow out of their nonsense and she believed her generation, Z, would refuse it. I was naive I guess…
In 2016, I got curious about Trump phenomenon and was checking out right wing sites to figure it out. I had to search for what an SJW was and ran into the whole Jordan Peterson debacle. I really like JP and the slander from the left against him was insane. Then saw the footage of Evergreen State College (I almost went there) and I became very committed to idea of doing whatever I could to heal divisions in our society-mostly by listening to people I might not usually listen to. Very eye-opening experience.
I was offline for a few years and then the Covid nonsense started. I couldn’t believe that the left were so conformist, so kowtowing to big pharma, and so authoritarian. And then I went down the gender rabbithole…. I committed to stopping woke.
My breaking point came from a unusual source.
I worked for a law firm (an LLP) in England two years ago. The business prided itself on promoting diversity, though none of its senior partners were anything but white males. Nonetheless it’s company intranet would constantly push its commitment to BLM, pro-trans attitudes, Pride carnival attendance, Stonewall Diversity Champion ranking. I’m (still) left-leaning, but was aware early-on that the firm liked to talk-the-talk, but certainly didn’t walk-the-walk and had no intention of doing so.
And the moment? Well my immediate work colleague was a lesbian, and made it plain-and-clear, really for the benefit of her co-workers, to let them know that she left her sexuality at home and came to work with her attitude and personality attuned to work only.
Except the firm insisted on publishing Riley J. Dennis’ ‘genital preferences are transphobic’ videos from the hate-site ‘Everyday Feminism’, which were basically a message to lesbians that “We’re (men who reckon they are women) not trying to erase your sexual orientation; we just want it to include biological males who take hormones and wear makeup.”
Well that was like a red rag to a bull, and my colleague recognised it as out-and-out homophobia. She called it out, so did some other lesbians in the firm and even a few gay men who recognised Dennis to be just a practising homophobe. Plenty reacted and there were no signs of anyone endorsing Dennis. Except in HR. HR really liked Dennis, and made it clear that Dennis reflected the firms views.
And for doing that, everyone who objected, was disciplined by the firms HR department for expressing ‘transphobic views’. Every single one. No-one fired, but it caused a sh3tst4rm of trouble. Well, not-a-surprise, it was a law firm. Plenty left. There were payoffs, NDA’s a-plenty and my colleague left and has been actively putting-off potential recruits to the firm for a year now. It’s been blacklisted and is being slowly strangled-to-death by being unable to recruit. Incredibly the HR director survives, though he’s cost the business millions. I reckon he must have something on the senior partners and can’t be got rid-of. I left a year ago, and took a chunk of business with me. The lock-downs did plenty of damage, but being ‘woke’ cost even more.
My breaking points started slowly then happened all at once. There are so many glaring, egregious flaws in this ideology and its execution that almost any intended merit is cancelled (pun intended).
First was the CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle WA, an anarchist boot camp that made national news during the 2020 protests. I was at the protests and witnessed the confrontations with police and protesters leading to CHAZ. I was really uncomfortable with the narratives I was seeing propagated by the left and in my FB feed about how the conflict was 100% police violence upon 100% peaceful protest. I was there and that frankly was untrue; nothing going down was one-sided. Then police retreated and CHAZ sprung up, quickly unfolding into multiple shootings and violent assaults. Two Black teenagers were shot; other people went missing; lies; armed self-appointed CHAZ guards patrolling the periphery which was by the way public sidewalks belonging to all taxpayers as well as small businesses already struggling under the pandemic, now having this wildly dangerous encampment on their door and forced to close and lose whatever little business they might gain during the pandemic shutdown.
The narrative surrounding the undeniable deceit happening at CHAZ was one of “equitable utopia manifest; an experiment in envisioning an alternate way forward”- straight-up propaganda plain and simple coming from people I knew personally who had a lot of social power in the community. If that’s your utopia please take it to an island and have fun playing it out amongst yourselves.
So that was my first awakening that something was really amiss, not transparent, and flagrantly dishonest. It felt like gaslighting- I see this with my own eyes yet wokelords are screaming at me and everyone else “no you didn’t witness that, that destruction never happened or if it did, it was an agitator planted there by police and Mayor Durkan to discredit the protest.”
That was my awakening, but I didn’t fully break ties until some months after. Since the summer of 2020 I’ve been gravitating from far left fringe, where I started, to center—I’m left on issues like abortion, working class solidarity (the hallmark of the original true left, not of this woke bs), climate, full and equal rights for all— and I also can no longer abide by the silencing that’s revealed itself as an assault on free speech, free thought, and basic right to different views. My breaking points that happened thereafter and continue to happen include:
The weaponization of everything and the manipulation of language into a cancellation weapon. Everything is always racist; it’s handy leverage for the woke power grab, the scene queens and socialites who bullied and excluded people like me for our autism, traumas, disabilities now the queens of the woke and here to protect their social capital and have a sanctioned and culturally legitimized avenue with which to cancel anyone they don’t like.
Another personal breaking point was being informed by an ex-friend that all concepts of time are a manifestation of white supremacy. This was in response to my being upset that my boyfriend was hours late, causing me to almost miss a flight. My boyfriend is white, but my being upset with him was white supremacist, brilliant!
Another breaking point is seeing how atrociously people treat others in their personal circles (call outs, cancelling, or just bring shitty toxic self-absorbed friends), but how puritan and above reproach they are in their woke social media branding. Some of the meanest, cruelest, self-serving social dynamics I’ve seen in my life have come from the woke queens. Others from my time in that world have proven to be good friends, but I know they’d drop me if I ever openly questioned or criticized as I’m doing here. As far as people, most things are not absolute, all-or-nothing— context which is lost in the landmine of woke culture.
Most recently a coworker accused me of hostility, gaslighting, totally and fully dismissing them, and all manners of things I did not actually do because I said “I’m sorry that’s been your experience.” I thought we were just venting about our jobs. I apologized right along the script lines being careful not to make excuses or try to defend myself- because doing so is white defensiveness and hostile and must immediately be silenced regardless of if you did anything wrong. Even after apologizing this person still replied a nasty reply, it took multiple apologies repeating myself but not engaging in any depth since that was a trap. My apologies are in writing just in case and I will never attend that meetup again.
Yes indeed folks, that’s how bad it is- someone doesn’t like the way you said something or just doesn’t like you for whatever reason, and your job could come under fire for it.
F this noise and stay strong surviving the incessant onslaught of false allegations and outright lies.
Calling all the left as woke is wrong. It’s a stereotype.
You are believing in a stereotype and will deny it.
Our dear author is not “calling all the left as woke”, so the problem you are exposing is that of reading comprehension.
No, all the Left is not woke, but the woke are in control. There have always been “liberals,” who the hard line Leftists call “useful idiots.” They are not steeped in Leftist doctrine, but go along with the crowd.
My breaking point was long before I was born, September 17, 1787 – the day the U.S. Constitution was finalized for the purpose of usurping the Articles of Confederation.
My woke breaking point came slowly, then all at once. I have always been a “good white liberal feminist” in the Canadian sense where we are perhaps more comfortable with certain socialist ideas and don’t necessarily identify for a lifetime with one particular political party. I thought I knew what it meant to be a “liberal” having lived almost a half century on this earth with these ideals, and could not understand the election of Trump in the US as described by our “left leaning” media outlets. I wasn’t devastated but I was immensely curious, and wasn’t completely buying the theory of a rise of an alt right takeover. Then George Floyd happened, and again I was saddened that this happened, but more surprised at the seemingly incongruent response of the riots, both in the US and Canada and even more disturbed by the fact that there seemed to be a lack of political will on both sides of the border to protect life and property in the wake of these riots. At that point, I was still willing to concede that as a white person, maybe I didn’t know all that there was to know about systemic racism in police forces in the US, or in general, and did my duty to learn about my “white fragility” and how to be a good ally, and about reconciliation and on and on. Though, anyone with critical thinking skills would surely understand what happens in society when you heed cries from the mob to “defund the police”, right? I still believed that sensible level heads would prevail.
Then one evening, I found myself lecturing my 13 yr old son, after a comment he made about sex / gender (that sex is binary though gender may not be – he’s a smart independent thinker, because he decided this using his own logic, and not automatically buying into the woke gender ideology they are shoving down students’ throats nowadays), and out of my mouth I heard every scripted buzzword and phrase I had been conditioned to believe my whole adult life about the nature of “reality” and what I’m supposed to say as a “good white feminist ally”. It was after that, through my son’s mirroring that I began to realize that NONE of it added up, AT ALL! It started unraveling very quickly after that. I got my hands on every book and podcast I could find, and have never felt more grounded in truth in all of my life.
When I realized that what “they” are asking me to do is to sell out my own son, daughter, husband, parents, ancestors, even my own soul, and to teach my children to believe something that is not grounded in facts or statistics, let alone reality, to go along with ideas that would have them sell out their own gender, sex, culture and family, in the name of some “ideology” that is so flawed and reductionist as to be absolutely sinister!
After that I started listening to James Lindsay around the same time I began my doctorate, and I was learning about cultural responsivity and ‘praxis’… say what now? Uhh…I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought they were telling me that it is not enough to believe what they believe, but now I have to BEHAVE like they do, and if I don’t, then I’m part of the problem (racist / transphobic / homophobic etc.). I was thinking, oh the irony of doing my doctorate to become a critical thinker, only to be told that only one way of thinking and acting will do thank you very much. Around the same time I was listening to a James Lindsay podcast where he spells out the “praxis” part, and it was like a million light bulbs went on in my conscious awareness all at once. It was true, all of it. And I was done. And the deeper I go, the more it resonates. I can handle ambiguousness, uncertainty and nuance. What I cannot tolerate is straight up hypocrisy and lies, which is what all of this post modernist crap has turned out to be (and feminism to a certain extent) and I have been lied to and drank the Kool-Aid for 30 odd years, but no more.
Won’t Get Fooled Again — really? I’ll believe it when college educated white females start to walk the talk and stop defending trans!
note: links contain disturbing images from the UK of males violently attacking female women — the males are all trans — trans mobs attacking real women in public and cops do nothing
if you are a female woman how can you keep supporting and tolerating trans violence against women and grooming of children?!? trans violence is what Biden and Trudeau and Macron and all the WEF puppets legislated into legality and female women keep voting for them to show off to other woke women on facebook that they’re not a trump/trucker/far right/conservative/racist! THIS is the problem!
also look up the massive increase in pregnancies in women’s prisons — it ain’t the male guards doing it — it’s the male “women” prisoners — women’s prisons are a trans’ autogynophile candyland of free sex with captive females
This Is What A Trans Looks Like:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10823787/Feminist-praised-JK-Rowling-says-cops-threatened-detain-breach-peace.html
https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-identifying-activists-attack-women-protesting-violence-against-women-girls/
https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-inmates-are-raping-female-prisons-at-a-shocking-rate-ministry-of-justice-reveals/
My woke breaking point came when I first became aware of what woke was. It was some really sick stuff and I wanted nothing to do with any of it. It was obviously Marxism working to cause as much societal chaos and division as possible pursuant to a communist revolution in America. Yeah, I know all about the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.
Maybe 90% of the common people can come up with a line that can’t be crossed, but I guarantee 90% of the High Priests of the Woke religion – the activist leaders, prominent authors, speakers, etc -, do NOT have such a line! They’re morally bankrupt and only have one goal, the utter destruction of Western Civilization, and rebuilding society from its ashes, with THEMSELVES as the leaders.
I think my wall first started to crack in 2017 after Justine Damond was killed and seeing woke publications I read at the time try to justify vitriol directed at her and the racist/sexist notion of white women as undeserving of any empathy ever, no matter how innocent.
Up to that point I had already swallowed the idea that white women needed to just shut up in general, because that’s what we’re told by leftists over and over until we just accept it, and then eventually, parrot it ourselves. It’s like an abusive relationship. And I really think they get off on it. It’s sick.
The cognitive dissonance of believing the left was the side of empathy and kindness and against racism and seeing evidence quite to the contrary led me to seek answers elsewhere. I stumbled on Benjamin Boyce’s Evergreen documentary and New Discourses. I also quickly realized how many “racist” or “misogynistic” boogeymen I’d heard of like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson were actually nothing of the sort, at least not based on anything I’ve ever heard them say. I felt tricked, lied to. The woke left is so dishonest, I’m not sure I can trust anything they have to say again without a mountain of scrutiny.
Thank You so much for this!
I also thought I had to be a good little white woman and shut up – then the woke started pressuring lesbians to like “female” penises. Then they started allowing genetic males to compete in sports with genetic females. Then they started saying “sex work is work” (having survived this horror, I can promise you it’s not). Then they wanted to repeal FOSTA. Then they wanted to abolish police and prisons, instead of reforming them. Then they said we should stop incarcerating sex offenders, batterers, and other violent predators (I guess only the police should be incarcerated). Then they started making heroes of men like Jacob Blake who was pursued by police for raping a black woman in front of her child! I guess only Black Rapist Lives Matter, not the lives of the women and children they prey upon.
The “woke” are a classist, racist, sexist, homophobic movement of privileged people who deny even the most basic elements of biological reality.
My Woke breaking point came last year with the ongoing riots in Portland, Oregon in one small event.
Statues everywhere were being torn down; it started in the South with Confederate statues and statues of slaveowners, which I’m still fairly ambivalent about, but it kept going until even statues of people like Frederick Douglass were getting destroyed. Irony-impervious, historically illiterate, ignorant people were clearly at work.
I knew it was getting absurd but it only really, really hit me when the Thompson Elk Fountain statue here in Portland had to be taken down because of fires lit at its base and attempts to destroy it. For those who don’t know, it’s a statue… of an elk. Just an animal. Facing west, away from traffic. Just an elk.The fact that that particular statue– about as nonpolitical as statues get– was “offensive” to someone somewhere and had to be destroyed.. that just bothered me deeply, that such thin-skinned, myopic people live in my city and were misplacing their anger so egregiously under the banner of anti-racism or some other such nonsense.
The fact that I couldn’t talk about how much this bothered me to anyone I knew, because presumably they sympathized with the elk statue-smashers and would see me as “racist” for objecting to it, disturbed me even more. It made me decide I was done with whatever movement this was (not that I’d ever been involved) would not have my respect any longer. It was in fact my enemy.
Did I mention that I’m basically still a Lefty? 🙂
I doubt anyone was “offended” by the elk statue. It seems more like a case of, “Ooooh, we are getting away with all this destruction, let’s go destroy the elk statue too.”
The fact that you didn’t feel comfortable bringing up the subject to anyone you knew, IS quite disturbing.
I don’t understand that myself. If one knows one is a fair, reasonable individual, who cares if someone calls you a “racist.” Really, who cares? You just laugh, or ignore it, or whatever you need to say in the moment to correct them.
It’s really no big deal, at least if they are “white.” I could see if one had a black friend, and things were more touchy about a particular incident, that would be uncomfortable. But, a freakin’ elk statue?
People have to stop whining, and stop madness, whether it comes from the so called “left.” or, “right,”
Who cares? Anyone who happens to fall into the categories of a) not being cancelable (very, very few fall into this category), and b) having an ounce of sense in them.
History—and YouTube—are replete with anecdotes of fools who couldn’t make out that there is a time and place for bravery, and otherwise they’re either a casualty, a public example, or both.
Mmmm this is good
My woke breaking point was several years ago when I first heard about Antifa as they had started to go around the states having black metal concerts shut down by use of threats, harassment, and false propaganda, using the 6 degrees of separation game to justify their witchhunt. “This band toured with this band who had a guitarist who was in this band who did a split EP with this band who had an album produced by this person who said something racist once 25 years ago so they all are nazis!” No band was safe then, and no band is safe now. They’ve now made entire subreddits dedicated to what bands are “safe” and what bands are big bad scary sexists and nazis (99% of the time, they are totally wrong about their assessment of these bands’ ideologies, by the way. Sometimes it’s as simple as them being all straight white men so that automatically makes them bad.) They claim they want to make metal music more “inclusive,” but by way of doing this, they are also making a firm stance that straight white men, able bodied people, biological cis gender males, conservative voters, anyone who doesn’t think the way they do, are not welcome. It’s pure hypocrisy. Metal has no borders. It has always been music’s melting pot. The universal rule has always been that when someone falls in the pit, you pick them up. There were never rules that you could only pick them up if they were a certain type of person. It has always been a brotherhood and sisterhood of likeminded comrades united by our shared love of riffs. But the woke left is trying to brainwash people into thinking metal is racist, evil, and inherently bad. My own people have turned on this genre. We’ve faced this kind of hatred and discrimination for a lifetime from religious zealots and the PRMC and paranoid mothers in the Midwest. But now, we’re facing it from people who claim to be our own. Music is the one thing in this wicked world that I’ve ever loved. Music has literally saved me. And they’re trying to take it away…
Katy…Wow. I am not into the music scene, and always hated metal music, but that’s simply my business.
These people are our “Taliban”. And my big question is, “Why did the music scene allow these Antifa jerks to bother anyone at all”?
For me it was Gamergate back in like 2013/2014. Seeing the sudden rise of feminist theory in games journalism and the outright demonization of an entire demographic was utterly baffling. Seeing the woke theory go past third wave feminism into whatever we call this monstrosity today–wokeism, I suppose–and bleed into the mainstream media and EVERY aspect of your daily life was crazy.
There is a lot of overlap between the Gamers and the Woke; they are not separate entities by any means. The misogyny of the Woke play right into the hands of the Gamergate supporters.
I was a hardcore commie in the 70s and regrettably did some p.c. bullying in struggle sessions myself. Since then I’ve been center-left – especially left on economic issues, a war skeptic, and against oligarchy.
Breaking points in the 80s: everyone on the New Left long rejected news reports about Khmer Rouge atrocities; during the harsh Volcker recession an employer told desperate applicants that he doesn’t employ “Americans” (instead employs Mexican illegals) and state and federal labor departments said discrimination on the basis of American national origin is not legally prohibited; the high-living local leftist refugee-advocacy leader it turned out cruelly extorted cash on an ongoing basis from the several dozen refugees from right-authoritarian regimes she had brought in by clandestine means; the local religious and newly “antiracist” left protected from legal scrutiny because of their Native ethnicity a large disordered family whose members in a low-income neighborhood engaged in frequent assaults and arsons against their neighbors – because police and prisons are not the answer. It took a lot to finally break me.
P.C. was dead after the fall of the Soviet Union and we thought it would never come back. It revived in woke form under late Obama.
Breaking points recently: the Russia hoax was obviously false from the getgo and the politicization of the FBI and CIA is dangerous; similarly, tolerance of street violence from Antifa and BLM but government classification of the right as domestic terrorists; Raytheon for revolution and intersectional CIA are creepy; we are descended over 500 million years from gonochoristic (male and female) ancestors and woke’s attempted abolition of sex could only be achieved by the harshest social and political totalitarianism.
There are objectionable things on the political right, but to borrow a phrase from Mao, today the main danger is from the woke left.
By the way, I’m well trained in political philosophy, ideologies, Marxism, Leninism, critical theory, postmodernism, and theories of justice. James Lindsay is putting out a large volume of material and it is 90 to 95% accurate. The critics who say that he is uninformed, doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is making things up are either naïve or deceitful. That’s the bleakest experience right now – the ease with which many collaborate with known falsehoods.
Thank You. I believe in Universal Humanism, and that’s it. We are all human beings and entitled to be treated as unique individuals under the law. I no longer subscribe to any political philosophies, but seek only to defend the right of each person to their personhood – even white guys!
Mine came in 2017. As a Dad of two daughters I had drunk the Kool aid and was determined my smart girls should be aiming for male-dominated, elite careers to “own the patriarchy” I even studied the gender ratios of different professions. When one started aiming for fashion and the other for HR, I was gutted – in both fields – female policy makers massively over-index. (90% and 80plus% respectively) I slowly realised I had turned against the aspirations of the people I loved most to support an dumb ideology that can only see the choices women actively make as the result of male oppression.
It happened to me several times. First when my son was born. I was turned on to some books about early childhood development and different educational styles . I decided to educate my son at home and quickly realized the woke teachers and democrats in my state got legislation going to ban homeschooling. I couldn’t believe it. We fought them off for now and thankfully our republican governor at the time said that no one will tell him how is child is to be educated and quickly shot down the teachers union dreams of every poor kid being forced into their schools. That was enough to pull back the curtain.
Good for you! Even in California, home of ultraliberal teachers unions, it’s not too hard to home school, although you do have to jump through some hoops. At least it used to be pretty simple.
For me, it was James Damore. Not his memo, which I read with I would say general agreement. How can you have 50% parity of sexes when there are only a small percentage of software engineers that are female in the first place…
The awakening was how the “liberal” media reported it. I was aghast. They misquoted and mischaracterised this young, awkward and probably spectrum young man most egregiously.
Up till then, I guess the bias in the media had passed me by. But once you start to question it, you realise just how deep it goes. Half the Trump reports were very misleading or even outright lies. I didn’t think Trump needed any help to sound bad, but they sure did. Constrast to Biden now, eh, it clear as day.
Anyway, I may have been shook by Damore, but my liberal twonk friends shook me more. They were ALL against him, and as you realise they took the devils shilling, they believe it all, the white privilege, systemic racism, sexism, Trans women are real women, the whole 9 yards. No discrimination, no skepticism. Also none of them have been banned from reddit or youtube, that’s a red flag at this point.
I didn’t bother reading Damore’s memo, because I have no interest in the tech world. What I got from others is that he claimed women are less interested in STEM than men. Who cares?
What I care about is how grossly underpaid the caring professions are.
Men tend to be attracted to STEM professions, while women tend to be bored out of their minds by gadgets and other non-human nonsense (of course there are exceptions, just as some women go bald, some women adore STEM)
There is no excuse for the care of human beings to be paid too little for a person to survive on – that’s my objection to the pay gap, regardless of the sex of the worker.
I cared for children and elderly people for years and never made more than a poverty wage, despite the desperate need for these jobs, and the inability to outsource them.
I don’ care if men and women are from different planets – I only care that the caring professions are given the respect and salary they deserve. I have ZERO interest in STEM. But I would like to work in a caring profession that’s vital to society without having to starve and risk homelessness.
I was never fully woke, but was sympathetic and saw my social justice oriented friends as a force for good in the world. Then, a respected SJW friend posted an article which blamed white people who chose homes in “nice neighborhoods” for low property values in predominantly black neighborhoods. The idea struck me as terribly racist that black communities would need white saviors to move in to make their neighborhoods better. That caused me to seriously question the movement.
Could work the other way around. The white people moving in to low property value black neighbourhoods could be called “racist” – it gets confusing.
Not to mention, blacks don’t WANT whites moving into their neighborhoods. Doesn’t your friend know that gentrification is the worst thing that can happen to a black neighborhood?
For me it was men demanding and gaining access to women and children’s rape shelters. This has happened repeatedly throughout Canada, the UK and the USA, and is still happening. Go to Graham Linehan on substack (Glinner update) for truly horrifying news posted 4 or 5 times a week on what the woke have done to women’s human sex based rights. He was kicked off Twitter for saying “men aren’t women”. Literally that was why they permanently suspended him. Women’s human sex based rights throughout the world have been – very quietly – shredded.
Anonforthis,. Thanks for the info. I too am absolutely disgusted by this, and have no problem bringing it up, writing to reps. about it, etc.
I despise Gov Newsom for allowing such debauchery in CA. Just another “wokey dokey” crowd pleaser.
And just to pass on some info, the only feminist org. that I know of helping women legally who have been violated by these, “trans biological men” is WOLF.
The progressive woke agenda has many objectives ranging from destruction of historical monuments to revising history , destroying science and l classical great literature , the normal family and respect for and obedience to law and order. All of these factors should make anyone very suspicious of and reject such an ideology which is Marxist driven, hates the American experience and is profoundly anti Semitic as well.
My “moment” will mirror some of the other commenters moments. Mine came around 2015 when it was discovered that Michael Brown wasn’t shot with his hands up. That shook the ground I stood on completely. My revelation was three fold, and came slowly: it first showed me that media publications, not all but a lot, were predatory in their relaying of information. The conclusion to be made was what aligned with their constituents, regardless of political leaning. Again, some of them committee this deed much more egregiously than others.
The second part was, if this isn’t true, then what other instances of negative police interactions were labeled as “racism”, but had no proof of the claim.
The third was the hypocrisy of those decrying racism while using it themselves; as long as you had an argument, a flimsy one often, to behave poorly, then you could do so. I’ve noticed the way in which people talk about other races that would not be acceptable for anyone who looked like them.
The doctrine was full of inconsistencies and contradictions, that I could not reasonably or in good consciences stay aligned with it. The more I payed attention to it, the more disgusted I became.
…When The UUA and UU Congregations cracked down on Todd Eklof (Gadfly Papers) and abandoned diversity of thought and critical thinking ,and abandoned tolerance for CRT dogma , and threw MLK under the bus for Malcolm X…. when Kamala Inc. raised bail for ‘peaceful ‘protestors/antifa…….when the bougies doubled down on race while continuing to dismiss class…..
Thanks for mentioning the Todd Eklof affair in the UUA. My breaking point also came in a UU church, but I’m in another part of the country and hadn’t heard of what happened to Eklof. UU’s seem to have given up their first and fourth principles. It’s extremely disappointing.
Excellent. Your post was referenced in the comments here:
https://notthebee.com/article/this-lady-asked-what-was-your-woke-breaking-point-on-twitter-here-are-the-best-responses
Hello. Summer 2020 I had heard the word “woke” but had little knowledge of what it meant. Then, among a group of older lesbians last summer I heard the word “terf”. I asked what it meant. They told me. I said, “Wow! I’m a terf!!” As a lesbian I found it utterly ludicrous that it would even be suggested that, let alone we’d be pressured to, accept intact males as sex partners simply because they think they’re women. I laughed. I said, “If that’s the case, just call me straight!!”
Over the years since the 1970s I’ve either met or been friends with guys who said they were women. Even in full female drag, they never, EVER, appeared as anything but guys in dresses, cocks in frocks, whatever to me; they were friends, however, so I went along with their delusion.
So, when I learned that I was a terf I not only did I happily proclaim it but I went in search of information to see how we’d gone from a few transexuals whose delusion I accepted in the spirit of friendship to being tagged with a slur because my sexual orientation clashed with their gender identity.
Over the past eight months I’ve immersed myself in the entire panoply of woke ideaology, reading everything I can get my hands on from Kendi, Crenshaw, diAngelo, Butler, Hughes, Loury, McWhorter, Lindsay, Boghossian, Pluckrose, and a multitde of others, pro and con. I am arming myself, and getting active.
Just as an aside, my social circle includes lotsa “woke” who are absolutely resistant and disbelieving that anything bad for women will follow from trans ideology as it slowly becomes enshrined in law (not to mention that critical race theory entrenches racism); my non-woke, old school liberal pals, also think I’m wasting my time thinking about a non-issue or else, they flat out think I’m nuts….that can’t possibly be happening.
I’ve got another peak moment around racism. It seems too much to go into but I did find myself last summer in a struggle session among a group of friends because expecting a member of the group to yield the floor so others could speak was deemed “racist”. I pushed back saying, “She’s WHITE, for crying out loud.” Well, she came from a country that had a lot of African descendants so she was deemed “POC-adjacent”. When that didn’t fly, they changed it to not being culturally sensitive. I held my own for two and a half hours, defending an expectation that all group members give others a chance to speak and talk, regardless of being African-adjacent or from a different (albeit Western) culture. Oddly, I’m still friends with them as they didn’t eject me from the group and I’m still willing to associate with and keep talking to them.
Chic. That’s great you are still friends with them. Friendships are hard to come by, develop.
See how good it is to hold your own!
They didn’t eject you because you stayed reasonable, and strong in your position. People admire that. Even if they insult you, if you stand your ground without getting all emotional they really do admire that.
I’ve never been ‘woke’ but old school left, class rather than identity politics (UK) These were the little awakenings – compelled speech in Canada, Brexit voters (I voted Remain) being called racist in the left wing press and the demonisation of white working class people, people losing their jobs for using the ‘wrong’ words when their intention was clearly good. The attack on JK Rowling was the big wake up (never really knew anything about trans activism until then) couldn’t believe she was threatened with rape etc… and men were talking about ‘girl dicks’ but most of all I couldn’t get my head around objective reality being conceived of as hate! In the months that followed I read everything I could lay my hands on and went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole finding out about Critical Theory (read Cynical Theories, The Madness of Crowds, Irreversible Damage, The Coddling of the American Mind & have other books on order) I find this cultural shift horrifying as well as fascinating. I have shared my findings with friends (one emailed me to say I would never change her mind and I was not to talk about or share any articles with her or our friendship would effectively be over) some other friends are a little more receptive but haven’t been red pilled yet, am working on it.
My woke breaking point happened in the summer of 2016 during the Ferguson Riots, when I realized Mike Brown never said, “Hands up don’t shoot!”. This was made clear to me while reading the court documents and witness testimonies. I was a life long democrat before then, voted for Obama twice, and thought racism was a real problem. Then I woke up. Darren Wilson lost his job after the media ran with a false narrative, and I’m pretty sure he lives in witness protection to this day. The city of Ferguson was destroyed and the police department labeled racist by Anthony Holder. It was clear via the court case, the officer was assaulted and didn’t have much of a choice.
It wasn’t amiss to me that the media gave this story massive attention during an election year, to feed into the race narrative. Living in the inner city and just a quick glance at FBI crime statistics show what’s really happening. Fast forward 4 years and the media did the same dam thing again, fueling racial tensions during an election year, mainly off of BS (ie the fine people hoax). When I realized hands up don’t shoot wasn’t real, I started paying attention and digging into all of the main stream narratives and realized almost nothing they tout is true.
I still can’t tell if they believe in the things they say or if they are just paid PR firms for the state at this point.
Kanye got it right when he said, “first rule in this world is, never trust anything you hear in the news baby”.
This is going to sound crazy but I’m black and I always believed there was systematic racism and white supremacy imbedded in every institution except law enforcement. I never believed cops were racist and always had big respect for them. My breaking point was the 2020 BLM riots when I was labeled a Nazi for being supportive of police and rejecting BLM . I did further research and found inconsistencies in liberal ideas such as Critical race theory and gender.
The only reason it sounds crazy is that the many people like you are discouraged from expressing independent thought; it’s not unusual for white people to call dissenting black people “brainwashed” just for formulating thoughts that make them uncomfortable. I’ve seen and experienced it many times and it never stops frustrating me. Thank you for sharing.
And woke black people will call them “uncle Tom’s” or “house negroes”.
Yeah, it’s not “crazy” at all.
Look at what the media called Larry Elder, “The Black Face of White Supremacy.”
Hahahahaha!
My friends who listen to lefty news got all freaked out about the Trump supporter who ran against Newsom in the CA recall election.
It was a perfect example of how influenced people get on either side believing what the news is saying.
They knew NOTHING about Elder. Only believed what the media was saying.
Plenty of people didn’t vote for Elder because they knew who he was, and disagreed strongly with him. But that’s reasonable.
Mexifornia, Commiefornia, whatever you want to call it, IS the land of fruits, and nuts you know. It’s loads of beauty, fun, and sunshine, and can also make you wanna pull your hair out. : ).
It has been really encouraging to read these comments.
I’m a Christian, so to some extent I’m used to being gaslighted; for example, being told that I “hate” gay people. But the church I grew up in was still somewhat Marxist. They interpreted certain passages to mean that poverty is a virtue. Also, Christians are big into self-examination and really trying to see things from others’ point of view, so I was susceptible to being told I have “unconscious” racism or that I had been insufficiently sensitive and caused someone else emotional pain.
So for me, it was when they kept changing the definition of racism. I agree that racial animus is a sin. But sins have to be something that involve the will, and something that you can repent of. They seemed to want to have it both ways: racism is both the worst sin (that puts you on a level with Hitler) AND it’s one that you can commit without realizing it ( in fact while intending the opposite), AND now it’s one that you can’t stop committing, because the definition now includes not understanding the BIPOC experience from within..
Probably not a very popular answer, but for me it was when I became (reluctantly) a Christian. It changed my whole worldview and established intellectual and moral ‘lines’ that didn’t allow me to even go there. The doctrines of universal sin and forgiveness by default made Critical Theory completely irrational, immoral and quite frankly, abhorrent.
I am a graduate student and was introduced to Critical Race Theory in a class. I interrogated what I saw in front of me after experiencing a strong and deep-rooted visceral reaction to the reading, exactly as I should have. My American antibodies to communism were kicking in. The timing was age 57 for me and for the nation, the 2020 election and pandemic and BLM riots in the streets. I dusted off my undergraduate education from Stanford and Googled some things, reread the Bill of Rights and de Tocqueville, the BLM manifesto before it was changed, and reached out to a colleague from my Palo Alto days. He was way ahead of me and provided me with an article from a Christian apologist who compared the church’s position to CRT. That was all it took. I fell back on the cross, shamed myself for my complacency, and activated myself on behalf of the Republican Party and the effort to beat the Left. My line I would not cross showed itself to be clear and urgent: I would not go quietly through academia with woke teachings. I set myself against them and because of the tradition of academic freedom and my own fearless nature, I challenge CRT at every juncture. I continue to do research and activism almost daily. There is no turning back, even if it means not working in education post-graduation, which had been my plan. God bless America. We are better than this. My country gave me the loan to go back to school, among other things.
It is worse than anyone thinks. I work for a large corporate creative team, and as a writer I am not allowed to say anything. It is bonkers right now. If you say something that is an established brand message in a piece of creative, even something used previously in say 2019, it is now seen as insensitive and racist. We have 22 year old ethnic studies majors with zero life experience (who come from far more privilege than I do btw) think everything is a horrific attack on their psyche. And THAT is who has final say in anything we make. I could provide a million examples but it is too exhausting to think about. I am a lifelong democratic voter and have read the NYT for 20+ years. But now? Once Trump gets away from the Republican Party I will vote Republican for life. Unless they became insane too.
Well, both parties are not trustworthy at this point, and I do not see any viable alternatives. I do not support Woke ideology, but neither I do support Alt-Right, that is equally dangerous. I fear, that USA will turn authoritarian within several decades if those kind of movements are not put to a stop.
Time will tell, how it’ll turn out in the long run, but I already know… We are going to have to act, if we are going to live in different world…
Good Luck, everyone!
Late to the game, but…
My breaking point was two-fold: one less clear, one more.
The less clear one was the BLM riots of 2020. Now, I marched in a protest, and have worked throughout my life as an educator (at the middle, high, and university levels), and this past spring was teaching kindergarten remotely at an elementary school in Coney Island, Brooklyn. All of my students were kids of color.
Now, I think racial injustice is systemic, and I do think it is important to have the conversations that have been happening, but the *way* they happened really alienated me. I found it insufferable that my Instagram feed was littered with hipster white people working corporate jobs telling everyone around them to check *their* privilege. I never felt personally threatened by these messages, because I *do* think it’s important, and for me, the proof is in my life: I’ve worked with Black, Hispanic, and other disadvantaged youth in the US and abroad for the past 13 years. Plus, I myself come from a socio-economically disadvantaged background… but I’m white, and come from a rural area. I grew frustrated by White Fragility-esquire discourse that completely writes out the fact that, yes, race is conflated into socio-economics, but in rural white areas like where I’m from (far northern Vermont, where some of my classmates lived in a junkyard and where the janitor picked out clothes for me and my sister to wear from the lost and found because we were so poor), there is *STILL* injustice. I found it insufferably hypocritical. Like, if you’re posting about enough black squares on your social media, suddenly it means you’re a) not a racist, and b) haven’t been participating for years in the very system you criticize?
The second breaking point for me has been the Trans movement. I find it utterly fraught with horrible, terrifying misogyny that makes me feel afraid to speak my views lest I be outcasted from my current relationships. The treatment of JK Rowling was disgusting. I fully believe that everyone should be who they are, no questions asked… but for MtF folks, MAYBE there should be a bit more respect for the struggles that we women from birth have had to go through— it’s a real struggle. I grew up when Monica Lewinsky was the butt of a joke, while the Clintons have continued to be seen as American royalty— and “boys will be boys.” I grew up with Howard Stern, songs like “Mambo #5” and “It Wasn’t Me” that all had the same message: men will never like you for your personality, only for your sexual output— and even then, one woman will never be enough.
The language orthodoxy of the left is utterly toxic. Even now, I feel ashamed to write these words, which is a sickness in and of itself. I’m a tolerant, loving person, but the Woke Police would probably try to cancel me.
JM – you say you didn’t feel personally threatened by messages about “checking your privilege” etc because of your personal background and what you do for a living. Make no mistake, these ‘credentials’ absolutely won’t matter the moment you push back ever-so-slightly on the mob message.
Consider JK Rowling, whom you mention. She’s rather progressive in these matters. They might even have called her an ally once, but one tweet (one sentence) later and…
Even being a minority won’t save you from the wrath should you place a toe out of line. They may even get it worse because they “should know better”.
Absolutely the trans delusion and the complete and utter capitulation of many to this delusion. I had believed that some were sensible, but they have bought the trans lie 100%. It’s really quite pathetic and stupid how many have bought into this nonsense.
The line was drawn for me when I was born with the ability to reason and powerful bullshit radar. This nonsense has been gradually ripening since the 1960s, and reached its current level of putrescence with the birth of anti-Trump hysteria. It looks like the nuts and cranks we used to joke about have inherited the earth, and there’s no stopping them. It makes me glad I’m old and won’t be around to live under their iron heel when they have finally absorbed everything. I feel deep sympathy for the minority of rational young people who will have to deal with this for the next forty, fifty, or sixty years.
Being born in’64 I wasn’t there for the 60’s crazy,but fortunately before seriously encountering it’s progeny,I was lucky enough to imbibe the most powerful agent for the rejection of ALL ideology Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.
My breaking point was the Jessica Yaniv “human rights” case in Canada. Essentially a trans woman tried to get his male body waxed, and when many female beauticians refused, he took them to court. These were all poor, immigrant women working out of their homes. To me this represented the logical end of trans, gender-identity activism: women getting taken to court for believing that biological sex exists and having boundaries around male bodies. Yaniv lost this case, but take note that no major leftist news outlet covered it.
In the same theme, in the past 2 years many of my leftist friends post yard signs that say “science is real” but then also promote gender identity ideology that states biological sex is a construct. We are all adults, we all know gametes are real. I hope our society figures out a way to show care towards men who wish to identify as women, but also have boundaries that protect women’s only safe spaces and women’s sports.
Guess what? Yaniv is BACK. He had a sex change operation and now has a va-jay-jay. And of course, he’s taking pictures of it and sending those pics to Canadian medical workers unsolicited. And he’s been calling their emergency services line several times a day for attention for this new body part.
There is something DEFINITELY wrong with this guy.
Stating that no one without a particular experience can possibly understand, thus undercutting any basis for empathy; unfalsifiabilty; invoking a “false consciousness” on the part of anyone who disagrees. Spikes my bullshit meter, sounds like a cult I already left.
Also there needs to be a delete or edit function.
The comment function needs to go at the top. This section got really long. I speed scrolled for 15 seconds and couldn’t find the bottom.
I never was really into it, but watching my children and their friends was so perplexing to me for several years. Then later on finding out what was being taught in university to them I was still of the thought they will figure out when they get in the real world. Then the horrific realization that this is the real world now came to me. It creeped slowly into corporations and now it is how things are run. I am so grateful to you James. You explain it very well but with enough humor I don’t feel like jumping off a bridge!
I was never really ‘Woke,” but I had voted Democrat all my life. My breaking moment was two-fold. First Ferguson happened, and while I found the incident to be nothing short of tragic, I couldn’t understand the continued “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” narrative when all evidence and testimony clearly proved that “that” never happened. That’s when I began to see how the media saw their job as not to inform, but to shape perception. I now always absorb anything from the MSM with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Not too long after, I began noticing those closest to me who followed this woke ideology also had severe personal issues dating back years. Incidents of infidelity, financial fraud, substance abuse that caused abusive behavior, etc. That in itself is not for me to condemn, but I just watched in disbelief as these people sat in judgment of others, calling strangers on social media racist and sexist with little to no proof, knowing not only how awful they had behaved in their own lives, but how none of them had ever really made an attempt to apologize or even acknowledged the hurt they had caused others. That’s when it dawned on me… this wasn’t about any cause or equal rights or the Orange Man. It was all a distraction from having to grapple with their own problems; attacking others in a desperate attempt to shore up their own sagging self-esteem. The best I could tell them is you can’t earn redemption through the destruction of others. I just can’t play that game.
I’m a little late to this party but let me share my breaking point.
I always considered myself to be a left leaning feminist.
I dated a man who ended up claiming to be transgender to his lesbian friend. Now, he vehemently denied it to me. I ended up breaking up with him for various reasons (lying, infidelity, etc.) but still was curious enough to look into the trans community. Specifically, I went onto reddit and read original posts from self proclaimed MtF individuals. I was curious if their experiences aligned with my ex-boyfriends.
Prior to this I fully supported the LGBT community and honestly didn’t think twice about it. I brushed off those who wanted to keep transwomen out of female spaces as backwards bigots.
Well, reading original posts from these self-proclaimed “women” opened my eyes as to how absolutely dripping in misogyny the trans movement is. Their idea of womanhood was so disturbing that the entire house of cards crashed around me. (Please note that I did take gender studies in college and had watched a documentary on a FtM and didn’t question it ever. I just took whatever my professor had said at face value.) Suddenly the whole narrative had been ripped from under my feet.
Still – I was wary to abandon what I had been taught about the trans issue. So, instead, I tried to find transgendered individuals who I could ask questions to – in good faith! I genuinely did NOT want to abandon my previous ideals.
Instead of being reassured, I was accused of being a white supremacist, a bigot, and a neo-nazi – for asking QUESTIONS. I couldn’t believe it. Me – a democrat voting, left leaning, pro-choice feminist. All because I *questioned* if men should be able to claim womanhood by acting out sexist stereotypes. (And white supremacist? Neo-nazi?? I was questioning gender issues – not even mentioning race or nationality?? That literally makes no sense??)
Then I fell down another rabbit hole regarding “sex work” – so I ended up being labelled as both as TERF and a SWERF. (Which is ridiculous, I fully think sex workers should be supported. But I most certainly think that johns and pimps should be prosecuted.)
Honestly, I am a survivor of domestic violence so issues facing women and girls has always been near and dear to my heart. But having feminists turn on me and accuse me of being scum of the earth? Having the left say that I should DIE? That I should be physically assaulted?!
So, then I started reading more. About everything. From critical race theory to queer theory to post modernism and back again. And I found myself more and more alienated from woke culture that I never had bothered to question before.
So, yeah, I guess my breaking point is being called a neo-nazi white supremacist bigot for questioning woke dogma. Feel free to disagree with me. But no one calls ME a fucking nazi.
Sex workers (prostitutes) should be supported, but Johns should be prosecuted? That sounds like the kind of contradiction of logic only a woke mind could concoct. But keep trying.
I mean – this isn’t exactly the forum to discuss the pros or cons of prostitution legislation. I will say that I don’t find moral equivalency in exploited/trafficked sex workers and the men who buy them in most cases. There should be common sense policy making to reduce the demand for prostitution and the supply of prostitutes. Prosecuting the johns and getting resources for the prostitutes definitely attempts to address that. Agree or not, the logic is definitely there. But keep trying.
That’s because you see the women as victims of neglect or abuse, and not fully responsible with their choice of career.
You fail to see that them male clients may have been the victims of neglect or abuse, and that their buying sex is a sign of total emotional weakness, fragmentation and post tramatic. Unharmed men do not need to buy intimacy.
The reason you can’t see this second part is that you fail at empathising with the life experience of men. That is what makes you a “feminist”, or in plain normal English, a sexist. Which I do not direct at you at all as an insult. Rather that is post traumatic also – you mentioned a domestic abuse history; this tallies. That sexism is what make you woke. And your seeing sexism all around you was projection.
Hope this helps you step further along in your healing journey. We’ve all been through things, we get what post traumatic shit is. You have no blame. But you do have a responsibility to be a functional adult, which means healing.
The fact is, men like variety, they love sex. Well, most of them anyway. There can be any reason a man wants to go to a sex worker. I rarely think it has anything to do with trauma.
Charlotte – honestly, the Critical Theories don’t create a space for productive dialog, they do the opposite. There is another good article posted on this site talking about how Woke Ideologs won’t debate or discuss anything with you. Sorry you were treated accordingly.
commenter wrote: “…woke culture that I never had bothered to question before.”
The key word in your comment is “bothered”. You did not BOTHER to question woke when you were reaping its leftist rewards: smugness, self-satisfaction, supercilious superiority, arrogant rightness, puffed up pride in being better than “Them” (the non-left, the “right wing”, the Deplorables). Only when the leftist privilege of your chosen ignorance of woke’s extremes smashed you in the face with The Big Woke Punch did you begin to “bother” about it. If the woke punch had not personally effected you directly, you would never have bothered at all. You’d still be smugly marching and power screeching and big left punching your leftist dogmas in the faces of all your non-left Them “enemies”.
THIS is the reason why woke happened. THIS is the reason why woke continues. The leftist privilege gained by not questioning woke because such questioning might threaten your insider status as a true leftist believer is a privilege no leftist will give up willingly. Only when forced by personal negative consequences from their fellow leftists will they balk at the “injustice” being done to them, an injustice done in the identical manner the now-attacked privileged leftist enjoyed forcing on the non-leftist “Thems”. You never gave a shit for the non-left victims you attacked in your self-righteous leftism, but when you become the victim of your own methods, you have a selfish panic attack. You are not Awakening to an understanding of an Authentic Wrong: the privileged lie of leftism laid bare to you by its more extreme woke gestapo. You are merely scrambling to avoid being displaced by your leftist complacency and cast out of the privileged leftist fold.
You only renounced (some parts of) woke while you were being tied to the stake for failing a leftist purity test that you were not even bothered to be aware of (ignorance is no defence for leftist transgressions — how could you pretend not to know this fact when you enforced it with fiendish glee on any non-leftist!). But your forced renunciation does not remove the reasons why you chose to believe woke so willingly in the first place. You remain puffed up about all your original leftist beliefs. Only when the extreme fringe of left (the woke) kicked your ass and made you fear that they may turn on you did you bitterly condemn that one flaming branch of the leftist tree you still cling to and derive your privilege and status from. Another burned leftist hypocrite who will turn on a dime back and join her comrades’ attacks on the non-left the moment her leftist sins have been forgiven.
Your confession is not believed. You have not learned anything. You are not absolved.
PERFECT
I like this idea, but have a question – aren’t your tactics of letting people grapple with the question of where their line is similar to DiAngelo’s tactic of letting them grapple with their “`whiteness” and what it means to be white? Just curious if this was intended or maybe I’m misunderstanding.
For me, the line was crossed when I saw a white young male get beaten up at a convenience store parking lot by several black young black men – after one kicked him in the face and screamed BLM – idealogical violence – imagine if they yelled Allah Akbar instead. Another line for me was blatant double standards for white people, especially men. The peculiar redefinition of words and use of language – for example racism is prejudice plus power, therefore black people can’t be racist – I just saw something very very troubling and disingenuous about this move. Tons of blatantly hateful male bashing commercials (e.g. Gillette). Then having authors like Robin DiAngelo come out and say that racism is inevitable – if you’re white you’re racist by definition – seems very nihilistic and depressing that you cannot change your destiny. Learning that the leaders of BLM were trained marxists didn’t help either. It just seems like an insane movement to me now, whereas in March I was pro BLM. Using BLM just as one example of the woke universe.
The Riots and protest of BLM summer 2020 and how there was no room for speaking out against riots and distraction of property. How the press would show video footage of destruction that I could see the truth about with my own eye but would say, “Mostly peaceful protests.” Basically, asking me to deny what I see and believe a lie. I hadn’t felt that gaslit since my childhood growing up in an alcoholic home where we were expected to believe and project that all was perfect when it was, in fact, not perfect.
My breaking point was 20 years ago, in the dawning age of the Internet. I was arguing with feminists about the “wage gap” and “male privilege”. They were spreading outright falsehoods. I was young and naïve and thought they were just mistaken, so I corrected them, and I provided credible sources from economists and historians. Only to be censored, told “those aren’t credible sources” and provided with “FEMINISTWEBSITE#5.ORG” instead, called “misogynist”, and mobbed.
Any narrative that cannot tolerate truth is a narrative that deserves to be binned.
Apparently I have a low threshold because illiberally curtailing the freedom of speech or thought by another group on to others was mine.
I reached my breaking point the day I was born. In other words, I was born with a naturally skeptical personality. As a boy I sat in church questioning everything. Then in college I did the same while Marxist theory underlined nearly every subject taught. But the real world back in those days had a way of forcing college graduates out of their haze. Those days are gone. That a silly campus movement dating back decades has made it’s way to mainstream, appropriated by global conglomerates and pushed hourly by corporate media, boggles my mind. Apparently the world needs more skeptics. BTW, I’m gay, if that gives a unique picture to my views. And yes, I’ve led a lonely life. I was called a self-hating homosexual back in my teens before the word homophobe was coined. My offense? I had suggested during a gay youth meeting that I would like to see gay marriage legalized. Apparently, marriage was too bourgeois and I was attempting to “act straight.” I’ve been on the front lines of PC battles most of my life. I’ve seen the hypocrisy and lies real time. The white middle class that has eaten up this SJ nonsense have no idea what it’s like. And now to have these woke people, mostly white straight suburban females, tell me how I should act to be a “good” LGBTQIAP+ has me steamed. The privilege of self-importance never goes out of style. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re losing so many gained freedoms to a mob that, 100 years ago, would be advocating for prohibition. We’ve even seen SJW shut down gay pride. No Christian conservatives for miles.
My breaking point came when I started pushing back against the transwomen ARE women narrative. No, woman is already taken. Transwomen are transwomen. The viciousness of the attacks that came afterward let me know that I wasn’t dealing with rational people, this was a cult with mob mentality. My breaking point came in 2017.
Jaclynn – if only you had done something really significant like write a seven-book novel series that became arguably the most popular books of all time, then maybe you’d have the weight to throw around against the mob. *sarc
Sorry in advance for my broke English. I’m so thankful this whole concept of the “woke breaking point” has finally been brought up.
For me and my friends in Rome, Italy, personal limits were crossed when a dear friend of us from the STEM field started to imply that science is basically homophobic when it comes to the “there are only two genders” thing. He tried to normalize gender dysphoria, like everybody can have it as if it were just another way of combing your hair, and this is coming from a person that used to be the classic “science doesn’t care about your feelings” hardcore, ruthless nerd type, saying computers should rule the world and laughing at religions and other ideologies for been too rigid and anti-scientific.
He really left us speechless because there was just no way in which we could reason with him, it just didn’t work… At first it felt like he was kidding, but after a while it became evident he was not. He shut the conversation on gender twice, on two different occasions, with a ridiculous “guys let’s drop the topic, I’m not agreeing with you anyway”, and then the topic was never brought up again. He even dropped out of social media contact with us, and hardly ever replies to our messages.
This has clearly become our (unconscious) breaking point: we no longer take people’s feelings into account when science and reality are coming under attack. We speak our mind to any type of SJW, mostly people from Humanistic fields (just like me by the way!) because, as I’ve read somewhere on the internet, “honest conflict has more social value that dishonest harmony, and emotions are the enemy of facts.”
Greetings from Italy.
I’m late to reply to this, but it’s a hard question for me to answer. After all, I was never really ‘woke.’ At best I was a political moderate, who was largely apathetic and hadn’t even voted before 2016.
Then the 2016 election happened, and this racist, anti-white “CRT” nonsense started gaining prominence. Then the BLM terrorism started (and has yet to stop). I can’t really pinpoint the precise moment. All I know is that at some point in the middle of all of this, the Saxon began to hate.
I think it’s safe to say that these people have created the very type of person they were railing against with their actions. I can promise you that no matter what they have to say about whiteness or white people in general (which, from everything I have read, would make the Nazis proud) holds a candle to how I now feel about them and their groups. Every time I see someone capitalize black and not White, a piece of what’s left of the part of my heart (which is next to nothing at this point) that’s still open to tolerating people who don’t look like me dies. They’ve turned this white guy into their eternal enemy.
I never used to hate anyone before this mess started, and now it’s so great that I’m honestly a little worried about myself. What I feel when I even think about these people can’t be healthy, and if anything I’m just getting worse.
It was not swiftly bred, it will not swiftly abate.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
You describe well what the impact of Woke and SJW is on normal people.
2022 is coming, and the insanity of the Dems in DC will produce a huge loss for them.
White Washington Guy, please know you are not alone in your feelings. This movement truly is dividing us and fomenting racial hostilities. I too am struggling with the bitterness in my heart. But we can’t let the race hustlers win, we have to rise above it and remember that the majority of ordinary Americans don’t believe the woke lie, it’s just being shoved down our throats by the powerful elite. I still look to MLK for guidance:
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Was never woke, but I wanted to chime in anyway.
I’m Gen X, the generation raised by parents who lived through the civil rights movement, and was always taught that women could work any job and race was no consideration in choosing friends. Equality, in the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. White kids in white communities were fans of black athletes, singer, actors, and comedians, and no one said we couldn’t be. Jesse Jackson was seriously considered in the Democratic presidential primary in 1988.
But in college in the early 90s, I saw a move towards separation, with the most prominent example being black student groups pushing for their own student union, their own graduation, and the like. It was such a common occurrence that even Doonesbury commented on it (with black students pushing for their own water fountains). There’s no point in trying to be friends with people who make it clear that they do not want to be friends with me.
I see the reason for integration. It’s fair to treat people the same. But the black student union was the first of many examples I saw where people would not be treated the same, and no one is allowed to question it without being considered racist. And the different rules have grown worse over time, to the point where people excuse criminal behavior and ignore basic norms of decency when someone with enough oppression check marks is doing it.
Also of note is that woke culture is normally talked about by extremely privileged people–intelligent, educated, above average wealth, high social status with strong networks. All this talk conceals the biggest driver of differences, wealth and social class. Programs ostensibly benefiting the underprivileged mostly benefit the privileged, and people on the outside are left there, forgotten.
There’s a concept of elite beliefs, which are dad beliefs that harm everyone but elites because they have the money to escape the consequences of them, if they act on them at all. Meanwhile the downstream effects….
I have found my breaking point and it isn’t easily definable but it surrounds language and context. I just came from a conversation online in which I was discussing an eerie situation where something I had learned in school happened to come up as a post on my friend’s timeline. I described the timing as “spooky”, and was hastily informed that I am not allowed to use this word EVER, regardless of its original etymology, regardless of the fact that it was Halloween, just… regardless of anything because of its association with a racial slur. I understood where they were coming from, but I wanted to know WHY and where the line was. Can I no longer buy or reference Oreos because of the product being used as a slur? By that standard, the term Jim Crow was used as a slur, so referencing the Jim Crow era should be considered insensitive as well, should it not? Am I not allowed to question why two of my friends, who are very different people, both POC, used that same word in separate conversations with me, in the same context (Halloween), and didn’t bat an eye? Why is my white friend telling me what is okay for me to say, when my black friends are telling me they love my handmade Halloween card that says “spooky” in great big letters across the front?
A similar situation happened previously where another friend became so offended by a reference to a character’s name in a TV show that was very popular in the 70s, that they left our D&D group over it. They had been a part of this group for many years, and their wokeness had become such a huge part of their identity that even acknowledging a fictional character by their name was too much for them.
At what point is language broken down and teared apart so much that we are ending relationships over things that shouldn’t be given so much power? Isn’t giving power to these innocuous words the problem that got us here in the first place?
Sadly, I have found that attempting an adult form of discourse around this has only been met with accusations of racism, being told that I cannot trust etymology because white people decide what words mean, that even attempting to research and not inherently knowing everything gets me labeled as some sort of ignorant, Googling scum, and that by questioning anything I am deemed aggressive.
I don’t think I will ever understand, but I know I am not a hateful person; I was raised right, I am doing the best I can with the cards I was dealt, I would never ever hurt another person of my own free will, and I am intelligent and aware enough to know right from wrong and adjust if I am way off base. I just hope that some day soon the woke bubble will pop, because everyone will realize that they are just too tired of trying to be perfect. Hopefully then we can all just agree to logically accept flaws where they exist and the religiously woke can learn to accept themselves and others as decent human beings, and not spend their whole lives enmeshed in a totalitarian belief system.
I feel like it happened slowly for me, but one of the main things was “Me Too.” I am a survivor of child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault, so when all my friends said “post me too on facebook!” I did. I just posted the words and moved on. I thought it was about letting people know they’re not alone.
Quickly I saw a lot of “me too” posts filling up my feed, and they didn’t seem to be about supporting each other. There were all kinds of allegations being thrown around, in some cases calling people out by name. To be clear, in some cases, yes, those named people probably did bad things, but there was no way to know what was true and what wasn’t. I saw friends accused, and moreover, not accused, called out, and publicly humiliated even over something serious, but more like “this person said something six years ago and he mumbled but it seemed inappropriate, so let’s get him fired!”
I used to work in a certain non-profit field, so this was all going on in that sphere. Trying to cancel certain people, generally over strange, distant, and fuzzy allegations. And I started to see it was about an effort to seize power, not help victims of harassment. Some of the women who were going after these men, calling for blood, were very difficult to work for and with themselves. Some had a reputation of being downright abusive to their employees, just not in a sexual manner. In fact I left the non-profit realm to work in corporate IT after having a dish thrown in my general direction by one of these “female leaders” when she threw a workplace tantrum. So, I was just stunned by what was going on and really ashamed I’d participated in at first.
So that was a cold bucket of water to the face.
Then I watched how many conservatives were being treated. Those Covington school kids for example. Friends of mine would say “well why should we care what happens to them? They’re Trumpers!” I always thought I can’t condone treating anyone, even my political opponents, even people I dislike, in a way that I don’t want my political opponents to treat me.
I wanted kindness in the world. That’s why I was such a bleeding heart liberal for so long. But none of this was about making anything better for anyone. I noticed my friends were completely intolerant to any questions at all. I lost so many friends just for asking “is this true” or “is this the way we should be acting?”
Neecie, your comment resonated with me, especially where you said “I wanted kindness in the world. That’s why I was such a bleeding heart liberal for so long. But none of this was about making anything better for anyone.”
I too think that kindness, along with rationality, are paramount to living the right sort of life and to ordering the right sort of society. I also believe strongly in civil rights, personal freedom, the rule of law, personal responsibility, and am also a struggling Christian. This makes me some sort of conservative libertarian bleeding-heart liberal.
And I’m trying not to lose my mind over the cruelty and irrationality and destructiveness of the current implementation of Critical Theories. It’s literally Opposite-Land; it’s literally advancing every bad thing that I naively thought that our (Western, I suppose) societies had long ago agreed was evil.
👍
About 10 years ago trying to teach Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale to undergraduates….Being obliged to include comments on a gender studies Literary Criticism book….Such untold nonsensical tosh – beyond belief…
About 10 years ago trying to teach Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale to undergraduates….Being obliged to include comments on a gender studies Literary Criticism book….Such untold nonsensical tosh – beyond belief…
Woke will eat itself up in its own self righteous excesses…
I support freedom of speech, protest, religion, etc. And I love and am fascinated by all cultural groups different than my own.
Hundreds of thousands go out to protest and invoke their rights to speak after the death of George Floyd (may he RIP), during the peak of the greatest pandemic of the last 100 years. Many people collectively decided that the suffering of one group is more urgent than the immediate cost of 100,000 deaths, and attempted to burn down the system in progress.
I think even Karl Marx himself would be at his breaking point.
Mine came when all my “woke” friends started spending all their time, energy and effort in identifying all the “anti-woke” things in their environment.
My Woke breaking point was the Harper’s Letter, specifically the widespread opposition of the Harper’s Letter by those who consider themselves woke. To me, the Letter was an basic defense of free speech that should have been uncontroversial. For people to oppose it with a straight face was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I commented on this article back at the end of June. My politics are right of centre, but barely. As someone to the right, I had been thinking about my breaking point. I realized it early on. I am a USN chaplain. My breaking point would be if my Sailors and Marines were ordered to fire on US citizens.
Then came yesterday’s news. Here is the link. Thus far, this seems to be a tempest in a teapot. May it stay that way. However, if it does not stay that way, we are past riots and lives mattering. If this group seeks to remove a sitting president by force, it is nothing less than a coup d’état. Logic suggests that my oath of office comes into effect.
I suppose that the challenges with lines in the sand is that the wind blows, moving the sand and erasing the lines.
May the best of the day be yours.
-RavSean
A few months ago, I parked my car in a garage in downtown Santa Monica, CA ( where I live with my toddler son) we rented a bike for the day. After the bike owner told us to keep the bike for the day because they were shutting down due to planned protests, I though ‘ ok no big deal, I’ll just bike home and get my car tomorrow”. When I realized that the ‘protest’ likely meant hell, fire, adn destruction, and my car was parked in the hot spot for the action, I jumped out the door with a jogging stroller with my son to try and get my car before things got too heated. We made it four blocks from my car before people walking towards us adamantly insisted that I must turn around for my son’s safety, that the looting had begun. I was heart broken. I didn’t want to leave my car, and jogging home, I cried, because wtf, I was literally running from looters and violence with my not even, two year old in tow. ” Where am I, what is this?”
So my woke moment came the next day actually. I walked down a mile ( alone) to get my car and was escorted by two armed national guards waiting at the entrance to the garage to retrieve my car ( thankfully in tact). I drove it home, saddened by all the destruction that I saw in walking there, and slightly freaked out I had just been escorted by the military for safety.
Still ; we had to return the bike. So later that day I bike with my son back to the rental shop, around armed guards, closed streets, and boarded up buildings. with shattered glass everywhere. We dropped off the bike. I decided to take the train home, just one stop, because walking a mile with a toddler would have been quite the workout, plus I figured he would enjoy the adventure.
I was holding my son in my arms, just chatting about the train we were about to take, to him and a young man walked by me, he said ‘ That’s why your shit got fucked up’, and kept on walking by us. This is what he said to me, out of nowhere, to a woman minding her own business, carrying her toddler in her arms. I am guessing because I am white and he was black. There was nothing else to account for, except the BLM riots that had happened the day before to evoke such a rude unwarranted exchange. I thought, What?? Is he for real??
This is the moment that woke me. But It was probably a few more weeks before I really began to dig in to why this exchange truly bothered me.
The racial tension are so high from this Critical Theory Wokeness, I realized, whatever the hell is going on , it is not for the betterment of our society or racial equality.
And we are moving out of this godforsaken state.
The norm-ification of bad language in front of small children is yet another the straws breaking the camel’s back in my case.
My breaking point came two years ago. I was teaching as an adjunct instructor for the English department at an urban community college in California. My moment arrived during an Academic Senate meeting. I had served on the committee for three years and had been working toward a full-time position. The college has an Equity Committee. The Equity Committee has “Equity Officers.” There is hint number one that things aren’t right.
At one of our September meetings, these officers came to our weekly meeting and explained the changes they were proposing to the college’s hiring process. Changes that were ultimately implemented.
The committee proposed that all future hiring committees– for every new hire in every discipline, no matter the size of the department–would be required to match, racially and statistically, to the racial percentages of our student body. For example, if our student body was 70% hispanic, then the hiring committee must be 70% hispanic, and so on.
One of the tenured facility pointed out to the “officers ” that most departments didn’t have enough minority faculty to meet these statistical requirements. Some departments only have two or three full-time faculty, and for the most part, faculty reflects the general population. We were told that we would have to bring in faculty from other departments, campuses, colleges….. Then, the leader of the group said that it wouldn’t take long to “get rid of all these white hiring committees.”
This was done in a well-known community college district in California that claims to be an “Equal Opportunity” employer. This was the day I knew that I would never be hired as a full-time instructor; I’m not the right color or race. This was my “Enough!” moment. Needless to say, I no longer teach at the Community College; I’m now teaching Adult Basic Education at a State prison.
Stand against thoughtcrime. Protect freedom of speech.
I am rather late in understanding what has been happening and only realized that there was an issue when the protests started. My breaking point was at my last job when a leader of a group for minorities asked what we were going to do as a government agency to give them an advantage for access to public services. My response was that we are a public agency so we must treat everyone the same, there are no special groups. There was dead silence in the room and everyone moved on without further input.
Prior to this, I worked at a major university and had to watch videos for diversity training. One of the scenarios required that faculty respond to the “third gender” appropriately. I had no idea what they were talking about. As explained in the video, some people identify as male some days and female on other days. The expectation was that faculty must respond to the individual with the appropriate pronouns depending on how they identified that day. Then a supervisor told me that she thought the videos were offensive since there were other scenarios that were anti-Christian. Again no one said a word about it and I was a little perplexed on how to identify which gender someone feels they are from day to day.
It is not so much the events as the silence in response that I find frightening.
Other more recent events have solidified my resolve to resist. The Metoo movement was alarming to me as a woman because the bar for evidence was very low. The inaccurate white privilege thought process appears to be a massive generalization. I am 56 years old and am still attempting to pursue my Bachelor’s degree since there are few financial assistance programs for white middle income Americans who work full time. The first time I was able to attend college was due to the outsourcing of my job when I was 50 years old. I frankly don’t see my life as white privilege. I don’t believe it is because I don’t recognize my own racism. I don’t adhere to sussing out thought crimes or subscribing to any movement that does either.
The most recent event for me is a male adult that I have known since he was a child decided he was a woman. My response to this is that you can make whatever choices you want but I also get a choice how or if I want to engage with this.
I have now decided that I don’t care if I am labeled in any disparaging way because I believe in reason, logic, evidence and civil discourse. I know there will be consequences unfortunately for that type of resistance.
Mine was in the DIY art and music scene in Chicago, realizing that the “top dogs” in the scene are card carrying communists. The whole “woke” thing is all about destruction, as deconstructive marxist critical theory teaches every college educated person. So woke-ism starts in academia, and evolves into anarchy and violence later on when the graduates of humanities departments enter the “real world” after being indoctrinated at college.
When I was in my 20s I thought communism might be a good thing and heard a few quotes from Mao that sounded good. I lost all of that when I read an autobiographical book, Red Azalea, about a woman who grew up during the Red revolution in China.
My breaking point was when critical social justice redefined racism as “prejudice + power”. Among the most common forms of antisemitism, especially among the contemporary ‘alt-right’ is the “Great Replacement” conspiracy; always couched in terms of nefarious, scheming, unduly powerful Jews conspiring to exterminate the white race. This definition of racism put forward by the ‘woke’ crowd was a concession to right-wing antisemites. The consequences are a political left incapable of addressing antisemitism with coherence and principle, and the fast normalization of these same conspiracy theories using woke jargon.
In some circles, Jews, once exterminated precisely because we weren’t ‘white’ are now branded as such, and have our collective movement for self-determination and return to our indigenous homeland [Zionism] recast as oppressive, white supremacist, settler-colonial imperialism. The woke left has fully embraced the same kind of rhetoric and polemic as national socialists when it comes to the Jewish people. That’s an existential threat to me as a Jew.
common application of antisemitism among white supremacists, ethnonationalists, national socialists et al., the most visible avatars of the ideology and movemenets critical social justice and anti-racism claim to oppose.
I was not truly Woke, but center-left, and perceived the evolution of these ideas as just politeness and fairness. My breaking point was the firing of Brendan Eich, the father of JavaScript, from the position of CEO of Mozilla Foundation for donating to a fund that was agitating against gay marriage. It was 8 years ago.
Note that the referendum for gay marriage in California was defeated. The majority was against gay marriage.
I voted for it, and I regret my vote now.
My woke breaking point was July 7th 2016 when Micah Xavier Johnson shot nine police officers and two civilians in Dallas, TX killing five officers because he was upset over police shootings of black men. He specifically stated he wanted to kill white police officers. I have family who have served in both law enforcement and the military so those deaths were very personal for me.
It could have been one of my relatives shot that day. It wasn’t my family that was killed at that time but it was someone else’s loved ones targeted for death because of their profession and their race. I thought for sure BLM and Antifa would be outlawed and things would calm down but instead Obama invited BLM founders to the White House!
I really got it loud and clear that something was really wrong with what I thought was an extreme faction of the Left and I have been a liberal my whole life! I remember thinking that there is no way these blatant falsehoods about law enforcement could ever go mainstream but I was wrong. I discovered Heather MacDonald’s book “The War on Cops” which has lots of crime statistics that pretty much blow the BLM’s claims about police brutality out of the water.
What is frightening about what I have learned about Postmodern theory and Critical Social Justice from this website and others is that there are people in the movement who actually believe that math is racist. I recently saw an article about a curriculum being launched in Seattle public schools that asks students to look for instances when math is supposedly racist. Do you see where this can go? Heather MacDonald’s book is full of statistics that contradict the Woke dogma. If the CSJ people can say that facts are racist if they don’t like what the math says, well we may all be in a whole lot of trouble if we don’t stop this world view/ religion from taking over.
I also believe in biological reality. Most people except for a very rare few are born either male or female. I have no problem with someone who after they reach their 18th birthday decides to become a transvestite. If they want surgery they can pay for it with their own money.
I also have friends who have the ubiquitous BLM signs in their front yard that states “in this house we believe : black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, Love is love, kindness is everything.” Now if the woke actually practiced kindness is everything we would not be frightened to express a different opinion in public. How can anyone say they think science is real and pretend that there is no biological differences between the sexes? I digress, I want to have my own pretentious yard sign. One that states “In this house we believe: everyone has a right to their own opinion and it should not get you fired from your job, biological reality is real, reason and logic are much better than emotional arguments and storytelling, kindness should extend to those you disagree with.
1978, 6th Grade. We all went to our upcoming Intermediate (Middle) school for a tour. We were told we needed to take a foreign language (for College: misleading, because only UC, not State had such a requirement…) and Spanish was “Strongly recommended, since you live in California!” We all knew that in the Ellis Island days, immigrants were required to know English, to be a U.S. Citizen. But this small taste of what would be later known as Woke Supremacy permanently STEELED me against it!
I think I had two breaking points that happened quite close to one another. One was the Kavanaugh debacle. I followed that closely, read everything I could find, and it led me to believe that there was nothing to it, yet the media and all the woke types were screeching for his head from day one and refused to even consider the possibility that he was innocent.
The other breaking point was how utterly they abandoned biology for the gender/trans stuff. I’m a biology nerd, I have a degree in it, and I cannot find the words to describe how utterly detached from reality this sort of thing is. I really have to compare it to being a Flat-Earther, it’s that nuts. NOTE: This does not mean I endorse bullying people for it, as the woke would insist it means.
Then there’s the more general thing about how racist and sexist wokeism is. If a white person talked about black people the way woke people talk about white people, that white person would be universally regarded as a racist asshole. If a man spoke about women in the generalized negative way woke people talk about men, that man would be universally recognized as a misogynist pig. But of course, by defining bigotry in terms of power, it precludes the woke from seeing bigotry as a two-way street.
My line was before Woke was really a thing. It was when my lefty friends started describing people, like other friends of mine and family members, as being racist for their political views. There was no way I would accept such a preposterous claim, especially when talking about people I know and love who aren’t prejudiced (of course, what’s considered racist has been changed so much that today it has no meaning).
So that was the first line. I’m not going condemn people for having opposing views. The next line was when the left and MSM started claiming that if you opposed any policy by Barack Obama, you were racist. That was it. I stopped taking the word seriously anymore. It’s done.
By the time Wokeness rolled around, I had left the left for good. I’ve never identified with any party but the Democrats truly frighten me with the future they promise.
My line was crossed not at one specific moment but a few times across 2015 and 2016, around when BLM was first gaining traction.
I was in a very liberal college and felt very liberal myself, and we had one very conservative student
in our hall. People would occasionally talk about how ridiculous his ideas were behind his back, which was slightly annoying but I figured it wasn’t doing much harm. One day he shared some of his honest thoughts in a completely non-offensive way at a dorm meting about some current events (I don’t remember what specifically), and to no one’s surprise they were against the grain for the most part.
Enough students complained and insisted that he was in fact being a horrible bigot that he got kicked out of our dorm. This poor kid who already had a hard enough time connecting with people (he was also autistic, a factor that not a single person expressed sympathy for when complaining about his methods/tone of communication), and was struggling to find his way in this new environment was now completely ostracized because people weren’t even willing to have a conversation with him. I reflected on this with some close friends of mine, expressing that even though I disagree with the guy’s ideas, it seemed harsh for the university to actually take action like that so swiftly. I was met mostly with confused looks, like I was the crazy one.
Another time was when we had Philosophy Professor Peter Singer invited to give a talk at our college to discuss his book “The Most Good You Can Do,” which is about effective altruism. He was very loudly boycotted by many students claiming to represent our Philosophy department because he apparently holds some controversial ideas unrelated to that book. I was still able to attend the talk but there were students there smugly taking photos of themselves and posting them on Facebook with captions about how horrible of a man Singer is.
I didn’t understand how people claiming to be interested in academics could be so embarrassingly immature and dismissive, but there it was.
So I guess my line is the silencing of ideas rather than debate with them — a line that’s crossed so frequently that it didn’t take me very long to make the transition from brainwashed college student to reasonable individual. Now I’m in a PhD program and I find that not much has changed. There are thankfully some reasonable people I can have open and honest conversations with, but for the most part our student leadership is dominated by people who parrot Critical Race Theorists as if their word is gospel rather than theory.
We recently had a mass email sent from the head of our graduate student committee suggesting we educate ourselves by reading about “white supremacist culture.” The central idea of the linked blog post was the assertion that there are “white traits” we should be aware of and avoid — including a belief in objective truth. I couldn’t believe this was getting sent around to everyone in our department as if it was actually good reading material.
A professor wrote out a very thought-out point-by-point response to this email laboriously explaining why we need to analyze these arguments carefully rather than take blog posts like that at their word without holding them to scrutiny (in this e-mail, he actually recommended your upcoming book!) The response from students (behind his back) has so far been to call him a racist and coyly point out the fact that he’s white and therefore nothing he says on the issue can matter. Incredibly disappointing, but I am very grateful that he stepped in and gave the rest of us some useful talking points.
I doubt anyone is reading this rant! Regardless, this was a great reflective exercise; thanks for the prompt.
I have read that rant! It was really interesting and really creepy. I have always had the feeling that the woke’s modus operandi is that of convincing themselves that they are punching up, while they are so obviously punching down. In the same way in which they “stood up to a professor” at Evergreen, or “fought against white supremacy” while pulling people out of their car to threaten them, they probably felt like they were in a David vs. Goliath situation when they kicked a kid out of their dorm. They have no real understanding of how they look like from the outside.
My woke breaking point took place many years before the woke movement even had a name. When it was clear that some people were willing to argue in favor of a woman’s right to choose, no matter the circumstances, I realized some people will never be able to accept, as the author suggests, “that things could possibly go too far.” They have, but extreme pro-choicers will never given an inch.
Like others here I’ve been skeptical of this movement for decades (if not openly critical). But moments that really shocked me and changed the way I viewed the world have included:
– The Brexit referendum. The way all the lefties on my social media feeds, who’d been spending years virtue-signalling how they were on the side of the masses, immediately and almost as one turned against democracy.
– The Google memo. The way Damore was fired for feedback that had been explicitly requested. The way the mainstream media misreported it as misogynistic.
– The jettisoning of the idea of fair process during the #metoo movement. The way even fairly obvious cases where accusations were weaponized for vindictive reasons were treated as automatically true. The way the accused were often not really cleared even after decisive evidence emerged vindicating them. The way the bar for ‘sexual assault’ was moved so low it became a charge that could effectively be hurled at anyone, with immediately devastating effect.
– Major scientific journals and institutions, as well as mainstream media, deciding that gender is really all cultural and biological sex isn’t a thing, against mountains of very good scientific evidence to the contrary.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The latest intensification of the madness hasn’t really surprised me at all. Unless more of us start speaking out against it – and I know it’s hard – it’s only going to get worse.
My woke meter hit its max when I read on a news site a woman raped a 13 year old boy and when she gave birth to a child she sued the child to start paying child support and the courts accepted
I remember the growing unease I felt when multiculturalism became all the rage on college campuses in the early 1990s. I was an undergraduate student, and I was forced to take 6 hours of specifically multicultural electives to prove my mettle as an enlightened individual. The Woke Movement was still drowsy at the time but was stirring in its PC bed.
An interesting question with many intriguing responses: as a social scientist, it helps me to break things apart, to “dichotomize” (e.g., past v. future or philosophical v. personal). Seeing myself as a progressive liberal, I used to take pride in my claims and others’ acceptance of my “wokeness;” it was akin to being “hip.” However, when a series of unfortunate events forced me to shift my perspective from future-philosophical to past-personal, my beloved wokeness was shattered. The first event was the vicious persecution of a colleague for creating a “hostile environment” by once using the phrase “militant lesbianism,” asking two junior faculty members’ about their views on the negative reactions to Chrissie Hynde’s NPR account of her own gang rape, and telling a very stupid, by mostly innocuous, joke before a department faculty meeting. It was determined that his “erratic” and “aggressively oblivious” had created a hostile environment for his junior colleagues. He was removed as department chair and forced to move from his second-floor corner office to a newly created office in the basement (whose only other occupants were the snakes in the college’s herpetarium). His subsequent clinical diagnosis with moderate adult ADHD was deemed to be irrelevant. That this was all accomplished without a proper investigation, administrative due processes, responses to specific issues raised in his appeals, or even a modicum of transparency was frustrating and a clear challenge to my “wokeness.” So, I set out to use the tools of my trade to learn about the perceptions and attitudes on our campus that may have contributed to such an injustice. Working with my Organizational Psychology course, I developed a survey of attitudes and judgments concerning hostile environments and academic freedom. Consequently, I was suspended immediately, banished from campus, prohibited from communicating with students, targeted on social media, deemed a danger to the “well-being” of others, subjected to false and defamatory assaults on my character, stripped of my tenure, found to be “incompetent” and dismissed for cause at the end of the semester. I no longer consider myself “woke.”
I’ve had two breaking points. The first was NFL decision for a black National Anthem. I see zero upside to that blatant wedge. Second, I said it is wrong to call Donald Trump a rapist. I said he can be called a liar, a con man, a narcissist, but not a rapist. A woman called me “a creep for defending a rapist pedophile.” I simply responded “Civil discourse is dead.”
Language is the only means to reconciliation.
Pain destroys language.
For those in pain, there is no means to reconciliation.
For those in pain, there is no means to reconciliation.
For those in pain, there is no means to reconciliation.
For those in pain, there is no means to reconciliation.
A few things come to mind. The first I noticed was the initiation of sexual harassment through the creation of a “hostile work environment”. I was struck by a legal definition that was based upon how it felt to someone – not based on some standard. At this same time I remember hate crime laws coming on the books, which still to me appear to be a gross violation of the 1st Amendment, especially considering how they are enforced.
Of course the Duke lacrosse team fiasco was the final straw. A complete miscarriage of justice. Those 87 or so professors who signed their names demanding the expulsion of those boys before anything resembling due process took place should have been an affront to any decent American. And not a single one of them paid the smallest price for that. They should have all been fired. Had I been president at Duke those without tenure would have been fired on the spot. Those who did would have been publicly repudiated by me, and given such duties that would make them want to leave the university.
One additional thought for Mr. Lindsay. A better question to ask is not, “Where is your line on wokeness?” A better line is, “Tell me what isn’t racist.” It’s a really hard one for our junior totalitarians to answer.
1. Personally. In the early 90s a very PC artist friend basically decided that we needed apartheid because race was so important. It just turned out he was basically a racist and scared of brown people. Everything was a just a veneer for what he actually felt without saying so explicitly. Also he used his permanent victim status to crack on to very young teenage girls and hide his immorality.
2. Politically. Peak woke was awakened in me when a left wing /Green party lost seats in parliament and then proceeded to blame the voters and electorate for their woes. Saying on a number of occasions that ‘the people need to be educated as their cause was so just’ . It was creepily apparent they would like to open the Gulag as soon as they could.
3. The idea that trans men are discriminated by society and we must be forced to like them. It both gives new meaning to the purpose of discrimination law and people’s humanity. If I don’t like you, I just don’t like you buddy.
A big switch flipped, for me, when Brandon Eich got canned from Mozilla. The dude invented javascript, which basically powers the modern world, and all he did was give a couple hundred bucks to a cause advocating for ‘traditional marriage’.
I don’t even agree with the propisition in question, but I was amazed he got fired for that.
Since then, I felt I cannot rationally anticipate what the reaction to anything I say or do might be and I’ve only grown more confident of that (exponentially so, recently).
For example, My kids go to a Classical Christian School. They’re a 503c, so my company will match donations. Every time I ask for a match, I know that one day it will probably end my career if/when word gets out. But I figure, at that point, it’s probably best I leave, anyway.
My activation point came last year at the UUA General Assembly when the Rev. Todd Eklof , minister of local UU church in Spokane, WA), passed out copies of his book “The Gadfly Papers”. The acolytes of CRT that were present went beserk (this was a true witch hunt), accusing him of all sorts of nasty “isms”.
When I later heard about this, I immediately ordered the book to look for all these nasty “isms”. Never found them. We were all left speculating on whose feelings were hurt and how this could possible justify shutting down what seemed like a call to open and honest debate (on DiAngelo, the Coddling book, etc). Later the UUMA (ministers association) violated due process to first “censure” Todd for unspecified and implausible harms, then finally kicked him out (de-fellowshipped). Except a strong majority of his congregation recently voted to keep him, with a minority of followers of CRT leaving.
Before this I wondered what all this “white supremacy culture” talk was about. I I saw it feeding into the traps of the cultural wars, especially as laid out by Trump. I had been a person who lived racial justice, which was just part of my living arrangements and my activism for social and economic justice and the Green New Deal in a system corrupted by neo-liberal capitalism. Suddenly I saw neo-facism at my door step.
My peal woke came with the manufactured “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” outrage, which was bad enough on its own, but has since been repeated (to include during this latest spat of riots) ad nauseum regardless of its fictional roots.
Then you can add the statistical lie that “cops are killing black people”. Study that issue for more than 30 seconds, using any half decent source, and you realize it would be like arguing with a 13 year old who “knows everything”.
The final straw has to be is knowing, assuming an IQ > 90, that BLM and ANTIFA aren’t about societal injustices for one second, but rather America-hate groups based on a perfectly failed Marxist ideology. No one has to figure that out, they tell you as much.
Critical gender theorist here. I’ve always had a bit of a rocky relationship with critical social theory, since while I’ve been trained to see gender, race, and class issues pretty much everywhere, I also don’t like reductionism and automatically deconstruct anything any other critical social theorist says. Naturally, I quickly learned to never talk to anyone else who was running with anything out of critical theory, especially the racial theorists, who were particularly explosive when their pet narratives were poked at in any way.
In a certain sense, I’ve been out of it for years now, since I followed all the pseudo-Augustinian undertones of the Theory to its natural conclusion, converted, and was somewhat domesticated by Catholic philosophy. In another sense, I feel like I will never truly escape from this totalitarian cult that is trying to drain me dry. I’ve been digging deeply into the underlying issues surrounding the J.K. Rowling debacle, because when feminism explodes into open warfare, it’s usually because there actually is a genuine, immense point of conflict at its heart. And while the radfems really are a mess of paranoia and misandry (and yes, transphobia), they also tend to pick up on problems that others miss.
The way this is playing out has been chilling in the extreme. I would be impressed with how my old friends the gender theorists have finally managed to come out ahead of the race theorists if they hadn’t managed to leave such an Orwellian nightmare-scape in their wake. I’ve recently developed concerns with the way the left’s approach to inclusiveness conflicts with the feminist idea that women are too quick to accommodate other’s needs at their own expense, so it’s like watching those concerns play out in real time. We have historically been burned whenever special interests collide, but this is the first time we have been told to hand over what little leverage we had at all because the queer theorists have gone and set the whole house that is oppression based on biological sex on fire. I’ve known critical social thought was a mess, but I never dreamed it would be unacceptable to be interested in phenomenology, gender, and self-identity and think that the dominant theory was absolutely incoherent.
I’ve also never seen such oblivious male privilege in my life as when “progressive” men suggest that women should be as afraid of being assaulted by other women as they are of “cis”-men. Have we been fighting sexism at all? Was it ever about sexism in the first place? Are we fighting anything at all, or is the whole left just so much performance art based around abstract concepts of oppression that may or may not actually play out in reality? I knew the whole thing was a house of cards, but I didn’t really expect to see it come crumbling down quite like this. Now I am trying to figure out how to deal with the wreckage.
Great points.
So one defines their personal line for peak ‘wokeness’ – then what?
I’ve read most of the comments. Lots of clear and compelling stories – but what then? Where does whining turn to action? What’s the appropriate response? How does the tide turn? I cannot see it.
HI Wilson, I’m moving across country and as a life long democrat voting Republican. Crossing out a lot a of acquaintances.
I “woke up” in 1997. At my very progressive boarding school, a kid was expelled for taking hard-drugs (heroin). My “friends” (that is the social clique that adopted me as a side-effect of me being both a smoker and a kind-hearted human being) rose up against “the tyranny of adults and the imbalance the power structures at the school” because the decision had been taken by the teacher’s council without consulting the students. In the progressive model of the school, all decisions were meant to be inclusive of the student’s point of view. This particular one hadn’t. I investigated the matter and concluded that the school, faced with the facts, had two choices: expel the student (and return him to his own country) or inform the police (which, likely, would have resulted in the same, as well as a criminal record). I concluded that, as a minor in a foreign country, I was not being de-legitimised by the teacher’s council decision.
My “friends” protested. Fine. School allowed them to. I had no objection.
My “friends” (self-professed anti-fascists) started chanting WW2 Resistance chants & phrased the situation as us-vs-them, labelling the school a structure of oppression that needed to be torn down. When their “protest” revealed itself to be minoritarian (the majority of students didn’t join), they came up with “silence is complicit” line. They blocked the road into campus and antagonised both the teachers and the rest of the students. It soon became apparent that I was expected on the barricade.
When I did not appear and, worse, I asked a teacher to drive me away from campus that day, I became “the traitor” that sided with the “enemy”. I will never forget the look of hatred in the eyes of my best friend of the time as I was driven across the picket line by my physics teacher. She never spoke to me again. None of them ever did. I became a pariah in my own social group and smoked my Gauloises alone in a corner of indignity for the next two years.
Earlier in the year, the same group of friends had staged an adaptation of “The Crucible”. That was my first encountered with the work and the notion of an ideological witch-hunt. A few weeks later, under my very eyes, I saw how easy it is to cross the line from John Proctor to Samuel Parris, all in the name of justice. Terrifying. I was 17.
It’s been over 20 years. In that time-frame I have crossed more picket lines, growing in confidence each time. I’ve had many “trans-peak” epiphanies. “birthing person” is one of my favourites (that’s the New Language of the maternity services in the NHS). The fall from grace of J.K.Rowlings a more recent one. The Guardian endorsing a columnist (trans activist) who clamours for “luxury communism” another. But the list is very long. I’ve been singled out for wearing skirts in the office (of Equality and Diversity of my university), apparently not good feminist practice. Accused of “being evil” for daring to voice criticism of the media portrayal of Greta Thunberg. The list goes on and on…
I am waiting for the day someone calls me out for being white. I really do.
I wouldn’t say it was just one point. The left’s justification for things in the media kept getting more paranoid and far out throughout the late 2010s. I very specifically remember listening the Ezra Klein’s interview with Kate Manne and realizing that you could justify basically everything she’s saying in a less paranoid and more plausible way — obviously an example of shadow texts and privilege preserving epistemic pushback. I went down the Sokel² rabbit hole when I ended up reading James’s and Helen’s essay on pre/post-modernism — I can’t remember exactly how I got there but it was over Christmas 2018 and probably involved Sam Harris or Joe Rogan (I usually only listen to Rogan when I know the guest, and Sam mentioned James’s work with the Conceptual Penis when it first came out). Once I realized that the “master’s tools” are basically what keep us from living in the fourteenth century, my attitude has basically been “kill it with fire.”
Maybe I’m not ‘woke’ or maybe I just haven’t reached that tipping point yet, but I have asked this question to others on the other side of the spectrum. To be more specific, I have asked my Trump supporting friends what he would have to do in order to lose their support. It’s interesting how the spin starts to happen and how the arguments start to unravel when you ask them to put a line in the sand. I’m tired of the Divisive culture we have. I’m exhausted.
Here is what it would take for Trump to lose my support: Biden and his supporters explicitly condemning wokery, and committing themselves to substantive action against it.
On or about 23 November 1963. After mulling over recent events in my life.
Its was when a Youtuber was jailed for making a joke about nazi pug dogs. Some people are confused as to why this seemingly ‘minor’ event was the one that did it. But it wasn’t about the joke or the You-tuber personality in question.
It was the legal precedent set that ‘context didn’t matter’. And it was seeing so many people perfectly enthusiastic about seeing the law manipulated to such illiberal ends just because they didn’t like the person in question. It made clear the mind set of so many people professing to be liberal progressive types who were perfectly OK with illiberal and authoritarian directions as long as it was against people they didn’t like. And i’ve seen many similar instances since then.
I’m pretty sure the Nazi-pugdog YouTuber wasn’t actually jailed. But you’re right nonetheless. The very fact of his prosecution would have been my woke breaking point if it hadn’t been reached decades ago.
I’ve had two breaks. The first came in the 90’s when the left reflexively defended things like stoning and sexism and religious discrimination as long as it came from non-white religions. But then the country elected trump who is racist or at the very least gins them up. So though a classical liberal, I had to hang with the far left because I can’t support a lot of what trump stands for. My second break came this summer as cancel culture revved up. What a totalitarian tactic. I probably won’t vote for president in November. The party that hates black people vs the party that hates white people. Meh.
Mine was when the Rev Stuart Campbell of the Wings Over Scotland website got all of his twitter accounts closed on an incorrect argument by a mob of woke activists because he is in favour of women’s rights. People where creating Wings twitter sites to make the wokerati whack-a-mole all of them so I did despite swearing never to darken twitter’s door. I’m @wingsecosse
I also broke my lifelong pledge never to join a political party. I have joined the Independent for Scotland Party (ISP) which will stand candidates on the List vote in next year’s Scottish Parliament elections. They are in favour of women’s rights and against ScotGov’s currently shelved Gender Recognition Act. I will be both an activist for them and a voter. I was an activist for Scottish Independence in our indyref and I’m anti-nuclear as well (I grew up in NZ and helped make it Nuclear Free with my very first vote).
My line was crossed years ago when the President made male/female unclear and risked my wife and daughters safety. But so many lines are crossed. Race baiting. Erasing history. Violence and rioting. Lack of respect of the police, laws and people with different views.
Now, what to do? Small step is to vote. Larger steps are to engage with your community to make your voice heard. Exert your influence. Lastly, protect yourself by what means you deem necessary.
Very clear line for me.
The language games in the early 2010s – followed by a widespread pattern of removing the comments section of websites.
The moment when it was no longer reasonable to expect someone who calls out an apparent problem (misogyny, racism, islamophobia) to be able to _point at the referent_, the instantiation, of the problem they’re naming, without mere assertion or moralistic name-calling or invoking even more insular terminology – the period when the Kafkatrap and the Motte-and-Bailey and “systemic XYZ” became standard-issue – and when those arguing in that manner dropped all pretense of being able to defend their crusade rationally against critics.
Excellent article by Jonathan Rauch (who describes himself as “an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual”) from way back in 1995. Don’t be put off by the title, of which he says, “This is not an article favoring racism or any other particular prejudice. It is an article favoring intellectual pluralism, which permits the expression of various forms of bigotry and always will.” https://www.jonathanrauch.com/jrauch_articles/in_defense_of_prejudice/
My breaking point was the trans agenda. My views on trans folks pretty much align with JK Rowling’s as described in the recent post on her site. Trans women/men are…trans women/men. Etc.
As for asking the breaking point question of a “woke” friend, I did that recently. He hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said he doesn’t feel good about any of the good fortune he’s had and feels no need to defend anything regarding Western Civilization. I don’t think he really believes that, but is simply clinging to a viewpoint he’s invested a lot of time an energy in.
Female software developer speaking here. Peak woke moment came a few months ago when a white South African coworker took it upon himself to preach identity politics to me, then somehow segued into discussing how much economic inequality bothered him – to the point where he decided it appropriate to ask me why I should be paid three or four times more than a cleaner.
He is paid more than me given his job title.
Before this incident, when I mentioned that I arranged for my dog to go to sitters during the day (since I don’t think leaving a dog completely alone for 10.5 hours indoors is very kind, and also, they have to go to the toilet) his remark was “I can’t believe you send your dog to daycare, there are kids in South Africa that don’t even go to day care”.
Fair enough – that would be a better use of funds. However, I tithe, I do not have children and my dog brings me companionship and love, and I couldn’t keep her were it not for using a sitter. But when I asked about what charities he supported, he completely deflected the question. He also spent £20000 last year on renovating his perfectly useable kitchen. When he knows there are people in South Africa who don’t even have running water….
He does not volunteer in any way, shape, or form, other than lending his support to Twitter battles and writing tweets supporting social justice.
When people feel comfortable in blatant virtue signalling, when they never open their damn wallets, or tangibly change anything for someone who has less than them -my peak woke.
Corporations are very open to SJ because, not only is it good publicity and murketing, it’s also an excellent tool for eroding workers rights. When an employee knows that he/she can be accused at any moment of thoughtcrime or wrongspeak, he/she will make as little fuss as possible.
This is another topic that rarely gets mentioned, because it goes against both the left and right’s narratives. The left pay lip service to workers rights, but plain that SJ advocates openly despise the working class because they are mostly white and therefore bigots. Notice that the only workers rights that most on the left talk about are well paid: “inclusivity” and “diversity” in upper middle class or upper class jobs – celebrities, CEOs, politicians etc. The right have been eroding workers rights for decades, so this facet of SJ doesn’t bother them at all. It’s quite clear why corporations are very receptive to SJ.
Good point about why corporations like SJ.
I never thought of it like that. I assumed it was just about money, but the punishment that can come down on you if you don’t play the wokey dokey game right – sadly makes sense.
I’ve never been “woke,” but my first real experience with it that opened my eyes to the extent by which it operated was in 2010 when I took a required Social Justice class for my M. Ed.
First day, white teacher walks in and first words out of her mouth were “All white people are racist and the purpose of this class is to fight white privilege.”
I should have gone to the administration and raised a stink then, but I didn’t.
The whole semester was nothing but white male bashing. All of it. It was all designed to make the minorities in class feel powerless at the hands of whites, while making the white students feel guilty for perpetuating a system they had no hand in making. I could see the weaker individuals break down over time and accept it without even questioning.
I would recommend some important French books on this subject, all written right after WW2:
“Les Justes” by Albert Camus (a revolutionary executes a prince, and must justify his actions in front of the widow and other guards and prisoners once in jail). It is a masterpiece, very much my personal Bible. Among my favourite quotes (approximate translation): “if an idea is not strong enough to kill a child, is it still an idea worth to kill a man for ?” or “one always dreams of justice, who then ends up creating a police”
“Antigone” by Jean Anouilh, reinterpreting Sophocle in a very emotional way
“Rhinocéros” by Eugène Ionesco (people in a small town slowly turn into rhinos, but after the initial shock they get along and start giving up on their humaniy)
I’ve never had a breaking point because I’ve never been woke. I never believedallwomen. I’ve never subscribed to the theory that ALL people of ANY race were racists, or that people who chose not to associate or do business with certain people were doing it from a position of pure hatred as opposed to genuinely held convictions. I’ve NEVER thought people should lose their jobs just for defending someone they knew was innocent or for having a differing political view. I just wanted to say how stumbling across this article has given me hope that we may not be headed to a very dark place.
“If we don’t stand together, we’ll all hang separately…”
What do you call a person who:
>Is charming, and has the ability to manipulate others into believing they’re acting with the best intentions
>Lacks empathy
>Lacks the ability to form real human connection or relationships
>Feels entitled to automatic respect and approval, and if not given any, will belittle and insult
>Treats people as extensions of their body, as mere objects to be used to better their own situation
>Believes that nothing is their fault or due to their actions
>Believes that their actions should never have any consequences
>Manipulates people into disbelieving reality itself – also known as gaslighting
>Accuses others of their own toxic actions and behavior – also known as projecting
These are the traits of clinical narcissism, and when it’s criminal: sociopathy. A minority of academics (Jean Twenge, Christopher Lasch, are two examples) have reported that we have an explosion of narcissism in modern society. One successful psychologist (Sam Vaknin) says we are living in a narcissistic society, becoming a sociopathic one. I’d like to know why so few people report on this. It’s a mass movement of narcissists. It’s the Salem Witch Hunts in the age of collective narcissism. Practically nobody is talking about this, and I think that this is because talking about it would raise a lot of uncomfortable questions for the left and right’s narratives. The left would have to ask how for decades so many people they think are “fighting the good fight” have never been interested in helping anyone except themselves, that they have no interest in the people they’re claiming to help and are only interested in one thing: power. The right would have to ask how our corporate capitalist, neoliberal, valueless, social darwinistic, community-and-human-relationship-destroying society (and I say all this with no love for socialism) has contributed to this epidemic we’re seeing. Nobody wants to ask these questions, and so the deep psychological and mental problems so many people have, are just ignored as though they don’t exist.
There are definitely other factors (for example, I can point to very interesting links between Marx and Engels and the latest version of “socialism”), but this factor is almost completely ignored: we’re dealing with a mass movement of narcissists. And as anyone who has ever dealt with a narcissist (a parent, a boss, a girl/boyfriend) knows, they only want to destroy, they can only destroy, they lack insight, they’re incapable of understanding the consequences to their actions, they don’t see human beings, they only see things to be manipulated for their own personal gain. You only have to read a few tweets and hear a few interviews to know this is the type we are dealing with. This is where we are now, as a society. And it’s now a mass movement, possibly a whole generation.
Abe, you are exactly right, for all the reasons you said and more.
(I’m seeing a clear thread connecting social media, narcissism, the particular narcissism of trans activists, and their curious ascendance in Black Lives Matter, “woke” culture, & our institutions in general.)
Not quite “no one” is talking about the narcissism problem, though. You are talking about it. Please, keep it up.
Thank you. You’re right, it’s not “nobody”, but I should have been clear. When I say nobody, I mean practically nobody. Functionally, practically nobody may as well be nobody. Is there anything that social media hasn’t poisoned? I can’t think of anything. It’s destroyed everything it touches, from a career as a taxi driver, to politics, to social cohesion, to relations between men and women, to dialogue between people with different opinions, to friendship, to intimacy. And social media is the internet to most people, there is no other internet.
I don’t know if it created our problems, but it is the fuel on the fire. It’s created this culture of, “as an x, I feeel y.” Everything is now neurotically political, whether you shave is political, your choice of boy/girlfriend is political, your language is political, how you’re intimate with someone is now political, the way you cross your legs is political, facts and reality are now political. (Ironically, the only thing that isn’t political… is politics! While everyone is neurotically trying to politicize everything, they have less power over government policy than at any other time in our democracy’s history. You can maybe mandate a gender neutral bathroom, but you can’t change economic policy in the slightest.) Reality is now just a question of getting the most upvotes. Social media is a narcissist factory. This has accelerated exponentially in just 5 years. Where will we be in 5 more years? We’re on the cliff edge of something terrible, and most people are trying to ignore it. On the left all I see are people, who I used to respect a lot more, who now seem to be trying to squeeze this wokeness into their pre-existing worldview. What’s even more tragic, is this shouldn’t even be the crisis we have to deal with, we have several civilization-threatening catastrophes arriving in the next few years – decades, if we are really really lucky – and this generation is the absolute worst in human history you would ever want to deal with a catastrophe.
Abe R,
Similar to your epiphany, I have seen amazing correlations between CSJ (Conflict Theory), its devotees, the current mass frenzy and what I’ve deemed cultural cognitive distortion. The intellectual powers that be are encouraging and legitimizing what has been well-known and researched as cognitive bias. This line of reasoning is akin to your observation of the CSJ movement being a case of collective narcissism (and often sociopathy). CSJ epitomizes painfully obvious violations of socio-psychological afflictions. And, I state this in full-knowledge of my own Naïve Realism… (that’s a joke)
It’s sad how regressive the progressives have become.
Thanks for adding to the breadth of my PhD literature/concept review. 🙂
Thanks. I can only say that we are living in an age of cognitive dissonance and blatant reality denial on a mass scale, on both the left and right. It’s becoming nihilism. Like Robert Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational creature. He’s a rationalizing creature.” The vast majority of people have very little idea how institutions and group psychology work (not that I’m an expert, but I do read). A society a self-organizing system. It’s adaptive, like an organism. It is like an organism in itself. In a way, we are seeing society adapt itself, evolve to its environment. Just like narcissism itself is generally accepted as a survival mechanism to an abusive childhood.
When you remove human connection (family, community, deep friendships) from people’s lives, when you remove human beings from natural cycles,then you get a society like the one we are seeing now. Nature abhors a vacuum. If a human being cannot get real human connection, a real family, a real community, he/she will try to fill the void with anything it can find.
Abe (for some reason it won’t let me reply to your reply to Jeremy below, so I’m replying to your reply here! ☺)
Everything you say is just so true – the destruction of the whole notion of reality – our impending doom – social media – all of it completely resonates with me.
Human connection, as you say, is missing. Instead we have this drug called social media, which feeds off our desire for connection while making us less connected. And we have wokeness which feeds off our desire for care and fairness while making us cataclysmically uncaring and unfair.
I just want to encourage you. You can find one or three or eight individuals with whom you can have a conversation in real life. You can discuss your ideas with them; slowly your ideas will spread.
There are many ways the world can – or will – crash and burn. There is only one way it won’t. That one way is by getting people to connect with each other, and to do so rationally, and with empathy. One conversation at a time.
Now is a great time for these conversations. Everyone jumps at the chance to have meaningful face-to-face interaction outdoors. I’ve had two in the past week; I’ve just scheduled two more; and each person has encouraged me to keep speaking out. And so I encourage you.
I meant an *attempt* at spreading morality and virtues – not that the CSJT itself is inherently moral and virtuous.
Edit:
“And I saw it all for what it is (or part of what it is at least), an attempt at a moral and virtuous path that is clamoring towards more polarity and societal fractures while yes! attempting to solve issues of our time/nation that are indeed important to attend to.”
It took about the last 10 years for me to slowly see the need for a line to be drawn. While in grad school at a prestigious art school, a very small group of people within my cohort were creating huge verbal kerfuffles about sexism and racism – aimed at a couple friends of mine – it was vicious. I remember feeling something was very off about the attacks (silencing, shaming, tons of emotion, little reason, little/no listening). And while on that campus, I also generally noted how hard it seemed for professors to openly present ideas for discussion, fearful of repercussions and the hypersensitivity.
Years later I found Jordan Peterson and finally took him seriously when I saw just how shallow the CSJT ideology was – representative in the Cathy Newman interview and the GQ interview.
Flash forward to this spring and I drew my line.
A group of colleagues starting a business together, it was decided to define a certain majority percentage of BIPOC workers to form the business. This was in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity. (I’ve been pouring over the SJ Encyclopedia and find it immensely helpful to pinpoint the ideology – so thanks for that!)
So when I saw the attempt to gain diversity/inclusion/equity for at the expense of other racial groups (white, Asian, etc) without any consideration with where *that* line gets drawn down the road with relation to intersectionality or any other human qualifier for that matter…well then, that was my line. And I saw it all for what it is (or part of what it is at least), a moral and virtuous path that is clamoring towards more polarity and societal fractures while yes! attempting to solve issues of our time/nation that are indeed important to attend to.
It also was a massive help (to the line drawing) that in the beginning of the George Floyd protests, my social feeds were flooded FLOODED with contradictory messages flat-out demanding/shaming me to speak up and at the same time shut up. “Silence is violence”, “white people it’s not your time”, “white tears” etc. all in the name of justice for a crime, which like all crime in this country, still deserves due process.
I am not competing for the earliest realisation event, but my disquiet started more than 20 years ago. My employer ran a set of ‘sexual harassment’ seminars which we were all required to attend (another tick in the box). The presenter persuasively argued that male compliments and office banter might not be comfortable for women employees. Fair enough, good points. The presenter then said that the intent (even when well meaning) didn’t matter – it was how the woman felt that was important.
Now I willingly accept that well meaning compliments and banter could be received as sexual harassment, and (more likely) had been offered as excuses for poor male behaviour in the past. It was the assertion that a woman’s viewpoint was always paramount that upset me. My boss had had a number of agency staff working for him doing administrative work. One vigorously propositioned him in an alley after the team Christmas dinner, and another was fine unless she had skipped her meds and started imagining things. Had either of them complained to HR he would have been in trouble through no fault of his own.
And that’s when I realised that sweeping statements elevating feelings above actuality were flawed.
@Discovered Joys: “The presenter then said that the intent (even when well meaning) didn’t matter – it was how the woman felt that was important. ”
This was gaining traction in the mid-1970s. A prominent feminist speaker (forget which) stated that a man asking a woman just once for a date in the workplace constituted sexual harassment. A woman in the audience asked “but what if I wanted him to?” The speaker replied that that was OK. This was at The U. of Michigan where activists were pushing to segregate the biographies in the bookstore to have a section for books by women about women.
Although memorable (clearly), these were not watershed moments — I was only a few years removed from the anti-Vietnam War movement.
While you keep up the idea that Business is continuing As Usual, more or less, and the good guys will naturally win, you are very vulnerable to Wokeness.
If the bad guys are still Over There, then whatever is happening Here, over the media, in the commentaries, must be Our Side, the good guys – and so your opinions will be steadily perverted.
Only when you accept that the invasion has happened can you get free of the propaganda.
I am no expert in any of these fields written about in the article(a great read BTW) but I can say something about my point of view based on experience, as others here have. In the 80s as an art student here in Britain. I was supportive of anti racism, anti apartheid in South Africa, general left of centre improve the world, people should be good, student thinking type stuff. etcetc. I have had personal experience of, and overcome, prolonged domestic abuse. My daughter, whilst away from home at university, ‘transitioned’ to live as a man, and became estranged from family despite our best efforts.My moment came over the course of a few months of participating in a support group for families of transitioning sons, daughters, fathers and so on. I recognised the same coercive techniques in the explanations and rationale offered by facilitators at that group, and the bewildered accounts of parents and wives struggling to cope with the cognitive dissonance required. My line is science denial, denial of fact,denial of evidence, the requirement that you agree to an obvious lie in order not to ‘offend’,or to be ‘hateful’ or unkind. This completely undermines ones own sense of self, of being a reasoning human being with a moral compass, and a member of a functioning society. It can pave the way for bad things to be implemented on a grand scale. That path leads eventuslly(sometimes in history we have seen very quickly) to totalitarian oppression. It’s all about control, and it is a deliberate strategy to break down existing structures making them vulnerable to takeover. It perfectly describes not just the activist trans rights movement, but the whole current woke critical theory movement. Doing an art masters a few years ago, and the reading around various critical theory writers, theorists-well, all I can say is that it was a real eye opener. I don’t feel hopeful for the next few years-it’s not the hot heads, cranks and zealots that scare me, it’s the fact that all of our institutions and the establishment generally have completely accepted the whole package without question and are busily putting it into practice in all areas of our lives. There must be millions of ordinary, bog standard people like me gradually becoming more aware that something is badly amiss, but who will only react or dig further and take some sort of position when it affects their personal life, family or livelihood. So I think we have a way to go yet before reaching that point. I’m not sure if what I’ve written in this comment explains particularly well, but I think it’s important to share it-it is really heartening to know that other people are finding the world utterly mind-bogglingly insane at the moment!Interesting times indeed.
Spot on. It’s the adoption of the mantra by institutions, the media and now a fearful big business that provides legitimacy.
“My line is science denial, denial of fact, denial of evidence, the requirement that you agree to an obvious lie in order not to ‘offend’,or to be ‘hateful’ or unkind. This completely undermines ones own sense of self, of being a reasoning human being with a moral compass, and a member of a functioning society.”
“I don’t feel hopeful for the next few years-it’s not the hot heads, cranks and zealots that scare me, it’s the fact that all of our institutions and the establishment generally have completely accepted the whole package without question and are busily putting it into practice in all areas of our lives.”
Exactly.
Recently, it dawned on me that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, I had read Edward L. Bernay’s “Propaganda” (1928). Now, in the run-up to the 2020 election, I felt compelled to read Gustave Le Bon’s, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895). Both books are considered to be foundational texts in their fields. (Both are available on-line as PDFs.)
Although I am only 30 pages into Le Bon’s text, I am impressed by his insights. Reading his text can help one understand phenomena as diverse as the protests-become-mobs that we see in our streets, as well as the rhetorical appeal behind President Trump’s campaign speeches.
It seems like a vote for Trump this time around would show that the Woke Breaking Point has been crossed.
It happened gradually for me: I came across Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman by coincidence. I found it thoroughly entertaining at the time, but shrugged it off as a one time occurrence. Still I thought I’d check out some of his other content. I actually found him to be a little off-putting at first, constantly going on about the “radical leftists” and students feeling oppressed. I thought this couldn’t possibly be a significant number of people thinking that way.
I reached a turning point when I came across Mike Nayna’s video entitled “James Damore, Helen Pluckrose & The Second Culture”. I saw how the students disturbing the panel discussion were walking clichés. The blue-haired girl literally exclaims to the security guard (who just doesn’t seem to want to understand!): “I’m oppressed! He’s oppressed!” She eventually leaves shouting “F*** the police! Power to the people!” Hers is the behaviour of somebody who feels angry, helpless, and 100% justified in her actions. Is this the future generation who will run this planet?
Mike’s documentary on Evergreen followed, and since then I see signs of it everywhere.
It’s not as bad yet in Germany. But our journalists are surely regurgitating a lot of nonsense coming over from the English-speaking world. Robin DiAngelo was recently quoted as some sort of expert on racial issues. We also had a day where PoCs were given a lot of space to speak their minds on national television. When asked what they would like to change, one young journalist replied that she would like to have “more honest conversations.” She explained that she meant conversations in which the victims of our systemic racism a heard more, and those who perpetuate racism are silent. Sound familiar anyone? Happy days.
The race-related headlines have calmed down a bit since then. I hope it was just a fad. It’s been encouraging to see a lot of people respectfully speak up against the contents of various online articles in the respective comments sections.
Big thanks to the team here at New Discourses. You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting to help others understand what’s happening. Your Social Justice Encyclopedia is invaluable.
The incessant call for reparations often brings me back to the same thought about slavery and the Civil War. Slavery was indeed a terrible stain on the country’s history, and we paid a terrible, but necessary cost to abolish it and preserve the Union. Over 600,000 men died (ref: American Battlefield Trust) with most of those casualties on the Union side. To my eyes, the terrible stain of slavery was washed clean by the blood of those men, who displayed the greatest love according to Jesus in laying down their life for their fellow man. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13). Their voices were silenced long ago, yet to walk along the sunken road at Antietam or the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh those silent voices speak volumes above those who shout out only for their self-interest.
Lincoln said it best at his second Inaugural address…..
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…..to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Someone in our country’s leadership needs to invoke these words. Let us not break open the wounds again. Yes, slavery was a terrible stain on our history, but let us remember that America paid the price in blood to wash it clean.
If I could leave with one final wish it is this: That every white child and adult visit an Underground Railroad site or the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. And every black child and adult visit one of our national battlefields from the Civil War. If we did this, I think we would all walk away with a different and better perspective on our common humanity.
Great suggestions!
Everybody needs to have an opinion these days. So do I.
As a EU citizen I have been following this debate from a distance. We face similar trends here, be it a bit less outspoken.
I support some elements that some movements put on the agenda, but as always, fundamentalism is never far away.
It’s up to us as free societies to have the debate and find the middle ground.
The world is in transition, like it or not.
One thing that seems clear to me, is that the USA will have to evolve to a less harsh form of capitalism, with social security, universal health care and good education for all. It surprises me that just mentioning this would make me a communist in some people’s minds. Having stayed in the USA myself, I noticed that too many people are left behind. As a result, society as a whole becomes a place of anxiety.
I’ve had my own share of woke moments in the past, but given the current situation, I’d think I’d panic the day they decide to bring down the statues of Isaac Newton.
Nice discussion going on here; I enjoyed it.
Isaac Newton? There are specific demands to remove the names of dead white people from theories in science to make it “more accessible” for minorities. Newton’s Laws were especially mentioned. I suppose we’ll also have to change the name of units like Watt and Hertz.
You might scoff, but only a few years ago, I postulated that perhaps they would demand the removal of the word master and slave from IT and telecommunications documentation and standards (it’s full of it). Well, here we are, that effort is now underway.
It seems to me that there is nothing crazy enough that will not come to pass. My current prediction is that they will attack “The Masters” gold tournament when it rolls around in November this year (it’s late because of CV-19).
GOLF!!
Peak woke came for me decades ago. It was the kind of vaccination where you get sick for a while, and then you are protected forever.
It was 1988-1990, and the phrase “all white people are racist” came to my college along with the concept of white privilege, and all manner of incubating Critical Theory. My friend group was very much the center of this kind of thinking, and we were led by a very few, very high-status individuals who were in charge of virtue and who could, through their social status, manipulate others into signing on to the whole shebang.
When I fell on the wrong side of one of these individuals (in an unrelated matter), I was freed from the thrall.
My awakening from the wokeness had more to do with my growing understanding of the uses and abuses of social status, than the strength of my logic. My logic was always sound, this BS was always BS and I always knew it, but for the sake of status and belonging I *believed* what I was being told even as I *knew* it was wrong.
Around 2012 I began a personal study of racism in America. I read every book in my library on the subject. One was Losing the Race by John McWhorter. That was the first time I had ever even heard of a reasoned argument against affirmative action. It was the moment I understood that the way I had been raised, while correct in its liberal values, could be quite misguided in its policies. From that moment I began seeking heterodoxy in earnest.
It was Benjamin Boyce, in 2017, who alerted me to the massive current problem.
Now I am gathering courage the way one would, wanting some saffron, gather crocus pollen in the city. Painstakingly slowly. James, Helen, Peter, Bret, Benjamin, Sam, Coleman, Glenn, John, Mike, and others are the crocuses and I collect a few grains of courage every day.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a book like “Losing the Race” by John McWorter is eventually eradicated from distribution with specific intent to silence such views. Honestly, we’re a step or two away from books of a certain view being barred from public discourse, maybe not by law but by the dictates of SJW.
There have been so many, and many have been named here. I am going to add in two. Whatever happened between Mr. Biden and Tara Reade deserves the same amount of vigour and vitriol as Judge Kavanaugh received two years ago. I am lost as to why Mr. Biden’s denials are acceptable, while Judge Kavanaugh’s are not.
As well, pulling down the statue of General/President Grant is also problematic. Yes…he owned a slave, whom he released. Then he put life and limb on the line to end slavery in the US. He wrote that he imagines that no one in the future will be able to understand the whole concept of owning another person.
This is personal on a lesser-known level. General Grant ordered the Jewish community out of Tennessee, an order that President Lincoln countermanded. As President, he and his cabinet attended the dedication of a new synagogue in Washington DC.
General/President Grant committed two sins. He then spent his days trying to undo the damage. Whatever imperfections we all have, and we all have them, to judge a man only by his mistakes rather than by real efforts to fix them will leave all of us sacrificed on the altar of moral perfection.
May the best of the day be yours.
-RavSean
The world has a huge over-supply of pride and self-righteousness. You can think of them as an infinite commodity that will never run out. The usual offspring of pride and self-righteousness is hate. What the world lacks today is grace and humility. The offspring of grace and humility are forgiveness and love. Grace has become the rarest, but most precious of qualities akin to gold or rare earth metals. Grace comes from the one blameless person who ever walked the face of the earth, the Son of God and Man, Jesus Christ. In Him and Him alone true redemption and reconciliation is found.
Jesus told us to only focus on 2 commandments: To love your God with all your heart and soul and mind. And to love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22: 37-39). All that is goodness and love flows from those two commandments.
It might seem strange to quote Nixon after quoting Jesus, but I think Nixon gave us the contrarian warning about hate. In his resignation speech, Nixon said, “Always remember that others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
I’ve never been able to buy any of this Critical Social Justice stuff. Like I first heard of it in the early 2000s at college. I thought it seemed irritating and I didn’t really believe it–terms like “white privilege” seemed loaded and with ulterior motives. “Only whites can be racist” sounded poorly reasoned and unrealistic. “Fragile masculinity” was intended to belittle and undercut. “Microaggressions” seemed like a way to control others by making them walk on eggshells. Etc. But it also seemed fringe. No one I knew supported that thinking as an actual creed.
Everything seemed to go crazy after Trump got elected. I supported the social justice side of things in a general way because I felt the divisions in our society were growing and hating on minority groups was becoming more prevalent.
But then, a couple of years ago, I read DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and I guess that more than anything was the line. I read it with an open mind and heart–I tried, really TRIED, to accept her ideas–and yet every word struck me as being untruthful, coercive, manipulative, and honestly racist. It was riddled with logical fallacies that would get you dismissed on a high school debate team. Its premises and objectives were self-contradictory (systemic racism is part of your socialization and you can’t help it. You must spend the rest of your life eradicating your inner racism because it’s your fault). To accept this, your entire mind has to go down a deep dark rabbit hole.
I can’t. My conscience says no.
Still, I was able to think it was really twisted and that probably most people wouldn’t really accept her premises.
Then George Floyd happened. All the people I thought were normal and sensible were spouting some of the most dangerous hateful CSJ stuff with glee. Trashing old friends and family. Crudely trying to brainwash others. Acting superior, proud for humiliating others in public. Mobbing and namecalling and bullying people, rather than engaging in real discussions. It was like mob rule. And I don’t care how righteous the cause is, that’s unacceptable. I study history, and mob rule has led to hell in the past.
And, it’s racist. It eschews messages of unity for narratives based solely on skin color, as if that’s what really drives human nature. But of course, it is a creed utterly out of touch with the realities of human nature. At the very least, I don’t think it is going to help heal the tensions in America.
So yeah. There’s almost no line at all with me. I saw it for what it was right away, and it got worse and worse. I will never be able to accept it. One day we will look back, shaking our heads and vowing to do better. For real this time.
Liz, are you, like me, utterly surrounded by people signing on to the Cult of Wokeness? 99% of my acquaintance worships at the feet of Robin DiAngelo. What do you do? Do you have any advice for people in my situation?
Hi Rebecca. Luckily I currently live outside the states (luckily), however, except for a couple of people, my entire Facebook feed is filled with this Wokeness stuff, as you say. Her book is touted as some sort of cure all.
I don’t know what to do about it currently, except to try to find a group of like-minded people and stick to your principles. There’s some good advice on this site.
Thank you, Liz, that’s good advice. I have begun having one-on-one conversations with reasonable people on these subjects, and I hope to (mentally) assemble a group of people I can count on just to exist and prevent me from getting completely demoralized. So far, it’s working!
The other thing I do is to ask for encouragement and advice whenever I need it, mostly from strangers online, like I asked you. So far, the advice is always the same – which is fine! The main thing is the encouragement. I need all the courage I can get – and so far, that’s working, too.
Thank you, and be well.
When I was a teenager, a black girl that I loved (I still do love her despite our going separate paths) was sitting with my family and me. We were watching television and saw some seemingly generic tragedy of a violent crime flash across the news. The host, who I believe was Shepard Smith, showed the face of the suspect; wherein, a black man’s face appeared. Nothing about this event would have occurred to me; whereas, it remains unfortunately common.
However, the girl I spoke of had an unsolicited comment. “Maybe he is just upset about slavery.” Before you become tempted to question her intelligence, I will tell you that she is highly intelligent and a brilliant artist. We were both quite bright; furthermore, she turned out to be quite serious. Not wanting to upset the girl I love(d), I did not comment on it. My Father mentioned it later; wherein, I pretended not to remember the incident. This event would stick deeply in my head and begged a particular linguistic way of expressing my problem with it.
That moment, when I was sixteen, is when I hit “peak woke.” I could not and cannot suffer the arbitrary establishment of different degrees of personal responsibility by determination of immutable characteristics like race or lineage. This concept is racist in and of itself; wherein, some are either assigned unfairly high expectations, and some suffer the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Been a Conservative all my life. As a young teen I was exposed to the John Birchers. Told my Dad about it and he freaked out. In hindsight it was obvious he was a Buckley-ite. But at least he kept me from going LibTard. (BTW, I was born in ‘51)
The Duke fiasco was my “woke” moment as well.
And then during the Trayvon “thang” I found “The Conservative Treehouse (CTH). And someone there posted a link to…
Western Rifle Shooters Association. I go there every day.
And also found Chateaú. Heartie (sp…sorry) who has since been deep-sixed by the “Gods” at WordPress.
So here I am.
My breaking point occurred in the early 1990’s, long before the term “woke” entered the popular lexicon.
I moved to St Louis with my wife & baby boy to take an engineering position at a local company. We fell in love with the cultural attractions of the city and its old neighborhoods. Against the warnings of coworkers we bought a house and became urban pioneers. After all we were open minded and not racist.
It didn’t take long for the steady, low level chaos of life in the city to make us question our enlightened beliefs. The occasional sound of gunshots, gang graffiti on the neighbor’s wall, etc.
The wake up call came one sunny September Friday afternoon. A few blocks from our house was a little Catholic school (our son attended nursery school there). A guy that was my age got off work from the St Louis Boy’s club (he was a counselor) and went to see him mom who was working at a charity fish fry at the school. There was a hand made sign with little red fish on the front lawn advertising the event. As he approached the school he saw a couple young black teens ripping up the sign, he confronted them and they shot him dead. It was later determined that the kids were in the local crips gang and they took offense at the red fish on the sign (color of the bloods gang).
Afterwards I attended a neighborhood meeting to hear a police captain discuss the investigation. Before it started I overheard a couple older white gentlemen discussing how “we” were at fault for the murder since white people had created the environment for gangs to flourish because our racism had left those unfortunate young kids with no other choices. I will never forget that.
From that point on we wanted to get as far away from that city as we could. But it took almost 3 years to sell our house.
On the night the buyers submitted their offer there was another shooting a couple blocks away. There was a little community outreach program that taught disadvantaged kids to fix up old bicycles they could then keep. The guy who ran it was shot by a couple gang bangers (he survived).
Fortunately the buyers either didn’t know or care about the shooting.
Wow.
Oooooh, this one is a thinker. Chiming in here from Brooklyn, NYC.
Beyond the MySpace era, hard to read white-on-black text, I have some serious questions about the author’s agenda, origin and intentions with this piece.
I read the meandering thing top to bottom, and have initially concluded this may be one of the most sophisticated, and therefor most dangerous (at least in terms of strategy, if not this article) pieces of propaganda I have ever seen. I have bookmarked it for further study.
I find their co-opting of a handful of urban phrases (including the titular “woke”) to be a deeply concerning wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I will bet you a Coke that it was sponsored, and that I will find evidence of such.
The viewpoint throughout this piece, that the tide has already turned, and that now the majority and oppressors in power are vegan trans people of color out to scold you for your misuse of pronouns and poor recycling etiquette is patently inconsistent with actual current power dynamics in the US.
And yet, simultaneously, it is skillfully tuned to folks such as yourself that have a foot in each hemisphere, and feel discomfort at the thought of a coming shift to the patently flawed status quo, especially in Portland, where you constantly have to hear non-white, non-straight, non-US-born, not-always-men whining about things not being ‘fine as they are’.
I’m working on something bigger and don’t have time to get into this tonight for you and your very visibly small audience, but I thank you for bringing this piece to my attention, and we will be exploring it’s quiddity at a further date, pending the breadth of it’s influence.
In the meantime, you know- stay woke, dudes.
Next time come heavy or don’t come at all. Trump 2020.
Tuck – my good dude,
You harsh James’ piece with some petty insults (text color – really?), then proceed to describe it as “one of the most sophisticated … pieces of propaganda” you’ve ever seen.
Please keep “working on something bigger” and then grace some other audience with it. It really sounds like something I’d be interested in learning less about.
I cut off an emotionally abusive “friendship” 2 years ago—someone who constantly questioned my motives and read insults into everything I said & did (nothing to do with race/gender/etc… pretty sure there was a PD at play). After that, my false accusation/guilt-trip sensors were pretty testy [“fragile“]. Later, I was regularly in conversation with someone who couldn’t stop talking about all the instance of racism she was seeing EVERYWHERE. When I tried to encourage her to “believe the best about others’ motives until you have evidence to the contrary” she looked at me with disgust. I continued hearing from her every single vocab word in your woke glossary. Then I providentially ran across Neil Shenvi’s work, who then led me to yours. I’m so thankful that you guys have given me the categories to understand and vocab to name what I’m seeing.
^both of these people were “Christians,” yet their behavior left me so unsettled.
Wokeness is especially hard to stomach from preachers/teachers. It has become self-righteous, others-burdening neonomianism. Racism becomes the ONLY sin. Atonement is impossible. There is no Gospel in this ideology. Not to mention, the other (very real) sufferings in the congregation are not acknowledged, sympathized with, or counseled.
PS: I’ve read you don’t believe my Jesus, but I thank Him anyways for making you reasonable and charitable (in His image), & I pray for you often.
“I’ve read you don’t believe my Jesus, but I thank Him anyways for making you reasonable and charitable (in His image), & I pray for you often.”
It’s good to see decent people either side of the religious divide standing up to this toxic nonsense.
Woke breaking point: when a friend told me to assume I am a racist as a starting point and work from there. When I was told by two other friends that I hadn’t reached my enlightenment but to keep doing the work. <<classic CRT language that I didn’t know at the time. When a prominent pastor friend said blanketly to all pastors: if you don’t preach against racism from your pulpit this Sunday, I won’t shake your hand ever again. When another pastor friend accused all other pastors of hiding from racism talk because they were afraid of losing tithes. When another pastor friend told everyone on his Facebook who had ever used the phrase “I don’t see color” to repent.
Thank you, Mr. Lindsay, for a great article and advice about bringing up the question with people who may be hostile to the question. I agree on both fronts: the question and the manner in which to ask it to elicit a contrarian thought.
If only we could go back in time and ask the same question of some Germans in the late 1920s up to early 1933 before Hitler became Chancellor. Or further back talk to the French people between the storming of the Bastille and the early 1790s before Robespierre and the Jacobins instituted their Reign of Terror. I would hazard a guess that many of the lines you would hear would echo the lines from this article albeit tailored to the context of those times.
Truth becomes the ultimate subversive thought as it was in Orwell’s 1984.
As Orwell said, “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four (the truth). If that is granted, all else follows.”
From 1984:
“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
Now substitute X chromosome + Y chromosome = Male in the equation above or X chromosome + X chromosome = Female in the equation above vs. the 267 or whatever it is different genders that have been conjured out of thin air and it is obviously apparent that we are living Orwell’s 1984 today.
Thank you for this essay and the opportunity to share. I am at a large flagship university and was part of diversity and inclusion task force. Last year when I suggested that we make a plan to ensure that our rural students (who are often first generation, less affluent, more religious ) felt welcomed and included (we have had some bullying incidents due to hostility toward conservatives), my colleagues looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head. Then when I attended a student red/blue workshop hosted by the philosophy department to help students overcome political polarization, I was gossiped about. I’m now having to endure my son’s deep disappointment (he is a student at my university) that I could be so hopelessly “sexist” because I believe biological sex cannot be dismissed as incidental. I appreciate that he respects me enough to try to change my mind, but it is a strange place to be as a mother and a scholar of gender and human rights. I feel genuinely afraid of what the future holds.
The NAZI’s and the Communists put a lot of effort into children reporting their parents. Unfortunately pseudo sciences have eaten universities from within. I suspect if you don’t toe the line and apologise for your heresy your career will be in tatters.
I was fired for standing up to woke people, who are largely funded by the government. Whatever happened to the separation of church and state. Woke is a religion.
Anyone else notice silent the feminists have been since Tara Reade, who had more evidence than Ford and Anita Hill combined.
Insisting that people like Bruce Jenner and Bradley Manning are females was my line. It’s been downhill ever since. Saying “white lives matter” or “it:s okay to be white” is a potential hate crime and a section of Seattle has been turned into Afghanistan. People have lost their minds.
Dr. Lindsay,
I sense your interest in the “woke” has more to do with the profoundly religious nature of neo-Marxism and the point when true believers can no longer reconcile their blind faith to reason…and it might be said the existential threat to Christianity is the same; two extremes yet both share the same fatal flaw. Imagine the angst and discord within both camps when they are confronted with an empirically evidenced being that chose the title “God” disinterested in what either believes.
As a mathematician you might appreciate an ineffable intellect and power leaving a mathematical key hidden in plain sight in history that equals the chances one man teaching for two years yet leaving no physical trace or writing could change the world like no other before or after; the deaths of Jefferson and Adams on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence…an event calculated at 1.67B to one odds not factoring they were the 2nd and 3rd presidents and most responsible for the founding documents.
The key…two men, 50 years, 250; start with the fall of the 2nd Temple in 70AD and walk through history in 250 year increments.
You have my email address and if you are curious I will provide stunningly accurate matrices on multiple axes spanning 6000 years defying the probabilities mathematics of Blaise Pascal who after a vision wrote “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude.”
The “woke” will soon be wide awake.
Thank you for sharing this. Just looked up Blaise Pascal. I agree. There is a mystery and a goodness to nature that works upon humans in miraculous ways. While this is a trying time, and we are at a perilous moment – there is a golden age ahead that is unthinkable to most. What we’re seeing is the end of one system and paradigm before we move into the next (digital). Let the woke tear down all the physical institutions. It will only hasten the transformation of our society from caterpillar to butterfly. Love to you all. And thank you James for your insight and your reason.
I hit my limit when I applied Umberto Eco’s definition of fascism. While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
However, the militant Neo-Puritanism of the SJW Red Guard turns out to be indistinguishable from the “fascism” they cannot define but believe they are fighting.
I have some comments to make about “Wokus Pokus” using Eco as a template.
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The hysterical gnostics of BLM and Antifa are the culmination of the Gramscian Marxist tradition combined with enraged postcolonial Black Power writers like Fanon. The fact that most of the people in the mobs are quasi literates who are probably unaware of their intellectual enablers like Marcuse, does not mean they lack a tradition.
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
From Feyerabend and Foucault and other intellectual vandals touting indictments of oppressive regimes of discourse to “women’s ways of knowing” and “indigenous ways of knowing”, Reason and “Western Science”, turns out to be racist and sexist and homophobic and the whole litany of oppressive things because it marginalizes better local traditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Vandalism, arson, theft, violence and intimidation are now legitimate kinds of expression by the oppressed, provided they are directed at and engaged in by the right people. Opposing speech and even silence is violence. Wearing a MAGA hat is racist violence, trashing stores and looting $300 sneakers is a nonviolent protest against white supremacy.
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Transvestites used to exist but stopped. They don’t exist because they are transsexual women, not men in dresses. You can’t say what was obviously true fifteen minutes ago because it is disrespectful and stigmatizes transgender men, who have insisted without the possibility of being contradicted that they are women and would also like to avoid being described as delusional, because they so clearly are. It seems that they are whatever they say they are, because they say they are. This is our pomo Lysenkoism, pseudoscientific bullshit that is politically enforced. Disbelief in this fairy take or even asking questions about this new dogma is transphobic violence. Cancel culture says you’re transphobic if you ask how a man can be able transform himself into a women by announcing that he has, but he is unable to transform himself into a cow by the same process. Why can’t someone “identify” as bovine? I do. And I am. After all, cows are socially constructed.
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Down come the statues of Columbus because all white people are invaders and usurpers who stole indigenous land centuries before they were born. Indigenous peoples that the European explorers found did not did not exterminate and displace other indigenous peoples because they got the deed to the Americas from God and in the 14,000+ years North America was inhabited, terror and genocide didn’t happen. Indigenous peoples were morally superior, not just technologically inferior to European land thieves because when they exterminated other groups, there were no new epidemics and it was a fair fight between mostly neolithic locals. Thus the United States is illegitimate and the world’s evils were caused by white men, so hate and rage and envy are now virtues which will end racism and capitalism and heterosexism and broken hearts and homesickness once we’re all reeducated to think in the right way and accept that whiteness is the mark of Cain.
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
It turns out that social frustration and feelings of humiliation are as powerful in racial minorities and Black Bloc lumpenproles as they are for middle classes. Hate is justice is good.
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
The diabolical intersectionality of straight, white, wealthy and male is the source of every one the problems that BLM and Antifa are interested in solving. The victimhood noise machine gets revved up only when racist white men attack a black victim, like the Duke lacrosse team.
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
We must fight the Power because straight white men are destroying all of our lives with capitalism and racism and homophobia and transphobia and verbal violence and fascism and Trump and we’re all very lucky that street violence is a plausible strategy for overthrowing the US government, given that it was so effective in 1968.
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
There is no alternative to leftist Manicheanism. You are either part of the antiracist/antifascist/anti-American street mobs or you are a fascist who must be vilified and threatened, dispossessed and killed. Wokeness is a gnostic cult like Jacobinism bent on a revaluation of all values in favor of a Puritanical antinomian hedonism, using intersectional lingo to hold all white people accountable for what other white people did centuries ago, but not to hold all black people accountable for the rioting other black people (or even the perpetrators themselves) did this week.
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
One of the wonderful things about Antifa is that since they understand Lenin’s point that all benighted workers can achieve is “trade union consciousness” and only the vanguard party can have ”revolutionary consciousness”. Thus Antifa, overwhelmingly composed of alienated white college dropouts with anomie poorly hidden behind slogans substituting for ideas, has taken up what Kipling called the “white man’s burden”, vandalizing and looting and burning black communities on behalf of the benighted people of color that actually live there because of the locals’ limited understanding of what is best for them. The Black Bloc that has coordinated these astroturf riots are political examples of arrested development, where emotional problems with authority are expressed in destructive psychodrama.
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Choosing a path to kamikaze self immolation like Che Guevara is a template. The fact that Che heroically wanted to launch nuclear weapons at the east coast of the US during the Cuban Missile crisis, thereby creating nuclear Armageddon, makes Che T-shirts de rigueur for social parasites with Daddy issues who are theoretically willing to die for the cause but are practically unwilling top part with their cell phones, much less their lives.
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Ironic rejection of reproductive sex and family means all orgasms are created equal. Hump the pooch as Peter Singer writes. Pop science has been weaponized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtJFb_P2j48
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Riots by Antifa and BLM are intensified by and legitimated and catalyzed by lies and corruption spread by the Main Stream Media, who long ago stopped pretending to report the news and are in fact political players pursuing the class interests of those who staff them, just like the BBC. The NYT ran a new “history” by BLM amateurs called the 1619 Project. It won a Pulitzer Prize and it is a fraud. Real historians pointed out that the 1619 Project is both dishonest and factually wrong. In proposing that the eighth or so comprising the enslaved fraction of the American population amounted to everything worth remembering about American history, they were simply laughed at by professional historians, because the pros know what they are talking about and the distortions and mistakes are obvious. I have a PhD in American history and I have forgotten more about American history than these “activist/journalists” have ever known. The 1619 Project was simply propaganda like Zinn’s old Stalinist agitprop and the bullshit that emerged was real amateur brain surgery, as with the clever thought that American history began in 1619, a century and a half before America was founded. The merely white settlers who founded Jamestown in 1608, eleven years earlier, were prevented from beginning American history by the absence of slaves to oppress. This idiocy assumes that everyone in the past shared these writers’ monomania about race. Yes I’ve heard critical race theorists insist that everything is about race, but I’ve also heard various other, insufficiently medicated people insist that the Bible reveals that everything is about Jesus or markets reveal that everything is about money. The 1619 Project is a pack of lies is designed to foment racial conflict and it is currently being developed for use in primary and secondary schools. The NYT is no more reliable than Fox News or Pravda or the official Chinese News Service.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
I’m Mike and I use he/his pronouns because I am a man. What we need now is a vast matrix of new and everchanging pronouns to prevent microagressions against the liberating new gender identities that are all the rage. This is not a pathetic cry for help from kids who desperately need attention, it is a recent discovery by some deeply maladjusted people with advanced degrees who dogmatically insist on the collective solipsism that the universe is socially constructed make believe. They further claim, on the basis of their superior powers of moral discernment, that it is all too easy to make people who are gender nonconforming feel “unwelcome” and “unsafe” by failing to validate their authentic identity as a neutrois or a demiboi or genderqueer or a two spirit or any of the dozens of other varieties on the new spectrum of gender reality that have replaced the oppressive sexual binary. Their demand is a very reasonable radical modification of every other Anglophone’s speech, effective immediately. Questioning this new ukase, much less denying it, is violence. Only flattery and remorse for being oppressive are acceptable and even silence is violence that needs to be criminalized. Ripley’s believe it or not has now become America’s believe it or else, since belief in the gender spectrum is now compulsory. The governments of various states and cities has made “misgendering” a civil offense with a fine of up to a quarter of a million dollars. The WHO and the CDC recently released world and US statistics regarding the differential lethality of the Covid virus. It turns out that males are almost twice as likely to die from the virus than females, This is great news for agender, maverique, novigender, aporagender, and the other new gender identities. Neither the WHO or the CDC has any data indicating that even one of these gender identities had been stricken by the virus, much less died, which means that there are only two possibilities. Either all genderqueer people have 100% immunity to the virus, perhaps from majoring in queer studies or some other intersectional critical victimhood pseudo discipline. Or, alternatively, their imaginary gender identities are 100% make believe, like all the other make believe new genders on the make believe gender spectrum.
NOTA BENE
The point I am making is that the violent left is as “fascist” as the Klan and the Nazi goons who SJWs take to represent the rest of America, especially whites. If a stereotype like “Karen” were deployed against any of the sanctified groups, say referring to black men as “Sambo” or homosexual men as “Nancy”, the media would facilitate and instigate the demonization of such usage and those that trade in it. Except for Karen, because white women deserve it, just like white men.
I have no problem making directly analogous arguments against genuinely racist, violent alt Right. They are all too real and I want nothing to do with them. They are anathema to me and I will work to defeat any populist movement or Republican faction that makes any coalition or has any truck at all with the dangerous, paranoid scumbags connected to the Boogaloo, QAnon, Pepe the Frog Holocaust humorists, Incel Jack-Offs going their own way, Antisemitic conspiranoia skinheads and their ilk. These people are both Anti Christian and Anti American and I refuse to concede my country or my culture to this vermin.
I do not approve of mob actions but I have been for about the last 40 years in favor of removing from public grounds, but not destroying, all Confederate monuments. I am no more interested in compromising with the genteel neoConfederates in the League of the South than with the trogdolytes hiring planes to pull the Stars and Bars because there is not enough race baiting at NASCAR races. The Neo-Confederates and their make believe war of Northern Aggression, fought over States Rights and the Tariff but not slavery, continues the revanchist tradition of mythologizing and creating an imaginary moral virtue for men who would risk death in order to keep other people enslaved. They are the right wing version of the 1619 Project, diligently propagandizing to create a veneer of legitimacy for their ancestor’s treasonous attempt to destroy America and perpetuate slavery.
I’ve had it with what are potentially real fascist groups, not merely as an undergraduate shibboleth, but visible on the political antipodes.
Wow, I had a hard time keeping up! What Eco book are you referring to? It sounds interesting.
CJ,
I now realize I think a Josh Jones may be the original author of this statement. It was originally (at least it was also) posted here in November 2016.
That post links here.
Still, quite a find by Mike.
Astoundingly good read. The problem with where you stand is that, like most clear thinking people, you stand there alone. You see the cultural marxists for what they are. You know the media and institutions that pander to them will eventually, to their surprise, be picked off by them. Your knowledge and intelligence is broad and obvious but to complex for most. Unless you can distill it down and communicate it simply you will be easy for the rapid left (or right) to destroy. There’s a reason mao and Stalin attacked intellectuals.
Andy,
Mike actually adds quite a bit of elucidation/clarification, his own insights, to the original post.
Mike,
Phenomenal. I’d love to see this fleshed-out into a full article, although I don’t know if even areomagazine or newdiscourses would even be brave enough to publish it.
My woke breaking point was the Duke Lacrosse Team and the false accusations of rape from 2006. The prosecutor in that case was so egregious in pursuit of those boys, that his name became a verb. To be “Nifonged” meant to be falsely accused and put through the wringer as a form of alternative punishment, for the sake of a public mob and social justice. That case previewed it all, including class, race, and gender-focussed tensions.
In particular, I raptly followed the work of KC Johnson and his blog, “Durham in Wonderland” that provided the best and most accurate description of this descent into madness. A close examination of that case, with all the twists and turns, including letters from Duke faculty and community leaders, public demonstrations and marches, responses from various authority figures, and the obvious exculpatory evidence, all provided an early warning sign of what was to come in the next 15 years.
I was amazed at how disappointed the entire SJW crowd was when this was shown to be a complete fabrication. It was the rare case where a public official exonerated those charged and stated the INNOCENCE of the boys involved. The DA lost his law license, and the accuser ended up with further legal problems shortly after this withdrew from the public consciousness.
The most recent victim to be Nifonged appears to be the Atlanta Police Officer charged with an open-count of murder for defending himself against an armed suspect clearly shown on video resisting arrest, stealing a taser, and firing it at the officers. In a you-can’t-make-this-up moment from that case, the charging DA in just the prior 2 weeks, had held a news conferences to state that a Taser was, in fact, a deadly weapon. Within 2 weeks, that standard changed once the mob came out for their pound of flesh.
It’s too late. We’ve already reached the tipping point and crossed the Rubicon. The only question is, when will we play out the remainder of this repeat of the Reign of Terror.
Great comments and feedback Jose! I couldn’t have said it better!
Well, it’s quite telling from the comments that your readers’ breaking point remain quite un-woke: “boys dressing up as girls”.
That’s not to say that any social movement can go too far, but it’s quite premature to ask about “woke breaking points” when most white Americans don’t believe structural racism is real or that transgender individuals have rights.
Guillermo Avila,
I recommend https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/26/is-white-fragility-training-ethical/
Dislodging one’s own deeply entrenched cognitive distortions takes a lot of intentionality. Good luck!
Gender is only applicable to languages. There are only two sexes, male and female. Trands doesn’t exist in the physical, only in a confused mind. Raysist doesn’t exist, please call it what it is “prejudice”! You must be “woke” whatever that means.
My woke breaking point occurred when I first heard the word “woke”. I mean, what nonsense. And of course it was not a breaking point but a breaking and ongoing reflection as the term began actually to be taken seriously by intelligent people I knew. These days, thank goodness, “woke” has finally begun to take on a negative connotation, as it should, and you can mock yourself and by extension others when you claim you’re simply not woke enough. The tyranny of woke groupthink remains, at least in public, but I hope it’s not wishful thinking to anticipate as the term humorously dies away that we will in turn recover our collective sense of humor–otherwise stated, our sense of decency.
It was the realization of the overwhelming conformity of the wokers – I tell people now I’m not interested in their opinions because I know exactly what they think about everything. They don’t like – too bad.
My woke moment came when my college-age daughter said that she had “white privilege”. Never mind that I grew up in a coal mining town and only through my sweat, sacrifice, and determination was I able to provide her with a middle class life. That phrase, combined with the “(fill in the blank)…of color” (I first heard it in 1987) language (which implied a special ranking for people who had more melanin than me), implied that somehow these “groups of color” suffered more than a white girl from a coal mining town in Appalachia. This woke culture is racist to its very core and will be the undoing of all of the great accomplishments of the civil rights movement.
I am not certain when the term “woke” came to prominence, but my line was crossed long before I was aware of the term. I recognized the inherent dishonesty of social justice activism in the 1980s as a teen. That was around the time I first noticed an open attempt to stifle debate by declaring certain opinions or beliefs verboten. I was deeply involved in the hardcore/punk scene at that time. I started playing out with bands when I was 14. The punk scene in the 1980s was a hot bed of social and political activism. At our shows we had hard left anarchists, socialists, right wing nationalists, libertarians, gay rights activists, skinheads (white supremacist and traditional). It was a microcosm of competing “fringe” beliefs. Obviously there was conflict. Sometimes that conflict led to violence. More often than not the crowd self regulated, and everyone had fun, or as much fun as their teen angst permitted. Most of my friends and band mates were apolitical. We were in it for sex, drugs and rock and roll (in that order). That lack of preexisting deeply held beliefs made us prime recruiting targets for activists. On any given night, I would be approached by at least 3 people with a political or social agenda. If I thought there was a possibility of getting sex or drugs out of it, I would pretend to listen for a while. The main groups to evangelize were the anarchist/socialists and the neo-nazis. Being a natural contrarian I would usually wind up assuming an adversarial position at some point. Usually when the prospect of sex or drugs was outweighed by the prospect of having to suffer through their sermon. I could end a conversation with a neo-nazi by countering their argument. The conversations would typically end with some yelling, but rarely with violence. The only time any of them ever hit me was when I said Skrewdriver ( a popular White Supremacist band) was awful. I was punched, pepper sprayed, stun gunned, and had countless beer bottles thrown at me by left wing “anti-fascist” types for refusing to join in their crusade to have the neo-nazis banned from shows. It wasnt that I liked them, or agreed with them, I just didnt see the point in banning ideas, especially dumb ones that are easy enough to refute. By the late 80s/early 90s the conflict between the warring factions in the hardcore scene gave rise to the “crews”. The violence from the “anti-fascist/anti-racist” crews was overwhelming. Hardcore was always aggressively dumb, they ruined it’s only charming attribute, it’s lack of principled exclusivity.
Just wanted to quickly say that I experienced a similar progression as you. But I think my very first encounter with a feeling of real uncomfortability and dissonance was as a teen. Andrea Dwarkin had an anti porn organization that had tables set up throughout my city. Donations were being asked for and there were large shocking images displayed. There was a binder on the table which proportedly contained images of women being exploited. I was told I could not see the images as I was a man. This sort of petty and more overt discrimination accumulated in my psyche. Now it seems pre genocidal rhetoric is acceptable in the discourse if it’s directed towards “privileged” groups and individuals. To me this is dangerous insanity.
I have never been woke, and don’t know any seriously woke people. But I know people who tacitly support all the nonsense that’s going on as long as the Dems are for it. It really is a party line thing. I was speaking to one person who is rather disapproving of all the PC nonsense but when I mentioned voting republican as a vote for sanity, or even voting 3rd party, he reared back like a spooked horse. So, speaking of horses, I guess you can lead them to clear waters, but you can’t make them drink.
My question would then be, once you’ve got your target drawing a line, what next? Will it be like Obama’s red line in Syria?
Benitacanova,
Very solid point I’d love to see more “old-school” Democrats, or even the genuinely liberal, address. Who to vote for? What to do? Biden will invariably be a puppet for the Woke.
Most of my family are the yester-year blue-collar, union Democrats. The older ones are totally ignorant to what is going on, but simultaneously don’t actually care: “Trump bad!”
President Washington rightly warned us of such extreme partisan problems in his Farewell Address (most Americans are unfamiliar with it, and probably never will be as his statues are coming down…). Unfortunately, and predictably, the choices are now few for those who remain unpolarized.
I’m a liberal/libertarian Independent. This may be the first presidential election I don’t vote in since 1992…
Your question is based on a false supposition and dichotomy: that there is a uniformity to “wokeness” and that you are either “woke” or past your “breaking point.” If I play the linguistic game for a moment and assume that there is such a uniform ethos, then some of its tenets I agree with and others I don’t. I wouldn’t say that anybody has “gone too far,” I simply disagree with some policy goals. For example, among protesters, the phrase “defund the police” has a spectrum of meanings. Some mean to literally remove all police funding or even abolish police departments, others mean to demilitarize, still others mean to reroute some funding to other forms of community engagement. I am not in favor of abolishing the police, but some “woke” people believe in that. Does that mean that “wokeness” has “gone too far” for me? Your essay made me want to engage but I’m simply not sure how I engage with your argument short of deconstructing it.
Yikes, I think you just totally rationalized yourself out of staying with the point!
I thought one aspect of the point was exactly that “the line” would be different for everyone.
It sounds like you think the author is trying to trap everyone into a specific line – no, the final summary was that we all need to think about it, so that each of us know where our unique line actually is, and therefore are less likely to cross it unwittingly and then expend effort trying to justify it (even though, in our own mind, it’s not justifiable – we already crossed our own line).
But it sounds like he got you thinking about it – all he asked…
JB,
My argument is that characterizing an individual’s choice as “crossing a line” is harmful, whether that line is personal or not. When we view “wokeness” as a specific set of beliefs (e.g. a religion) with some uniformity and then ask when (for us) wokeness has crossed a line, we create an us vs them narrative that I don’t think is grounded in reality.
Let me try this analogy. Republicans make up a political party in the United States. When we say “Republicans” we’re talking about at least two things: the vast number of voters who are registered with the party and the party organization. The party organization has a platform but voters fall all over the place in their opinions on that platform. Some agree with 100%, others might agree with 25%. I could ask: when do you think the Republican party “crossed the line?” The person answering that question could go to the Republican platform or look at party leader decisions and say: I think it was when it supported this policy. If the person answered that way, it wouldn’t be an indictment of every Republican voter, because not every Republican voter agrees with that particular policy!
“Wokeness” is not a political party. It has no party infrastructure or platform. I would argue it’s not even an ideology, although it’s used to describe some. My argument is that making “wokeness” analogous to a political party or a political ideology is a bad idea. It creates a narrative that there is one coherent platform that all of the “woke” adhere to. When you create that narrative you buy into an us vs. them mentality (i.e. They’re woke and I’m not). Doing that would be akin to saying “all Republicans are racist” or “all Republicans support the war in Iraq.” We know that’s not true.
As an alternative, I suggest monitoring our own language and being very clear about what we – personally – mean when we use phrases like “defund the police.” Whilst monitoring our language and clarifying our beliefs, we ought to take every policy or stance on its own terms and not view it as part of a “woke” ideology or movement. If we do that then it no longer makes any sense to ask about a “woke breaking point.” There’s no such thing.
Iit seems to me you just did a pretty good job of defining a ‘breaking point’. What if there began to be a large-scale movement to actually just get rid of the police (or close enough to that) and enough people with state policy level authority had been infected by that idea to begin enacting it?
Sounds like that would be a breaking point for you. Is that the only one?.. or are there any closer ones that come to mind? If you’re not sure then fine. That’s the sort of thinking he’s advocating for in this article.
Simon,
I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible to disagree with a policy position that the majority supports. There are plenty of those for me! My point is that it’s inappropriate to assign a breaking point to an unorganized, undefined collection of ideas that you’re calling “woke.” When you do that you suggest that there is a social movement in force with a defined ideology and I wholeheartedly disagree with that. I am similarly troubled by your use of the word “infected,” which is necessarily pejorative and suggests that an emerging majority can’t in good faith disagree with you (or me) about a policy.
Luke,
First, I appreciate your writing with seemingly perfect grammar. I can only aspire to crank out comments with that level of proficiency. (I’ll bet your texting is in perfect grammar as well. You and my wife… 🙂
Second, I think I get what you’re saying. The point at which you and the author may begin to diverge is where they ascribe Wokeness to being much more organized, although likely stopping short of a political party, you see it as much more organic (perhaps entirely).
I probably lean in the direction of it being propelled by many Influencers with somewhat similar agendas but without anything resembling a coalesced platform.
Perhaps you, the author, and I would all agree the movement is progressing in a general direction. IE, what might seem radical today will appear rational tomorrow. Or what would have been completely absurd yesterday is palatable today. In this sense, what powers it, whether organized or not, isn’t the crux of the matter.
Defining that direction is difficult, but identifying something, or many things, that would mark a line crossed, may help you and I better track the progression. Because when it happens, we’ll be able to calibrate its direction by seeing where it came from, which helps us project where it’s going and whether we want to stay on the train.
Luke,
Your response accuses James of playing “linguistic games”. In actuality, you are the one who has introduced them (as is often the case with those self-identifying as “woke”). It’s probably not worth taking the time to respond to you to try to change your mind, but your post provides an opportunity to showcase your tactic to others, who should be made aware of it.
The game is played (particularly frequently by the “woke”) by employing multiple meanings for a word or phrase – often along a spectrum, with a “strong” version and a “weak” version at either end. The player’s definition can then vary based on convenience and circumstance.
So let’s say I call you a “racist”, Luke. (A “woke” tenet is that all whites are racist, so I’ll just guess and go with that for you. If you agree with that particular tenet you shouldn’t mind.)
Now if you protest, I might say, “Come on – everyone’s just a little racist. Haven’t you ever had a racist thought?” Here I’m using the “weak” form, and you might admit that you’ve had a racist thought at some point in your life. At this point, we now have your admission that you’re a racist.
Later, I now can call you a racist, and tell people that you told me you were one. The fact that you didn’t mean the “strong” version will probably not enter the conversation. As a “woke” person, I can now continue on my mission to convince everyone that the world is full of racism, armed with your own confession.
Your attempt to delegitimize James’ question uses this tactic with the word “woke” itself. By playing the game, you can now be a chameleon, being a little “woke” to some and a lot “woke” to others, when it suits you.
In reality no groups have zero variance, but named clusters of characteristics are tight enough to have meaning nonetheless. “Woke” is tight enough so that very few people have trouble figuring out whether they are “woke” or not; the actual “woke” generally revel in the fact that they think they are, as opposed to the rest of us whom they have gratuitously slurred by implying that we are asleep.
You also play other games, with statements such as, “I wouldn’t say that anybody has ‘gone too far,’ I simply disagree with some policy goals.” If the “woke” burnt down your house, would you just characterize that as an unfortunate execution of a policy goal you didn’t happen to agree with?
My woke breaking points occurred almost simultaneously
(1) the idea that only white people can be racist (since they have all of the power)
(2) the concept of white privilege
My breaking point happened a while back, but I found subsequent lines being crossed so quickly. one of the most important to me was Language. Language is a breaking point. It’s so deliberate. When I realized the words and alternate meanings were filtering out of universities and into the world it made me feel there was more than unfocused intention and I got a sense of architected schema. Syllogistic fallacies and cleverly framed non sequitur now hamper honest good faith conversations. Fascism for instance. They tacked on context making identity pivotal to the meaning. It’s no longer about what it is that you are doing when you are being a fascist, it’s about that identity performing those actions. So you can’t point to Antifa and say. That looks fascist. Normal politically disconnected people will go with this new language, and the media will run with it. You can’t be fascist if you don’t possess those specified prerequisites. Subverting language and how people relate is absolutely villainous.
Now I’m stuck trying to ask my family and friends to define the line they won’t cross, but the lines that might be breaking points become harder to define as clear language becomes obscured.
Long skeptical of its extremism, a sequence of key events transformed my thinking about social justice.
1. Circa 2012, Marxist fellow PhD students criticized identity politics for undermining class politics. At the time, I blew it off as unimportant. Later, when push came to shove, they decided a common enemy was more important than private reservations. As a heretic, I have not heard from them since.
2. A friend was viciously denounced as sexist by a pair of very well-off professional young woman friends. His crime? Suggesting in private conversation that they were privileged. Those Marxist students had been right.
3. During MeToo, A woman whom I respect tremendously (to this day) suggested that we bring in an expert to instruct schoolboys not to abuse women. My wife and I have taught our son to treat all human beings with dignity and empathy. I do not want him to experience a repeat of the oppression of the early 1990s. I will not accept him being singled out, or that he single out women for special treatment. This was my key turning point. I thought I was above this stuff. Then they came for my son.
4. Lindsay Shepherd. The passive-aggressive assertion that people need to be told what to think is wrong. The claim that there is no biological basis for sex is crazy. Still, it could have been an outlier but for one thing: academics, journalists and educated people all attacked her. This wasn’t just a campus thing. It implicated a whole class.
5. The Covington kid. I could not figure out why people were so sure they knew this kid’s mind. Apparently everyone just knew he was racist. Then the truth came out – and the media doubled down. Respectable professionals were falling over themselves to call for the destruction of a sixteen year-old boy because they did not like the look on his face. Our educated class reminded me of the bloodthirsty villagers in The Lottery.
People do not realize that for adherents, fascism and communism did not seem dark and hateful. These movements were youthful and optimistic. They believed that through solidarity and strength of will they would create a glorious future. We have an ecstatic hegemonic elite movement that is: millenarian; conformist; manipulative; reality-denying; explicitly attacks core principles of human dignity, equality, and freedom; wallows in hate; and seeks blood. I don’t expect a dire outcome (internal fracture or broader social disintegration is far likelier), but the seeds of horror are all there.
My woke breaking point was incredibly low: Anita Sarkeesian and her ‘Tropes against video games’ series. I have been avidly anti-woke ever since.
That series was such a blatantly obvious scam, such an amazing example of pseudo-scientific discourse that it immediately alienated everyone who knew a bit about the source material from the feminist perspective. Anita is a charlaten.
I am thrilled to have recently discovered this site. I have shared it with many friends from across the political spectrum in recent weeks.
As overused and predictable as the word “Orwellian” has become, there really is no better way to capture the totalitarian philosophy, practices and dogma of this woke movement.
As President Reagan famously warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
The woke movement deceives well-meaning and gullible young people by using words like “justice, equality, equity and antiracism.” But those words are window dressing that poorly obscures something more sinister – Marxism and a particularly ugly strain of race and gender fanaticism.
Thank you to Mr. Lindsay and his colleagues for their thoughtful and pointed responses, and for this website. I do believe the woke movement, clearly built on a foundation of feeble lies and hypocrisy, will burn itself out. But not before more people suffer the consequences of this new cultural revolution.
I would also recommend to the woke and more reasoned alike, “Life and Death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng. It is a personal and powerful remembrance of one woman and her family during the darkest days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. You will find chilling similarities between the woke culture we see today and Mao’s reign of terror – False confessions, forced apologies, firings, censorship, shaming, imprisonment and eventually, mass murder.
Remember when Rolling Stone published it’s infamous “Rape on Campus” story, about an undergrad who was supposedly gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation ritual at the University of Virginia? That was in 2015. Shortly after that piece came out, a Facebook friend of mine — a journalist named Richard Bradley — posted on his blog about some obvious flaws in the reporting. He did not, at that point, suggest that the story was fabricated; he just observed, sensibly, that the reporting had some obvious problems, and the story was published prematurely.
I agreed with Richard, and said so on Facebook. Immediately, I received a great deal of vitriolic pushback from my FB friends. I remember one person calling me a “piece of shit,” and another saying he “felt sorry for my students.” But far worse than that, someone (I think I know who it was) went on Richard’s blog and impersonated *me.* This is to say, some sicko posted purposefully reductive and clumsily-written statements about the story as “Johnny Mac” or “John McM.” This person took viewpoints that I had expressed on Facebook, but he reduced them to caricatures, and then posted them in public, under my name, to humiliate me and damage my reputation. (At the time, I was a college professor without tenure.)
Still, I continued defending my viewpoint. Rolling Stone’s story just had too many problems. The reporter had not even sought to identify or interview the men who’d been accused. And the story had always seemed implausible to me. (I’d been a grad student and lecturer at two elite universities.) The supposed victim, “Jackie,” said she’d been gang-raped and beaten for three hours over “shards of glass” while a frat leader ordered seven pledges to rape “it.” (That last detail — that they rapists dehumanized their victim by calling her “it” — seemed like an obvious case of gilding the lily.)
Of course, the story soon collapsed. “Jackie” was a fabulist, and the reporter had been a credulous fool. The whole thing was a farrago of lies, errors, and laziness — a case study in how journalism is NOT supposed to work.
But here’s the thing: After the story fell apart, I noticed the woke progressives I’d been in touch with were outraged! They were so, unbelievably upset to learn that a college freshman had NOT, in fact, been gang raped.
You would think that they might have been pleased to discover that the woman they professed to care so much about didn’t really have to suffer for three hours in that dark room, while being held down, beaten, verbally abused, and vaginally penetrated by seven different men. She didn’t really wander out of that frat house at 3 a.m., bruised, bloodstained, and traumatized. You would think these SJW’s might have been relieved at the opportunity to revisit their presumptions, and ponder whether maybe — just maybe! — “rape culture” was not quite as pervasive at elite universities as they had once thought.
But no. In the end, they were outraged because they no longer had a story about a deplorable gang rape that they could have used to further their woke feminist agenda.
The UVA rape hoax was a “peak woke” moment for me, as well. I had abandoned the idea that women would never lie about rape years before—of course they sometimes do, as everybody is capable of anything—but to see so many people I knew, as well as the media establishment, not only go all in all for a clearly-false story but brand anybody who questioned it as rape apologists if not actual rapists was pretty horrifying.
Without wanting to sound too reductionist, the manner of which this virus is hidden in plain sight is most unnerving. I was never caught up in the woke brigade, as soon as there was suggestion that certain demographics couldnt be racist “by definition” I realised this was obfuscation.
To my surprise, erstwhile ‘intelligent’ family members have been totally wrapped in the euphoria of the movement using defensive arguments, that in any other sphere would be dismissed as illogical and almost childish.
What I’m writing is less of an answer, and more of a question; is there a certain level or sunk cost, before a loved one cannot leave the ideology? Currently I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, as woke relatives wont even entertain communication that challenges their worldview, believing any opposition is bordering on evil. All I can say is, well played cultural marxists, you have created a closed loop, where by any attempt to unravel it only drags it tighter.
Excellent article and video analysis, I will try to establish their boundaries and hope it at least plants a seed of doubt in their mind.
Currently the score is in favour of postmodernism, whose game is on course to become the dominant one. In their quest for justice and unity, we will gravitate to an ever more polarized society.
Kayson, I hope you have made some leaway with your family, and friends. Unfortunately, you have discovered what it is like to try to converse, and reason with what we call a “cult mentality.”
My rejection of CSJ was more gradual.
First, the list of demands made by students at UNC Chapel Hill (and other schools) a few years ago made me realize how ridiculous the Woke vision for the future is. At this point I thought CSJ was just silly.
Second was the lack of any evidence base regarding micro aggressions (or even a definition) and the insistence on trigger warnings despite evidence they do harm to the people they are intended to help. This blatant disregard for evidence is unacceptable to me and actively trying to prevent research is beyond my comprehension. Here I found CSJ to be irritating.
Third was the puritanical zeal of the believers. The coworker emails during the Google memo fiasco for example. From this point forward I have found CSJ to be scary.
The very term ‘microaggression’ was a red flag for me when I first heard it since it makes no distinction between unintentional and intentional transgressions and reveals that the recipient’s subjective experience of it is all that matters.
Intent and impact are two different things.
Tom, evidence is racist.
My Woke Breaking Point happened a long time ago working in the heart of Woke Culture in Portland Oregon at the Portland store New Seasons Market a very epicenter of woke. When Trump was elected a lot of people were crying and the store manager bought pizza for everyone (about 300 people) that day. This was not the breaking point but rather a reinforcement. I personally did not vote for Trump and was surprised at the event, but I didn’t feel the need to cry.
I am a big fan of Orwell’s 1984 which is often cited by the woke in reference to such things as “Big Brother is watching you” but not realizing more subtle concepts such as “two minutes of hate” or double speak. I realized long ago that there was thought crime to commit and hid my questions or conversations so as not to alert. I often tried to ask people to articulate what racism was. In a training class, they suggested that “try to hire ethnic diversity”. I attempted to have a conversation on this idea because I sincerely felt it sounded illegal, but then was accused of having a cliche “reverse racism” idea and reported to HR.
A specific conversation I remember was discussing fascism with a coworker writing a report. He pointed out the bullying nature and dominance of the ideology of the masses and how “against freedom and equality” this was. I brought up the point that if there a conservative/Trump Voter working at this store, they would have a similar experience. They retorted that “yeah, but those people are stupid and they deserve to have the fuck beat out of them.” There was no ability to reflect on how easy it was for a population to develop hate of another class/label/designation and utterly dismiss them.
Are you still in Portland? If so, what a challenge it is to be sane in the middle of all that. I was an undergrad and CSJ disciple in Washington state (WWU, Bellingham) in the ’90s – at the veritable launch of wokeness. I’ve gone through several evolutions since then.
My true breaking point was in 2016, in the aftermath of the election. (BTW – I am registered Independent, and I didn’t vote for either Hilary or Trump.) This is my line: the “subversive manipulation” of epistemology. It’s one thing to disagree on the best way to pursue and protect life, liberty, and property (e.g. via a Democrat or Republican, or libertarian, vision), it’s another to entirely misapprehend reality, and then promote arguably the absolutely worst distorted worldview possible.
Not in Portland any longer. Lived in Seattle for a couple years (which was equally bad). But to be honest, it is very difficult to have a conversation with anyone these days that isn’t mind melded with a narrative regardless if they are coming from the SJW side or not.
Wokeness really is the new religion. Agree with us and supplicate begging forgiveness for inherent guilt (very 20th century Roman Catholic). Every person not high enough on the victim schedule has “original sin” and anyone not in the religion is worthy of having violence committed against them. You have the most to fear though. You are an apostate. A former believer having seen the failure of religious movement is super dangerous to that religion and must be destroyed at all costs.
Yes, all the hallmarks of religion – except redemption. The stain of original sin (my whiteness) which can never be redeemed. No apology, no wokeness, no stepping-back, no allying for the downtrodden, no restitution can ever wash away my guilt, my shame and my sin – whiteness.
I spent 8 years in Catholic boarding schools, so I’ve seen cultism up close.
I do not know that I saw a “woke moment”, it’s been a gathering storm of ever darker clouds since the first droplets in the 90’s, I would guess. But sitting in a hotel room in Japan watching the 3 day pillage or Portland (all denied in the MSM) was when I realized we might be in trouble.
But this latest explosion, the speed of it, has taken me by complete surprise, and with some alarm. And now I’m discovering that completely normal, sane people that I thought I knew seem to have caught some nihilistic virus and are determine to pull down the walls of the temple.
I used to always say to people that the next war would be a civil war, and it would be global. But I never expected to see it in my lifetime. Now, I’m half thinking I might not have long to wait.
A group in Marin , California is pushing to rename Sir Francis Drake Blvd as he was involved in slavery.
I asked two especially engaged individuals what eventual outcome they would seek – mentioning Amerigo Vespucci’s much more significant involvement in the formation of the slave trade and the country and companies bearing the name “America” derived from his name – they agreed this may need to be changed.
They then clarified that it was necessary to “decolonize” our nation. I asked if the states named after colonizing monarchs would need to be renamed: Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas… again yes they may need to be changed.
This also means the Stars and Stripes would need to be changed — after all the stripes represent the original colonies.
They agreed all this maybe necessary.
I asked, hypothetically,if all the signatories of the petition to change the name of Sir Francis Drake Blvd would agree with all of these changes, to be consistent.
I suspect when there is a realization this level of change is expected some may start to snap out of it, others may double down with acknowledgment and realization of indeed these changes are congruent and perhaps necessary.
I found this through a post on the New Discourses YouTube feed. Wonderful read, but I feel you would reach far more people if you recorded video, or even audio, of this essay and posted it to YouTube.
There is a massive demand for content from you, Helen, and Peter regarding all of your points of view on this current moral panic. I’ve hunted down every interview I could find on YouTube because the three of you, and especially you, are able to articulate what I feel is wrong about the current woke culture.
I listen to all these interviews and lectures while I work, drive, or do chores. You have the unique view of someone who has actually studied the academic side of woke philosophy without actually drinking the kool-aid, so to speak. I’d love to be able to hear you read this kind of essay.
That aside; where was my line? I know a lot of people won’t understand it, but it was what coalesced into the GamerGate movement. I was an avid reader of gaming websites for years before 2014. Around 2012 I noticed the websites were starting to push a narrative that being white, especially being a white male, were things that one should feel guilty about. Articles with titles like “ Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” started popping up on sites like Kotaku. It seemed needlessly antagonistic towards the largest demographic of gamers. The whole kerfuffle was started by a blog post by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend claimed that his ex had slept with multiple games journalists who happened to mention his ex’s below-average text based “game” in a positive light. Some commentators thought it was a conflict of interest that journalists were positively covering a game created by someone they were sleeping with, especially because the game was (as far as you can get) an objectively terrible and low-effort project. A lot of people commented on how they’ve felt like journalistic standards have been low in games journalism. Then, all at once, the games journalists circled their wagons and decried all gamers as sexist men who don’t want women to make games.
The narrative was created by the journalists, but the journalists were the bad actors in this instance. Nobody could argue with the narrative because they would be called out as misogynists. It started with the games websites. One site would fabricate a story out of whole cloth, then the rest of the games websites would cite the first article, then the mainstream media picked up on it and cited the gaming sites, then everyone believes that the only reason that GamerGate exists is because there is a huge contingent of sexists in the gamer community and gamers can’t stand that a woman would ever be successful in the games industry.
I watched this play out in real time, and I couldn’t believe that gamers were being misrepresented to such a huge degree. Sexist, misogynist, racist, rape-apologist were like magic words that stopped people from looking objectively at what was going on. All it took was accusations of bigotry, and the narrative was formed. Any rebuttals or refutations we’re met with further accusations: “you think there’s a problem with journalistic ethics? You’re a sexist.” Or “you don’t think it’s fair to give a bad review score to a game because there aren’t enough POC in it? You’re a racist.” This is the narrative formed by these journalists. It’s ironic that a complaint about poor journalistic ethics exploded into a situation where journalists lied to create a narrative where anyone who criticized them.
That was my line. I couldn’t unsee that something was rotten in the way a lot of influential people see the world. It wasn’t long before we started to see more “woke incidents”. Soon after, we saw the video of the Yale students shouting at Nicholas Christakis, then we saw Bret Weinstein at The Evergreen State College. Every time someone stood up to wholeness a weird thing happened. Their careers and professional lives were dismantled; companies and corporations would bend over backwards to placate the mob by firing these people. At the same time, there would be a tremendous amount of public support for these people. They would lose their job, but they would swiftly transition into media personalities that now make a living by talking about the problems with wokeness – see: Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Jordan B Peterson, Lindsay Shepherd, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, et al. The narrative is that these are bad people, but there’s a lot of people that support them despite the narrative.
Apologies for the wall of text. Rarely have the opportunity to say or write what I actually believe because the mob usually comes at me pretty hard because of my patently racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic views.
There is video on unsafespaces.com but sadly the video is overly long – 1 hour plus podcasts – what is needed are much more bite size explainers (talking heads appear more sincere and genuine than animation).
Each explainer would focus on specific aspects like these articles.
“Bite-size explainers” are the problem. The internet has created an entire generation, and infected the older generations, almost neurologically incapable of reading anything longer than a tweet. 6 out of 10 shared articles are by people who only read the headline (this was an academic study). Can’t even be bothered to read a few sentences in. The SJ narrative, like all alluring ideas, works because it’s based on knee-jerk, emotional reactions. Until people can consider the full implications of their actions and beliefs, nothing with change. Serving up TED Talk style infotainment will change nothing. It is the root of the problem. “Bite-size explainers” need to be avoided at all costs. People have to read, consider, think it out.
I’d argue that you need to work with the hand you’re dealt. We have to acknowledge that attention spans are short thanks to years of exposure to clickbait-style journalism. It is what it is. You could argue “be the change you want to see” and focus on long-form breakdowns of whatever subject and you’ll certainly get SOME readership/viewership. But to really get your ideas’ and arguments’ foot in the door, concise bite-sized arguments is presently the way to go. At least until collectively we’re
able to slowly inch the rudder and turn this battleship around. I believe that once society begins to show signs of growing out of this infantile, short-attention-span, feely appeal to emotion (I.e. outrage) zeitgeist we can be much more persuasive with lengthier dialogues and whatnot.
Right now though, I believe disseminating ideas is most effectively done through lowest common denominator 5-10 minute messages that can be read or watched while on the flush or during coffee break at work.
Of course there needs to exist more substantial works for people to follow up with once you’ve awakened their interest and curiosity. This website is great in that regard.
Okay, you get the fist of what I’m getting at, I’m sure. Sorry it was kinda needlessly verbose.
Thank you so much for sharing!
No need to apologise. I find it refreshing that somebody actually takes the time to write a coherent and insightful comment. If this were YouTube, I’d give you a “thumbs-up” to express my approval before moving on to whatever captures my fleeting attention next. Fortunately, this is not a YouTube comment section. Nonetheless, I wanted to give you the feedback that people are reading your comment and finding it valuable. Thanks for sharing.
Ditto!
I am almosy 70 years old an not a gamer, but I agree 100% with your view.
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting. Well thought out.
It happened for me when it was no longer a conversation about historical injustices or marginalized peoples but rather a war of attrition. Similarly, it was the utilization of misleading or blatantly falsified information and statistics in order to push a narrative.
I like the idea of this, but am not sure that woke or woke-adjacent friends and family grappling with the question now will prevent them from being frog-potted.
My peak woke came at the same time as my peak trans. It was when I found out that men larping as lesbians are sending rape threats to lesbians who won’t let them act out their paraphilic fantasies with them. And that the paraphilic males are the oppressed ones here. Around the same time I found out about muslim men gang raping English girls on an industrial scale in the UK (“grooming gangs”) and doing similar albeit less organized at this stage things in other European countries (Sweden notoriously) while the people who talk about it get cancelled or straight up erased from social media (Tommy Robbins) and everyone is most concerned with “islamophobia” and I was OUT.
Larry Elder talking to Dave Rubin about systemic police violence against Black people opened my eyes, closely followed by Ben Boyce’s Evergreen series. Up to that point I had been a lazy woke virtue signaller. It felt so goood being morally superior. 🙄
Well, I realize this is theorized differently than race, but mine came with the idea of allowing a boy who identifies as female into the girls’ locker rooms in school because he “identifies as” a girl. I thought of what that put the girls through. To me, all of this is a part of a greater whole, a gestalt of woke.
I’m an executive at a huge media company in the UK and I was recently publicly called on to to count Transwomen as Women in our official government statistics. We have less than 20 senior women in decision making positions and one Transwoman in our organisation of about 225 people. The Transwoman was hired and promoted as a man. She transitioned 4 years ago and has been with the company for 16 years. She has been perfectly accepted and accommodated for. I refused to alter the numbers and was publicly called a TERF and taken off the inclusivity and diversity group.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with our black employees in the last few years. We have a real diversity problem that I have been working to fix. We are not reaching a huge potential audience because we are ridiculously white. There was a real pay differential, I fixed that. There was a real difference in terms in contracts, I was working to fix that.. There were real miscarriages of justice in terms of promotions, I don’t know what I can do about that now. I can’t fix this overnight but I do keep these historical inequalities in mind in everything I do. It’s good for our people and the company. We are making huge errors because we only have one voice in the room. We need diversity to succeed.
I’m the one that woke up in the morning thinking about this. But I won’t allow my truth to be compromised. We can do this without compromising our truth. I will not stand in front of my colleagues and lie.
I’ve since been reinstated to the group because a Black, famous man demanded it to my bosses but I have already given my 3 months notice and taken another job. He had more power points then me so they had to listen to him. I’ve been the one that has cared about this for years but I wouldn’t say that transwomen are women when it came to statistics.
This all happened in the last month. It happened really fast.
I still have the responsibility to finalise the racism training that we are supposed to spend a pile of money on. I have the proposals from outside companies and when I started seeing this strange language and started to get a very bad feeling, I ended up on this web page. I imagine I’ll be taken off this project as soon as I suggest that we might want to develop something in-house. If I have any say at all, there will be zero public confession or forced speech in writing. There is will also be no required admission of being a racist. That is where I hold my line.
I really do care about this but I can’t just jump to the next job every time this comes up. What day will it be when a lie pays my mortgage?
You live in a European nation, yet you think your company is “ridiculously white”?
I don’t understand why you’re here. You seem to me to be the exact crazy person being written about in these pages. The only “problem” you seem to have is utterly slight: you have some intensely insane woke theory that “diversity” is critical to “succeed”.
You seem to be the people who view James as an enemy. What are you doing here?
Don’t worry, I’m not expecting a response: Lindsay explains why you can’t respond.
Her breaking point is much higher than yours, that’s all. So if even she doesn’t quite fit in, it exemplifies quite nicely how far the left radicals have gone and how much power this ideology has on our institutions.
“We are not reaching a huge potential audience because we are ridiculously white.”
The UK is 85% white. Why should your organisation of 225 people have more 34-35 non-white employees
Because if it’s a huge media company I’m guessing it’s likely based in London, which is only 60% white.
Ok , I was never ‘woke’ . I don’t believe that there is systemic racism in our country, whatsoever. So for me the line came right after George Floyd’s death. Yes, that act by (perhaps a crazed) policeman was a horrible thing , very painful to watch. And maybe , he was just tired, sick and tired of all the outright disregard for law and order, and disrespect for the system that he just lost it. Should he perhaps, be disciplined and retrained? I would say yes. But should people riot, loot, burn down cities because of it? Absolutely NOT. They were not arrested or even prevented from continuing this complete and utter disregard for law and order; or even logic and reasoning. We don’t hold these Marxists to the same standards that most citizens are required to live by?
Thank you for that wall of text. Its a relief to know there are such likemjnded people out there who see what I see. My line came into focus during the same course of events as you describe. I havent been able to discuss it much with people because they dont realize how pervasive and virulent all this has become, while I saw it from miles away. Either that or they fall for some of the disingenuous pemises because they haven’t been paying as close attention to this.