For at least three or four years now, I have, together with my closest colleagues, been recognized as something of an authority of the ideology most of us just refer to now as “Wokeness.” Spanning that time, certainly at least as far back as early 2018, I have frequently faced the challenging question of “how did this Woke stuff escape the university and go mainstream?” While we were doing the Grievance Studies Affair, in fact, we ended up in an epic argument about the issue that led to us giving a kind of quirky name to the difficulty we had in answering this question. We called it “crossing the Tim Pool Gap.”
This challenge in communications gained this name for us in February of 2018, when Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, Mike Nayna, Tim Pool, and I all met at Peter’s house, rather by chance, to have a discussion about this exact topic. In a heated discussion that went on for hours, we hit a major impasse in which we could not satisfactorily convince Tim of our thesis, and neither could Tim convince us of his. Tim argued that activists, especially in media, were the primary agents of change in Wokifying everything. We insisted that, while this may be, there was a significant university component as well and, further, that it was the root of the activist mentality. “Ideas like ‘hegemonic masculinity’ didn’t come out of the sky! They came out of academia!” I still remember Peter yelling in frustration. The thing is, Tim wasn’t wrong, and neither were we (there’s something like a revolving door of bad ideas between these groups, who all fancy themselves activists in the same causes). We were so alarmed and frustrated by our inability to communicate the university-to-culture pipeline (or lab leak, as it might better be understood) that we referred to this challenging comms problem ever after as a search for a way to bridge the Tim Pool Gap, or “TPGap,” in our private communications.
This is a question that deserves an answer though, because when something this pernicious takes hold of the core of a culture, we have a duty to understand how it was able to do so, so that, whether our culture stands or falls by it, future societies will not so easily be threatened. As indicated by the existence of the Tim Pool Gap, though, the answer to that question is complex and probably deserves a book’s length to get anything better than a very cursory treatment. Certainly, the roles played by the Internet (thus democratization of information), social media (thus decentralization of publishing and broadcasting), and other infrastructural changes are significant. They are also beyond my scope, and I recommend the reader consult Martin Gurri’s admirable book The Revolt of the Public, if not works by Marshall McLuhan and even the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, for insights in that regard. So too have intentional agents who funded or promoted Wokeness as a tool for facilitating their own agendas or for waging political warfare by turning the West simultaneously stupid and wholly against itself. That said, media and academia also both played a role, as we argued, and I would refer readers to Tim Pool’s analysis of the former and Helen Pluckrose’s analysis of the latter—though until someone (I know, I’m someone…) takes on the bear of Critical Pedagogy in sufficient detail, that latter domain will remain a bit mysterious. I will touch on that aspect here, but I will only touch.
In this essay, I hope to outline a few factors that I think offer a partial analysis of how this societal virus escaped the university lab. I don’t really mean to be so narrow, though, as to insist that the university is the only relevant “lab” or to imply that the media and activists were merely vectors, as we shall see. Reaching back even into the 1960s, radical leftist thinkers, notably including the very famous Herbert Marcuse, were writing that a fusion between the radical outsiders, racial minorities, and leftist intelligentsia (itself a loaded and important term) were to form the vanguard movement to change Western culture from within and prepare the way for what has ultimately become the Woke movement and whatever horrors might follow it, if it is not put to a stop.
Rather than detailing the various structural components that made possible the ascendancy and temporary grasp of power that Wokeness has achieved, I want to outline something like a timeline of when and how it managed to thrust itself upon us, where it was never particularly welcome. Thus, simplifying in the extreme, I hope to shed some light on four (or five, depending on how you count them, not on what two and two equal) phenomena have led to the rapid mainstreaming of the Critical Social Justice, or “Woke,” ideology in Western society over the course of the last decade and a half. I hope to tell the story of how susceptibility to this catastrophic ideology played out through a small number of key events that moved Wokeness from fringe to center stage (hopefully very temporarily). I offer this with the hope that it will help us backtrack psychologically and socially and take a step back from the ledge before its too late, and also to give some account so that others in other times and places may be able to see these manipulations before they become a full-blown civilizational threat.
Preparing the Soil
Insofar as I’ll talk about the relevance of Critical Pedagogy to the mainstreaming of Wokeness, I will say this: had the soil not been properly prepared and tilled for the ideology to take root, it probably wouldn’t have. Ideas like Critical Theory, especially in its contemporary manifestations, which are grossly anti-intellectual and, in fact, not only stupid but also insults to hard-won truths about human dignity, do not take root in healthy societies filled with healthy minds and healthy relationships. People, frankly, have better sense until they’ve been manipulated into a position of susceptibility to its backwards frame of analysis.
The responsibility for preparing a culture for such an infiltration falls on all the players mentioned above, plus on the general complacency of neoconservatives and astonishing greed of neoliberal players throughout, but it lands significantly on the shoulders of the Critical Pedagogists. Behind that fancy term, these are activist “reformers” of education who sought to bring Critical Theory into the theory of education, thus our society’s schools, thus our children’s heads. This, believe it or not, has been a successful push that has been proceeding in the West since the 1970s and that has been generally victorious since the very early 1980s. That means that Critical Theory activists have had significant access to the subversion of the minds of our nations’ youth for almost forty years with almost unmitigated access probably for at least the last twenty of those and the ability to run a full-court press over the last ten.
It’s tempting to call this shift in educational priorities toward the neo-Marxist an “indoctrination,” but it would be more accurate to call it a “reprogramming,” or, with children, merely a “programming.” The goal of Critical Pedagogy in general isn’t to educate students but rather to induce in them a so-called “critical consciousness,” which is to say that it aims to shape their minds to interpret the world in “systemic” thought processed through Critical Theory. This process has much less to do with installing some doctrine or dogma into the minds of the students by force and enforced ignorance and much more to do with teaching them a particular—and particularly bad—way to think, claim to know, and, crucially, to act with respect to anything and everything they might encounter in their lives. Critical Theory demands social activism by definition, after all, so Critical Pedagogy is designed to train students to become generally uninformed, uninformable, incurious complainer-activists in the mold of Critical Theory.
This programming and reprogramming of an entire generation or two has mostly succeeded. While most students in America, perhaps until recently, would not have been identifiable as little critically conscious proto-Red Guards, the cynical and self-hating line of Critical thought—an uninformed yet profoundly radical skepticism not just of what we might know but of why our society is even organized the way that it is, even to the level of basic shared assumptions of right and wrong—wormed its way in some degree into the thought processes of virtually everybody currently under the age of forty, unless they’re traditionally conservative.
The proof of this is in the pudding. The Millennials are, in this respect, largely a lost generation (unless they start bootstrapping themselves into a different frame that better realizes the power of responsibility and freedom to speak), as are at least half of the so-called Zoomers. This is a tragedy even without its being dangerous, and it has mostly to do with so-called education “reformers” ruining their educational milieu with crackpot theories about self-esteem and asking Critical questions about their own civilization (all done against a backdrop of not-so-called neoliberal corporatists screwing them over enough to make Critical Theory far more relatable in their lives). As a result, not only is it highly likely that most Millennials and Zoomers you meet will think at least in some part in this toxic “Critical” way, which mustn’t be confused for critical thinking, as proof that Critical Pedagogy tilled the soil for the Woke ideology (and planted most of its seeds), there’s also the wholesale bending of the university to the ideology that has to be appreciated for what it represents.
It turned out to be a naive assumption on our part back in 2018 that the process of Wokification emanated from universities that, in housing and nurturing Theory, then must have taken it up and stared indoctrinating students in it (or, as above, reprogramming them). “They teach! They teach lawyers! They teach journalists! They teach teachers!” I remember repeating at the time. “How would Wokeness not get out into society if they teach everyone who enters its professional class?!” I still think we had a point, but this analysis is far too simplistic and cannot explain an crucial fact that undermines its credibility almost totally: it gets the Wokification of the university backwards.
Whatever was going on in some fringe classrooms in the humanities and occasionally social sciences departments in those schools, they had only a little effect in directly changing the institutional and administrative direction of our centers of higher learning. How do we know? Besides the fact that, at least until quite recently, fewer than 2% of university graduates left with any sort of “Studies” degree, the administrators have told us so. Their self-defensive claim about the Wokification of institutions of academia is that these changes were institutionalzed after being demanded from below, from the students coming into the schools and wanting “safe spaces,” “homes,” and all manner of protections from the slings and arrows of rather cushy middle- and upper-middle-class life.
This claim mostly checks out, even though there were certainly some activists in their administrative ranks. Generation Snowflake had the administrations by the balls because academia had, following the federal underwriting of student loans, foolishly entered into an unsustainable student-services arms race that, even by the late 1990s, was forcing those once-venerable institutions into a business model that had to attract (with gyms, fancy dorms, and movie theaters on campus, for example) and keep (by never failing them or letting them feel unwelcome or even uncomfortable) students at virtually any cost. A whining minority of Snowflakes in any given institution, by the early 2010s, didn’t just represent a moral provocation to university administrators, but also a credible financial threat under the weight of all those new mortgages and student-services administrators hired to help keep them happy.
So, the Critical Pedagogists were able to till the soil in the primary and especially secondary education arenas for a couple of decades, which resulted in our society sending these disproportionately Critical, self-esteem-obsessed, entitled little monsters (half of whom, at least, had no business going in the first place—another catastrophic civilization-threatening lie we still attempt to maintain) off to colleges that would be willing to do anything to keep them happy. Puppies and crayons? Bubbles? A special room because a conservative-leaning Democrat is speaking in a hall across campus? No problem! Just don’t drop out (and take your gravy-train tuition dollars you’re saddling yourself with crushing debt (and more anxiety) to pretend to have with you)!
For those who had been reprogrammed, even if a rather tiny but terrified and vocal minority, remaking college into a safe-space that taught the only view of the world they found morally tolerable became an increasing priority, and the universities were no longer in any position to withstand those demands. Inch by inch, these already progressive institutions sought to coddle the least consolable until they became, in the oft-repeated words of my colleague Peter Boghossian, “indoctrination mills” in leftist ideologies, particularly the emerging Wokeness of Theory. More accurately, Critical Pedagogy wormed its way into many required courses for all majors while the administrative architecture of the institution enforced a cultural expectation of deference to Wokeness and coddling to the Woke.
This background phenomenon was not merely how the societal soil was tilled to promulgate and accept Critical Theory analyses of the crucial events of the last dozen years or so. It was—as we had hoped to persuade Tim Pool—also the programming bed for the new crops of little professionals who would either work to remake society around them, just as they had done college, or who, seeing themselves as elites with their fancy degrees, would do anything to stay in the good graces of a society that has to think in a particular way to be considered Respectable (more accurately: not Deplorable). That is, universities were training the new generation of professionals, particularly in education and media, that Tim was pointing to as the primary disease vector of the Woke pandemic we’re now engulfed in. Unfortunately, our analysis was too shallow, relying largely on the idea that something as technical and academic as “critical constructivism” (which is the right name for the operating system of the Woke ideology) must have wholly academic origins.
I’ll leave this issue here—it being rightly the subject of several chapters’ treatment in a proper analysis of the broader phenomenon of the Woke bid to take over society—and turn to several societal-scale phenomena that led to the widespread adoption of some Woke ideology, if not full reprogramming in many cases, outside of the academic setting. Suffice it to say that my view on the role the university played, beyond just in incubating and nurturing this demon where it should have been uniquely equipped at several points to have aborted its development, is one of having tilled the earth so that when the events and phenomena I now describe unfolded, conditions were right both to push (through “educated” activists) and to receive the ideology in ever greater numbers in the Western mainstream, especially on the left, but also on the country-club right, which has never had the chops to stand up to anything that looks like it came out of the once highly esteemed halls of the Ivy Leagues, to which, not knowing what time it is between cocktail parties and dinners, they dearly hope to send their precious children.
Barack Obama, Our First Black President
It’s easy—which is to say facile—to say that President Obama, being something like a light Critical Race Theorist and perhaps a Fabian Socialist himself, brought divisive Wokeness into our society directly. At the governmental and policy level, in some regards, this is true—one need only think about the Title IX “reforms” he initiated under the infamous words “Dear Colleague” to get a sense of it. When I name the 44th President of the United States as a central cause in the mainstreaming of Wokeness, however, I don’t mean to bring up what Obama did, however significant that may have been. Politics shapes culture in some ways, but typically more by reaction than by leadership; the river between politics and culture mostly flows the other way. Honoring that fact, I therefore want to talk about the phenomena of Obama’s election and presidency in the cultural realm. OJ Simpson’s preposterous trial notwithstanding, the election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States in November of 2008 marked, to me, the first major cultural phenomenon that began the mainstreaming of Critical Theories (especially Critical Race Theory) in the West, for a variety of reasons.
To understand how the election of Barack Obama—as a cultural phenomenon, again—would lead toward the mainstreaming of Critical Race Theory requires understanding a little about how Critical Race Theory thinks about the world and does its activism. We also have to reckon with what really did happen after the election of America’s first president who happens to be black. (This, I promise, will tie a few strings together for you.)
We have to lie to ourselves from our lofty position in the 2020s to deny that an outburst of racism followed the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I lived in the Southeast at the time, and I saw it and heard it myself: “It’s called the White House for a reason” being a milder ejaculation of racist ignorance at the time. This happened. It was an ugly spot on our cultural fabric that hadn’t yet come out, even as late in the game as 45 years after Dr. King inspired us not to judge one another by the color of skin. Conservatives can say whatever they want about the content of Obama’s character, as the Fabian Socialist remark I made above certainly may corroborate, but it would be difficult for them to explain a proclamation like I just quoted as a condemnation of anyone’s character without considerable racist assumptions being baked into the claim.
How widespread was this kind of attitude? Well, living in the Southeast, I can tell you that it wasn’t exactly common but couldn’t rightly be called rare either, at least not around here. It was, for all its ugliness, typically expressed in hushed tones or private settings, as you might expect in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eight (or Nine, or Ten), but this is where the worldview of Critical Race Theory bears most significantly. Critical Race Theory holds that racism is the “ordinary state of affairs” in society and that the apparent reduction in racism that we have seen since, say, the Civil Rights Era, in fact has been the mere adoption of a comely mask that hides racism more successfully than was required of “polite” society in earlier times. Respectability, to Critical Race Theorists, is a mask worn by racists—a mask that sometimes slips. Barack Obama’s election, to the Critical Race Theorists, caused that mask to slide down a few inches, and not only did they push a narrative of the exposed face of racism rather vigorously, they were able to do so with a bit of we-told-you-so authority that persuaded many, especially in Obama’s progressive and left-liberal fan base (which was large and energized).
I still need to circle back—if you’ll allow the phrase—to the fact that I don’t actually know, even from my perch in the Southeast, how widespread and rampant this latent racist sentiment that the Critical Race Theorists capitalized upon really was, though. Why? Because Tim Pool had a point. The activist media, which we thought was merely corporate at the time, seized upon this narrative and amplified it, likely to many, many times its true scope and certainly well beyond its true depth and significance. They also, I can more confidently attest, pushed it beyond its temporal bounds, for, like any ejaculation, it didn’t last long. By the time the reactionaries got over their post-racist refractory period, a lot of older racism fell asleep, and we really did enjoy a much less racist vibe than before Obama was elected. It bears mentioning that this defies the Critical Race Theory analysis of the situation, but, as it’s all about propaganda and narratives, none of this matters to the people who took it up.
Thus, the narrative that conservatives were a bunch of racist hicks who hated the very idea of a president who happens to be black was leveraged very effectively in left-leaning circles to denigrate virtually all conservative objection and all conservative thought as reactionary. No one I’m aware of noticed that this copied a move well-tested by Lenin and perfected by Mao, but even if they had, no one would have believed them because, obviously, such a thing couldn’t happen here and conservatives are, in addition to being racist hicks, histrionic snowflakes who can’t stand not getting their way or being called mean names (because, says Theory, they fit). Most conservatives, who expressed absolutely no racist sentiment but who did raise significant questions about Mr. Obama’s content of character as, perhaps, a Fabian Socialist and progressive activist, were tarred very successfully by this accusation, which found occasion to be amplified and expanded into the ethos of the counter-movement (the Tea Party, for example) every time it arose. Indeed, it became hegemonic in left-leaning circles during this time to merely dismiss and reject anything connected in any way to a “conservative” source. That’s a big part of how Wokeness came in despite the accurate objections of conservatives who actually could see the writing on the wall.
This growing “reactionary” movement gave so-called “liberals” (who were rapidly growing less and less liberal as they were slowly being reprogrammed toward the Critical and radicalized against all things conservative) plenty to work with too. Perhaps most notably, the left picked up a lot of Critical ammunition in the Birther conspiracy that maintained that Barack Obama was not born in the United States at all and was therefore not eligible to have been its president. This idea, which was pushed most visibly by Mr. Obama’s unlikely successor, was readily turned into an expression of racism and xenophobia by an activist left and its operatives in the media—even if such motivations were nowhere near the minds of the people pushing the issue. This mindreading, though, is the superpower of Critical Theory. Critical Theorists obviously know everyone else’s bad intentions better than anyone, including those who deny them (as a means of self-preservation) and who are unaware of them (who suffer some form of willful ignorance or false consciousness). Slowly, the worldview underlying Wokeness crept through the left half of the Western world, even if hardly a word of the actual ideology was spoken outside of any strictly academic circle.
Now, this isn’t all about conservatives. Obama’s presidency cut the other way too, particularly in his second term. By 2013, I was noticing a very strange (to me at the time) trend in my progressive leftist circles: they hated Obama. Most, by 2013, were beginning to call him names like “neocon,” “closet Republican,” and “conservative.” 2013! Give that date a moment to sink in. It’s passe now—standard Wokery—but to identify Barack Obama as conservative in 2013 was a more worrying trend than I realized, and I was worried about it even then.
Why were they mad at Obama? He failed them. He wasn’t progressive enough. They were upset with his failures to be more aggressive with progressive policies and, very much in particular, his failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, as he had said he would. They were incensed by his neoliberal policies, particularly in the realms of foreign policy and war-making. For the progressive left in 2013, Obama’s globalist and neoliberal tendencies became their own pressure toward what would emerge as the Woke ideology a few years later. That ideology already explained that their hoped-for progressive change-agent as just another shill to a rapacious imperialist neoliberal establishment (the left-wing populists among them are, in fact, kind of right about this).
Critical Theory, which would already have been held in high esteem in progressive leftist circles anyway, has for decades provided the explanation for these Obaman failures of progressive utopianism, and so the radicalization of the putatively “dirtbag left” accelerated through the early 2010s with rage not just at the Republicans, whom they hate beyond great hate on principle, but also at Obama himself. Eventually, this became the full-blast energy for the Bernie Sanders campaign against Obama’s would-be neoliberal successor, Hillary Clinton. Of course, it should also be noted that Critical Race Theorists addressed the phenomenon of late-stage Obama by leveling accusations that our white supremacist society hampered his ability to be a radical capital-B politically Black changemaker by forcing him to “act white.” The Woke ratchet only turns in one direction: further left and further away from sanity.
Black lives matter and Black Lives Matter
In 2013, the teenager Trayvon Martin, who happens to be black, was shot dead by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, under what appeared (there’s that activist media again) to be shady circumstances. Zimmerman was eventually acquitted under a defense that he had been defending himself, but long before this, soon after Martin’s death, a hashtag arose: #blacklivesmatter. This was meant to be an awareness campaign about the kind of violence that seems to—and probably does—disproportionately visit people and youths who happen to be black, and it had grassroots origins. Chances are, though, you never heard the phrase “black lives matter” in 2013, maybe unless you were a progressive who was also mad at President Obama. That would take another year and half.
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, who also happens to be black, was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, allegedly, and incorrectly, with his hands up asking the officer not to shoot him. “Hands up, don’t shoot” set the country on fire, and within the midst of the conflagration, an organization, not just the grassroots movement it portrayed itself to be, arose proclaiming, now with appropriate capital letters, “Black Lives Matter,” because it was now capital-B politically Black in orientation. Throughout late 2014 into 2015, BLM took over cities, blocks, and streets, blocking highways, even to destinations like airports and hospitals. They demanded to be heard. Black Lives Matter! All Lives Don’t Matter! That ignores what, though few could name it at the time, Critical Race Theory teaches us about capital-B politically Black lives. BLM was heard, though, like they wanted. It was a huge, divisive thing, just like it was intended to be. Less heard, however, were organizers on the ground who had been involved in the nascent grassroots organization mentioning that copious amounts of Astroturf had been laid where their movement once stood.
The curious history of Black Lives Matter isn’t my point, however, and it’s only tangentially relevant to recognizing that as a cultural phenomenon, BLM was enormously significant in spreading the views of Critical Race Theory into society. Now, a real Critical Race Theory term was rising to prominence in society. Though third-wave feminist activism, especially on college campuses and in heaps of histrionic leftist think-pieces had already mainstreamed the idea of “privilege,” qua male privilege, BLM successfully launched the idea of white privilege into the mainstream.
This idea, white privilege, is pure Critical Race Theory. It was first described by a radical activist-scholar named Peggy McIntosh, who happens to be firmly upper-middle-class and white, in 1989, lifting the idea from the earlier concept of white-skin privilege, a favorite of the Weatherman Underground terrorist organization that preceded her.
“Check your privilege” became the haute phrase of 2015 as a result of the culture war that broke out around the heavily Astroturfed capital-B politically Black Lives Matter movement and a rare moment of apparent vindication for campus-aged feminists. Privilege, though, while touching some ugly real truths about our country-club elites in society that might really need addressing, is the late neo-Marxist term for the line of stratification in society across which “class” conflict rages. That is, “privileged” means “bourgeoisie” in contemporary neo-Marxism. In other words, with the mainstreaming of the concept of “privilege” in the mid 2010s, Critical Theory mainstreamed further as well, even if the only word of the ideology people grokked was that diabolical p-word. Wokeness was becoming part of our common societal frame of interpretation.
Eventually, the furor around Black Lives Matter largely died out, but not before attempting to fully co-opt the left-wing populist campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, much to his confusion. Attacked from his neo-Marxist flank as insufficiently progressive and cheated by his neoliberal right in the establishment Democrats, Bernie’s campaign was ultimately defeated, and the establishment Democrats identified a new ally in their bid to consolidate their power. Woke capitalism, which would do much in the coming years to mainstream Wokeness, was being formed in that crucible.
BLM obviously didn’t end or go away in 2016, however, and that’s why I don’t know if it’s better to call Black Lives Matter one or two cultural phenomena that were integral to mainstreaming Critical Theories, particularly Critical Race Theory, in Western society. The most significant phenomenon of this sort was the activism of Black Lives Matter that followed the death of George Floyd at the end of May 2020, which was fully encouraged by the activist media, Woke Capital, and the now co-opted (or co-opting) establishment Democrats. Truly, Black Lives Matter activism in 2020 is what brought Wokeness to full ascension in Western society, and it is the most obvious touchpoint for most people, who may think that it arose almost out of the ashes of a police precinct in Minneapolis not quite a year ago instead of being the endpoint of a century-long project that was already well in the process of emerging victorious long before George Floyd ever tasted (probably Chinese) fentanyl.
But Donald Trump
For reasons that are difficult to articulate while being taken seriously by people who still refuse to hear it, the most significant phenomenon for mainstreaming Wokeness in the West was the combined campaign, election, and presidency of Donald John Trump, who would have, if he could have, made America great again. Contrary not to popular, but to allowable, opinion, however, and perhaps against my better sense in saying so in such a plain fashion, this wasn’t President Trump’s fault. Tim Pool had this part right. On the ground social-change activists together with the activist (“Fake News”) media, academics, and established elites bear far more responsibility for the rise of Wokeness under Trump than does Trump himself, as do the legions of everyday country-clubbers (formerly including myself) who fell prey to an induced psychological disorder of the severest kind known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Remember, by the time that Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, we had had 35 years of successful ground-tilling by education, academia, and its professional-class graduates. We also saw a warm reception under the reaction to the election of his political antipode and nemesis in 2008 and reelection in 2012, and a solid year had passed in which Black Lives Matter and other activists mainstreamed the idea that a central organizing principle of society is some new kind of “privilege.” This new concept of privilege has less to do with money and is primarily borne by access to “unearned advantage” in “systemic power dynamics” like “racism,” “sexism,” “misogyny,” “homophobia,” “ableism,” and “transphobia,” all of which Critical Theory associates with a broader evil it calls “fascism,” by which it means something roughly like “a functioning liberal society in which conservatives have rights.” That is, by the time Trump began his (at the time) shocking (now: hilarious and eye-opening) run through the Republican primaries, left-wing and capital-R Respectable American society had imbibed an awful lot of Wokeness and entrenched themselves in a sea of capital-R Respectable norms of fakepolitik upon which Wokeness operates as an immune-suppressing ideological viral agent. Trump’s genius was in disrupting all of this (remember when Marco Rubio tried to make fun of Trump’s genitals, not understanding that only Deplorables and not Respectables can do such a thing?), and they punished us all with a huge psyops that opened the door wide to Wokeness in the attempt to punish him for it.
How did Never-Trump capital-R Respectable society, squishy liberals, and the hardened leftists pulling their leashes respond to this brash, uncouth outsider daring to run for president while being liked for doing so? They mainstreamed Critical Theory, many inadvertently (useful idiots are useful because they’re idiots). They called him racist, for everything. Clutching their own secretly kinky pearls, they called him sexist and accused him of misogyny. The branded him xenophobic, often, in conservative circles, for having the spine to stand up for precisely the sorts of immigration policies they claimed to favor for themselves. They said he hated gays and trans people, despite all evidence. They lied to falsely portray him as mocking a disabled reporter for his disability, which wasn’t how that really went down. They called him a fascist and compared him to Adolf Hitler. They did all this, but far more than this, they leaned right into Wokeness by directing most of their ire at the Great Orange Scapegoat onto his supporters.
A prevailing narrative of the Trump era from the Respectable class was that Trump held up a mirror to our society and, as Hillary Clinton put it (to her well-deserved detriment), revealed that it’s filled with Deplorables. Trump’s popularity with these American Dalit must be explained, however. We must have an answer to the burning question—which is unanswerable from within the Matrix as a result of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem—of what his popularity must reveal about the hidden (read: masked) character of his Deplorable supporters and a society that allows them. Of these diverse millions, they said not only that they were the worst of everything America had failed to live up to but also the long-awaited answer to the question of how the Nazis came to power in Germany. Mitt Romney could have been reading from a script written by Herbert Marcuse until he was, for a time, brought to apparent heel in one of the most humiliating pictures that haunted the internet in 2016. More than that, though, they were identified as white.
The central thesis of Critical Race Theory, I’ll remind you, is that society is systemically racist and that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society, though many people deny or hide it. Further, white people uniquely benefit from this state of affairs and have no motivation to challenge it, though they do have reasons both to deny it and to hide it (intentionally and unintentionally, as they say). Critical Race Theory is that which is said to expose this presupposition upon the world (as though that’s possible, even in principle—a presupposition, by definition, cannot have evidence in its favor). The capital-R Respectables who are in no way to be mistaken for—shudder—Deplorables enabled the Woke activists to mainstream their ideology by disagreeing with it only superficially while reiterating its core thesis. These are what some Marxists refer to as a “controlled opposition” or “sham opposition,” then, when, indeed, they could be bothered to oppose abuses of the “MAGA cultists” at all.
Support for Trump by his Basket of Deplorables was, more than anything in American history, held up as absolute proof that the Critical Race Theorists and other Wokies were right. If Trump was racist (and, per everyone whose opinion mattered, he was), his supporters must also at the least be content with racism, which upholds and maintains systemic racism. If Trump was sexist (and, so Acceptable Opinion declared, he was), his whole base is complicit in upholding systemic sexism. So on it went with ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism (the bugbear of the true neo-Marxists of fifty years ago): Trump is these by Respectable Decree, so the system that supports him must be as well. Appreciate that this represents the mostly self-identifying elites of American society (most of whom have worthless degrees and a couple of quasi-famous friends as their only elite credentials) lending support to the central thesis of Wokeness and Critical Theory: American (and Western) society is, in itself, corrupt beyond repair. How can you know? It produces Deplorables whose Deplorable Attitudes upholds Systemic Deplorability that has no place in our society.
It’s tempting at this point to sit back and say, “holy shit, Johnson, Trump caused Wokeness.” That, however, is the result of the entire capital-R Respectable class being captured by Respectability itself, which had been corrupted. In effect, the capital-R Respectables had joined that motley crew of radical outsiders and capital-R-M Racial Minorities that Herbert Marcuse cobbled together into a political action bloc in the 1960s. What did they share in common? A highly exploitable pathological desire to be capital-R Respected by the leftist intelligentsia that Marcuse set up to round out and empower the bloc in intellectual society. This, I suppose, is as good a time as any to remind the reader that Lenin considered the “intelligentsia” to be those people who were, in one way or another, “intelligent” enough to be a part of the cause in their rigorous adherence to all the proper opinions as spelled out by the radicals pulling their leashes. What was the mission of this counter-hegemonic bloc the capital-R Respectables were sucking up to (thus being led around by)? It was doing its damnedest to become the setters of a counter-hegemonic culture that would despoil the West from within—especially the activist Jokers in the corporate media. But, we heard, Fox News had become de facto state media under the Tangerine Tyrant.
To actually take the time to listen to Trump (he gave actual speeches and press conferences that were full-length, not just CNN-clipped soundbites) is to dispel the ridiculous notion that Trump caused Wokeness at once. The Iron Law of Woke Projection strikes again! Most people, especially most capital-R Respectables, have never actually heard Trump. The only Trump the capital-R Respectables and squishy uninformed “liberals” ever heard was a propagandist creation of capital-R Respectable society and the corporate press. Orange Man was a character designed to foist upon the public the idea that Trump, a person outside their agenda and control, was, in fact, a monster who could only be supported by a population that is at least half monstrous themselves. Orange Man was a Fake News Media and capital-R Respectable intelligentsia creation leveraged to install as taken-for-granted true that society itself is an anachronistic hellscape of oppressive systemic power dynamics maintained by horrible reactionaries who found in Trump a strongman and would-be despot that threatens the very seat of capital-D Democracy. People have to hashtag-Resist. We need, the narrative led millions to believe, a full-on cultural revolution to stop Trump. Good thing they used the Critical Pedagogy-corrupted schools over the last decade or so to make all those Red Guards!
So, I wouldn’t say Trump caused Wokeness to mainstream or even that the phenomenon of Trump caused it to mainstream so much as I would say that the spectacle created around Trump, as a cultural phenomenon, mainstreamed Wokeness more than any other factor so far discussed (with the obvious caveat to be addressed momentarily). Further, I’d say that it Wokeness was mainstreamed by the squishy “liberals” and capital-R Respectable class—being used as the useful idiots they are by the harder activists pulling their leashes—in order to utilize Trump (more accurately: “but Trump!”) as the rationale for a complete rethink of American society and Western Civilization, which we can now Build Back Better than ever before. Just in time for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, eh? Good thing we all saved capital-D Democracy, just barely!
George Floyd
That caveat is, of course, that the George Floyd riots—the BLM and Antifa Riots, more fairly—were the precipitating event, not Trump or anything directly to do with him, that actually triggered the Woke Cultural Revolution in the West. Wokeness, which had been slowly mainstreaming for a decade, seized the cultural throne of the West when George Floyd died. In that sense, while I’ve used the metaphor of tilling the earth up to this point, it would perhaps be more resonant to replace it with one of pouring gasoline all over the structure of Western society. The corruption of education by Critical Pedagogy spread some fuel and handed gas cans to a generation. Those students-turned activists looked upon the phenomena of the Barack Obama presidency and early Black Lives Matter activism and began to soak the ground. The corporate press and capital-R Respectables used the same, and then especially the Great Orange Scare, as pretext for saturating all of Western Civilization with enough accelerant to try to burn the whole damn thing down.
The death of George Floyd—no matter the circumstances—dropped the match.
On May 25, 2020, Western civilization was set ablaze with the Woke ideology, which was offered as the explanation and remedy (through the usual, thus thoughtless, Marxian-utopian alchemical magick) to a completely misdiagnosed societal sickness. With the death of George Floyd, a switch was flipped, and Wokeness spread like wildfire through a society that had unmade its ability to withstand its rapid spread. The natural resistance had been dismissed as Deplorable, part of the problem Wokeness arose to solve. The rest of the resistance remained too capital-R Respectable (which is an exquisite blend of clueless, feckless, and self-interested) to mount a defense. Carrying a lance of ethnocommunism into the fray in a fist clenched around real historic injustices, Wokeness rode into and over much of Western Civilization upon a pale horse named “Mostly Peaceful” none would withstand. CNN danced while Minneapolis burned.
So, while this isn’t the whole story, and while it ignores important components like the rise of the Internet, social media, rivers of 501(c)(4) gold, and opportunistic exploitation by the various enemies of the West, hopefully this explanation sheds some light upon how it has come to pass that one of the least commendable and, frankly, dumbest ideologies in the history of mankind has managed to present a legitimate threat of laying low one of humanity’s greatest and, on the whole, most beneficent societies. Where it is my hope that an analysis like this may cover some of the distance to saving my own civilization, and perhaps my own skin with it, may it at least serve as a first step toward a robust warning for others that might fare better should it arrive upon their shores.
In closing, if you want my advice as simply as it can be put: don’t put too many of your society’s eggs in too bourgie a basket. The Respectables can’t withstand the Criticism. Somebody “important” might think something bad of them.
91 comments
The reason you had that difference of opinion with Tim Pool was that his experience was in journalism, while yours was in academia. And Tim didn’t go to college, like most modern journalists.
The wokeness he saw in newsrooms was acquired in universities.
Also, wokeness didn’t escape the universities, it was incubated there and released into the general population quite deliberately.
The start of the woke mess was with Plato and Socrates. They were the first to engage in arm-chair theory at the societal level.
If I was to point to an Ur-event that helped mainstream Wokeness, it would be, in a word, Watergate.
As the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky noted in his 1991 book “The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism” (https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Radical-Egalitarianism-Wildavsky/dp/1879383004), one of the under-appreciated effects of the Watergate scandal on American culture was to delegitimize the concept of legitimate authority in democracy and strengthen the forces of the libertarian (TM) right and the radical egalitarian antinomian left (which would later fuse into Woke Capitalism).
Watergate naturally lead to the Church Committee (exposing the excesses of the CIA), the resignation of Nixon, and the Fall of Saigon (although we can’t know for sure how that would have turned out had Nixon and his successors been in office). The Vietnam era more broadly helped entrench an under-examined class divide over values that has never gone away. It was mostly poor and working-class Americans who fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia under patriotic banners and it was mostly the highly educated (who were attending university in unprecedented numbers) who protested back home. After Watergate, the latter half gained a sense of moral superiority that has never gone away. The long-haired freaks, Yuppies, Black Power and Panther forces, radical-chic bohemians, cultish feminists, introverted university students who couldn’t get enough of Marcuse or Fanon, and other assorted freaks and weirdos were right and the Li’l Abner demographic were “baby butchers” who deserved scorn.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted in his iconic speech to Harvard University of 1978, it was already “fashionable” by that date for “sophisticated” Americans to draw no moral distinction between Western democracy and totalitarian states,
“In 1978, the Cold War was raging, and the U.S. was still reeling from its humiliation in the disastrous war in Vietnam. Anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its principles, its culture, its traditions, its way of life. Some proposed communism as a superior system; many suggested what came to be known as “moral equivalency” between American democracy and Soviet communism. By 1978, to suggest such equivalency had become a mark of sophistication—something to distinguish one from the allegedly backward hicks and rubes who believed in the superiority of the American to the Soviet system. There were many such “sophisticated” people at Harvard. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard to confront them and others.” (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/06/solzhenitsyns-prophecy)
The failure of the Vietnam War clearly provided a clear impetus in the radicalization of “sophisticated” opinion and the shift away from the Kenneth Clarke narrative of American (and Western) civilization (from barbarism to culture to Renaissance to Enlightenment to liberal democracy and the Industrial Revolution, etc) to the Howard Zinn narrative of American civilization (an unending litany of atrocities by wealthy, white men against poor, black, and brown people). Radicals are good at interpreting contemporary setbacks as part of Larger Fundamental Stories About Ourselves. Much as the writers of the 1619 Project portrayed the Trump election as the inevitable consequence of a Larger Story that began in 1619, so the Vietnam War was interpreted as just the latest episode about a Larger Story that began in 1492 of white, colonial imperialists slaughtering non-white victims.
Watergate created a snobbish sense of moral superiority among the highly-educated Americans regarding their radically transgressive and antinomian attitudes has never gone away. While you uneducated deplorables shouting “My country right or wrong!” believe your country is based on Freedom and Democracy, we sophisticates are “awakened” to the fact that is really (or at least also) based on Racism, Imperialism, and Exploitation” (One can add that the seminal article on “White Privilege” was originally published in Peace and Freedom Magazine).
Batya-Ungar Sargon in her book “Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy” notes how an under-examined legacy of Watergate was its transformation of journalism from a rusty, working-class profession for the Peter Parkers and Lois Lanes of the world to a glamourous, high-prestige profession for the university educated (a trend that was exacerbated by the collapse of local print journalism and rise of digital journalism after 2008)
https://thehub.ca/2022-01-27/is-woke-media-undermining-democracy/
On the role of non-profits, here is a brilliant article by the ever prophetic and insightful Michael Lind.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-end-of-progressive-intellectual-life
thank you for the link to this excellent article
the statement below from the article sums up my own personal cultural epitaph — I mourn for something that was a major part of my life from my teens to my 50s (I’m in my mid 60s now) and which at varying times I played a very small, but significant to me, part and which for the past ten years I have grieved as a cultural survivor left intellectually intact and capable of contributing as always but now there is no longer any ‘there’ there — I am left bereft because the cultural engagement to which I had expected to keep contributing to and engaging with until the end of my life has DIED. It is dead and I miss it. And I hate the wasteland that is left by those who killed it. I call this horrible development: Cultural Despair.
“If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds.”
You’re welcome.
I would agree with Christopher Lord that radical feminism was arguably the genesis of Woke thinking, especially in universities. From the start of its institutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s, radical feminism had a notorious insularity as it regarded all other disciplines (and pretty much everything else in the world) as irredeemably corrupted by the patriarchal system.
One quote from George Orwell’s 1984 notes how in the dystopian world of Oceania, “It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.”
Radical feminism had more of this Year Zero attitude early on than any other field for reasons that were somewhat understandible. Pretty much all of the great figures in history that they would have been taught to revere from a young age: the great kings, the great writers, the great scientists, the great inventors, the great generals, the great politicians, the great priests, the great artists, the great explorers, etc…were pretty much all men. Pretty much all of the faces in books and statues in public squares were male including revolutionary leaders. Academic feminism was henceforth a pioneer in the need to rewrite history to elevate obscuries and denegrade those that previous generations revered as patriarchical oppressors responsible for every ill from war to superstitution to pollution or to paraphrase Orwell, “The centuries of patriarchy were held to have produced nothing of any value”.
Naturally, when intersectionality came along it turned even more fundamentalist as the target shifted to “white men” and then just “white people” in general. Susan Sontag even exhibited a proto-Diangeloan attitude when she proclaimed in the mid-1960s that, “the white race is the cancer of human history”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10311-mozart-pascal-boolean-algebra-shakespeare-parliamentary-government-baroque-churches-newton
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1084904
On the subject of calling all conservatives “reactionary”, author/political scientist Corey Robin did a lot to mainstream this idea in the early 2010s. He used all sorts of Critical Theory language (i.e. “power”, “privilege”, “hierarchy”, etc) long before it was fashionable
https://inthesetimes.com/article/born-losers
Never accept their frame.
Naturally, the predictable happened with Obama. Everyone with a brain should have a problem with a black leftist community organizer becoming president of the united states. Being black makes it worse and should make it worse, and did make it worse, but it was disqualifying long before then. Still, revel in your racism as the term “racist” is completely incoherent. Their frame of racism is almost always evil 100% of the time. It’s dumb-dumb talk for dumb-dumbs.
We collectively have to stop being pussies and afraid of the left’s silly, retarded accusations.
When they call you a racist, you respond:
Go fuck yourself, cockroach.
Super interesting and helpful. I wonder if a dimension of Mass Hysteria is needed to pull all this together? It wasn’t just academia, nor was it just the media – it was both. One the fuel, the other the match. But the fact that during this we were all locked up in a pandemic cannot be ignored. Overnight an existential fear that white supremacy became the norm. Hysteria can have serious physical and mental effects. Google the Kosovo student poisoning and read about that…thousands of people, and this was before the internet.
@Sara You said, “I guess Critical Race Theory would say that anytime white people or white culture have embraced racial justice it’s because black or other POC have organized to force the shift (as in the case of the Civil Rights Era). ”
You might find Thomas Sowell helpful regarding this point. I think it was in his book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” that he laid out some relatively ignored statistics regarding the cultural and economic progress that American blacks made after the end of slavery and leading up to about 1948-1950, iirc. Well before what we recognize as the modern civil rights era of the late 50s through the middle 60s. I think he makes the case that the Federal government’s policies, starting with the civil rights act and Pres. Johnson’s War on Poverty, had the (unintended?) consequence of stunting, or even setting back a significant portion of the economic and cultural/familial gains that had been on a notable sustained upward trend for several decades before race was politicized in the 60s. And frankly, the situation has continued spiraling downward ever since then.
So I would say that the reality is almost exactly the opposite of your above quoted understanding.
Sowell is especially hard on those white academic liberals who encouraged the Democratic party ( and it’s pet black grifters)in the destruction of the black two parent family ( so vital in keeping the black population dependent on Democratic party largesse)
For another critical black writer of realism see: Manning Johnson’s anti-communist 1958 ‘Color, Communism, and Common Sense’. Contents: “1. In the Web; 2. Subverting Negro Churches; 3. Red Plot To Use Negroes; 4. Bane of Red Integration; 5. Destroying the Opposition; 6. The Real ‘Uncle Toms’; 7. Creating Hate; 8. Modern Day Carpet Baggers; 9. Race Pride is Passe; 10. Wisdom Needed”
All this got started in academia back in the 1980s at least, when I was in college. I was woke in my late teens/early 20s (I turned 20 in 1989 and was well on the way to wokeness even then, long before social media was a thing). Tim has to understand that the roots of all this go back so much further than he realizes.
I was also woke in the 1970s and you are correct that the whole thing goes back decades and decades. The issue though is that is was not until social media in 2005 that woke went from obscure to mainstream. Rather than tens of thousands of academics and activists and artists and so on being and doing woke, it became hundreds of millions of ordinary people doing woke. Back then woke was only influencing society from the margins inward toward the centre because the woke “influencers” back then were relatively few in number compared to the total population. In the last 15 years, woke became the mainstream and has literally destroyed civilization because it now lives not merely in elite revolutionary journals and films but in every human’s hand and home via phone and computer social media. It is the scale of the social media spread of woke that is the issue and not woke itself. The beast itself has been the same since day one. Only now every single person and societal structure has become the beast. Social media has turned a localized avant-garde into a planetary prison guard.
This is what Tim Pool accurately describes as the algorithmic dissemination of the woke mind virus through smartphone social media.
You should listen to Hegel, Wokeness and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism. James does a wonderful job of tracing the origins of this ‘academia’.
I’ve heard Tim Pool say that he doesn’t read books much. He spends most of his time reading articles, blogs etc.
If you can’t/won’t take the time to unwind the ideological history as James et al have done, you’re going to ascribe the phenomena to what’s in front of you. And what is in front of Tim is the MSM and Twitter Blue Checks.
I regret I must disagree with every heretofore made statement of individual wants, desires and inherent differences except Larry Cox on 6/2 or George Tyrebyter on 6/3.
The issue at discussion is 100% caused and potentially corrected by the often forgotten pineal gland, our PH, our diet and our physical proximity to others BUT it is enhanced by communication over which we do have control.
The pineal gland in each of us determines our color It immunizes us against too much U/V absorption to prevent cancer but handicaps people of color because they can not then absorb Vit.”D” and their immune system is compromised by a life above the 38th parallel. The pineal exhausts itself in defense of the skin of Africans and then fails to provide a sufficient adolescence by suppressing other glands and they become sexually active before the mind is mature enough to temper their actions to ignore pheromones or differentiate between wants, needs or desires.
The result is race wars that become violent since the Pineal glands exhaustion also allowed black males to gain both size and strength ahead of their whiter contemporaries and then revert to a “survival of the fittest” Darwin proven, quest for dominance and power and “equity”.
In two or three generations a portion of blacks who are taught skills, intermarry and adopt a Trumpian way of life and action and self control that leads them eventually to the outcome they desire BUT it only takes one generation when their ancestors accept gene therapy to control the release of the Pineal glands hormones (Melanin/ Melatonin).
This will then focus away from a tinting of the skin to instead focus on maintaining individual dormancy of the controlling procreation/maturation cycle until learned mental constraints of the individual’s will can control it.
This conscious decision to create a better world and alter your Childs’ future will require a “sacrifice” by the parents to make it “fact” both monetarily and emotionally since their offspring will not be “a chip off the old block” and could be seen as a “non white/non black” individual.
Science is now able to change the reality of what God ordained and granted to certain groups (tribes) to sustain life in a hostile environment where shielding from Sun, early maturation, size and strength allowed Darwin’s Theory, not Race Theory to prosper! ;Universally! in plants ,animals and humans.
Wokeness is nothing more than people believing in the Hegelian ideology of dialectics, in order to define their version of truth. Its the same tactic used by Hegelians for decades. Its identical to the tactics used by the National Socialists in Germany, which plunged the world into war.
Dialectics are the primary function of reasoning used by all those who believe in Hegelian doctrine.
Factually these subverted believers think the dialectic identification of individuals as being either Black or White is valid. The real truth emerges with a quite different result. There exists ZERO white humans and a very small group who could be somewhat classified as “Black”, in reality they are best classified as “Ashy” as defined in biblical texts.
The reason Hegelian’s classify people as Black and White is because dialectics only work if they are set out in opposition… War in antithesis will not work with variation present in the thesis or antithesis definition…
Wokeness is only the subversion of humans to believe in the nonsense of dialectics. It factually requires a completely closed minded, unreasonable person to be …. Woke….
Dialectics goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks. Dialects is a method of logical thinking that splits the world into two or more opposing views. And evaluate the situation through all of those views.
But the end goal of true dialectics would be synthesis. Which means that you take on all of those views, evaluate which view explains the situation the best and merge those explanations together into greater understanding.
But that is what the leftists don’t do. They deliberately take ONE view and accept only the explanations of that view. Whether it is the dialectic materialism of Marx, gender-is-a-social-construct, or all-differences-in-outcome-are-due-to-racism.
I knew you were getting somewhere when you saw how funny Trump was. I’m both a privileged member of the bourgeoise and a superannuated Deplorable. Columbia ’64, the son of Columbia 35 and Barnard 34 who went farming in the late 30s. So I grew up – up to my knees is manure on a farm among American dalits. Those dalits, who were descendents of the men who dragged the cannons from Ft Ticonderoga to Boston and blew the Brits out Boston, plus my own daily physical toil taught me that intellectuals, including me, took themselves far too seriously. So when Hillary uttered her would be slur in 2016 I recognised instantly that I was a Deplorable – gilt edged and proudly irredeemable. As a child of 1968, I immediately repackaged Hillary’s remark in Danny The Red’s rejoinder to Charles De Gaulle: “Nous somme tous Deplorables!!” Like any true son of America’s Calvinist soil I know that human nature has the potential for complete depravity because I have seen it in myself and those around me from the beginning. My mother taught me how to read Middle English and that bottomless evil and darkness lay inside us all as well as imparting to me a Medieval metaphysics in which everyone was a child of God, lived in an immortal soul – and had a purpose. So too, our woke brothers and sisters – even if their purpose remains a mystery. I expect, sometime well after I am gone, they will eventually earn our compassion and understanding that they were reaching for the highest spiritual ideals and fell, partly but not completely innocently, into its opposite. In the end I don’t think wokeness will burn itself out until it has taken Western civilisation down. May it be otherwise.
Please don’t take this the wrong way… but
Wokeness is nothing more than people being subverted to believe in Hegelian Dialectics. They actually are not woke, they have been subverted to sleep, and march in the streets to the drum of their Hegelian prophets and task masters. You will not find one who is not continually spewing the antithesis which they have been subverted to war under.
Dialectics are a circular reference of self destruction… That is the truth which these so called woke shall eventually figure out…. when the next ones fighting in antithesis come to take them away, when they are branded as the evil Thesis…. That is the point where they will start to scream
The good point is, most people, don’t follow these Hegelian dialectic ideals. They are smart enough to figure out there is only one blue ball in our universe which supports human life, further, that the human existence is a temporary one. They are out to make the best of what they have been given and the short time they have to accomplish that task. Wokeness simply wastes ones time and diminishes ones chances of making the best of what they have been provided.
In the end is it better to say, I loved and cared for these people…. or…. I hated and wared against these people of dialectic Thesis?
Then isn’t it time – long overdue – to take the Wokers down?
I am sorry to say that you sound like one of the R-Respectables
Dr. Lindsay writes about.
Wow. Great essay, James, though I feel you could have mentioned one important element, namely the infiltration of academic jobs by ideologues. To my mind this started on a large scale with feminism/women’s studies, which introduced the theological principle that the details of your arguments don’t matter as long as your conclusions and assumptions all align with the groupthink. Once this had been established as a new normal, it spread to the other ‘studies’, and also to the professional training of teachers and university administrators, taking over literature departments, history, and social sciences on the way, as is now well-documented, including by you. Your argument that the pressure for wokeness came from below has the ring of truth and congratulations, but a whole academic superstructure had been prepared, made up of people with no real core beliefs or intellectual commitments beyond a commitment to keeping up with fashion. They were a pushover for safe spaces/trigger warnings demands, and before they knew it were engulfed by a tidal wave of nonsense that nobody could now control or resist.
The humanities have been completely taken over. I have a close acquaintance who is a conservative due to his taking his academic training in the Street University of NYC. This made him a complete conservative as he observed the hell of Race Hustling Equity Process up close. He is now an aspiring faculty member in a tenure-track position in a major university in a language department. He walks the talk, but doesn’t believe any of that shit. He knows that until he is a full professor he must hide his actual thoughts. My concern is that speaking lies for 25 years will convince him of the truth of the lies. We’ll see.
I strongly agree they were a pushover. I’m not sure why exactly why. It seems more than being interested in fashion or even the desire to fit in and not lose prestige and security. Why was Hayakawa taking a stand at San Francisco State the stand out exception from the start of it in the 60s? Why did Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather take a principled stand? Or Peterson over Bill 16C? Why are they so rare?
Yes! What we have today began with hard line feminism, mostly from the Gloria Steinem branch back in the 70’s. this is what it has metastasized into.
This is a wonderful chew-toy for the over-intellectual, but you could have just said “Jews” and been done with it.
I think your final paragraph points to maybe the fundamental problem with the effort to fight Wokeness: if the Respectables are too “bourgie” to fight Wokeness, it’s hard to imagine the few remaining “true Liberals” doing the job. I think the defense of Liberalism is an excellent response to Wokeness from an academic point of view, but in the “real world” of culture and politics where the war will be won or lost, we need something a little “tougher”. It looks to me like the only hope is for their to be a genuine meeting of the minds between the #MAGA movement, the true dirtbag libertarian-leaning Left, pro-life traditionalists and classical liberals, but do they agree on anything? Could we put Candace Owens, Glenn Greenwald, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin on an island together until they come up with a common platform?
A short quick answer, which Pool often speaks of, is incrementalism. Also PNW niceness and passive aggression and people’s general decency was taken advantage of. I think a key to understanding the mainstreaming of it all, is to understand the PNW as a trendsetter for the nation. I saw how this all metaphorized and metastasized close up. My first struggle sesh was in 2010, which I did a short segment for the Woke Reformation show.
I think you all may be missing is psychology, and especially mass psychologies as it relates to moral panics. We all see the dehumanizing they are doing, which is in direct contradiction to their anti-oppression values. I am resisting actually DUE TO MY LEFTIST TRAINING. They taught me to never dehumanize anyone, and so I am not doing that with anyone, even conservatives, who they have completely treated as monsters as you say. So the question is why did they flip? How did all these people go from fighting separate but equal to embracing it?
Incrementalism, intimidation, lack of spine, being out of touch with reality, being fed false information, the need to feel connected as the penalties for speaking out are harsh. I think it is a classic story and we are seeing it, Dr. Peterson is seeing it, we are feeling it, I now understand how the Holocaust happened in a very real way. I am not saying we are in death camp territory, but we are in dehumanizing and intentional harm territory, with a side of turning one’s head when one’s team is doing the harming.
Their academic concepts were treated as canon, decided, well researched, not to be questioned. They were spread as memes by people who were trusted. They were professors. They studied this stuff.
People in the PNW are very very nice, generous, open, and in general life is pretty good here esp when it comes to crime (which is changing as we are seeing in real time). It is a very soft place to live, not like my hometown of Buffalo. People here are really trusting, credulous, and eager to be liked. They are not like NY who will disagree to your face, and not care. Here aggression is sublimated to passive forms, and hence things like microaggressions and white fragility makes sense to this psychology as they do not do overt aggression.
People are mortified at offending anyone and basically have been easily bullied/convinced they are RACIST WHITE SUPREMACISTS. They lack the chutzpah, or outside references to understand they are not and/or to resist. For most in the PNW blacks are an abstract concept. They really have not been exposed to black people or black culture except second hand, so they lack a real understanding of blacks as people so the savior complex is strong, as is guilt, which has also been absolutely a factor.
The white guilt, the class guilt is off the charts. People feel guilty for having a home, for having a job, for having basic security. This is fucked up and it is the general operating system that has led to thousands of people living in tent encampments in the PNW. Nobody has the spine to be the bad guy and say this is wrong. That is why I am running for Olympia City Council (OlympiaFTW2021.org) because the current council is allowing my city to be destroyed, and people to live in camps. I have emails where they call the encampments part of our safety net and a “cost effective solution.” They speak of the new normal, and climate refugees and look for ways to maintain the camps, and to maintain people in addiction, and they offer them socks out of guilt, but nobody takes these people into THEIR homes, their guilt is not that deep.
So you need to not only look at psychology, but also the particular cultural factors in the geolocations where this stuff took hold and compare the two. The PNW is a monoculture and that is a big part of it too.
I could go all day. I have so many stories of absolute insanity, cowardice, groupthink. I have been an activist here for 25 years and oh how things have changed.
“…they offer them socks out of guilt, but nobody takes these people into THEIR homes, their guilt is not that deep.”
THIS comment touches on a debilitating and enduring psychological and social phenomenon that needs to be put under a microscope if Woke is to ever be ended. The psycho-social reasons why so many white middle class young (teens to 40s) people are doing these public (struggle session) presentations of pretend superficial pseudo-“moralizing” to assuage some form of inner guilt-shame for being the children of success and wealth creation in the most free society to ever exist. Why are they so ashamed of this? And have been since the 1960s. Watch “The Mod Squad” tv show circa 1968. Three young people: rad ghetto black dude, poor homeless white female waif daughter of a trampy drunk single mother, and a male white rich kid from Beverly Hills. The goading of the white rich male by the other two and his burning shame at being presumed guilty of some societal crime by an accident of birth because he is a son of the upper middle class is a major theme of the series that I never noticed when I originally watched it in the ’60s. But when re-watching the dvds recently this class attack, personal shaming and self-shame theme was literally sickening to watch and shockingly contemporary. It IS the Woke psycho-social control catalyst! Without it, the Red Guard house of cards collapses. Fifty plus years of white (or any group’s) success is ritually smashed via self- shame and misplaced self-guilt. How to stop this psychological (self-)destruction (incomprehensible to other cultures that revel in multi-generational success transmission) which is now in its third generational iteration in the West? Analysis of THIS psyche-poison is a critical missing piece in the counter-Woke discourse.
I think the role of “modern” psychology is critical to understanding what the planet has been though over the last century or more.
Pyschological ideas of a behaviorist and morality-neutral sort began to spread from Europe to America around 1900. They pushed hard into teacher colleges. But the public in general and intellectuals in particular were entranced by the subject of psychology, and still are! I see it as the kingpin around which all these other broken ideas revolve.
Psychology had walked away from its namesake – the psyche – treating it as mere delusion and took up the highly irreligious but scientifically strong position that people were merely a special type of animal. There are still intellectuals in “both” camps who can’t make up their minds about this one; it was so well pounded in!
Good to hear the perspective of someone who has lived the past 25 years in the middle of this change, while I have watched it from far away in Australia. Here we have a slightly different form of post colonial guilt which genuinely wants to do the right thing by Aboriginal people but prefers to project our lost Western spirituality on the remnants of an ancient people rather than acknowledge the ongoing suffering of a people displaced in their own country. They make a great show of thanking the traditional ‘owners’ of the land, but are not prepared to stop rescuing them on the basis of Western civilisational values. The fixing mentality rather than seeing that people must have agency if they are going to be able to help themselves. John Vervaeke’s account in his Zombies book of the fate of Grassy Narrows community in Canada is what I have witnessed in Australian Aboriginal communities across the north of Australia from W.A. to Queensland.
(1) I had to search for PNW because hadn’t heard the term before, didn’t realise it means Pacific Northwest.
First thought it was Purdue Northwest ~ alright, my bad! 🙁
(2) “…..but nobody takes these people into their homes, their guilt is not that deep.”
Well, unless you want to wake up one morning and find yourself murdered – I’m paraphrasing a classic line from the 1936 screwball-comedy movie *My Man Godfrey*.
Definitely too many citizens live coddled lives of selfishness; there’s been more ‘Me First’ than ‘#MeToo’ out there for too many decades. But you can’t seriously believe it isn’t a big-time risk! Inviting one of the camp-city residents into your home, especially if you’ve young children/teenagers, is as foolish as believing that AOC has genuine depth and intelligence. No sane person – single or otherwise – would consider that in this day and age.
Good Luck with the City Council election!
Interesting run through of the timeline. I see why you repeat that a better version of the essay would be something more like a book. There are some parts that read very chunky, like the capital-R Respectables when connected to another capital-insert-letter combo.
I’ve been following the Woke takeover since 2017, but stumbled upon early Wokeness in South African universities from mid to late 2015. There is this now famous clip taken from a Fallist (Fees Must Fall activist) meeting in which an activist called for the decolonisation of the sciences in the university. I’m trying to figure out how this movement is/could be connected to the takeover of Universities and colleges in the US and other first world countries.
The rise and triumph of Trump in 2016 and his near reelection in 2020 was premised in no small part on the elite’s desertion of American values and allowing American jobs to be exported offshore. Trump was the only president since Nixon and Reagan to address these issues.
Trump’s views on immigration, job theft by scabs from India, and other such related topics got him elected president. Once in the office, he appointed Ivanka and Jared to be head of Trumpist policy work. The problem is that Ivanka and Jared are and were completely in favor of illegals, work visas, and the other things that Trump opposed. Trump, being a complete moron about policy while being a genius about conning people, did not realize that he was undercutting himself. Rather than ending H4EAD, OPT, fixing H-1B, and so forth, he let it slide. When he did reforms, he did them wrong, and the Administrative Procedures Act undercut his efforts.
But the fact remains that the policy ideas remain out there, if only someone could grasp that nettle and do it right.
I think that the essay missed a critical factor. The radicals who revolted on college campuses in the late 1960s and their allies who pushed the “sexual revolution” to its logical conclusion of a hedonistic based individuality never succeeded at the ballot box, but ,except for communities strongly committed to religious faith, conquered the academy , culture and the media and set out based on Marcusian Marxism which is evident in BLM’s ideiolgy, radical feminism and its fellow travlers and climate change devotees to destroy America, its values and institutions. That is why we saw the rise of a judiicary that decides issues of policy and not cases and which ignores elections that failed to pass constitutional muster . This is no small reason why the tyranny of PC and cancel culture , radical environmentalism and identity politics is asserting itself into American culture. with very dangerous consequences. What happened at universities now is filtering down into public and private schools, with freedom of speech, association, and free exercise of religion at grave risk from the intolerant woke left which views no dissent from a world view that is limited to oppressors and the oppressed. This is what happens when the inmates run an asylum because of the fear of administrators and alumni who are afraid to confront Marxism for the evil ideology that it is.
Yes, I think these are important points. We must remember that Marxism as an ideology was solidifying in Europe around the time of our Civil War here in the U.S., and that by 1900 was firmly entrenched and gaining ground in many areas. This was a materialist, anti-religious (but more importantly, anti-spiritual) philiosophy that saw people as animals governed by their genetics, similar to the teachings of Eugenics. This whole group of ideas, which was also supported by the psychologies of those times, was very dangerous to the continuation of peace and freedom on the planet, elevating as it did the criminal to a similar moral and mental level as everyone else. This mistake is still not well understood.
I am a non-religious, non-spiritual materialist who thinks that humans are animals governed by their genetics (and some environmental influences).
But I still detest Wokeness, the CRT cult, etc.
Religion and faith may be one thing that can hold off Wokeness, but I hope that basic common sense can also do the job.
It’s possible for people to not be religious and ALSO not be Woke.
In fact, I would even say that Woke people ARE religious, in a way, with Woke-ism having replaced Christianity, Judaism, or whatever other religion they might have been members of otherwise.
And to a degree, the sexual revolution led directly to the Trannie Revolution. The sexual revolution decoupled sex from procreation. With the Trannie Revolution, the process completes itself, because Trannies are a mockery of glamour. Sexual attractiveness was always related to the degree to which a person was a potential partner, and a potential mate. Young women have sexual attractiveness because of their potential to be mothers. With trannies, this allure of sex is perverted into a false thing. That’s why trannie prostitutes are murdered.
Consenting adults should be able to do what they like. That’s what freedom means. Woke-ism is tyranny, but so is telling people what they are allowed to do with their bodies and with whom.
“Woke-ism is tyranny, but so is telling people what they are allowed to do with their bodies and with whom.”
Then why do Trans keep screaming this precise demand at anyone who does not sexually desire them? Men pretending to be women have demanded and threatened with violence lesbians who will not have sex with them. Women pretending to be men have done the same with homosexual men. And men in wigs are now demanding heterosexual men be attracted to them as women or else human right commissions and career ruin. Who is the tyrant here?
Your original noble liberal freedom of the body ideal, my dear, has long been Transjacked into true tyranny. And since grown adults (other than ulterior motive wokes) just laugh in Trans’ faces when Trans demand adults have sex with them or else; Trans have moved into the K-12 with their upside down version of “telling and allowing” in the hope their propaganda will make a whole generation change human sexual nature and want Trans sexually! It would be pathetic and funny if it weren’t so vile and dangerous.
Yes, people can do whatever they want and that genie ain’t goin’ back in no bottle unless it’s forced at the point of a gun, which it will be and it won’t be any “right wingers” doing the shooting (at least not the ones caricatured by the Western Left)– it will be one of the Left’s many “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” groups waiting patiently for Western societal collapse for their takeover. The first thing Lenin , Hitler and Mao did on gaining total power was exterminate the LGBTQ useful idiots who helped their rise. Just wait for it, when the hammer falls, you’ll be permanently “out”, Queered Others.
And yes, as the previous commenter said, adult Trans are a mockery. Indeed the word transvestite comes from the term “en travesti” which means men acting on stage as women and it’s origin is the word travesty: a farce, a con, a ruse, a trick, a game, a joke.
Other than the extremely rare but very real genetic/gestational hermaphrodites and the teens/children being TransFrankensteined by the woke, the modern adult Trans is a sexual fetish trick used by psychologically damaged men to pretend they are women when all they are is a travesty — a sexual joke. And they’ve discovered that the joke is on them and their furious. Adult FetishTrans don’t sexually desire homosexual men because Trans hate homosexuals because if a homo desires them then the Trans is just another “fag” and not a “woman”. Men who pretend to be women want heterosexual men because hetero male desire for the Trans will prove the Trans is really a woman if a real man desires a him pretending to be a her. This is a critical part of the Trans delusion that Trans throw tantrums over: the truth that literally zero heterosexual men will ever be sexually attracted to anyone other than a real born actual female woman. That is a fact of human reality and any “hetero” male who claims or acts otherwise is bisexual (nothing wrong with that as long as you OWN it).
When trans first launched its assault on gay men and lesbians in the 90s, I as a gay man, wrote over and over that to me there are three sexualities all perfectly matched within each group: 1) male and female heterosexuals (90 per cent of the human race); 2) male and female homosexuals (2.5%); and bisexuals (7.5%). Bisexuals are anyone other than heteros or homos; and I mean literally anyone who is trans, bi, polypanfluid, demi-semi-hemi-any genital, or whatever preposterous identity invention they use because for every person in this bisexual grouping, genitals and sex of partner do not matter (in some variation) while for heteros and homos, genitals and sex of partner are ALL that matter and that is their definition: same homo or opposite hetero SEXuals, meaning genitals and the rest. Thus all bisexuals are really one group who can date and go for it with each other and since they’re a much larger group than homos, they have a huge selection of bisexual partners to chose from so don’t need to harass homos or heteros for not wanting them. And no one but bisexuals cares about the microscopic bisexual indentity labels they keep inventing so why force them on children 92.5% of whom will be hetero and homo and not bisexual/Trans?
My perfect logic was attacked by Queers in the 90s as Hitler, Nazi, McCarthy, traitor, phobic scum, kill the fascist dead! etc. The insane overreaction to my simple and easy to understand categorization revealed their true motive: All of these these bisexuality groups do not sexually desire each other. They want heteros to want them! (Or for some, homos). And they hijacked human rights concepts to get want they wanted and got it as a forced cultural and political policy in the name of “diversity”. But they did not get what they really wanted between the sheets. Homos and especially heteros still and always will reject them sexually. And this is why Trans are so frustrated , furious, violent and deranged: Revenge! Trans are a revanchist false sexuality.
ps An anecdote of hope that demonstrates how the whole Trans Tyranny is a farce. During “Drag Queen Story Hour” somewhere, a reporter was interviewing a mother and a child. The mother strutted and crowed on camera about diversity and inclusivity to ensure the most facebook likes. The reporter then turned to her child, a little four-year-old boy, and asked , “And how do you like the Queer Drag Queens?” The child looked puzzled and the mother said, “He means how do you like the performance.” The child looked at the stage, jumped up and down clapping and with a huge smile shouted, “I love clown day! I love the funny clowns!” The mother and the reporter were flabbergasted. I literally cheered. Out of the mouths of babes, it again took an innocent to reveal the Emperor (not Empress) has no clothes. To today’s children, Trans are nothing more than hilarious and ridiculous Bozo the Clowns.
Great essay.
My two cents:
I’m an educated, working-class white American who has never been near a country club. Nor have I ever lived in the Southeast. My grandparents didn’t go to college. My parents did … In the 70s. Racism was high on the list of sins in our home.
When I first heard Obama’s name, I was living overseas and not following American news at all. “Who do you like? Obama?” I was thrown that an American politician had become popular with a name that sounded so much like Osama.
By 2008, I was back in the U.S. It was a source of frustration to me that I couldn’t vote for Obama because his platform had not one single plank I could support. Most white conservatives I knew felt the same. I did not hear any snide racist remarks after he was elected. Being called racist over not supporting Obama was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life … To that point. Now, of course, it has been eclipsed by the Robin DiAngelos of the world. I actually kind of prefer being called racist just for existing, because the absurdity is more obvious.
Not a mention of Christianity!
Is not what we are experiencing, isn’t the ultra-fertile ground for the spread, the acquiesence of the majority, a strangely intense ultra-Christianity? The concern for victims trampling everything else. The Last shall be First, and so the great oppression olympics to get to the bottom and so to get catapulted to the top. Take no thought of the morrow and open the borders. Victimism. Safetyism. Judge not that ye be not judged. Pregnant people flying jet fighters to build democracies in deserts, as a matter of national priority, the new Jerusalem.
This is, or it appears to be, Christianity in it’s purest form. It may be (as Rene Girard thought) the devil doing an imitation of Christ, or it may be that ultra-Christianity is a bad idea. It is certainly a project that’s ripe for exploitation, bad actors, and grift. The bad actors are heaping up scapegoats so they don’t fall on one another as they scamble to the bottom. The good actors are scapegoating themselves for not previously living out their creed. It’s a part-corrupt project for sure.
Is the origin of this single-mindedness somewhere in the deep past? Is it somewhere nearer, like MLK’s Birmingham Jail letter and his assassination? The holocaust? When it collapses, will the damage be irreversible?
I’m not sure what version of Christianity you have in mind. Many churches have/are going woke. But orthodox, biblical Christianity has as one of its core assumptions the doctrine that: “The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Evil is located inside each human heart. This runs directly counter to woke doctrine that evil is located in “systems,” “power,” or history, and to the woke insistence on viewing people only as broad-brush groups, not individuals.
“What version of Christianity..?” The purest imitation of Christ (universal love, love your enemies, hope and charity, judge not, kingdom of heaven on earth, give away all you have.) This is the headline mission statement and it’s obviously deployed with almost total cynicism, or naivety. “Judge not lest ye be judged” is both a threat and a troll, as increasingly bad and deranged people are held up as un-judgeable. “Give away all” is a shakedown. And the whole thing is bureaucratised in a mechanical and impersonal way – which might be your point about seeing groups, not individuals.
But large numbers of people decided, at some point, to give this whole idea a go. Radicals (themselves working under Christian heritage) made the running, most stood aside for them (withdrawal from the world being another Christian trope), more or less happy to see this core of Christianity implemented, even as all their own explicit faith collapsed as consumer atomisation set in.
I don’t know if this is Christian values working a Pagan puppet, or the other way around.
I would find it hard to see how Christianity could be compatible with any philosophy that grew out of Postmodernism. Where does Christianity teach that we are to sell all we have and give it away? That isn’t even supersized Christianity. It’s just not part of Christian commands anywhere. Christ said this to a particular person, not to all men. In fact, in one Gospel account Judas complains about “wasting” perfume poured on Christ feet by saying, “Why wasn’t this sold and the money given to the poor?” And Christ tells him to leave her alone and that the poor would always be with us.
This has NOTHING to do with Christianity as a religious philosophy, not even slightly.
St. Francis was born into a wealthy family and gave his entire fortune to the poor. A number of other saints did as well though sadly, I can’t remember names at this moment. Christianity doesn’t command to do so but it’s regarded highly that St. Francis and others gave up substantial inheritance for the benefit of the church.
If anything, this is the old Christian virtues gone mad. Christians have believed for centuries that virtues are in a conflict and that there needs to be a balance. This thought comes directly from the Christian scriptures. The same one who told us not to judge others lest we be judged later threw furniture down the front steps of the temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. And even in the context of his teaching about judging others it was not an absolute but a conditional – a first fix yourself, then you can help others sort of thing (the whole plank in your own eye, while telling another about the speck in his).
I believe that you are onto something here. In Jesus’ “Olivet Doscourse” (Matt 24), he is quoted as saying, “Matthew 24:22–28 (ESV)
22 And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. 23 Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. 24 For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. 25 See, I have told you beforehand. 26 So, if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. 27 For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 28 Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.
He said that a time would come when pretenders would arise, false messiahs and false prophets. They would do things that would draw people after them, and they would be claiming to usher in the Messianic Kingdom. For us in America, that means a lot of things pertaining to justice and making things right, but for an Israelite under the boot of Rome in the land of promise, that would mean EVERYTHING pertaining to who they were as a people, all of the things that they had been raised to believe about themselves and the world in which they lived.
We have, in the United States, been led to see ourselves as a nation that has, in many ways, inherited the mantle of Israel. For much of our history as a nation, we have cast ourselves as a nation with God’s favor, with a “Manifest Destiny” to rule and advance the cause of liberty in every place where we had influence, with a few exceptions based on color. For that reason, we didn’t annex Mexico (read the documents from that era to see why the goal of the Mexican American War DID NOT include making Mexico a State, thus increasing the percentage of non-whites).
The Civil Rights Movement, had, as part of its message, the idea that the American Descendants of Slavery were, in fact, cast into the role of the Children of Israel, with the Jim Crow -supporting State and Federal governments playing the role of Pharaoh. In the South, the various State governments, to a greater or lesser degree, played that role to the hilt while Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. took on the role of Moses. If you remember the original story, Moses does NOT accomplish his objective of bringing Israel into the “land of promise,” but he DOES get them “out of Egypt.” In like manner, King did not secure full acceptance for the American citizens who had descended from the slaves and free persons of the 18-19th Centuries, but he did get them out from under the more onerous burdens of Jim Crow.
The CRT Movement claims to be Joshua and David – The Messiah of this New Israel that arose out of the prolonged disappointments of the aborted/Co-opted Civil Rights Movement. I say this because (1) the goals of the movement were not accomplished, as color never completely left the stage as a determinant of one’s status in the U.S., but instead, it got morphed into the means of punishing the South for its continued adherence to the 19th Century vision of a white citizenry and a black underclass, while Civil Rights suddenly morphed into “Affirmative Action” to move everyone who was not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant MALE into the place that they (WASP men) had occupied since before the Revolution – the top of the American socio-political and economic structure.
Thus, now, white women are the largest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, Feminism and its offspring LGBTQ++ etc, etc, etc, has taken the energy of the Black Power Movement, and everyone steps over the rotten corpses of the communities that were established when the U.S. government determined that it lacked the funding to get all of those former slaves off American soil.
CRT is the illegitimate offspring of America’s debt to the Ex-Slave and Freemen population. “You sowed the wind, and you have reaped the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7).
Good essay but you didn’t address how it came to be that the previous uni students had to be treated as they were. Bill Ayers, former Weatherman, and his acolytes took over Ed Schools in the 1980s and 1990s.
I just now read this article, but I want to acknowledge that I had the very same concern. I certainly agree with the Snowflake notion, etc.
But the statement “…being demanded from below, from the students coming into the schools and wanting “safe spaces,” “homes,” and all manner of protections from the slings and arrows of rather cushy middle- and upper-middle-class life.” seemed quite a big transition without how it came to be.
You americans always make the same unconscious mistake. “American” is not a people, it is a nationality. Anyone with american citizenship is american, be the chinese, zulu, sikh or irish. But a chinese moving to Ireland does not become irish. Can you spot where the american error of thinking is? Being part of a people can never come about by a stamp on a piece of paper, nor can being member of a race (no matter how the term is definied – a cat born in a stable does not develop into a horse).
—This is one root of Woke (or PC, it is virtually one and the same) that americans are blind to, and it is an important one: the american blindness to the difference between citizenship, ethnicity, and race makes it impossible for you to adopt any other position but the inherently liberal one that a persons actions should be how they are weighed (and their financial assets, money doesn’t discriminate after all and american capitalism is an equal exploitation -ism).
—But a persons actions are rooted in what people that person belong to. An action that is virtuous for one, is anathema for another. To argue that there is a common universal metric for moral means declaring anyone beyond that pale an enemy – exactly what the Woke are doing.
—And that is your eternal dilemma: you must choose, but all your alternatives are wrong according to the western, liberal, modern and secular core values of your identity as an american, leaving you in an existential and unsolvable dubble-bound Gordian-style knot.
—Try it: declare someone specific, an individual or a group of people, your enemy. Not an abstract group, not a principle like “totalitarianism” bur something that actually, really, physically exists.
—Today, in the USA – who is your enemy? Who must be brought low, eradicated, controlled, humbled? Name them.
As an american, I do not need to look for enemies. I speak, and they come to silence me.
You should have gone further back in time to find convincing evidence for your argument:
“The bridge to political power, though, will be build [sic] through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these mythic possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum–research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.” — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Port Huron Statement (June 15, 1962)
https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111huron.html
I wonder what role 9/11 played in this? Jamie Glazov and other conservative thinkers credit it and the wars it spawned with re energizing the Left.
Thanks James… it is an excellent essay that is only imperfect because the topic requires a book length to detail 1) Academia, 2) Propaganda Media, 3) Obama, 4)BLM 5)Trump, 6) … Your summary is impressive, and distills the key points.
I like you metaphor of Academia tilling the soil, and a community organizer (CRT radical) for president planting some seed corn. However as a mathematician, I would suggest another a quantitative framework (network theory) rather than farming metaphor. In network theory People are defined as nodes in the network, and the linkages between nodes are 1) Academic linkage (student-teacher) which is your origin story for CRT, 2) One-directional linkage (Media, Broadcast) the TPgap and his origin story for CRT, 3) Parent-Child linkages (Politics and coercion).
More linkage between nodes (people) can be defined in granularity, but it is the clusters of nodes and their linkages which create the dynamic effects of how “Wokeism” can overwhelm a society in a short amount of time. A network model can also produce forecasts and scenarios of how resilient society is these pathogenic CRT ideas. Your debate with Tim Poole on the origins of Wokeness is an excellent discussion, and a network theory approach can resolve your differences. Society can be modeled as a complex adaptive system, and fold in network clusters like #BLM or #GeorgeFloyd with ease. Not origins and vector, but nodes and linkages.
“Wokeism” is changing daily- as you colorfully chronicle on twitter, so a dynamic network model can capture the origin story, and the make predictions about the future.
Interesting article. That time when you could call people who didn’t like Obama as racist… I thought about it, and I remember feeling weird about just labeling a person as racist without regard to their criticism. It was weird how effective it was.
I remember back in 2016, it was Hillary Clinton who said trump supporters belonged in a basket of deplorables, and that they were racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic. The media and most of the left really ran with this. I think this was the moment when it became common to just label someone you didn’t like as an “-ist” or “-ic”. Also, I’ve noticed a large surge in how much wokeness grows during the leadup for a presidential election (2016 and 2020). Perhaps we’ll see another surge in craziness in 2024.
Hey James (or whoever reads this). I’m an Evergreen alumnus trying hard to deprogram.
What’s tripping me up is the concept of “whiteness”. (I’m white) At Evergreen I was fully persuaded to see whiteness is an all-encompassing force that seeks to advance any and all destructive qualities and policies in order to preserve power. European colonizers set up America for our own exclusive benefit, and any time our power has been diminished it’s only because of great struggle and pushback from black, indigenous, and other POC.
This was the only script I learned in college, and honestly it was taught so effectively that it made perfect sense to me. Even as I read your “wokish” entry on “white”, some of it still sounds compelling as hell.
What I’m trying to piece together is how the European influence in the US seems to contain sites of violent racial superiority/subjugation AND sites of liberating ideals. These things have been joined at the hip since the foundation of this country (i.e. slavery co-existing with the constitution).
I guess Critical Race Theory would say that anytime white people or white culture have embraced racial justice it’s because black or other POC have organized to force the shift (as in the case of the Civil Rights Era). But couldn’t the issue also be framed as a competition between forces of racial supremacy and forces of humanism (of which white people exist on both sides)? And if so, how would you make this argument? After all, we know several hundred thousand union soldiers died fighting slavery, we know 27% of people who were lynched by white mobs were themselves white (many of whom were lynched for protecting blacks–Tuskagee has info on this)
CRT would say it doesn’t matter if a white person is a humanist, or dedicates their life to social transformation, they are still part of “a network of norms and practices that consistently result in advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color.” (Frankenberg) I think that’s a pretty good way to look at structural racism, which I think is real and needs to be addressed. I just wonder why CRT is so hell bent on enforcing a stark narrative of white oppression, while blindly rejecting the evidence of constant, unrelenting black and white partnership towards ideals of human rights, liberty, and democracy.
DiAngelo says there is no way to have a “positive” white identity. Why can’t whiteness be a site of complexity? Is it because racial categories were created by Europeans solely to justify exploitation and violence towards non-white people, and thus the existence of “whiteness” enforces these oppressive categories? And if that’s the case wouldn’t the goal right now be the end of abstract racial categories (rather than the doubling down into identity politics?) I guess what I’m asking, is can you write a piece that totally reframes the issue and help people like me escape from this cult that equates whiteness with pure evil.
Sara, you’re really overthinking this. To deprogram, what I would recommend is to immerse yourself in European art and culture, especially from the past. All the woke lies about “white culture” will sound preposterous after prolonged direct experience with that culture. Your views have been warped because you have been taught to see white culture through critical eyes instead of your own.
For example, I am a mulatto and I can’t listen to this and believe that whiteness is synonymous with “pure evil”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XiSHNrZK-k
This is Alberto Ginastera’s Pampeana Number 1.
Yes, the antidote to Wokeness is Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. These are the white men who all white people should be proud of. They define excellence. I include Wagner because he belongs in this group, and because the Woke will then call me an anti-semite.
Well, as Chuck Berry said, Roll over Beethoven.
There is no specifically “American” music without the Black contribution.
I would recommend reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve”.
The fact is, history is not about race (and it never was). It’s about culture, cultural development, and memetics, as well as the accidents of geography which caused these factors.
Even better is to read Jared Diamond’s previous book “The Rise of the Third Chimp”, since it lays the ground for his master piece “Guns, Germs and Steel” and also discusses more openly ourselves as animals. One of the cornerstones of Woke ideology is the Blank Slate assumption, which disregards humans as just another animal species, as we are. It provides insights on our most famous and infamous traits, like monogamy, speaking, substance abuse and genocide. It also provides examples of similar behaviors in the Animal Kingdom. When you see that in perspective, you realize that Western Civilization is a blessing and its short comings are not unlike other cultures, but actually milder that what they practice.
Finally a glimpse of sense amongst a plethora of progressive and intellectual musings
But we aren’t just another animal species! This is where some aspects of “woke” get improperly handled by otherwise more sane and sensible thinkers.
I will go so far here as to make the “impossible” claim that if you want to see an example of a culture of “whiteness” study the Reptilian culture.
The pathways of knowledge that you can discover and walk down in trying to unravel what is going on on Earth today are truly mind-boggling. I have walked them fully cognizant that most “serious” thinkers will not take me seriously!
Well, again, absolute statements are almost always absolutely wrong. We ARE animals in that we have drives based in biology. We are MORE THAN ANIMALS in that we can choose to satisfy those drives or not based on our intellectual determinations.
Jared Diamond’s work (he is, actually, an ornithologist) builds on that of the great cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris, who posited that cultural values are actually veiled survival mechanisms (from this point of view, teh growth of trannyism might be seen as an unconscious cultural response to overpopulation). Harris’s “Our Kind” is a good introduction to his work. Another great read is “Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture.”
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Kind-Where-Came-Going/dp/0060919906
Diamond completely missed who Yali, his primary source in New Guinea, actually was.
Whiteness can’t be a site of complexity because it useful in activating the black/white binary. Jung had the warning: ‘If enough individuals don’t rise who can integrate the opposites, humanity is doomed.’ For such mystical insights, this 20th century prophet was exiled from the western academy, attached as it is to ego and its hierarchies.
Look at Western civilization and culture. Despite its problems, it has progressed significantly since the Middle Ages and no Third World culture has produced a body of thought, literature and scientific development comparable.
Interesting – I’m sure that the Eastern Byzantines, Ethiopian/Egyptian, and, yes, even Islamic cultures would find that statement highly amusing, especially since they were the custodians of much that the Western Europeans drew upon as they emerged from the Middle Ages. I fear that your knowledge of history is rather limited, even myopic.
America is not perfect, but you would be hard pressed anywhere to find a nation that fought a bloody civil war that led to the abolition of slavery within 100 years of the founding of that nation, and the abolition of segregation within the next hundred years, followed by the election of an African American president with African American Supreme Court Justices and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. CRT is ahistorical if not totally built on a false reading and denial of history.
allright! Yea.
Meanwhile, the Canadians to the north managed to accomplish all of the foundational elements of that without firing a shot. So all they need to do now is elect a black Prime Minister and the U.S. won’t even have that to boast about.
Just ask yourself, if “blackness” were the dominant culture then would they act any better? Do any other cultures really act any better? And if you’re putting the entire moral weight of the world on the shoulders of white people, the implication is that whites are indeed so superior that it is only they who possess a sufficiently rich and complex prefrontal cortex such that they may be judged as moral agents. Of course I wouldn’t recommend making this point on any term papers at Evergreen…
Sara, one of the things you need to do challenge much of the history you learned. Take for example the idea that only POC are responsible for positive social change. The reason slavery does not exist as a legal institution any ware in the world is because the British Empire put its foot down about it.
It was a lot of Quakers in both North America and Britain who agitated against the traffic in human beings.
That was a first in the history of the world and in the history of slavery, which had been practiced forever within Africa and between Africa and the MENA.
Sara, I’d also add that “whiteness” is a dehumanizing concept that collectivizes and totalizes white people into a single identity group. Groups of people are composed of free-thinking individuals, who interact with one another. Individuals are complicated, with thousands of individual traits, and multiple ways of seeing the world.
“Whiteness”, “White People” are oversimplified models used to describe complex societies and people. They are intellectual shortcuts that inadequately describe how humans work. Defining “whiteness” as a force of evil perpetrated by all “white people” is a flawed world-view, because these ideas are inherently racist. It just sounds like something a black person who suffered racism, and who now hates and fears all white people, came up with to justify their own racism and resentment.
A little old white lady might care about a POC, and want to help them out as a fellow human, but she could also have been mugged by a young black man, and harbor irrational fear towards young black men, which is probably racist. She can simultaneously hold a racist belief, and be mostly not racist, at the same time.
Just the idea that all white people are the same is bogus — it’s used mostly to describe American culture, in which many groups of European immigrants with different cultures and religions gradually intermarried, fought in wars together, went to college together, and experienced a cultural blending. There are still ethnic differences between white people — they are not all the same! My grandparents on one side were white-collar British Episcopalian immigrants; on the other side, they were Polish-speaking Catholics who worked in a brewery, and retired to run a tavern. They were different!
Take an American from Birmingham Alabama, put him next to a guy from Minsk, Belarus, and tell me “white people are all the same.” It will be apparent that they are not (does the guy living in an ex-Soviet dictatorship really benefit from white privilege over black Americans?)
Or more simply, “whiteness” is a racist concept.
Sara, I’m not a self-hating white person, that’s a waste of time for all concerned. How does it help anyone else for me to feel bad about who I am?
I fully agree that whites of good will are underappreciated, but it’s also not anyone else’s job to make me feel comfortable with my place in time and space.
It’s my job to live in personal integrity and let my actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t conflate large scale systemic and historical problems with individual culpability for those same problems.
Yes, color is a “made up” thing– a social construct — but it’s also “real”, a real source of inherited conflicts in society. We’re born into that culture, so it’s not our fault. What do we do about it now is the question.
We whites got snared by our own Euro-enlightenment values of equality, justice, fairness, and freedom. Dr. King did NOT say America was irredeemably evil in its foundations of slavery, genocide, and conquest. Instead, he challenged us to live up to our own creed as expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution. He expressed belief in our ability to be good.
We must form a more perfect multicultural union — not so much because it is morally correct but because pragmatically there is no other choice; this is one of the most diverse countries on earth. If we can hold it together through a challenging time we can become a beacon of greatness once again.
Susan Sontag described the white race as “the cancer of human history” in 1967 and pathologies among the cultural left haven’t changed since.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10311-mozart-pascal-boolean-algebra-shakespeare-parliamentary-government-baroque-churches-newton
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1084904
re Susan “Sontag”
Susan Rosenblatt! Sleazy Sooz was a multi-millionaire rich-bitch phony-ass manque-mediawhore hack-skank. She died almost 20 years ago and her grave still reeks of her foul hypocrite’s mendacity. A literal cultural scumbag!
“Tom Wolfe dismissed Sontag as ‘just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.’
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book ‘Skin in the Game’ criticizes Sontag and other people with extravagant lifestyles who nevertheless declare themselves ‘against the market system’. Taleb assesses Sontag’s shared New York mansion at $28 million, and states that ‘it is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it.’ Taleb also argues that it is even more immoral to ‘claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.’
Outstanding essay.
That was horribly written
“one of the least commendable and, frankly, dumbest ideologies in the history of mankind” => If the West keels over from THAT then it would also have deserved it, now, innit?!
@Sara You also said, “[CRT would say,] if a white person is a humanist, or dedicates their life to social transformation, they are still part of “a network of norms and practices that consistently result in advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color.” (Frankenberg) I think that’s a pretty good way to look at structural racism, which I think is real and needs to be addressed.”
I’m not at all clear on the definition of structural racism or even what you mean by it. But please consider that the American Founders enshrined the highest ideals in our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, e.g., all men are created equal, even though they often failed to achieve the fullness of their own ideals. And as Mr. Lindsay has pointed out (I think), this laid a sound foundation for our country since their time pursuing and successively achieving results in both law and culture that have gotten ever closer to these same ideals.
And may I point to the US Civil War as a clear contradiction to the idea that the American system “consistently result(s) in advantage for whites and disadvantage for ‘people of color’ (Frankenberg)?” The vast majority of the 700,000 who died on both sides of that violent convulsion were ‘white,’ which, at least in their shortened lifetimes, would seem to be a decided disadvantage. Also note that, though I believe that the entire preserved US was better in the long run for having gone through the Civil War, the former slaves ‘of color’ were decidedly advantaged afterward in comparison to their former state of chattel slavery.
Yes, it seems more like we’d come unglued from war, economic collapse, and environmental disaster than which pronouns to use.
So James openly admits he suffered from TDS early on. As Bruce Lee once said “mistakes are always forgivable if one has the courage to admit them.” A very insightful essay. It touched on a lot of things I had forgotten about or contributing factors I had completely ignored.