Welcome to Wokeistan

Why woke took over the western world 🌎

I don’t like the word woke, it sounds like an off-brand toothpaste you’d buy from a Vietnamese quickie mart. However, without any great alternatives I shall brush aside my distaste and use the phrase.

I’ve spent years researching this ideology and I’ve now reached a point where I feel relatively confident in my analysis. So without further introduction, I hope you enjoy my longest piece to date.

A brief history of the last 100 years

In the nineteen forties the great western democracies formed an alliance to defeat a horrible man and his wicked empire. Shakespeare wrote that “there is no good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” A profound bit of wisdom, but Hitler and his cronies were as close to a “true enemy” of humanity as you’ll ever find. Thankfully, the better humans won the war and there was a justified sense among westerners that good had triumphed over evil. We felt pride in our culture.

After the cessation of hostilities the American economy soared. Veterans went to college and hard men who had fought dearly for their country took up leadership positions to oversee America’s evolution into modernity. There was prosperity, then there was the cold war. The Rooskies. The Iron Curtain and all of the malignancies shrouded behind a weird alphabet and strange ideas about how people should be governed. As it turned out, those ideas led to millions of deaths and incontrovertible proof that communism is a doomed system. The people of the west (rightfully) continued to feel secure in their moral superiority.

When the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union was dissolved, the victory was celebrated once again in the west. However, this time we did not escape with our virtue intact. The Vietnam war. The Bay of Pigs. The Iran Contra Affair and the Ollie North debacle. We had won, but we’d stooped to their level. We had won, but there was no country to take the USSR’s place in uniting Americans against a common enemy.

China might have been a natural fit, but instead of waging war on those commies we invited them to join the WTO. Shortly thereafter we outsourced our manufacturing sector to their increasingly smoggy shores, granting upon the Chinese great prosperity and a century’s worth of modernization in just a few decades. In return, China bought trillions worth of American debt. These bond sales enriched everyone who had a hand in exporting dollars (the elites of Washington & New York), while impoverishing those who didn’t. But I digress.

Without a common cause to rally around our society began to splinter. The splintering was encouraged, then greatly exacerbated, by the internet and social media algorithms. Algorithms that, as Matt Taibbi detailed in his book Hate Inc., are designed to stoke ire and distrust of the other.

Faith in ourselves was further eroded by blunders like the Iraq war, the mishandling of hurricane Katrina, the Afghanistan war, the colossal fuck-factory that was 2008. Each of these institutional failures chipped away at America’s belief that we’re the good guys and we know what we’re doing.

With competency in decline we found it increasingly difficult to believe in our leaders. With science and technology ascendent we lost our faith in God and his mystical floods. People stopped going to church and participating in their community. Finally, the internet was the nail in the coffin of American civic life. We don’t sit on our neighbors porch, we sit inside and post on Facebook about how he’s a delusional MAGA terrorist. Everywhere you look there is a void left by the social beliefs that once united our society. Natures abhors a vacuum, so the vacuum was filled.

What do you believe in when everything else has failed? Social justice is the most soothing of balms. Come my children, let us make sense of the world for you. Our creed will explain why you feel bad and why you can’t get ahead. Our faith will give you a group to join. You can be the good guy fighting for the advancement of a new utopia, won’t you enjoy that?

Many people apparently do enjoy that, and so here we are. Snow White is snow light brown, the world record female deadlift was set by a black man and the Victoria’s Secrets models are obese because it’s inclusive to weigh more than a refrigerator. Truly we live in a golden age of reason and intellectual achievement, our enlightened society a shining example for the rest of the world to emulate. Woke is ascendant, woke is righteousness, woke is…

1. A replacement for religion

Human beings have an innate desire to believe. Carbon dating, weather models, microscopes and the internet have all made it increasingly difficult for religion to exist. While this has been celebrated as societal progress by many, the loss of religion has had the unintended consequence of depriving our society of,

… a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience…

The investor and Renaissance man Mike Green quipped once that religion isn’t really about floods and crosses, it’s about dressing up in your best clothing to spend time with your neighbors once a week. To further this point I’ll call upon Erich Fromm and an excerpt from his book, To Have or to Be.

Social character must fulfill any human being's inherent religious needs. To clarify, “religion” as I use it here does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion. Indeed, in this broad sense of the word no culture of the past or present, and it seems no culture in the future, can be considered as not having religion.

Religion answers life’s trickiest questions. Crucially, the answer needn’t be correct, it need only exist and be shared by one’s peer group. When a group of people agree to live by the dictates of religion, they can further the community’s goals through collective action. Here’s El Gato Malo explaining his interpretation of how this works.

it has long been my sense that there is a fundamental human need to feel oneself a part of something bigger than just ourselves. we create (or find or come to depending upon who one asks) religions and tribes and philosophies to fill this “slot” in our heads that most of us seem to have. this is an itch i always seem to have experienced less intensely than most others (perhaps cats are simply not joiners) and i’ve certainly never been accused of being typical, neuro or otherwise. my pet theory is that “typical” exists for a reason and that that reason lies in the odd outcome of humans having been the only known species to domesticate itself.

Unlike Gato, most people require an external belief system to guide their affairs. If religion no longer provides that framework they will look under other rocks. This short excerpt is from the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.

People can’t just give up a story. That’s what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.

Today’s dominant story is that we live in a deeply racist society managed exclusively on the basis of power. The righteous are the woke, the glorious crusaders denouncing this dastardly race-based tyranny. Through their anointed clergy of college professors, HR professionals and self-flagellating public speakers, the woke propagate their faith with the zeal of revivalist Christians.

The great qualm that I have with the new clergy is that like every other ideologue of the past thousand years, they’re so convinced of their own righteousness that self-reflection and course correction are verboten. This is M. Scott Peck, from People of the Lie, explaining how certainty can turn deadly.

Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.

If you are absolutely convinced of your own righteousness then anything is justified. This explains why the woke are merciless as they ruin the lives and careers of those who have failed their purity tests. The woke are on the side of the angels, they are doing right!

Whatever you may think of Christianity, one of its strengths is its constant admonition to its practitioners that they are prone to error. Jesus Christ alone was infallible, and while anyone may try to follow in his footsteps they will inevitably fail. The Christian faith also provides a framework for forgiveness, another ideal sorely missing from the woke faith. I wrote an entire article about forgiveness if you’d like to read it.

In summary, the woke religion gives people a belief system that is remarkably similar to the void left by the decline of Christianity. In the woke faith there are,

• Heretics

• Crucifixions (cancellations)

• Priests

• Holy books

• Strict rules

• A promised heaven

• Moral purity

• Logical inconsistencies

And more. Wokeism is a religion by any other name. The fact that its acolytes would deny this charge is worth very little in my book. To close out this section, please enjoy this quote from Andrew Doyle’s interview with Jordan Peterson.

Activists often use words but they mean the opposite. They call themselves progressives, but I believe that they are regressive. They call themselves liberal, but they are deeply illiberal. They’re in favor of censorship and authoritarianism. They scream about fascism while they themselves are using fascistic tactics such as violence to silence political opponents.

Unless you understand where they’re coming from, and unless you understand that theirs is a belief system which is largely tied to unfalsifiable claims, which depends upon a kind of coterie of high priests - edicts from above - telling the masses what they should believe and punishing those who dissent, it has all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion. At least, the idea of excommunicating heretics, sort of sniffing out heretics, searching for them and doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning them at the stake, which is what we call cancel culture.

2. A method of making sense of the world

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, which I reviewed here, is an astonishingly insightful book. I learned much and will almost certainly read it again. Of the many lessons Hoffer teaches I was particularly struck by his claim that people don’t handle uncertainty well.

Based upon my own experiences of being afraid, I’ve often found that my worst emotions are lit by the fear of the unknown. We don’t fear the thing so much as the uncertainty of it. Perhaps this is why Franklin Roosevelt brilliantly said that we have; “nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Religion provides a framework for coping with uncertainty, and so does the social justice movement. Here’s Andrew Doyle from his book The New Puritans (see my review here).

With the recent rise of the new puritans and their religion of ‘social justice’, there are many good reasons to reflect on the lessons of Salem. The willingness of the villagers to believe the girls’ visions serves as a reminder of the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths.

Ideologies dilute complex topics into simple “truths.” African Americans, on average, earn less than their white counterparts in America. Why is that?

The woke view

• Racism!

The non-woke view

• Racism plays a role, but this is surely decreasing over time. In some instances it may even be moving in the opposite direction. Corporations are now instituting “diversity” hiring, Hollywood is doing the same, and of course there is affirmative action at universities.

• African Americans on average attend lower quality schools growing up, which don’t prepare them for the highest paying jobs.

• African American fathers are absent from the home at an alarming rate. It’s widely understood that children who grow up without fathers earn less, are more likely to become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and to spend time in prison.

• Nigerian Americans are one of the more successful minority groups in America. This suggests that cultural factors may be more important in success than the color of one’s skin.

Nuanced thinking, unfortunately, is not in vogue and the woke prefer to just blame “racism” and call it a day. This is an effective method for contextualizing the world, but it’s not particularly brilliant. As pointed out by Andrew Doyle, due to their intellectual rigidity you can often predict a woke person’s views on a wide range of subjects.

The religion of Critical Social Justice, in other words, is a hydra with many heads. When one encounters someone who speaks in the familiar slogans of intersectionality, one can almost always predict their opinions on a whole range of other subjects.

One of the great paradoxes of the social justice movement is that the activists who claim to be engaged in a holy war against racism are themselves actually racist. Doyle continues.

For those of us who still believe in liberal values, the reduction of individuals to mere representatives of their particular demographic leaves us feeling somewhat unhorsed. The virtues of individualism, one of the many products of Enlightenment thinking, have been all but rejected by the commissars of Critical Social Justice and their acolytes. They would much rather see people defined predominately by their race, gender, and sexual orientation, as opposed to their own distinct qualities. Racists, misogynists and homophobes tend to adopt a similar approach.

Power is another foundational element of the woke movement. Power, so sayeth the woke, is the sole explanation for why some people rise to the top while others continually fail. According to their simplified standard white men hog all the power at the base, while the top is presumably composed of transgender handicapped Native American midgets experiencing homelessness.

A fascination with hierarchies explains why the woke are so keen to play in the oppression Olympics. The higher a social justice activist can place themselves on the pyramid of oppression, the more power they may claim is due to them.

These pyramids are asinine. For one thing, maximizing your victimhood (perceived or real) is not a healthy way to live. Groveling in perceived persecution is no way to promote human flourishing. We do not know Helen Keller’s name because she wrote a thousand angry letters to the editor about how unfair her life was.

Furthermore, a victimhood hierarchy fails to consider any of the dozens of factors that determine a person’s place in society. According to the pyramid, Barack Obama’s two daughters have less power than a white male growing up in an orphanage. According to the pyramid, I am more privileged than Oprah Winfrey or Serena Williams. As explained by this passage from The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray, these simplistic classifications are absurd.

From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives.

Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.

The human experience is rich and dynamic, and to reduce unequal outcomes to simplistic ideas like racism or power is a great disservice. These simplifications may help people to make sense of the world, but they will rarely help to solve the problems that they’re so quick to point out.

3. A mystical belief in the explanatory power of racism

The woke believe that most if not all unequal outcomes in society can be attributed to racism. If you follow their line of thinking you might be led to believe that white Americans are doing so well that they’re hoarding all the success in the United States. The statistics, however, do not bear this out.

• White males are getting hired in record numbers. Oh, wait. Reverse discrimination against white males is a thing now.

• Whites live longer than everyone else. Oh, wait. So many white Americans are dying that their life expectancy is actually decreasing over time.

• Whites don’t kill themselves as often as everyone else. Oh, wait. In 2022 a record-breaking 37,459 white Americans killed themselves, compared to 3,825 African Americans.

Rather than blame whites for the afflictions suffered by marginalized groups, we’d be better served to dissect the system as a whole. To see how our current economic structure does a disservice to all non-wealthy Americans, not just those with a certain skin tone. Peter Turchin in his book End Times (see my review here) shares a similar view.

The economic and social forces that have been harming labor have affected all working-class Americans, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity.

Turchin also believes that whatever historical advantages white Americans may have held in society, their influence is now on the decline.

David Blanchflwoer and Andrew Oswald used the surveys conducted monthly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to measure the level of “extreme distress.” They found that the proportion of Americans in extreme distress nearly doubled—from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. The strongest effect, consistent with previous findings by Case and Deaton, was observed in white working-class Americans. In this group, extreme distress—despair—Increased from less than 5 percent to more than 11 percent over the same period.

I think that it is far more useful to view inequality through a lens of wealthy versus poor, rather than black versus white. It is my contention that a poor black kid from Harlem has a lot more in common with a poor white kid from rural Kentucky, than either of them has in common with Barack Obama. Poverty is opportunity’s assassin and it afflicts tens of millions of Americans equally.

• Shipping American industry to China has curtailed opportunities in the manufacturing sector for all Americans.

• Wealthy Americans, regardless of their race, can hire SAT tutors and send their children to expensive boarding schools.

• Wealthy Americans own all the assets and have benefitted the most from ten years of QE and 0% interest rates.

• Money printing and inflation cut painfully across all racial divides.

According to the woke the conspiracy is racism. But I believe the real conspiracy has been the management of America by the rich, for the rich. It would be refreshing to see the wokies acknowledge this and direct their ire in a more appropriate direction.

4. Etiquette for sorting & terminating elites

Sixty years ago, give or take a decade, we decided that to be “successful” one ought to have a college education. So tens of millions of Americans got their degrees and these graduates flooded the job market, oversaturating it. The solution? Stand out from the crowd by getting your masters. That worked for a while, but then a masters wasn’t enough either. A doctorate became the new hot ticket item. Education inflation.

Elite overproduction has reached such epic proportions in modern America that you can’t get someone to fix your air conditioner, but you can hire a doctor of philosophy to tutor your kid for $60k a year. Entire generations of dispossessed Americans, richly indebted to pay for diplomas that aren’t paying them back.

These elite aspirants were promised a fast track to the high life and now the local plumber is making twice their salary and he’s not $100k in debt. From among the ranks of the disposed elites come the most devoted foot soldiers of the social justice movement. Guy Standing has this to say.

The third faction is what I call progressives, since they feel deprived of a lost future. It consists of people who go to college, promised by their parents, teachers and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realize they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt.

This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions.

If the wannabe elites cannot distinguish themselves from the masses with their salary, they can at least do so with their beliefs. I’m not like those uneducated racists who voted for Trump, I’m enlightened. I believe all the right things. I might not earn more than a farmer but dammit, at least I’m not an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. See here 👇

Richard Hanania has the provocative thesis that leftism is a way of signaling eliteness. Elites are constantly looking to distinguish themselves from non-elites, and egalitarian ideology prevents them from using the normal differentiators (e.g. intelligence, industriousness), so they use other status signifiers (beliefs, taste, language). Saying you know about heteronormativity is actually a signal you went to college. It’s a way to separate yourself from the masses, while also not becoming a threat to them.

To summarize,

• Too many people get a college education because they want an upper class lifestyle.

• College grads flood the job market, creating a surplus.

• There are not enough high paying jobs so millions of educated Americans end up doing work that’s “beneath them.” Since they can’t afford to peacock their educational attainments with a Mercedes or high-rise apartment, they unironically parrot talking points like “silence is violence” or “if you don’t understand how men can get pregnant then you’re part of the problem,” because they think it makes them look smart.

There is now widespread awareness about the lack of jobs for aspiring elites. What can be done? If it were my kid I’d send him or her to trade school. An electrician, marine mechanic or HVAC technician is laughing all the way to the bank. But the elites find these career paths to leave a sour taste in one’s mouth, so they push their children to stand out even more. That’s how you get these headlines.

Parents are desperate to make sure that their kid is the one who gets one of the increasingly limited opportunities. Here’s an excerpt from Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, by David Callahan.

As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition, in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper tiers of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic—or sleazy—efforts don’t guarantee a superior edge.

Lost in this nepotistic hellscape is any consideration of an actual education. Getting into Harvard isn’t about turning your daughter into a Renaissance woman trained in critical thinking and timeless western values. Harvard is just a means of standing out from the other three-hundred people applying for one of two positions at Crooks Conmen & Sue-em-alls. Although, if stories like this one are any indication of a growing trend, the Ivy League emblem may be losing some of its luster.

One of the key understandings about the modern university is that there’s a reason that young men and women study intersectionality, heteronormativity, critical race theory, white fragility and so forth. They are learning the “correct” things to say, and this language serves as a talisman of righteousness that will identify the bearer as “the right type of person” to future employers. This is another excerpt from The Madness of Crowds.

As anybody who has spent any time there will know, the political atmosphere in Silicon Valley is several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college. Social justice activism is assumed —correctly— to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations. Those who have gone through these tests recount that there are multiple questions on issues to do with diversity—sexual, racial and cultural—and that answering these questions ‘correctly’ is a prerequisite for getting a job.

I’m reminded of 18th & 19th century Russia. The upper echelons of society instructed their children in a second language, most commonly French. One’s ability to speak French was a proxy for status, as the peasants only knew Русский язык.

If you spoke French yourself, you could casually drop a few words with the person you were speaking to. Their ability to reply, or not, would give you a clue to as their status. The same thing happens today. Complain about white fragility and see how your conversation partner reacts. In an instant you can find out whether you’re dealing with a backwards ass deplorable, or an upstanding citizen with a fine moral compass.

Part 2 - The termination of elites

If speaking fluent woke is a ticket to success in the social justice atmosphere of today’s corporations, then non-fluency is justification for ostracism. Excommunication is back, hallelujah! Those who blunder their language may be attacked by the mob and henceforth denied access to jobs and other opportunities. With too many “elites” skirmishing for too few positions, cancel culture is a strategy for thinning the herd.

Once you understand this dynamic you can see why the intelligentsia is so vicious in their attacks. “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” Elites have an incentive to destroy as many other elites as they can. In feudal Japan this was done elegantly with the killing sword. Today’s internecine warfare is done online with the hashtag and invocations of righteous fury. As Jacques Mallet du Pan put it…

Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.

5. Calorically impoverished virtue

How do you feel when you see this?

A few years back I went on a solo motorcycle trip in India that went from fun to hellish with the first flat tire. That awful excursion didn’t conclude until I’d nearly lost my dehydrated sanity; pushing my bike along the shoulder of the highway in 100 degree heat (I wrote about it here).

I bring this up because halfway through my journey I took a wrong turn and got lost in a classic Indian slum. What I saw there was more dignified, clean, and life-enhancing than the environment from any of those streets in American cities.

How do you feel when you see those pictures? I feel bad. What does one do? Historically a person of a certain income and station in life might have volunteered her time in a local community organization. She may have led fundraisers or gotten politically involved. All of that requires real work and sacrifice.

The woke religion offers a less demanding alternative. Solve racism from the comfort of your couch by putting a black square on your Instagram page! Feel better about yourself after you’ve retweeted a plea to end the police! Defend your community from the patriarchy by posting the top sixteen reasons that men are evil!

Or one of my favorites… Don’t worry about helping those homeless Americans. It turns out that the real problem isn’t that they’re sleeping on the street and shitting in the gutters, their worst suffering is inflicted by the words we use to describe them!

The woke religion offers its adherents the opportunity to be morally pure without leaving their living room. Wokeism is empty calories of progress. Here’s Andrew Doyle from The New Puritans.

These are the people who make grand claims of moral purity and brook no dissent, a mindset which has led to the development of today’s ‘cancel culture’. These are the powerful few who seek to control public discourse by deeming certain terms ‘problematic’ or supporting legislation against ‘hate speech’.

These are the clerics who advance a modern-day equivalent of the Augustinian notion of original sin in the form of concepts such as ‘whiteness’, ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘heteronormativity’. These are the chosen few, the elect, the discoverers of individual ‘truths’ and ‘new ways of knowing’ that bear little resemblance to reality. These are the arbiters of justice who require no evidence of sin in order to detect and denounce the sinners in our midst.

A recent article from Chris Bray, excerpted below, introduced me to the delightful phrase: commie mommies. Wealthy women who bemoan the despotic ills of capitalist America, but are surprisingly unwilling to divorce their hedge fund husbands.

The secret of the commie mommies, I’m pretty sure, is that they aren’t commies. They perform commie rage, as a status signal, like well-to-do white women who were afflicted with neurasthenia during the Gilded Age. (They…had to…summer at…very expensive resort hotels…to…recover.)

But they don’t divorce the hedge funders, and they don’t pull their children out of the $50,000 middle schools, and they don’t give up the keys to the Mercedes. Their signaling of disgust and loathing for capitalism is how they separate themselves from the poors, much as the more you spend on college the more you learn to despise wealth and privilege.

We’ve established the yearning for cultural suicide as a high-status socioeconomic signal, like you burn your house down to prove that it’s the nicest one in the neighborhood. They posture as communists because they want privilege.

At some point all of this posturing, virtue signalling and Facebook posting gets a bit weird. The unstated assertion of the woke religion is that minorities are incapable of succeeding without social justice activists laying down a red carpet to prosperity. The woke religion is deeply patronizing and, frankly, racist in its assumption that minorities cannot succeed but for the grace of the enlightened woke.

Having trouble, no problem my poor minority! It’s not your fault you can’t succeed in this fascist hellscape. We’ll give you a pass and a pat on the head.

The woke religion positions its clerics as the gatekeepers of millions of Americans. It also makes false assumptions about how people view themselves. Andrew Doyle, again.

The conflation of material success with ‘whiteness’ is reminiscent of the guidelines issued by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which claim that ‘white culture’ is defined by qualities such as independence, rational thought, hard work, respect for authority and politeness. - Many black people were naturally outraged at the implication that such positive traits were alien to them.

The same thing happened with Latinx, a phrase invented by the far left but which very few Latinos identity with or even like. The woke have a frustrating habit of telling so called “marginalized groups” what their problems are, and what the activists will do to solve them. There is little room for feedback, and those who don’t fit the mold may be called out as traitors to their race or gender.

Erica Etelson wrote a wonderful article entitled Why I'm no longer woke, in which she points out that one of the appeals of the woke religion is the meaning it provides for its acolytes.

We all want our lives to have meaning and purpose. “We all want to change world,” as John Lennon sang, but most of us are mere mortals who don’t know how. The consolation prize for wolks is to lash out at convenient targets and, in so doing, feel like they’re bending the arc toward justice when, from what I can tell, all they are actually doing is cranking up the misery index, making everyone hate each other and themselves.

I get it! Modern life is frustratingly devoid of meaning. Without a clear enemy like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, the west has begun to drift. We’ve wrangled nebulous adversaries like climate change and racism into the foe’s corner, but these gremlins lack the concreteness that defined past skirmishes.

A lack of meaning, however, is no excuse for the excesses of the zealous woke. There are healthier ways to find purpose and to live virtuously than by demonizing white men and assuming the role of gatekeeper for minorities

6. A feminine movement

Historically men have settled their disputes by beating each other to a pulp. Masculine confrontation is brutal, inelegant and obvious.

Women use a different tool set to wage war. According to Joyce Beneson (please check out her excellent interview with Chris Williamson 👇), a lecturer of human evolutionary biology from Harvard, women brawl with GSR.

Gossiping
Shaming
Ridiculing

Women seek to KO their romantic rivals by discrediting them, excluding them from the group and tarnishing their reputation. These fighting principles coincide almost perfectly with the tactics of the woke. Persons are shamed and ridiculed because of their past “mistakes,” or current actions which fail to meet the latest politically correct standards.

What do we know about the origins of the woke religion? Like the alien blossoming from Ripley’s chest, the movement grew out of the supposedly secular universities. Institutions that’ve been undergoing a process of feminization since the turn of the century. This excerpt is from Christopher Rufo’s essay: Welcome to the Cluster B Society.

Journalist and social critic Heather Mac Donald reveals the basic contours of this regime in a 2023 City Journal essay titled “In Loco Masculi,” where she argues that the dramatic rise in the number of female college administrators—who now dominate campus culture—has led to a growing obsession with “safety” and “victimhood.”

Rather than prioritize academic achievement and substantive debate, administrators have elevated nebulous, therapeutic concepts such as trauma, white fragility, and systemic injustice. Mac Donald concludes: “When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity.”

Is the feminization of education inherently wrong? No, but there must be balance. Trends have tipped too far towards the feminine and this is to everyone’s detriment. In his popular book, The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm explains why too much of a feminine influence can be unhealthy in a society.

The feminine, according to Fromm, is represented by unconditional love. It is the mother who loves her child for who he is, taking no heed of what virtues the child may or may not possess. Babies, infants and young children thrive with this unconditional acceptance, as it provides them with security in an otherwise hostile world. The child learns that they are a person who can and should be cherished. This is healthy, this is good.

It is also healthy that as the child grows it increasingly comes under the influence of the masculine. The masculine, as Fromm describes it, is conditional love. The father is proud of the child for its accomplishments. The child must earn the father’s love with hard work, bravery, studiousness and other displays of upstanding character.

We can take these trends out of the nursery and into society. A healthy society awards every person a certain amount of dignity and respect due solely to the human soul that we’re each born with. The unconditional, however, must be balanced with the conditional. A thriving society also gives the most rewards to the bravest, the hardest working and the most valuable citizens. The society rewards virtue and punishes vice.

The universities, in their mad dash towards the feminine polarity, have come to believe that it’s our moral duty to remove challenge from a person’s life and to reaffirm a person’s status regardless of achievement. This obsession with feminine love does not prepare students for a life of problem-solving and achievement. Nor does it inculcate the golden ideals of personal responsibility.

What students and young people need right now isn’t one more person to tell them that they’re beautiful and bloody perfect already. That is a lie, you can always be better. We need more of the masculine. We need to tell students that if you want to excel you must work harder and take responsibility for your life. You must confront your demons and be brave. This is Jordan Peterson’s mantra and his immense popularity reveals just how many people are desperate to hear this message.

7. A power grab

I am endlessly amused by the woke practitioners who claim that if they were teleported into Hitler’s Germany they would be part of the resistance, or in Alabama circa 1820 they would be one of the few southerns crusading for the abolition of slavery. The truth is that the most ardent adherents of the woke religion would also be the first to join whatever cause is the most popular in their time period. The woke are not rebels, they are conformists. The woke would be the most excellent and devoted SS officers.

In my reading of The True Believer I came to better understand how those susceptible to ideology and dogma are desperate for structure and aren’t picky about who gives them the rules. For example, Hoffer claimed that it was easier to convert a diehard socialist into a fanatical Hitler-worshiping fascist, than it was to convert a non-committed citizen into a fanatic fascist.

Hoffer explains that there are well-understood reasons why people dress up their lives with dogma. A person thwarted in their personal ambition may redirect that ambition onto the group. I may not be able to achieve great things on my own, but my group will prove more than capable of doing what I cannot.

Although I find it difficult to understand how this happens, I concede that perhaps even a majority of the woke believe that they are doing the right thing. That they are improving society, fixing past transgressions, and furthering America towards a more just and charitable future in which all persons can have an equal opportunity to enjoy our fecund bounty.

However, there remains the fact that some percentage of the woke warriors are only in it for power. They don’t give an otter’s ass about “fixing racism” or lifting the impoverished out of poverty. These people have gone woke solely because that’s where the power resides.

Let’s continue with an excerpt from an article in The Free Press.

DEI is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power. And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.

And once more from Doyle.

They are the clergy for the digital age, an elite class that claims to know what is best for the unlettered plebeians. The trouble with all such righteous causes is that they attract the bullies who seek an approved outlet for their baser instincts. Some don the sacerdotal robes out of a sense of duty, others as a disguise.

Moving on… Perhaps you’ve heard of James Lindsay? If you’re familiar with his work you’ll already know two things. The first is that James is distinctly brilliant human being with a gift for oration. The second is that contrary to my interpretation of woke primarily as a revivalist religion, James believes it’s more accurate to view wokeism as revivalist Marxism.

Woke is Maoism with American characteristics

Swap out “minorities” for the “working class,” and “white men” for the “bourgeois,” and you’ve got yourself the 21st century version of that mind-plague that killed tens of millions of Europeans & Chinese in the not too distant past. This video below is an excellent introduction to James’ work on the subject. The speech he gave to the European Parliament is also outstanding.

By the late 20th century the intelligentsia realized that Marxism was a non-starter in America and a workers revolution wasn’t going to happen. What to do?

The professors tweaked their theory, changed that and adjusted this, then slapped a bow on their new creed and began rolling out social justice in the universities. From within, the architects of woke began a gradual process of corruption which has been so successful that the leaders of our country won’t even define what a woman is. The following being a short quote from the book Originals (see my review here).

As iconic filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola observed, “The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the establishment, but first make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the establishment.”

Say what you will about the wokies, they have proven themselves exceptionally proficient at penetrating and corrupting our institutions. First they came for the pronouns, then they came for the adjectives, then they took the verbs and we were all truly .

8. A corporate problem solver

Theoretically the free market loving, big government hating corporations should be opposed to the woke religion. But they’re not. In fact the corpos seem to be pushing wokeism harder than anyone. Why is that? We begin our journey with an excerpt from N.S. Lyons tour de force: The China Convergence. Lyons’ illuminating short book long article will come up several times in this section.

Doesn’t the state want order and control, not revolution? Don’t corporations want a flourishing environment for free-market capitalism, not Marxist grievance and street violence? Don’t academics want to preserve the tranquility of their ivory tower so as to pursue truth (haha)? Don’t the elite in general inherently want to maintain the status quo of their rule, not advocate its overthrow? Doubtless many casual observers may be confused by the idea of a revolutionary regime.

But this shouldn’t be such a mystery. Wokeism poses no threat to the basis of the managerial regime – quite the opposite.

Drilling down on corporations and woke ideology, Lyons explains why these two entities have a symbiotic relationship. To understand how they cooperate we must view these structures as a whole. What does the woke faith have in common with corporate America? Managerial control administered by college graduates.

For example, as I wrote about in my article The Global Reserve Curse, the export of dollars has benefitted an elite group of people in New York and Washington at the expense of the average American worker. The interests of the elite managers are broadly aligned to keep the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, while working and middle class Americans might prefer for the dollar to lose prominence abroad.

To understand how everything from the border patrol to Target to Harvard went woke, you need to think about generals, CEOs, news broadcasters, Silicon Valley billionaires, real estate developers and Senators not as distinct entities heading up gated institutions, but as a class of homogeneous managers with aligned incentives. The managerial class.

The managers eat at the same upscale restaurants, send their kids to the same universities, watch the same shows, marry from their own ranks and live in the same zip codes. It’s not the Senate versus Salesforce, but the managers versus middle America. All of the “elites” involved in these structures benefit from more rules, laws, edicts, HR managers, etc. Anything that expands the bureaucracy, and hence the availability of new positions, is favorable. Here is Lyons in his own words.

Why did Wokeism seem to take over every elite institution at once? Primarily because it was a dominant narrative innovation that justified making the managerial elite and the whole managerial system larger, more powerful, higher status, and of more central importance to society. Of course very few individuals in these institutions were ever going to stand against it.

From the corporate vantage point, the woke faith is a thousand golden eggs. It’s their get out of jail free card. Here are a few thorny issues that corporations should, in a just world, be held to account for.

• Chinese slaves forced to make iPhone components.

• Congolese children dying under horrible conditions to mine the cobalt that goes into EV batteries.

• Hundreds of billions if not trillions of corporate profits parked offshore in tax havens.

• Legions of lawyers and lobbyists to influence DC politicians towards corporate interests.

• Real wages that have been stagnating for decades.

These are blights on our world that could be fixed if the interests of humanity were placed above corporate profits. However, the managerial class is benefitting tremendously from the status quo and they don’t want to upset the apple cart. That’s why wealthy America is fucking thrilled that all they need to do is turn their corporate logos into a rainbow, sponsor a few pride parades, and after that nobody will bother them. Corporations hand out scraps to the activists and in return they’re branded as allies. No sacrifice required. Doyle, again.

Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible.

I’m less convinced that going woke is an effective strategy to increase sales, since the activists represent a minority of the population. Disney, for example, is up shit’s creek after releasing a string of propaganda movies so blatant that they would have made Soviet filmmakers blush. But going woke as a distraction, as a pretend panacea while making no significant improvements to real working conditions, now that all makes economic sense. I’ll finish this section with another great quote from Erica.

The way I see it, this social justice jumble is a gift to a corporate oligarchy that is happy to host DEI seminars, capitalize “black,” and wokewash itself in rainbow flags.

These actions are chump change for large institutions, the equivalent of Coca-Cola setting out recycling bins in its corporate headquarters. - This is the how the game is played. The ability of politicians and marketing professionals to obscure institutional failures and misdeeds behind smoke and mirrors is all the easier when wolks are constantly blowing clouds of smoke.

Wokewashing misdirects our attention in the same way conspiracism does—look away from the things that are too confusing or painful to bear, and swallow this tantalizing morsel of synthetic nutrition—tastes great, but not filling. 

9. A diversion for the left

A sensible society requires balance between liberalism and conservatism. A highly conservative society remains stuck in the past. The following isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but I believe it’s instructive nonetheless. There are approximately 1.9 billion Muslims on this planet and collectively they’ve produced eleven Nobel laureates in the 21st century. An astonishingly low number, given the size of their population. For comparison, there are approximately 15 million Jews and they have produced sixty-eight Nobel laureates in the 21st century.

If a society wants to innovate and advance into the future, it requires liberalism. The American left served a critical purpose in promoting women’s rights in the earlier parts of the 20th century. The left also fought against racial injustice in the American south and overturned decades of atrocious Jim Crow policies. This was the left at its finest: pulling a truculent society into the future where it belongs.

Unfortunately for the left, just at the moment when progressives were on the precipice of the 21st century’s great crusade, their cause was diverted. The 2008 crisis revealed the stunning ineptitude and greed of America’s financial leaders. The housing crisis made all the headlines but the real revelation was the excessive financialization of our country. In America it’s derivatives contracts all the way down.

This is another quote from End Times.

The economic elites, who dominate the American polity, can tolerate a great diversity of views on such [cultural] issues, as long as the consensus on promoting their collective economic interests (keeping their taxes and worker wages low) is strong.

Occupy Wall Street wasn’t a serious threat to the financial establishment, but it could have served as a catalyst for ongoing and increased action against the big banks that were too dumb on a Darwinian scale to survive without Uncle Sam’s magnanimous grants.

Did corporations support Occupy Wall Street? No.
Did the police support it? No.
Did the mainstream media fawn over it at the top of every hour? No.
Did the powers that be wish the whole thing would shrivel up and die? Yes.

That’s how you know that Occupy Wall Street was touching on a raw nerve. Unfortunately, instead of pursuing crooked bankers and corrupt financial regulators, the left was led astray. Anti-racism and trans rights became the issue of the day, causes I would broadly categorize as diversions from the real succubus. I’ll explain why right after this quote from Douglas Murray.

How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is - whether you are a man or a woman - to bring down the patriarchy.
And this creates an auditioning problem, where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be volubly made whether there is a need for them or not.

It is an extension of a well-known problem in liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome.

After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be founds swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons. If that is the temptation for an actual St George, imagine what a person might do who is no saint, owns no horse or lance and is being noticed by nobody. How might they try to persuade people that, given the historic chance, they too would without question have slain the dragon?

Racism is a scourge. However, I don’t believe that it’s the primary reason why minorities in America have fewer opportunities than their white counterparts. I think we need to take several steps back and address the systemic issues that are hurting all Americans, regardless of race.

• Quantitative easing - Bill Fleckenstein called QE monetary policy for rich people. 50% of Americans don’t own any financial assets and have not benefitted from the stock market’s tremendous appreciation since 2008.

• Seigniorage - The difference between what it costs to produce money, versus its value. Seigniorage benefits a government since the cost of printing digital money is essentially zero while its value is nearly infinite.

• The Cantillon effect - The people/institutions (like the government & big banks) closest to the origination of newly printed money benefit the most, since they can spend the money into the economy before it’s diluted.

• Wealth inequality - The United States has more wealth inequality than any other developed nation.

These economic plights hurt all Americans and if you fixed them you would improve the quality of life for everyone. I think that addressing the economic inequalities in modern America would be a far healthier objective than telling evil whitey to piss on himself because he’s a hopeless homophobe.

Furthermore, a laser-eyed focus on racism to the exclusion of everything else is myopic beyond belief. The bankers, billionaires and corrupt politicians are putting rainbow flags on their front lawns, right before they walk out the back door with suitcases bursting with cash. Here’s Doyle.

The rise of the new puritans, and the success of their culture war, has effectively sabotaged the class struggle of the traditional left. Identity politics is not progressive; it is a bourgeois fig leaf that conceals the realities of economic inequality.

Let’s consider who supports the woke religion.

• Universities

• Large corporations

• A majority of the mainstream media

• The military

• Certain factions of the police

• The government, both local and federal

• The entertainment industry

• Big pharma

If all the major power brokers in your country support your cause, you are not pushing in the correct direction. You are not “fighting the man” or going all “power to the people,” you have become the blasted man!

When a progressive movement takes a stand against real inequality, injustice and ineptitude, its members get sprayed with fire hoses and sent to jail. If everyone from the president to Larry Fink to the local newscaster is supporting your cause, I don’t believe you can claim to be fighting against the status quo. Here’s Doyle’s again.

The rise of the new puritans has meant that it is not uncommon to see self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ cheering on multi-billion-dollar corporations as they ratchet up their policies of censorship and their determination to control the parameters of acceptable thought and speech.

The wokies have diverted the left, and because the woke religion does not allow for introspection there is precious little chance of a course correction. So long as the left allows itself to be guided by its fringe elements, I do not believe it will make real inroads into solving the most pressing problems afflicting the citizens of our fine country.

10. An agent of regression

If the woke mob were to come across this article they would predictably label me as a bigoted racist. This is unfortunate, because I am not that thing. I think racism is a scourge and should be discredited at every opportunity. However, how might we go about doing that? Therein lies the problem.

The woke who cried wolf have pulverized the word “racism” into meaningless. If roads, coffee, showing up on time, statues of Abraham Lincoln, hard work, math, moving into a black neighborhood, moving out of a black neighborhood, embracing someone’s culture, not embracing someone’s culture, and forks are racist, then nothing is racist. Words only have meaning when we use them selectively. The woke have pulled the fire alarm on racism so many times that it’s become impossible to sort honest to god acts of overt racial bias from histrionics.

The torrent of racist accusations has a numbing effect. The term means everything and nothing, presenting a huge “boy who cried wolf” risk of the public tuning out every time they hear the word.

That’s another quote from Erica’s excellent essay - Why I’m no longer woke - which again, I encourage you to read. Erica also believes that if you indiscriminately summon racism for years on end, what you get is a society numbed to the concept entirely. The social justice activists have, in my opinion, done more harm than good on this front.

One long-term result of the woke’s mob tactics could be that some white kids/teens embrace casual racism as the cool thing. From a white kid’s perspective, they’ve been told that they’re irredeemably racist and foul to the core. And with a message like that, what does it matter? Why try to be a good person if you’re beyond redemption anyway? Here’s Doyle again.

One of the cruel ironies of the new puritanism is that it relies on strategies and conceptualisations that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate and even exacerbate the very injustices they seek to counteract.

The woke religion emphasizes group identity above everything, which I think is a tremendous mistake. A person is no longer a unique individual with hopes, dreams and demons that may have nothing to do with their heritage. No. If you are black you are this, if you are white you are this. The tenants of wokeism are taking our society away from integration and color blindness, the very ideals extolled so fervently during the civil rights era half a century ago. Doyle continues.

The concept of ‘anti-racism’ is an illiberal notion cloaked in liberal terms. It sounds bold, virtuous and active. No wonder so many well-intentioned people are declaring themselves to be ‘anti-racist’ with little understanding of its divisive implications. The worst possible way to tackle prejudice is to reanimate the racial divisions of yesteryear through a heightened emphasis on group identity.

One risk is the potential for a far right backlash. A real far right backlash with extreme nationalism, overt racism towards minorities, and its own brand of ugly intolerance. The potential for this movement to manifest was captured quite well in this video by Whatifalthist. The woke are playing with fire, but they’re too blinded by ideology and virtuousness to see how they could get burned.

Finally, I am not convinced that an endless obsession with racism and historical injustice are helpful for minority populations either. What you focus on you will see more of, and the woke may be convincing minority Americans to see racism where it doesn’t exist. Might that not plant the seeds of failure, to the extent that it convinces people to not even try in the first place?

Pity and the victim card may be the currency of the realm on Twitter, but in the real world these mindsets will not carry to you towards your goals. David Goggins, for instance, is a legendary athlete, mentor, millionaire, author, and accomplisher of things previously held to be impossible.

David also happens to be black, and has spoken on numerous occasions about the racism he’s encountered. However, David has not allowed the insults of imbeciles to prevent him from performing at his highest level. Here is an excerpt from his book, Never Finished.

Pity is a soothing balm that turns toxic. At first, when your family and friends commiserate with you and validate the reasons you have for grumbling about your circumstances, it lands like sympathy. But the more comfort pity brings you, the more external validation you’ll crave and the less indepdenent you will become. Which will make it that much more difficult for you to gain any traction in life. That’s the vicious cycle of pity. It saps self-estaeem and inner strength, which makes it harder to succeed, and with each subsequent failure, you will be more tempted to pity yourself.

Winning at life requires resilience, mental fortitude, discipline, perseverance and self-belief. The woke religion does not transact in these values, which is a shame for our society as it reduces the potential for all our citizens to succeed.

Solutions

I am of the opinion that the woke religion is having a deleterious impact on western civilization. So, what can we do about it?

The Westboro Baptist Church

Freedom of speech means that people who we deeply disagree with, and might even detest, have a right to make themselves heard. I find the Westboro Baptist Church and its fanatical members to be jizzwads of humans, and I’d wager most Americans feel more or less the same way.

We tolerate these nut jobs because that’s part of living in a free society. It does not mean, however, that we grant them the power to set hiring practices in our corporations, create the syllabi that we teach our children with, reinvent our university system into halls of indoctrination, or decide what other Americans are allowed to say out loud. If I floated the idea of letting the Westboro congregation determine domestic policy in America I’d lose my credibility. Let a fringe hate group run our country, are you nuts?

This is the point we need to reach with the woke religion. I do not believe that wokeism will ever go away entirely. Many congregants may leave it in good time, especially as it loses power, but vestiges will always remain. As such our mission ought not be eradication but isolation. As a rule of thumb, if we wouldn’t let the Westboro radicals do it, we shouldn’t let the woke do it either.

Practical religion

I think there is a great opportunity for the Christian church to reinvent itself for the 21st century. It shouldn’t be the case that Jordan Peterson is the only prominent figure to explain the significance of biblical stories. Jonah swallowed by the whale isn’t really about a blubbery behemoth, it’s a story about a man whose life is consumed by darkness after years of poor decisions.

If the church wants to regain influence in our society it needs to present itself not as the opposite of science & modernism, but as a compliment to it. There is timeless wisdom in our biblical stories. We need a new generation of preachers and teachers who can interpret that wisdom in a way that modern man can relate to.

Get young people invested in society

How many millions of young people have taken up an anti-west, anti-capitalist slogan because they have no stake in society? They are priced out of the housing market, cannot afford to have kids, and have little hope of ever getting on the career ladder let alone climbing it. Why wouldn’t they want America to burn, if their country has burned them first? This is from Konstantin Kisin.

We will not overcome woke nihilism as long as young people are locked out of the housing market, unable to pair up, unable to have children, unable to plan for the future. I know it’s difficult and I know that whoever solves the housing crisis will pay the price at the ballot box. This is true of many other pressing issues too. Or at least you think it is.

What if we forced Blackstone to sell its portfolio of 30,000 single family homes?
What if we made it illegal for billion dollar hedge funds to buy residential real estate?
What if we made college debt dischargeable in bankruptcy?
What if we made it illegal for corporations to donate to political candidates?
What if we started a national campaign to get young people into trade schools?

If we don’t give people a chance to become part of society they’ll become part of the problem. As one person said on Substack, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s almost impossible to found a business and stay woke.”

The left must reassert its core values

The moderate left finds it difficult to oppose the far left because the woke operate under a banner of restorative justice, virtue and equity. But to call this movement morally laudable is like saying a grenade is benign because it’s green and kind of looks like a pineapple. True liberal values, as I conceive of them, are

• Freedom of speech - But the woke live and die by cancellation and censorship.

• Tolerance - But the woke are deeply intolerant of anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their worldview.

• Equality of opportunity - But the woke push for equality of outcome which is a radically different proposition; one which has historically led to great atrocities and millions of deaths.

• Equal treatment no matter skin color, sex or ethnicity - But the woke are racist, sexist and anti-Semitic.

I have found it deeply frustrating to watch the left get swallowed by an ideology that does not adhere to its foundational values. At some point the moderate, majority left must distance itself from its extremist fringe. For the final time, Doyle…

Many who oppose ‘wokeness’ do so precisely because it represents a direct threat to social liberalism. If we are serious about true social justice, we should take the Critical Social Justice movement to task for its ongoing trivialisation of important causes such as anti-racism, gender equality and rights for sexual minorities. It is the responsibility of genuine progressives to reassert the centrality of open debate as the cornerstone of any free society.

Conclusions

A Fan’s Notes is a strange book about a man struggling with alcoholism, mental illness and an unhealthy obsession with the New York Giants. Many pages of tedium punctuated by moments of brilliance, so when I found this quote I knew I had to save it.

Nothing was wrong with them save that they were damnably hung up on all sorts of banalities, orthodoxies, and affectations they imagined had something to do with life.

The woke religion is not life-giving, beautiful or uplifting. It produces no great paintings, orchestras or moving cinematic masterpieces. Wokeism appeals to the worst elements of human nature, and spreads its oily teachings on the back of resentment, bitterness and exaggerated prosecution.

To tame this new religion each of us must stand up and say what we believe in. That we no longer agree to live under conditions of ideological tyranny imposed by a minority of the college “educated” population. That we will treat all Americans the same, no matter what color their skin or cultural heritage. That we won’t stand for cancellations and witch hunts, struggle sessions and the stupid fucking pronouns. It’s time to restore some common sense to modern America and I hope that you will join me in that pursuit.