A friend asked me to define woke/wokeness.
Cultural Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Progressivism, social justice, anti-racism, and critical theory/intersectionality are related terms.
Woke implies the person has undergone a conversion experience enlightening him to power dynamics, systemic racism and social injustices of Western civilization.
The new convert experiences critical consciousness. He laments his whiteness and forsakes his white privilege. He joins his comrades in indoctrinating others and dismantling hierarchical power structures to achieve equity.
Equity is the mandate of wokeness. Equity does not mean equal opportunity. Equity means equal outcomes for all regardless of individual initiative and merit. Redistribution of social and economic capital/privilege is required to achieve equity.
Hierarchies are considered inherently oppressive. Parents, for example, are oppressors of children. Woke educators justify covert indoctrination into wokeness and gender ideology on this basis.
Cultural Marxists are embarrassed by the word “woke” although they coined it. I prefer it because it accentuates their cultishness.
In woke ideology, the hegemony is the collective of white colonizers who created systems of oppression, which operate today in hidden systemic forms requiring critical consciousness to perceive.
Their goal is to undermine the current social order and replace it with a Neo-Marxist state.
Woke ideology is advanced primarily by the long march through the institutions, a phrase originating with activist Rudi Dutschke.
This long march involves capturing the means of cultural production by infiltrating key leadership positions within institutions: government, education, media, entertainment, corporations, churches, and healthcare.
Stabilizing institutions like the natural family, marriage, father-led homes (patriarchy), parental guardianship, heteronormativity, and biblical churches are targeted. Christianity and our constitutional republic are despised. These institutions hinder dependence upon a Neo-Marxist State.
Undermining the current order includes planting seeds of chaos, envy, resentment, rage, and division. Propaganda, indoctrination, political activism, intimidation, and violence are also used.
Developing a sense of victimhood and entitlement is essential.
Wokeness is totalitarian. Affirmation, not mere tolerance, is demanded once adequate penetration is accomplished.
Critical theory provides wokeness with an illusion of serious scholarship.
Critical theorists examine culture for power structures and systemic oppression with a Neo-Marxist lens. They always find oppression because its presence is assumed.
Victimhood status is coveted in the woke community. Intersectionality is the scheme used to assign victimhood points.
White, heterosexual, cisgender (non-transgender) Christian males are considered alpha oppressors. Their intersectionality score is low.
According to intersectionality, a black lesbian experiences more oppression than a white heterosexual male. Therefore, she should be platformed and receive more social and economic capital/privilege. He should be silenced and his social and economic capital/privilege should be stripped.
Members of historically marginalized groups are deemed oppressed and require a transfer of capital/privilege to restore them.
The woke reduce mankind to groups primarily based upon ethnicity, sex and unbiblical sexual behaviors and identities.
They do not focus upon our collective humanity or individuality. Therefore, as a white man, I am complicit in evil acts of all other white men across time, especially slavery.
The woke maintain unfavorable disparities between ethnicities are caused by systemic oppression. More credible explanations like absent fathers and culture-specific values are dismissed as victim-blaming.
Woke reasoning is circular and reductive. Their worldview predetermines their conclusions. Double standards and blame-shifting abound. Thomas Sowell, black economist, author and former Marxist, is adept at exposing this.
Redistribution of capital/privilege and shared guilt based upon class, ethnicity, or skin tone are thinly disguised Marxist adaptations.
Wokeness is not mere awareness of social causes. It is an anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American, totalitarian worldview with a Neo-Marxist foundation.
I recommend Awake Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology by Noelle Mering for more information.
The video in the related content section section is a presentation Noelle gave to young attendees at a Young America’s Foundation meeting.
Comments? Email me at [email protected] or leave a reply below. Respectful comments and questions without expletives will be posted and I will respond to them.
Robert Sparkman
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Note: This is a modified version of a letter to the editor that I submitted to the local newspaper. Some or all of the content is applicable to a general audience. The article was written under the constraints of 600 words, which is generous for a letter to the editor, but insufficient to address every nuance or facet of complex topics.