The modern phenomenon of ‘woke’ is hard to pin down. Is it a movement, a religion, an attitude, or a lifestyle? Here we offer our own definition that places woke in the broader historical and political story of the West.
We start with a list of attitudinal elements that most people would agree should count as part of woke. In this we are spoiled for choice, with a whole smorgasbord of examples from the personal, political and corporate spheres from which to discern the core elements. Here are our top five:
- Identity theft. This is best exemplified in gender appropriation, whereby anyone who says or believes they are a woman is indeed a woman and must be treated as such by others, at pain of social disapprobation and even legal punishment. The woke lack respect for previous identities.
- Illiberalness. The woke perspective in many areas features a suspension of belief in public debate and the value of diverse viewpoints, to the point of being willing to invade and sabotage public spaces in which such debates and viewpoints are aired.
- Cancel culture. We see the cancellation imperative of woke in the destruction of symbols and rituals of the previously dominant Western culture: felling monuments, defacing art, negating traditional days of celebration, using disruption and chaos to draw attention to causes, and targeting the careers of those who defend the pre-existing culture.
- Victimhood. Woke places primacy in the public sphere on helplessness and victimhood, preferably victimhood resulting from perceived injustices at the hands of traditional Western culture.
- Alarmism. Woke promotes the idea of the collapse of civilisation due to human-induced threats (like climate, viruses, or the Chinese government) and adopts ever new totems allegedly to ward off that collapse.
Identity theft has always been a go-to in the toolbox for hopeful cultural coup d’états, as for example when the Christians outfitted their Devil with the trident of the Greek god Poseidon and the goat feet of other religions, bolstering their own credentials while marginalising the older culture. Illiberalism is a staple of communism and fascism, both Western inventions. The absolutism of cancel culture is a mutation of traditional liberalism. Victimhood is an old Christian meme. Alarmism has been the bread and butter of subsidy-dependent international groups for centuries.
These five elements have long antecedents in our cultural history. Yet they were not of prime importance in mainstream Western culture, say, 30 years ago, so their collective centrality in today’s discourse is novel. Woke’s incessant harping on about tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity, and caring is all posturing, and in fact is the 180-degree opposite of the reality of its actions and reactions. Yet wearing that mask helps it exploit the naivete of those who previously adhered to other faiths.
Woke Activities 1: The Raid
The primary activities of the woke movement collectively can be viewed as a territorial raid: a takeover of the cultural and economic spaces previously occupied by other groups and cultures. This is a historically normal occurrence in times of turbulence, when opportunistic groups take advantage of distracted populations to snatch away privileges and undermine the existing culture. In this sense, the woke phenomenon is just an extension of other quite recent raids in the West.
For example, the latter-wave feminist ideology of resistance to ‘the patriarchy’ can be seen as an attempt by dominant white Western women to usurp the privileges of dominant white Western men. ‘Intersectionality’ can be viewed similarly as an attempt, mainly by white Western women, to take down white Western males by allying themselves with other ‘oppressed’ groups, because, supposedly, they were all victimised by white Western males.
Today’s woke movement ups the ante by advocating the takedown of all things Western, including white females, who have thereby been hoisted on their own petard and are thus feeling rather betrayed. Their raid on the privileges of their men has been overtaken by a much bigger raid that the very men they had been targeting would previously have combated.
In the vanguard of the current usurpation are young white Westerners, showing the economic theme of woke: it is an attempt of young white youth to muscle privileges away from ‘old whites’. Once again this kind of dynamic is very normal in royal courts, seats of power that typically attract many hangers-on who have nothing genuinely productive to do but instead just fight over privileges.
Woke Activities 2: The Religious Experience
Woke, with its alarmism and cancel culture dimension, is an outgrowth of a kind of spiritual journey by a new generation that is searching for new overarching religious narratives. Consistent with the central tradition of Western mainstream religion, the new woke religion follows an absolutist mould: just as the first commandment in the Bible is to “have no other God but me”, woke is similarly absolutist and violent towards anyone refusing the ‘one God’ dictated by woke in an area targeted by woke.
Disciples of woke have abandoned the ideology of freedom of faith and speech that typified the Enlightenment, and have instead travelled back to the Middle Ages for their inspiration. Tearing down the symbols and rituals belonging to old gods and defeated groups is (like raiding) a historically normal activity of rebels and would-be ascendant groups in Western culture, or any culture really.
Woke Activities 3: Parasitism
Woke feeds like a parasite not merely on the successes of previously dominant groups and religions of the West, but on anything healthy and fertile in the West. We see this in its attack on families, its attacks on positive historical images of whole countries, and its attacks on actual health embodied in the peddling of unhealthy lifestyles (for example, advocating masks and safetyism) and the celebration of unhealthy body types (for example, those of obese or gender-converted people). During covid especially we saw this parasitism on success in woke’s attack on science, as it instead celebrated the ‘truths’ put out by authority figures. Diversity is healthy, and accordingly we see woke attacking it too (though its adherents would never admit this), whenever it seeks to cancel diverse opinions.
The Telling Case of Posie Parker
The woke phenomenon has had bittersweet moments. Take the experience of Posie Parker (Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) in New Zealand. Posie travelled the world loudly proclaiming in demonstrations that “a woman is an adult human female”, essentially implying that womanhood is a biological fact and not a choice any adult can make, thereby defending the territory of women in Western culture.
This was in open defiance of the ideology that self-identification has primacy over biology, leading New Zealand’s immigration minister to call Posie’s views repugnant. A violent mob of over 1,000 ‘trans activists’ in Auckland intimidated Posie and her supporters, leading the Guardian (arguably the ‘home of woke’ in the media) to call her an anti-trans activist and to publish an opinion piece calling her an ”agitator” and her language “hateful” and “dangerous”. All this violence and virtue-signalling was neatly summed up by Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator as “a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic”. Quite so.
The irony of the whole thing was that it took burly male police officers to save Posie from the mob. Posie’s main allies in the last few years have been second- and third-wave feminists whose principal enemies until recently were masculine white men – i.e., the very types of people who came to her rescue: men who took their ancient patriarchal role of protectors seriously. The lesson of being careful what you wish for was delivered in spades to any woman watching.
Our Definition of Woke
Assembling the attitudes and activities that characterise the woke phenomenon, we arrive at the following definition of woke:
Woke is a movement that invades and usurps public spaces and economic roles occupied by dominant cultural forces and group identities, displaying moral absolutism, intolerance, narcissism, victimhood, identity theft, alarmism, and the appearance of tolerance and diversity instead of their substance.
Our definition is quite a mouthful, but that is hard to avoid when trying to capture a complex, large-scale sociological phenomena. If we were writing a dictionary for the common man and needed a simple one-liner, we might write that woke is a “sterile death cult of unproductive whining kids who find each other in a raid on the adults they hope to replace”.
The Politics of Woke
On the upside, a movement like woke could, in our judgment, be crushed by money in an instant. If Big Money wanted to, it could use mass media and political tools to steamroll woke within weeks, and would moreover be cheered on as it did so by the vast majority of the population.
Why doesn’t this happen? For the simple reason that the activities of woke fit the economic interests of large corporations, international agencies, and the globalist class. The enemies of the globalist class are patriotism and virile communities capable of seeing the truth and organising themselves against the globalists. The globalists then naturally back woke, following the ancient Arab saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. There is also a clear economic rationale: by aligning themselves with the fluffy face of woke, corporations, NGOs, and international agencies can get more business, more money and more power. (In recent times, we have seen a few corporations – like Anheuser-Busch – fall afoul of their own eagerness to jump on the woke bandwagon, but those scant examples have not yet delivered enough pushback to reverse the movement.)
Some have tried to trace lines of international corporate funding (e.g. via woke scoring systems and the ESG investment system), an ongoing investigative task made difficult by a lack of financial transparency rules.
Still, what can be observed fits with economic incentives. The woke are being given resources and exploited by the globalist class as a kind of fascist shock army to assist in dividing and ruling the populations of the West, while the globalists dream of eventually establishing a technocratic neo-feudal empire that they control.
The globalist class – about whom we have written previously – is playing with fire when it aligns itself with woke. It is betting that its members can personally escape the downsides of woke, and that it can squash woke when it is no longer useful, both of which are probably fair bets.
Yet the globalists are also wagering that the woke agenda will not undermine the rule of law on which their own property rights depend, or the strength of the whole West on which their international status depends. This is a far riskier wager, akin to burning down a house in order to evict the occupants and then live there yourself.
Woke’s lust for destruction has emerged from the heart of a decaying Western society. Woke is an attack on the most potent and healthy elements of that society, backed by the super-rich who seek more control. At once a sterile new religion of the useless to celebrate uselessness, a fanatical doomsday cult, and a thief of what is good, healthy and self-affirming, woke represents in four letters what ails the West, and the antithesis of what is needed to heal the West.
Paul Frijters, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, UK. He specializes in applied micro-econometrics, including labor, happiness, and health economics Co-author of The Great Covid Panic.
Gigi Foster, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research covers diverse fields including education, social influence, corruption, lab experiments, time use, behavioral economics, and Australian policy. She is co-author of The Great Covid Panic.
Michael Baker has a BA (Economics) from the University of Western Australia. He is an independent economic consultant and freelance journalist with a background in policy research.
This piece was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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‘[M]ost people do not expect cancer to be an adverse event that could be caused by a vaccine. However, as we have outlined in our paper, if the mRNA vaccinations are leading to widespread dysregulation of oncogene controls, cell cycle regulation, and apoptosis, then VAERS reports should reflect an increase in reports of cancer, relative to the other vaccines.
‘This is in fact what VAERS reports reflect, and dramatically so.
…
‘Notably, there were three times as many reports of breast cancer following a COVID-19 vaccine, and more than six times the number of reports of B-cell lymphoma. All but one of the cases of follicular lymphoma were associated with COVID-19 vaccines. Pancreatic carcinoma was more than three times as high.’
https://www.authorea.com/users/455597/articles/552937-innate-immune-suppression-by-sars-cov-2-mrna-vaccinations-the-role-of-g-quadruplexes-exosomes-and-micrornas
I suppose one should not be surprised. All cancer is is a last ditch healing mechanism of the body got out of control through prolonged irritation. Interfering with the body’s natural processes could cause this. Breaking off pregnancies prematurely can have this effect (although research showing this is probably banned under wrong think rules);Excessive consumption of milk or anti-perspirants can cause cancer – apparently the majority of breast cancer cases start on the left side as most people are right handed and therefore apply antiperspirant more vigorously with that hand under their left arm (blocking the body’s natural sweating process is harmful). And it seems that these “vaccines” interfere with the body in a pretty aggressive and fundamental way. Of course, many people will be harming their bodies anyway with one thing and another (household chemicals for example) and will not need much to tip them into cancerous growth.
In other words: they just don’t know. It’s too early yet – quite a few years or more, perhaps. No shortage of historic examples. An obvious one in some circles is the emerging knowledge of how risky asbestos is, e.g. Or even tobacco. Somone else on this site today mentioned DDT; the list goes on.
Freedom Convoy Israel 2022
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/freedom-convoy-israel-2022/
Sonia Elijah
Don’t get complacent. Let’s keep getting the message out with our friendly resistance.
Thursday 17th February 4pm to 5pm
Yellow Boards By the Road
A321 Wargrave Road (Twyford Side)
near Junction A4 new Bath Road
Twyford RG10 9PW
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
This is a working paper, and can be downloaded at the link:
‘Under the assumption that all reported inoculation-related fatalities in the survey were caused by the inoculations, calculations indicate that as many as 308,000 people may have died in the US following Covid-19 inoculation. However, not all reported inoculation-related fatalities are necessarily caused by the inoculation. If we subtract fatalities that might have occurred regardless of inoculation, estimated fatalities are about 260,000. Many of the descriptions such as “heart attack”, “stroke”, or “blood clot” are consistent with FDA documentation about the potential risks of the Covid-19 inoculation. They are also consistent with the research and concerns of many scientists.’
https://mark-skidmore.com/2022/02/15/how-many-people-died-from-the-covid-19-inoculations/
“Scotland and Wales offer ‘covid’ ‘vaccine’ to 5-11 year olds.
On what basis? And what exactly has the JCVI said this time?
Something I’ve been wondering is what consensus there is among physicians and medical scientists with no current connection to big pharma (such as the OMNS) about these experimental “vaccines”. Has any survey been done on this?
The JCVI produced the least enthusiastic ‘endorsement#’ if this crime that was ever penned by a bunch of treacherous cowards whose arms had plainly plainly been twisted. I think it was linked to in DS yesterday.
Here it is.
Judge for yourselves.
“Vaccination of children aged 5 to 11 who are not in a clinical risk group is anticipated to prevent a small number of hospitalisations and intensive care admissions in this population and would provide short-term protection against non-severe infection (asymptomatic and symptomatic infection that does not require hospital-based care). The extent of these impacts is highly uncertain. They are closely related to future levels of infection in the population in the period following vaccination; these in turn are influenced by the timing, size and severity of any future waves of infection, and the characteristics of any new variants that may dominate future waves of infection. Vaccination is commonly associated with systemic and local reactions (such as headache, fatigue and local arm pain) which typically resolve within 1 to 3 days.
Overall, the committee agreed that the potential health benefits of vaccination are greater than the potential health risks when not including the opportunity costs of a programme to vaccinate all children aged 5 to 11 due to this being part of a pandemic response. The impact of vaccination on school absences was indeterminate; the balance between school absences due to reactions following vaccination versus school absences avoided due to prevention of infection is highly influenced by the uncertain timing of any future wave of infection and of the vaccination programme. In particular, school absences are affected by whether an infection wave falls within the period of good protection against non-severe infection provided by the vaccine, and whether vaccination occurs during school term time or holiday periods.
Vaccination of children aged 5 to 11 who are not in a clinical risk group is not expected to have an impact on the current wave of Omicron infection. The potential benefits from vaccination will apply mainly to a future wave of infection; the more severe a future wave, the greater the likely benefits from vaccination. Conversely, the less severe a future wave, the smaller the likely benefits from vaccination.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-update-on-advice-for-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-5-to-11/jcvi-statement-on-vaccination-of-children-aged-5-to-11-years-old
To summarise: there might be another outbreak of nasty covvie and if there were, jabbing little children might help, or alternatively, might not.
I’m off to vomit.
A good analysis by yourself. Those who promote it’s use haven’t got a leg to stand on, relying on the output of the JCVI.
That’s kind of her. I remember when I was 5 and the public information films always said don’t accept vaccinations from strangers. Or was it sweets? They were much simpler times. You didn’t have to be up to date on transgender issues by the time you turned 6 either.
Germany offers train rides for jews
Dick
(Don’t worry, not intended as an insult, just that your post reminded me of a book – any guesses? (A clue – the “N word” comes into it) ).
I started a post then deleted it, but you can’t get rid of it completely!
I’m not sure about the book, will blame tiredness…
It’s gone now anyway. Some forums let you delete posts or threads. I suspect people could potentially play havoc though. (Incidentally I got a post deleted the other day. I don’t know if it was because of the “N-word” or just the way I made the post. A reply to my post ended up being to something no longer there).
Trudeau’s crackdown is making things worse, but mainly for Trudeau.
Legault said using the emergency powers offered by Trudeau against the protesters would be unwarranted and divisive.“I think that at this moment, it would not help the social climate. There’s a lot of pressure right now, and I think we have to be careful. We really don’t need to throw oil on the fire.”
“Dube (Health Minister) insisted the abrupt decision to remove vaccine passport requirements had nothing to do with the Freedom Convoy protests.”
They still can’t stop telling porkies.
Dupe, surely, not Dube? It’s easy to confuse those plosives.
Dr Prasad pours scorn on the false evidence for the effectiveness if muzzles, while asserting on no evidence whatsoever that the snake oils ‘have saved millions of lives’.
Where, in heaven or in hell, can one find a sane scientist?
Try off-line
A bit of news that had escaped me, until last night. Found through twitter.
Athletes, celebrities, businessmen, all looked in a false vaccinated certification investigation.A winner of the recent Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, The Goya awards, is mentioned in the article.
News in Spanish.
And if any of them had promoted the jabs their punishment should be jabbed until yellow card
Glad to see the Canadian truckers keeping their oath to guard Canada, unlike that stupendous fool and WEF puppet Trudeau.
I’ve been saying this for ages. On certain subjects like COVID and climate change, main stream media only provide lies. The Internet and social media provides lies and rubbish BUT also in there you can find real truthful information which just isn’t available in the MSM.
You just need to learn to find it and discern what is BS and what is true. It’s not easy, but it’s there at least.
Deliberate rubbish is inserted to discredit.
Quite. I have hugely increased my knowledge of climate, pandemics and deranged and malevolent governance thanks to the internet.
“Climate change” taught me how to find the truth…my first suspicions as a “default warmer” appeared when I started to see the language used against sceptics, notoriously Monbiot comparing them to “Holocaust deniers” (not just “deniers” – “Holocaust” deniers).
At which I thought – this is not about science.
Was already on the same trail with Covid before they announced the death jabs. Started to do some research into vaxes 4 Covid, to find they’d all been hopeless, and worse, catastrophic in animal testing.
So we’ve got a jab for a mutated lab created Chimaera virus.
But not for the common cold.
OK.
Well, at least this comment is not pointless!
My friend who is coming to stay has just sent me a photo of her lateral flow test. It’s so exhausting. Please someone tell me it will end one day soon.
I’m not sure if I can comfort you.. I lost most of my “friends” and family members to this madness. No one died: we simply have nothing to say to each other anymore. And these are the same people who (probably) are convinced they would never leave a friend in need over cancer, HIV, etc… It’s devastating, I have to say, but I’m convinced that if anything bad happened to me, they would be satisfied, at least a little bit, with the “didn’t we tell you so?…”
It will. The In-laws relentlessly test themselves, often getring a positive result with no symptoms, before seeing each other/NOT seeing each other, and they are constantly on missions to get hold of the things. We refuse. They know not to argue with us now. No one gets ill.They can’t believe it!
Soon they’ll have to pay for their tests…it’ll be over soon, don’t worry…until the next big scare mongering.
show them this
“Scotland follows Wales in offering Covid vaccine to all five to 11 year-olds” – All five to 11 year-olds are to be offered the Covid vaccine, the First Minister has announced.
Its not Scotland, its SHOTLAND
Or, Clotland.
‘U.K. shale gas is unlikely to be commercially viable, argues Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph.’
Well that’s great news. Then no oil & gas company would even consider wasting the cash and other resources carrying out surveys and test drilling, or if they do they will soon enough realise its not commercially viable and stop.
So there can be no sane reason to object to fracking.
Which just leaves us with insanity – no short supply if that these days.
The Swiss Doctor has gone full-Covidian.
Someone urgently needs to tell all these spokespeople of $random_organization_of_very_pitiable_people to shut up as they’re doing the people they claim to be representing a very serious disservice by trying to wield them as weapons in order to keep more failed, Chinese policies in place based on entirely laughable claims. Such as the implied Except Sars-CoV2, there are no pathogens on this planet would could pose a danger to someone with a compromised immune system. Millions of people have died from the consequences of AIDS before 2020 because that’s decidedly not the case.
The police and political response to the anti mandate protest here in NZ is going from the surreal to the ridiculous.
After the effort to play Barry Manilow and turn on water sprinklers failed to dislodge the freedom protestors, the police threatened to tow the vehicles blocking streets. But as they had no tow trucks they made a public appeal for some live! Egg face turned to red face as no towies came forward to help. The police chief said they were to scared too. No. The head of a towies organisation stated on radio that most towies supported the protest! And a request to the Defence Force for towing capability by the cops was ignored! The army never returned my call the deflated police chief admitted on TV.
And so the protest continues to grow. A poll shows 30 percent of people now support it. The govt says this can’t be possible as 90 percent are vaxxed. They seem to have a memory lapse that they FORCED everyone to get vaxxed or else!! Many vaxxed people support the protest and other camps have sprung up in Picton and Christchurch.
Jacinda seems to be digging a hole and if she doesn’t stop soon she’ll end up in China. Mind you, she’ll be in like minded company there.