The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness
Until we all understand this one crucial point, the war cannot be won
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. So goes the refrain popularised by Kevin Spacey’s portrayal of Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects.
This glib snatch of dialog runs the risk of overuse in the 2020s as conservative and libertarian commentators trot it out on a regular basis to combat the accusations of ‘conspiracy theorist’ constantly levelled at them by ‘mainstream’ culture.
But clichéd though it may have become, nothing better encapsulates the core issue faced by those of us who oppose wokeness.
The idea expressed in the sentence, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, is integral to the ‘conspiracy theory’ label in that it attempts to convince people that that evil does not really exist. And that if evil does exist then it is only in a nebulous, atomized form that finds voice in the crazy loner – the school shooter, the serial killer – and that organised evil of the type that might, say, fabricate a pandemic in order to erode civil rights and make billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry, is too farfetched to be given serious credence.
There is a Catch 22-like circular logic to the whole conspiracy theory thing in that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ itself was coined and popularized by the CIA to deflect public inquiry away from the corrupt Warren Commission, charged with investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thus, to this day, establishment mouthpieces are fond of saying things like “there’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term conspiracy theory!”
Bobby Kennedy Jr and others have spoken about this at length, and the scrubbing of this widely discussed facet of 20th Century lore from most search engine results is telling in itself. I have just spent ten minutes on two different browsers trying unsuccessfully to find the 1967 memo from the CIA to various media outlets titled: “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report,” aimed at dissuading citizens from getting interested in alternative theories about JFK’s murder, but there is a transcription of it here. And questionable though the correlation may be, the sudden surge in usage of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ from the mid-60s onward can be clearly seen here.
Of course conspiracies exist. And of course they exist at the highest levels of government and business. Not only is this obvious to anyone even remotely capable of observing and analysing human behaviour, but there are mountains of hard evidence stretching back the length of historical record proving that not only do people engage in conspiratorial behaviour for nefarious ends, but that the higher up the chain you go, the more Machiavellian the scheming becomes.
As the years tick by and the principal actors drop off their perches, the documents are inevitably declassified – such has been one of the true wonders of our nominal democracy in the West, that freedom of information is even a thing. This too will likely soon vanish into oblivion as so many of our taken-for-granted rights already have.
The conspiracies are real, and the documents prove it. From Watergate, to the Gulf of Tonkin, to Operation Northwoods, all the way back the Reichstag Fire and on down into history, power structures have always conspired to mislead people in order to justify exercising and increasing their own power.
Eventually, when regimes fall, or when there are none left alive in the ascendant regime with any vested interest in maintaining the deception, the truth trickles out. But this usually takes a couple of generations and, if the lie was big enough, of sufficient magnitude to upend the system completely like, say, the murder of a popular reformist president by his own intelligence agencies, then it can take longer.
Consequently, when we are in the eye of the hurricane it can be difficult to appreciate the true nature of things – these events, while within living memory for some, seem distant. The delay in declassification acts as a buffer in this way. It insulates regular people from unsavoury truths about their ruling elites and as such, people tend to view conspiracies as a thing of the past – something that used to go on before these progressive, enlightened times.
They invoke the ridiculous maxim of Hanlon’s Razor – ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’ – a favourite fallback position of the credulous which has no basis in intellectual thought, much less real-world experience and which was in fact originally submitted by Robert J. Hanlon to the work of light comedy: Murphy's Law, Book Two, in 1980.
Because while on the one hand we are expected to revere our leaders as canny, capable people who have risen on merit, we are simultaneously expected to believe they are nothing but bumbling fools, constantly making terrible calls which any layman in the street could have warned them would result in precisely the disaster that inevitably unfolds.
In much the same way, contemporary cultural forces are dismissed as grassroots movements or ‘emergent phenomena’ and never seriously considered to be top-down impositions. This again defies the manifest evidence before us – notably that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on shaping public opinion, not only in the form of advertising and public relations but now by way social media and search engine algorithms also.
It is a fact that public opinion is heavily influenced, if not entirely programmed, according to the strategic goals of multinational corporations, governments, and NGOs.
Why then are movements like Black Lives Matter, Pride, and Third Wave Feminism fiercely defended, even by people with no vested interest in the causes, as ‘grassroots’? Why do folk get so bent out of shape when one suggests that there could be a hidden agenda?
Are we expected to believe that a commercial system that can trick us into consuming vast amounts of refined sugar to the catastrophic detriment of our physical health is incapable of distracting us from noisy social ‘causes’ that it does not even remotely care about? Are we expected to believe that this same system which deliberately weaponised the human brain’s dopamine response to create billions of smartphone addicts and a corresponding mental health crisis is incapable of keeping our eyes on their products, rather than off somewhere in woke la-la land?
The credulous would argue, ‘No, the corporations have adopted wokeness because it helps sell their products. The movement was too big, and they knew they had to get on board or become irrelevant.’
This is nonsense. While it’s true that wokesim gives the corporate establishment a handy shield to hide behind, this is merely a convenient byproduct of a much larger divide and conquer operation.
As I have previously discussed the woke revolution did not unfold in the way one would expect of a grassroots phenomenon, it exploded around 2012 as these charts from researcher Zach Goldberg illustrate.
Such a sudden and dramatic upswing in the time, effort and money being spent by the establishment on this one ideology is not indicative of the corporate world clumsily glomming onto the current thing, but rather the corporate world manufacturing the current thing.
This should not even be up for debate as one only need look as far as the ESG criteria (environment, social, and corporate governance) imposed by BlackRock and the other asset management behemoths to understand that wokeness and all it entails is not the genuine voice of the people, but the edict of the corporate superstructure.
The timing of the woke revolution is conspicuously concurrent with the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Federal Reserve bailout of the big banks following the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The thesis has been advanced by many who were on the ground at #Occupy, including Tim Pool, that the identity politics of wokeness effectively splintered the movement, much as the FBI successfully neutered the Black Panthers in the 1960s by sowing the division that ultimately led to the formation of the Bloods and Crips.
This is what most people in the West get wrong about wokeness. They may not like it, but they shrug it off as a bottom-up phenomenon, granting it legitimacy in the best tradition of tolerant liberal thought – for any genuine expression of collective human will must at least be given room to breathe, right?
As such, wokeness seeks to hoist our once free society by its own petard – it invites us to the table using the language of tolerance, inclusion, and equality so sacred to our civilisation, and then uses its moral highground to silence all questions.
This is not the behaviour of a grassroots social movement but of an authoritarian political ideology. And when we look at who funds this ideology, there can be no doubt that the biggest players on the planet – the billionaires and the corporations that coalesce around then – not only aided and abetted this ideology from the start, but indeed were instrumental in its germination.
Until people understand this, the battle against wokeness is doomed to failure.
Far too many on our side of the aisle still believe they are just fighting noisy pink-haired chicks and soy boys – cringey, laughable characters who only appear to have the upper hand because the liberal media are on their side for some inexplicable reason.
No. These people are just the foot soldiers. They are useful idiots, cannon fodder. The real enemy is the system itself, the system that fuels this profound division in our society for its own nefarious ends.
This is what our side must collectively realise if we are to have any hope of victory.
Evil does exist, and it concentrates itself in lofty power structures. It roils and seethes and consolidates its force, and it uses its vast resources to construct grand narratives and colourful fairytales which have but one simple objective: to convince the world that it does not exist.
Lesbians aren’t woke actually. They are leading the TERF war against transgender ideology- a key platform of SJ/CT and really being pushed by the UN, implemented by most states in Australia and by stealth in all public schools- against public opinion. Why? To what end?