Executive
Wokeism as a cult
Wokeism has become a cult, not only in America but worldwide. The larger question is: who is financing that cult, and why?
The Twitter Files have wound down, but those who exposed it have found better game. Michael Shellenberger, for example, has locked in on the phenomenon of wokeism. In two threads over the weekend, he shows it for the cult that it is. In fact his insights have filled a book, which he introduces in the thread. And the most important of those insights is that wokeism causes the very harms against which it purports to fight.
The specific wokeism of LGBTQ+
Wokeism takes its name from the misuse of the past tense of the verb to wake as a past participle. This faulty usage first appeared in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Now it applies more generally, and refers to “awakening” to the alleged oppressive nature of civilization. Wokeism is, in fact, the application of critical theory.
The specific application of queer theory is at issue in Shellenberger’s first thread (February 11, 2023, 5:01 p.m. EST). But he’s not talking about how absurd it is to think that God mistakenly mismatched souls and bodies with respect to gender in scores, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of cases. He’s talking about how clinics, dedicated to the “treatment” of gender dysphoric youth, have been pressuring their patients to opt for surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning. Several clinic workers, in American and Great Britain, have been sounding an alarm about such pressure.
So Mr. Shellenberger dropped this thread (odd numbers only):
Toward the end of his thread, Shellenberger drew attention to a clinic called the Tavistock Centre. CNAV contributor Linda Goudsmit mentioned it three years and eight months ago. John Coleman, Ph.D., cited Tavistock (est. 1947) as an institution making a frontal attack on the sexual nature of human beings. In reaction to this thread, one user cited a book recounting Tavistock’s collapse.
Another user speculated on the three motives for acts of the kind Shellenberger described: money, politics, or madness.
A general thread
One other user put her thoughts into an essay, saved it as an image, and shared it on Twitter. In three words: follow the money.
And one father predicted that many of the children so treated, will take legal action.
But Shellenberger recognized that this is only part of the problem. Wokeism applies also to climate activism and deliberate campaigns to raise racial tension. To address that, he dropped another thread, which he began by “quote tweeting” the anchor tweet of Saturday’s thread.
Here is his nineteen-tweet thread (odd numbers):
That thread definitely struck a few nerves. But some users got the point. See, for example:
Two users correctly observed that, in the not-too-distant past, the adults were not so quick to rush to the doctors. Many adolescents struggle with such feelings. Ride with it, the adults would say, and that advice usually worked. But now the “experts” are pushing treatments that change a body in ways one cannot always reverse.
Analysis
These two threads clearly show that wokeism is a cult, as Shellenberger says. But it’s more than that. Wokeism is a weapon of civilizational destruction. That destruction takes the form of engineered scarcity, deliberate divisiveness, and sterilization by deception. The “alternative lifestyles” at issue here, all work against the production and rearing of children. “Transgender” surgeries and hormone treatments always sterilize the patient. The rest of that alphabet soup involves lifestyle choices that don’t produce children even if the participants stay fertile.
“Follow the money,” one user said. But where does the money come from? It comes from the Denizens of Davos and others who think like them. These are the Deep State – or the “Western Oligarchs,” as the Russians call them. They either finance such efforts directly, or finance elections of politicians who will legislate the funding from public treasuries.
Under other circumstances, one would expect wokeism to fade away through attrition. But the Denizens of Davos know full well that the movement they engineered cannot sustain itself. So they will try every trick they can devise, to persuade people to adopt it. And if they cannot persuade, they will intimidate – or force. Hence the censorship, and proposals to incentivize wokeism and dis-incentivize its opposite. Because without censorship, people can compare notes, and realize that wokeism is not only a cult but also a fraud.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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