Tag: Wokeism

Walmart Ends DEI, ‘Woke’ Programs in Response to Questions from Tennessee Filmmaker Robby Starbuck

Tom Pappert
Robby Starbuck

Tennessee political commentator and filmmaker Robby Starbuck on Monday announced that Walmart Inc. confirmed it would drop its “woke” corporate policies, including its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program, in response to questions about its practices.

“Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened,” wrote Starbuck in a post to the social media platform X, revealing he contacted the company’s executives to inform them he was preparing to release a story about the corporate “wokeness” at Walmart.

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Commentary: America’s Public Education Crisis

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Teacher Teaching

In April 1983, U.S. Secretary of Education Terrell Bell created the National Commission on Excellence in Education, directing it to “examine the quality of education in the United States.” The panel found that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

The report famously asserted, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.” It also insists that “…academic excellence [is] the primary goal of schooling [and it] seems to be fading across…American education.”

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Commentary: Understanding ‘Woke’ Supremacy

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In a recent interview, Bethany Mandel, author of Stolen Youth, a book discussing how woke ideology is erasing childhood, was asked to define the term woke and froze. The media has predictably had a field day with this. We can be sympathetic to Mandel’s explanation of the stress she was feeling in the moment. At the same time, this situation can remind us that when engaging in such conversations, having clear definitions and logical arguments is foundational. So what do we mean by woke?

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OANN’s Neil W. McCabe Weighs In on James O’Keefe’s Future and Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 Presidential Chances

Julie Carr

Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed top gov tracker and One America News national political correspondent, Neil W. McCabe to the newsmaker line to comment on James O’Keefe’s departure from Project Veritas and newly announced GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s chanc

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Half of Americans Believe Wokeism Is Undermining the Military

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Half of Americans believe “so-called ‘woke’ policies” cause the military to be less effective, according to a poll published Thursday by the conservative Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.

The National Defense Survey, which was conducted in November, found that overall, perceived politicization among the military’s top brass continues to drive historically low levels of trust in the institution among Americans. Half of respondents, mostly Republicans, identified “woke” policies, such as a focus on race and gender diversity in the U.S. service branches and training academies, as one of the greatest threats to the military’s overall effectiveness and the greatest contributor to decreased trust.

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Parents Raise Alarm over Gender Ideology and Race Essentialism Pushed in Classrooms Through ‘Social Emotional Learning’

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Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not the only three-word phrase that has parents concerned; Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is the latest curriculum headache that education experts warn is permeating the American public school system.

SEL purports to teach students social skills that aid their mental health and emotional wellbeing, yet has been criticized as both a tenet of and a euphemism for CRT, which has become a hot button issue among parents, teachers and politicians concerned about the state of the country’s public schools. Educators are teaching gender ideology and race essentialism under the guise of SEL, education experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Conservative Investors Launch Campaign to Take On America’s ‘Wokest’ Corporations

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A group of conservative investors plan to take on four of the “wokest” corporations at upcoming shareholder meetings over allegedly discriminatory policies in an effort to defend shareholders, according to a press release.

The Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Boardroom Initiative (BI) coalition member, will make proposals at Walmart, Twitter, Facebook and Comcast shareholder meetings held over the next two weeks to hire outside firms to investigate whether or not the companies are placing merit behind “equity” considerations, according to the release.

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Commentary: The Left’s Misery Continues to ‘Elongate’

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A few weeks ago, Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.

Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came.

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Targeted Staff Cuts, New Corporate Ethos: Netflix Takes a Stand for Creative Independence

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Dave Chappelle’s 2021 Netflix stand-up special “The Closer” sparked protests from the streamer’s own employees over allegedly anti-trans jokes.

Now, the platform is drawing an unmistakable line in the sand, proclaiming a corporate culture that prizes individual creative freedom above the collective ideological discipline enforced by cancel culture.

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Commentary: Confronting the Snake Oil of Woke Ideology

RealClearWire
Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

Woke ideology is proof that the world has gone Mad – as in Mad Magazine. What passes as penetrating insight on the left is just a newfangled version of the old fill-in-the-blanks word game Mad Libs. Try to guess what the Princeton University students are talking about here:

We aim to decolonize our practice of ____, even as ____ remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form. (Answer: ballet)

How would you complete this statement from Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

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Commentary: The Woke War Machine vs. America’s ‘Minutemoms’

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Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

Critical social justice’s (CSJ) march through America’s institutions is very nearly complete. CSJ, and its woke evangelists, easily penetrated and commandeered U.S. colleges and universities.

Even White House occupant Joe Biden speaks incessantly about “white supremacy.” The Department of Homeland Security tells us white domestic terrorism is the top threat to America.

Not to be left out, corporate America has proclaimed its total fealty to woke ideology. Leaked documents show companies like Coke imploring their employees to “be less white.” Raytheon—whose laser-guided bombs are disproportionally dropped on people of color—tells its white, straight, Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking employees to deconstruct their identities, “identify [their] privilege,” and “step aside” in favor of other identity groups. AT&T offers employees training that says racism is a “uniquely white trait,” telling white employees that they “are the problem.” It’s pure racism, of course. But not a single Fortune 500 CEO has spoken out against it. They’re too frightened to do so.

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Analysis: China Is Weaponizing Woke Rhetoric Against the Biden Administration

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The Biden administration is experiencing an uptick of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spokesmen channeling left-wing talking points aimed at discrediting American institutions.

Seeking to denounce a key Department of Justice (DOJ) counterintelligence program billed to “identify priority Chinese trade theft cases,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, invoked its domestic critics during a recent Jan. 18 presser.

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Commentary: Woke Is Broke and Costing Democrats

RealClearWire

We are in the first month of 2022, and, from every sign, it appears my Democratic friends are determined to stick to their guns when it comes to both their agenda and how they intend to sell it. In other words, America has not heard the last of the Woke Police.

The 2021 elections, especially in Virginia, could have served as a wake-up call for Democrats. When Terry McAuliffe announced he thought parents should not be telling schools what to teach, the voters spoke loudly and clearly that they felt differently. Attempts to make Republican Glenn Youngkin into the Old Dominion’s version of Donald Trump fell flat as he scored a solid victory.

You might think that after the events of 2021, Democrats would be inclined to engage in some self-reflection. You would be wrong. How do we account for the largest increase in the inflation rate in a generation? President Biden has decided Sen. Elizabeth Warren has it right. Defying logic, gravity, and common sense, they have placed the blame on “meat conglomerates.” Why the cost of a steak would cause spikes in the cost of so many other items, including gasoline, is a carefully guarded secret. Why don’t Democrats in a position of leadership make clear they will not submit to viewpoints held by such a small percentage of the public?

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Commentary: France’s Version of Wokeism

RealClearWire
La Justice Pour George at Coucou, French language school, in Minneapolis, Minnesota

PARIS — Rachel Khan is a 45-year-old writer and actress, half Gambian, half Polish Jew born and educated in France, who was appointed by the mayor of Paris to be co-director of a cultural center called La Place, or The Place, dedicated to hip-hop music in France.  Then she became a target of the wrath of “le wokisme,” French version.

Khan, who was already well-known as a dissenter from the identity-politics orthodoxy on race and victimization, published a slim volume titled “Racée” — meaning racy, daring, but also a play on words — in which she lampooned the politically correct idea that to be authentically black meant that she had to incarnate a “woke” ideology.

“It’s supposedly anti-racism, but in fact it’s dogma,” she told me in Paris in November. “A black actress is supposed to be anti-colonialist. But just as I’m not obliged as a black actress to play a cleaning lady or a prostitute, I’m also not obliged as a black person to be ‘anti-colonial.’”

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Commentary: Christmas Movies Without the Hollywoke Scrooge

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Christmas tree, TV playing The Grinch and stockings on chimney

Hollywoke may be spearheading the War on Christmas, but three cable channels are mounting a far more effective counteroffensive, running traditionalist Christmas movies 24/7. And one of them, Lifetime, is a surprising beachhead. While HBO Max is showcasing the insufferable Seth Rogan’s latest bomb, Santa, Inc. (angry elf girl wants to succeed white male Santa Claus), the once male-bashing Lifetime “for Women” now boasts such romantic “heteronormative” fare as My Sweet Holiday, A Sweet Christmas Romance, and A Christmas Village Romance. Lifetime has joined the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries to reflect a realistic rather than fantastical vision of and for women, and their genuine desire for true love over a feminist-fueled man-light career pursuit.

Some Grinches criticize the films as bland, corny, and predictable. They’re certainly not on par with Yuletide classics by Ernst Lubitch (The Shop Around the Corner) or Leo McCarey (An Affair to Remember), and they do stress a secular more than spiritual Christmas magic. But normal viewers gleam from them values no longer found in the tiresomely “dark, edgy” mainstream series and feature films, such as beauty, sensitivity, warmth, uplift, and niceness.

Start with beauty. The movies are gorgeously photographed to resemble, yes, Hallmark cards. Many depict Robert Frostian villages and valleys in holiday winter, but even major cities like San Francisco in A Christmas Village Romance, Chicago in A Kiss Before Christmas, and New York in the majority appear as lovely metropoles instead of the crime-ridden progressive hellholes the Left has made of them.

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Commentary: Biden Targets the Religious Freedom of Federal Contractors

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Joe Biden is systematically eliminating the religious freedom protections that Donald Trump established. The latest example of Biden’s secularist program comes from his Labor Department, which is planning to undo Trump’s policy of defending the religious freedom of federal contractors.

Trump’s Labor Department protected federal contractors who “hold themselves out to the public as carrying out a religious purpose.”

“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” said Trump’s Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.

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Commentary: ‘Woke’ Superman’s Mission Is Neither Bold Nor Brave

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DC Comics recently revealed that in an upcoming issue titled “Superman: Son of Kal-El,” the son of Lois Lane and Clark Kent would be bisexual, and that he’s going to fight “real-world problems” such as climate change, that he’ll protest the deportation of refugees, and date a “hacktivist.”

What exactly is a “hacktivist”? Isn’t hacking illegal? Is Superman supporting  criminal activity? It’s a chore to keep up with all the different iterations of the current superheroes, but DC Comics is calling  it a “bold new direction” for the character. I  see nothing “bold” about it.

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Commentary: Winning the Cold Civil War

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We find ourselves in a cold civil war. But we have no real generals. A war without generals is no war at all. There is no liberty or death, only death, the death of our once cherished republic. Leading Republicans who should be our generals fight battles, sometimes with spirit, but they don’t seem to see the war in its entirety, particularly its cultural aspects.

This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life. The war is between those who salute the flag, and those who take a knee. Those who believe that America is built on freedom, and those who believe America is built on racism. Those who are convinced that America is good, and those who are convinced America is bad. These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In this case, a cold civil war.

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Commentary: The Woke Road to Kabul

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If stagflation, rising urban crime, and a weak Democratic president did not remind us enough of the 1970s, we now have our very own fall of Saigon.

To the astonishment of many naïve observers, especially those among the polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline (for whom I suggest the acronym “POCAD”) now so foul misplaced atop our discredited foreign policy establishment, Afghanistan’s Taliban shrewdly—and predictably—waited until U.S. forces had nearly completed their withdrawal from the country before launching a massive offensive that has conquered almost all before it.

Outside Kabul’s precariously held airport, the capital has fallen. Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani fled the country and was within a matter of hours replaced by a Taliban mullah. U.S. diplomats destroyed the secret papers (and, reportedly, images of the American flag) while pusillanimously begging the new regime not to attack the embassy, over which the colors no longer fly. Taliban fighters are joyfully lounging in captured bases where they have won huge caches of American military hardware for use against their doomed countrymen, or to supply whatever other terrorist groups take refuge with them.

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: Patriotic Olympians the Liberal Media Didn’t Want You to See

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by Newt Gingrich   Now that the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have concluded, it would be easy for the casual viewer to think that American patriotism and love of country is at an all time low. Throughout the games, the woke liberal media continuously highlighted American athletes who refused to hold American flags, snubbed the National Anthem, and denigrated the country they were sent to represent. But despite who the anti-American media chose to cover, there were many proud athletes who were thrilled to go to Tokyo and represent our country and our people on the world stage. When Naomi Graham stepped into the boxing ring in Tokyo, she was representing both her country and the U.S. Army. She’s the first female U.S. active-duty service member to compete as an Olympian. Graham, who was raised in North Carolina, joined the military as a young woman to take control of and improve her life. Before then, she was homeless. Graham said joining the American military was “the best decision she ever made.” And the message she had for young people was patriotic, clear, and quintessentially American: “You can be anything you want to be. You can come from nothing and be…

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Biden Administration Approves Rule Forcing Companies to Hire Minority, LGBTQ+ Executives and Publicly Disclose Diversity

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group of people in an office watching a presenter

The top U.S. financial regulatory agency approved a rule that forces publicly-traded companies to reveal the diversity of their executive boardroom to investors.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted in favor of the rule, which will apply to all companies traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, according to the text of the approval released Friday. The rule, first proposed by Nasdaq in December, will also require companies to hire at least one female director and one either minority or LGBTQ+ director to their boards.

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Commentary: Politically Correct Ideology Is Masking and Contributing to the Widespread Failure of Our Institutions

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close up of green masks on a table

We know the nature of mass hysterias in history, and how they can overwhelm and paralyze what seem to be stable societies.  

We know the roots and origins of the cult of wokeness.  

And we know, too, how such insanity—from the Salem witch trials to Jacobinism to McCarthyism—can spread, despite alienating most of the population, through fear and the threat of personal ruin or worse. These are the dark sides of the tulip, hula-hoop, and pet-rock fads, the mass obsessions so suited to past affluent Western societies.  

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Evergreen State Professor Who Berated White Colleagues Resigns

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The Evergreen State College professor who was caught on camera screaming at her white colleagues has elected to resign, according to an internal announcement.

“I am writing to let you know that our faculty colleague Naima Lowe has elected to resign her position at the College,” Provost Jennifer Drake wrote Monday in an email to faculty and administrators, praising Lowe for her work teaching “feminist and queer theory, race, and decolonial studies.”

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NPR Will Now Allow Journalists to Take Part in Partisan Activist Demonstrations

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National Public Radio this month said its reporters will now be permitted to take part in public partisan demonstrations and activist events of which the news service approves.

In a revision of its internal ethics handbook, the outlet said that its journalists may now participate in “marches, rallies and other public events” from which they were previously barred.

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Commentary: Alumni Organizations Are Pushing Back on Woke Campuses in Battle for Free Speech

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When Davidson College senior Maya Pillai was asked about her greatest college memory, the first-generation immigrant answered, “I don’t have one.”

In an August 2020 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Pillai, the president of Davidson’s chapter of College Republicans, described her alienating college experience.

“Because of my political affiliation, it led to not having friends,” said Pillai, who received a full, merit scholarship to the highly-respected North Carolina institution. “And because it led to not having friends, it led to not having a fair reputation on campus. So I’ve been essentially outcast due to my political views.”

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Scientific Organization Erases Informal Names of Two Insects Due to ‘Racist’ Connotations

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Gypsy Moth

On Wednesday, a scientific organization announced that it was changing the names of two species of insects, due to the informal names allegedly being “racist,” the Daily Caller reports.

The Entomological Society of America (ESA) announced in a statement that it would end the use of the terms “gypsy moth” and “gypsy ant,” the colloquial names for the Lymantria dispar and the Aphaenogaster araneoides, respectively. The statement, issued by ESA President Michelle Smith, claimed that these names were offensive to the Romani people in Europe, who have been known as gypsies for centuries.

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Shrier: ‘Aw Shucks Conservatives’ Are Handing America Over to the Woke

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Christopher Rufo

Both meek “aw shucks” conservatives and “chest thumpers” conservatives are handing America over to woke activists, author Abigail Shrier claimed in a Monday Substack.

The journalist and author highlighted the successful work of anti-Critical Race Theory writer Christopher Rufo, who Shrier praised for speaking not to elites, but to Americans, by “gathering evidence and pointing out the glaring harm in clear, unapologetic (but never crass or rude) language.”

“Rufo is out there identifying the problem, alerting the public, and sounding all available alarms,” Shrier wrote. “If he hasn’t yet slain the beast, he has at least awakened American parents from their coma, convinced them that they cannot trust the teachers and administrators and school boards who treat children, not as students, but as recruits for their revolution.”

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Commentary: Florida’s DeSantis Is America’s Great Right Hope

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Democratic Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan shatter everything they touch. Ron DeSantis, conversely, seems to get everything right. The Florida Republican has emerged as America’s governor. 

“We’re standing with our folks. We’re going to do the right thing. We leaned into it, and we stood strong,” DeSantis told Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently.

Rather than snip a tax, kill a regulation, and then doze off, as too many Republicans have done, DeSantis is a tireless, full-spectrum conservative. He has authorized a host of economic, cultural, and law enforcement initiatives that are buoying Florida and transforming him into the Great Right Hope.

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Commentary: Dissenting from Woke Superstition

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Person sitting down. Praying hands on a Bible

A few weeks ago, I offered commentary on wokeism as a new iteration of Karl Marx’s notion of religion as the opiate of the people. Specifically, I made the case that wokeism is not so much Marxism but a heretical Christian construct that oligarchs exploit for the sake of their own preservation and dominance. Wokeism hoodwinks labor—those we often call the forgotten middle class—into serving the interests of monopolistic Big Tech and Wall Street capital, and its handsomely compensated technocrats (those Marx called the petty bourgeoisie).

Other recent pieces, including “The Art of Spiritual War,” by Michael Anton (which discusses wokeism as a parallel to the corrupted Christianity of Machiavelli’s day) suggest a growing consensus that wokeism, rather than something new under the Sun, has characteristics of something old, namely religion. Understanding wokeism as a religion, cult, or spiritual phenomenon may help us challenge and defeat it.

They Believe In Something Else 

Permit me to borrow for a moment a thought from a friend. Deion Kathawa wrote recently that our modern, technology-driven immorality may represent “a worldview that is closed off to the supernatural.” But this is only a superficial closing off. It is a fundamental feature of human psychology that it is never truly closed off to the supernatural.

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Commentary: The Systemic Con Behind Wokeism

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Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

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Commentary: Anatomy of the Woke Madness

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Black Lives Matter Protest in DC, 5/31/2020

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

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New Docuseries Takes Aim at the ‘Woke Reformation’

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Dave Rubin

An upcoming docuseries hopes to burst the woke bubble billowing across Western culture.

“The Woke Reformation,” first teased on “The Rubin Report” May 14, tracks the rise of a woke culture that has infiltrated everything from academia to global corporations like Coke, Starbucks and Nike.

Dave Rubin, a self-described “classical liberal,” broke the news about the docuseries via his “Rubin Report” YouTube show and podcast.

“Woke Reformation” director Travis Brown also teamed with Rubin to share details about the project via Locals.com, Rubin’s social media platform. The author of 2020’s “Don’t Burn This Book” created the cyber network to allow artists to speak their minds without fear of cancellation.

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Commentary: How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War

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Riot in Minnesotta; BLM

The other day, I wrote that “woke” was the new conformism.

It is, of course, but I undersold it. It’s much more than that and more dangerous.

As Tal Bachman notes at Steynonline, it’s now our state religion, a state religion in a country that—constitutionally and for good reason—isn’t supposed to have one.

But “Wokism” is yet more than that, too. It’s a mass psychosis similar to many that have arisen throughout history when the masses followed leaders who, in their zeal or self-interest, took them to disastrous ends.

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Commentary: Tuning Out Wokeism

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Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

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IWF’s Carrie Sheffield Weighs in on Wokeism, Critical Race Theory, and the ‘Manifestation of a Liberal Wishlist’

Julie Carr
Carrie Sheffield

Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Independent Women Forum Senior Fellow Carrie Sheffield to the newsmakers line to weigh in on the woke critical race theory permeating America’s K12 public school system and the small percentage of dollars dedicated to real infrastructure in Biden’s plan.

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