Anatomy of the Woke Madness
“…First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.
These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”
Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.
Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.
The people—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.
Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.
As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.
Apparently, we can only prevent the tragedy of thousands of young black males killing each other and hundreds of innocent bystanders each year in our major cities—if Oprah, at her $90 million estate, conducts a series of TV interviews with Meghan Markle (denizen of a $15 million mansion) about the psychodramatic slights she feels she received from the Royal Family, or if Black Lives Matter founder and Marxist Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac gets her $35,000 new fence around her new Topanga Canyon home, in an era when “walls don’t work.”
The elite Woke are now obsessed about race because of leftist failures in the past to galvanize a permanent class of victims of the grasping rich—given the upward mobility and expanding economy of the United States.
Race, in contrast, is deemed immutable. The Left sees it as permanent proof, a stamp of victimization and thus deserving of reparatory government action. LeBron James may be worth $1 billion, but he will always be a needy voice of the helpless given his race. Or so the woke would have us believe…”