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The History of Wokeism by Steve Hilton
Political Crossfire The History of Wokeism
An excerpt of Steve Hilton’s monologue on April 4, 2021
By Steve Hilton
There is a new religion stalking our land that is becoming one of the most powerful ones. In the last year, it seems to have taken over nearly every part of our ruling class: corporate America, corporate media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party, which now controls the federal government.
This new religion is Wokeism. It has core beliefs like “the world is out to get you,” “victimhood is sainthood,” “if you are not a straight, white male you are oppressed.”
It has sacred texts like “White Fragility” by Robin DeAngelo and “How To Be An Anti-Racist” by Ibram Kendi.
Wokeism has its own version of 10 commandments: “Thou shalt not think for yourself,” “thou shalt not hold an opposing view,” “thou shall definitely hold false witness against a neighbor if thy neighbor is not woke.”
The punishment for nonbelievers: Canceled, cast out to the wilderness, financial and social ruin.
And, of course, it has its own vocabulary. Speaking your truth, lived experience, microaggressions, being an ally.
We should think about it as a religion because that is how its adherents think about it. It is not really about a set of policy ideas; you can’t reason with them; it is not like conservatism and liberalism. It is deeper than that.
Wokeism is the biggest threat this country faces because, as we’re about to show you, it is the product of a hundred-year-long effort to tear down the values, ideals, and freedoms this country was built on. It is the real enemy within.
It has to be confronted and defeated. But to do that we must know our enemy, where did all this come from? Did it just spring fully formed from AOC’s Twitter account or the death of George Floyd? No. Really, no. What we’re seeing today is not a fleeting cultural moment; this is the realization of a planned and carefully executed campaign to destroy our society that began a century ago. It started here, in Germany, 1923 at the Institute for Social Research, part of Frankfurt University’s Goethe Institute. A group of Marxist philosophers gathered to debate a central question.
Why did the working-class revolutions, predicted by Marx and Engels as the inevitable consequence of the capitalist system...not sweep the world? A Hungarian philosopher, Georg Lukacs, was one of the key figures trying to understand why it did not rise up everywhere.
Their main conclusion: it was not all about economists, as Marx had argued. In reality, the proletariat were held back by other forces that destroyed their class consciousness. These other forces, not just capitalism, were standing in the way of the worldwide communist revolution. And what were they? The philosophers of the Frankfurt School concluded that it came down to three, in particular: family, religion, and culture.
In their view, family, faith, and culture were their building blocks of bourgeois society used by the elite to keep the masses oppressed, so they invented a new theory that explained all this and how to dismantle it – critical theory.
For around a decade, the Frankfurt School pursued these radical ideas in Germany, many eventually made their way across the Atlantic to New York, where they made residence at Columbia University’s sociology department. The leading figure, this man, Herbert Marcuse, whose work was massively influential in American academia from the 1960s onward, changing the whole approach of academia – instead of studying the world, they exist to change it.
The entire purpose of higher education must shift from education to activism. Also influential was Marcuse’s book, “The One-Dimensional Man,” laying out a blueprint for the social revolution, and for the first time, added a racial component. The idea was there an alignment of racial minorities, the liberal intelligentsia, and violent outside agitators would take power.
Marcuse also pushed something he called “Repressive Tolerance,” the idea that violence by the radical left must be tolerated, but such tolerance should never be extended to the right. You can see how that played out just in the last year.
One of his students was Angela Davis, one of most radical activists of the 1960s and ‘70s involved with the Black Panther Party in California.
Critical theory became critical race theory and grew and spread throughout the 1970s-‘90s to become the dominant on-campus ideology we see today. One of its leading champions, Derrick Bell, at Harvard Law School, who was later involved in controversy over his influence in Barack Obama.
Then came a move to unite all various oppressed groups to one overarching theory of social justice – the person who did that was Kimberly Crenshaw, who invented the term “intersectionality,” how different parts of your identity, could compound your oppression.
What is this point of telling you all this? When we see Biden, on his first day, pushing for boys to compete in girls’ sports, restoring racist training for federal employees, and canceling education about American history, and we see deranged call to defund and abolish the same law enforcement agencies that protect us every day, and our leaders, preoccupied with woke virtue signaling, while a humanitarian crisis spirals
out of control…we need to know that these are the fruits trees planted hundreds of years ago.
One reason they have been successful is their mastery of language. They hide their vicious, intolerant ideas behind words like diversity, equity and inclusion.
Of course, in their true meanings, they are good things. Diversity is part of nature, and we should love it for that reason alone. It is important to make sure that everyone is included in the amazing American opportunities that America offers.
It is obvious that hasn’t always been true in the past.
But these positive truths have been hijacked by hateful dogma in service of a radically destructive mission to replace family, faith, and culture with a new ideology.
So, when your local government, your health provider, you corporate H.R. department starts mouthing the woke-cabulary, forcing workers to denounce themselves and each other. When your grandchildren return from university talking and behaving like red guards from Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution. When your children come home from school and tell you that they now know they’re actually racist. When you see this this evil fanatical religious terror creeping into every aspect of your life, destroying careers, friendships, and relationships, realize what it is. It not going away like a fad.
Wokeism has been marching forward for a hundred years, marching through our institutions, through the power centers. Marching through our culture and society. It has all the hallmarks of the worst authoritarian regimes in history, but it is more insidious and dangerous – it is the enemy within. And right now, it is winning. We need to wake up and overturn wokeism with our own revolution, fight it wherever you see it.
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