Check Yourself – You Are in Control

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

It might, heck, -check that- it does seem overwhelming at times. But that is the nature of this collectivist strategy. That is the purpose of this “great reset” bombardment. We must hold strong; you must hold strong.

If you look closely at the attacks that unnerve us, most of them are weak, and almost all of them are targeting your psychology. Do not fall into the trap of despair. Step outside of your home right now; look around, do you see any threat – or is the sense of fear and foreboding created by a dark imagining?  If the latter, ask yourself, is the psychological attack working simply because you are allowing it?

You have purpose. If you walk into a room, and the people within it respond negatively to your presence, it’s likely because your disposition unnerves their demons. The need for control is a reaction to fear, and you have stopped pretending.  As a consequence, you create fear amid those who do.

When I share the message, “Live your best life”, it is not without purpose. Every moment that we allow the onslaught to deter us from living our dreams, is a moment those who oppose our nation view as us taking a knee. Do not allow this effort to succeed. You might ask yourself how I can, one person, a flea looking into a furnace, retain an optimistic disposition while all around me seems chaotic and mad?

Ultimately, the collective weight of leftism is putting us in isolation. There are many historic references to this disconcerting sentiment to review with hindsight. However, ultimately the feeling of isolation first begins with a rejection of God. Defeat dark imaginings by embracing Him. Stand in the light of a loving and purposeful God. Hold faith, and evil manifest will run away because the dark whispers will fall on impenetrable ears.

Yes, it is true; I will not deny it; all around us is this great sense of foreboding, ugh, and it’s not just connected to you – it’s everywhere. Everything being created by the constructs of those in power is weird; everything created around us is less comfortable; everything created around us is intended to project less joy – and as a consequence, it requires an intensity of thought just to carry on ordinary events. It’s exhausting at times.

Diminished faith creates anxiety, a sense of foreboding, a sense of fear and worry and a sense of trepidation. Additionally, evil tribesmen know the strategy to create the environment for control is isolation.

Isolation, the tool to remove hope, first begins with a diminishment of God. A faith-filled person is never alone.

Throughout history, large armies have been defeated through the process of division. It is not a leap to see the same strategic objectives being deployed against social assemblies with ridicule, labeling, targeting, diminishment. All of it intended to fuel this purposeful division.

Ultimately, it is the currency of human connection that is the true value in our lives. We have each felt how our positive influence upon the lives of others nourishes our own sense of purpose and fulfillment.  Do not lose that.

Perhaps we are in this position today because we didn’t sit still enough and contemplate the real priorities in our lives. Fellowship is the essential ingredient to a purposeful life. I fight like hell to keep this website operating, to keep our community discussion ongoing, in the largest part because the assembly is the point. The connection is the most important facet.

On our prayer threads, and within our conversations, families return to see, read and feel the words from those we and they have lost. Do you know the scale of responsibility that comes from hearing the words of a granddaughter who visits CTH every year to read the words of her grandfather who has passed away?  Can you imagine how hard you would fight to keep that ability present? We are more than just a conversation!

Perhaps tears flow at times, and we struggle to understand what this unusual anxiety is all about. Then, we begin to struggle with the feelings of shame or guilt for being weak and allowing our humanity to pour out of our human selves. Then, perhaps when needed most, our faith organizations are slow to understand the importance of fellowship and community amid an upheaval that seems unrelenting.

The insufferable lack of regional or national leaders standing tall only makes the anxiety worse. Where ARE the brave?

Where are the purposeful few who know the benefit of larger messages?

Yet, I do not fault their absence; I find value in it. Why, because the void reminds me to stop, look at that face I see while brushing my teeth, and remember the greatest strength of all is from within. Nothing has the capacity to remove the strength provided by a loving God unless we allow it to, unless we allow them to.

As our grip on our familiar surroundings becomes more tenuous.  As we face dictates or mandates, or financial pressures that only exacerbate the issues, the ridiculous media drumbeat becomes an incessant noise intent on destabilizing us. Perhaps we cannot quite put our finger on why the impact is worse now, but it is. This effort of theirs is more impactful. It is all ugh. It is all just ugh.

If you find the assembly of these simple words familiar to your current sense, first understand YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Second, understand there is nothing wrong with you. This blanket of anxiety is laying across our entire nation, indeed the entire world, and no matter where we stand – we are all sensing a various level of this ‘ugh’ with some familiarity. However, that said, it is important to know this is transitional. We will not be in this place long. This too shall pass.

How do we shake these destabilizing feelings and emotions?

♦ The first way we shake this ‘ugh’, is to give to others without reservation. Giving with purpose is the true spirit of human contact. The giving is not related to money or wealth, the giving is related to our human purpose. Perhaps we give a smile. Perhaps we give a kind word. Perhaps we give a compliment, or perhaps we just give time to another.

Giving, is being present – talking, engaging… giving yourself.

Perhaps send an email; or better yet, write an actual penned letter to a dear friend or family member. Or just randomly, like right now, pick up the phone. Reach out and tell them they matter and express why their place in this life of yours is important.

Remind them of your specific thankfulness and connect to the purpose of why we endeavor in this thing we call life.

Years from now, what they will remember, what will have much greater impact, is today. That random message from YOU to THEM that they matter, that they are loved, will not be forgotten.

That moment you create, perhaps those multiple moments provided by your strength, will NEVER be forgotten. And don’t be surprised when you hear, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that right now. Thank you!”

That look in your eye or sound of your voice that reached into them and emphasized their value, their worth, their importance. That is the gift they will remember in great detail, forever. If you write it down, they will cherish that letter forever and carry it with them in every move of their life.

The important thing is to give, and to do it without any other intent or purpose than to fill their heart.

♦ Within the giving, remind yourself what this journey is all about, and look around to recognize how fortunate we are to have this life. Choose to cherish the ultimate gift from a loving God who wants joy and hope to permeate our human sense.

Hope is the one necessary human element beyond all other facets of life. Give the gift of hope and light to those you love by first reminding yourself of the gift that a loving God has given us all. It is too easy in our human sense to forget the biggest gift we have been granted, the gift of life. The ability to live and choose how we engage in the lives of others.

Remind yourself of His kind of purposeful HOPE, because that hope is pure. That love is perfect.

No politics, or false sense of security, can overwhelm the message of HOPE that a loving God has provided. No effort of man or human disposition can surmount the greatest love of all. The message of grace and faith, the message of the purest truth, is bigger and greater than any great reset or legislative battle.

“No power of hell, nor scheme of man”, can come close to the purpose of God’s intent and love for you as a unique person qualified to receive that love.

Wrap yourself in the blanket of that unconditional love. Stop listening to the dark imagining, the whispers of foreboding.

Pause in the peace of the moment that you can create within your own mind.

Set down your troubles, pray, LISTEN and FEEL.

Love to all,

~ Sundance

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- November 6

 

Higher Ed: Now it’s Just Loco

posted by Clarice Feldman at American Thinker 

Decades ago, higher education was held to a standard of legal responsibility for the welfare of its students. The Latin term in loco parentis (in place of parents) gave them the right and duty to act as parents would. In recent decades, a better description of the how they manage their responsibilities to all students in their care is just plain loco.

David Burge explains:

@iowahawkblog

The idea that virulent antisemitism on campus is some kind of shocking unforeseen phenomenon that suddenly appeared out of nowhere in October 2023 is f***ing willful blindness. Every "elite" university in the US has spent 40 years creating sinecures and chairs and entire departments for Jew-hate-peddling lunatics, and for the last 20 years panhandled donations from every lunatic oil sheikhdom to pay for them.

So, college presidents and deans can spare me the shock when some of their edgy pity-hire faculty members chant support for Hamas into a bullhorn. You dumb f***ers knew full well what they were all about when you hired them in the first place, it was all there in their curriculum….

Hamas filmed and published with glee many of its barbarous atrocities in Israel. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide the worst of it. Dwight David Eisenhower, then commander of the European Theater of Operations, knew there would be Holocaust deniers and made neighboring German civilians join the press in touring concentration camps so that they and the world would have a hard time doing that. Today, there can be no question of what Hamas did: We have the audio of their phone calls and the videos they produced. After the war, Eisenhower was the president of Columbia University. Today, he’d be appalled to be connected with it in any way.

The media has downplayed much of the horrific barbarism, and this may be hard to hear, but here are just a few examples. In one family, a first responder reported the husband was shot, the baby was placed in a burning hot oven, and the wife, to the screams of her dying child, was gang-raped and then killed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken offers another:

"The father's eye gouged out, the mother's breast cut off, the girl's foot amputated, the boy's fingers cut off before they were executed, and then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with."

In recent years higher ed has been a place where free speech was muzzled with lunatic claims of misgendering, misappropriation and such. This conduct now makes hash of the bull hockey.

Professor David Bernstein nails the hypocrisy: 

@ProfDBernstein

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile. Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one? 

There are more than enough examples of the Loco in higher education today, but here are some, unfortunately not inclusive:

• A professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School was found after an internal investigation to have engaged in anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli discrimination. No personnel action was taken and one Harvard publication hailed him as a “civil rights hero.” 
• At the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill refused an effort to move off campus a festival called “Palestine Writes.” One of the featured panelists posts on X under the name Rafaat in Gaza. 

In response to the baby burned to death in his family’s oven, Rafaat Alareer posts “with or without baking powder.”

He’s a Gaza professor who was hailed by the New York Times as a “bridge builder” two years ago, a man so vile, Burge remarks that Alareer was “auditioning for humor columnist for Der Sturmer.” The paper has now admitted it was taken in by him.

• UC San Diego’s ethnic studies department demanded “an end to genocide in Gaza” and cancelled a day of classes to conduct a general strike in support of Hamas. 
• Yale’s Daily News editor, a major in “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” issued a “correction” to an article on the atrocities by Sahar Tartak, a correction which ignoring all evidence, said that the claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men were “unsubstantiated” and was finally forced to correct the correction albeit still disingenuously. 
• At Brandeis, a university founded by Jews after the Holocaust, the student government, padded with radicals, voted down a resolution to condemn Hamas.
• At Stanford students wrote “Come chat about how Jewish babies should be burned alive.”
• At Georgetown University (a big if not the biggest recipient of Qatar funds) Aneesa Johnson, who has a long history of anti-Semitic and anti-American conduct, was hired by the School of Foreign Service to be the "primary point of contact" for master's students on "everything academic," and only after public exposure was she placed on administrative leave.
• At the University of Minnesota posters of kidnapped Israelis were repeatedly vandalized, and “posters too obscene to share …were plastered around campus, Students at Hillel there say they are struggling.”  
• At Rutgers Professor Noura Erakat claims Israel is thirsty for Palestinian blood.
• At Harvard, some students went to Palestine and returned to campus to endorse Palestine and harass Jewish students.

One of the founders of GS4P, Elon Tettey-Temalko, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School was filmed this week allegedly assaulting an Israeli Harvard Business School student who was filming a pro-Palestinian demonstration. 

Tettey-Temalko is under investigation by campus police and the FBI, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon. Neither Harvard nor Tettey-Temalko returned The Post’s requests for comment Friday. Tettey-Temalko is also a proctor, a staff member who advises undergraduates and lives in their dorm.

A Harvard Law Review editor was also among those harassing and assaulting a Jewish student.

• At Cornell: 

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents “more than doubled in May 2021 compared to the same time period in 2020.

Cornell President, Martha Pollack sent out a letter in which she noted the “alarming national rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes… amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East” and appealed for “rigorous discourse and debate, devoid of personal invective and attacks.”

Cornell SJP’s [Students for Justice in Palestine] response was to trivialize this increase in anti-Semitism and condemn President Pollack for her statement.

In response to President Pollack’s letter, the group rejected the university president’s call for “rigorous discourse and debate.” Instead, they promoted “the duty to resist colonial violence.” The chapter added, “In conclusion: Our expectations for you were low but Holy F#%k.”

Cornell SJP then called on their followers to “send an email to administration [sic] in regards to their complete dismissal of the ethnic cleansing and apartheid of Palestinians.” 

In an Instagram post, Cornell SJP attached a link to an email condemning President Pollack’s letter. It was signed by Cornell professors, students and student groups.

One Cornell student was charged by the FBI after issuing death threats to Jewish students.

• At Cooper Union Jewish students took shelter in a locked library against a threatening mob.
• At Columbia:

Jewish students at Columbia University facing growing antisemitism on campus say they are feel unsafe and abandoned by campus administrators and some of their faculty and classmates, as tensions from the war between Israel and Hamas spill over onto college campuses.

Their concerns are echoed by many students across other New York colleges, including Cornell University and Cooper Union, who have reported feeling threatened on campus or isolated in their condemnation of Hamas’ terror attacks on civilians.

“This is a failure of the university to create a setting where students see each other as human,” said Yoni Kurtz, 21, a junior at Columbia studying history.

Kurtz and dozens of his Jewish classmates at Columbia have been stunned by a series of incidents, including an assault on campus being charged as a hate crime and a swastika found Friday in a school bathroom. They gathered Monday to say the university’s official response to these reports and others has been inadequate.

“We got to this point because the Columbia administration by their inaction has enabled antisemitic rhetoric to spread,” said Eli Shmidman, who is in his second year at Columbia Law School. Shmidman reported a student who approached him in a main thoroughfare of Jerome Greene Hall in the middle of the afternoon and said “f*ck the Jews.” 

• At Berkeley, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, a leftist whose record I’m sorry to say is not itself beyond reproach, says “Nothing prepared me for the antisemitism on college campuses.”
• Oberlin, which now seems to exist only to expend its endowment on litigation fees, fines, and judgements for outrageous behavior while its Board of Trustees (like those at all these schools) looks away and fails to act on the administration, faces a Title VI investigation for tolerating anti-Semitism and hiring Mohammad Jafar Mhallati (Professor of peace) who called for the elimination of Israel and the death of Salman Rushdie. 

Apart from the question of who funds and endorses this outpouring of hate, the best explanation is again David Burge’s:

@iowahawkblog

The intellectual manifest for this (to the degree it even exists) is People With Perceived Power = Bad and People Lacking Perceived Power = Good, and any that all People Lacking Perceived Power must sympathize and unite with all other People Lacking Perceived Power, regardless of how many children they behead.

Truth told, not *regardless* of how many children they behead, but *because* of how many children they behead. Because beheading children only underscores how desperately their plight, and the righteousness of their fight against the evil People With Perceived Power. 

The anguish among Jews who so respected academia and supported it is real.

We are not the ones ripping down missing posters or celebrating deranged murderers, but our uneasy silence has allowed those people to monopolize our public squares until we no longer have space to mourn our dead. The past three weeks are what happens when we stay quiet and let others set the alarming temperature of the air in the elite institutions we inhabit. Because to take a stand would make it harder to enter certain rooms. It would interfere with the work -- the increasingly difficult, uncomfortable, queasy-making, indeed disfiguring work -- of belonging.

I see clearly now who occupies those rooms -- the moral arbiters of our generation, with their “pristine” ethical codes riddled with hypocrisy, their jargon-bloated excuses for antisemitic hate, their hollow pontification about empathy and justice delivered in the same breath with which they rationalize the murder and torture of people who might be my brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins, or friends. I don’t want to contort myself to be in those rooms anymore. Do you?

It’s time those outfits that rank colleges and universities (Forbes, US News, USA Today), include a measurement of safety and civility for all students. Other measures in response to this rot are worth consideration and support.

There’s Title VI and other legislation that would apply. The Departments of Education and Justice should be pressed to investigate.

Can the radicals who have rotted out what until a few years ago was a country with an outstanding higher education record, be removed? Steve Hayward says it’s unlikely.  

He looks to the example of Ward Churchill, who like Elizabeth Warren faked his way into a professorship by lying about his ethnicity.

Though he didn’t have a PhD or any major publications, the department granted Churchill tenure in an accelerated process, and in due course he became department chair. 

It is clear the reason for his surprising advancement was ideological and not academic merit.

How often is this ideological process duplicated today? Quite widely. 

Here’s a current job ad from Georgetown: “The Department of Economics seeks to hire a tenure-track assistant professor who aligns with the University’s social justice objectives by conducting outstanding research and teaching in the areas of race, gender, inequality, and social justice economics.” 

In other words, it wants an ideological leftist.

Ohio State’s English Department is seeking a scholar who will work on “settler colonialism, decolonization, genocide, Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, social movements and activism…”

Students hoping for lively readings of Shakespeare or Jane Austen will want to enroll elsewhere.

Not to be left out, Duke University’s literature program is looking for a professor who will focus on “political theory, decoloniality and post-colonial theory” and “critical race and ethnic studies.”

Or consider elite Williams College, whose German department wants an assistant professor “committed to inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy,” especially in the areas of “migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches.”

These are just a few of the current university job ads in the humanities and social sciences; I have enough to fill a file cabinet. 

The irony of the Williams German department seeking a plainly ideological hire is that these centers of virulent antisemitism would have been at home in the pro-Nazi German universities of the 1930s.

University presidents and especially provosts, who are supposed to be the quality-control officers of higher education, could put a stop to this by exercising their authority to veto such ads or disapprove tenure and advancement of politicized professors. 

The invertebrates who serve as college presidents will do nothing meaningful beyond appointing a task force to look into the issue, as Harvard has done to cover its shame.[snip]

Our universities are so far gone and the number of professors deserving of dismissal so large that every school will shrink in terror from the controversies any housecleaning will cause 

Tongue in cheek, he suggests on X “we should dust off the de-Nazification manuals from 1945 and update them for use on college campuses in America.”

Of course, you can pressure Boards of Trustees to fulfill their fiduciary and moral obligations to clean up these outrages and put an end to them. You can fight to change tenure. You can (especially at state colleges with public funding) demand the end to DEI departments which foster this and the elimination of the made-up studies programs both of which are designed to employ pity hires -- that is, people with no accepted academic credentials -- to pad their diversity quotas, and return to solid scholarship. 

Apart from government action and pressure on trustees, those few sane deans left could follow George Q. Daley of Harvard’s medical school and condemn such rotten behavior. Major law firms have offered to represent Jewish students at universities which have allowed this harassment. Other firms have withdrawn employment offers and threaten to never hire students involved in anti-Semitic campus attacks. A number of major donors have said they will no longer contribute to schools which tolerate this, Steve Eisman, for example, has said he no longer -- “ever” -- wants his name associated with the University of Pennsylvania. And similar big donors to the school are withdrawing patronage over its support for Hamas and anti-Semitism. We can endorse legislation that limits foreign donations to these schools and provides some real oversight into the use to which they are put. Whether a big or small donor, you can keep your wallets shut when the begging letters come, and fight to end federal and state contributions to these cesspools. It might be time, even, to raise much higher taxes on the big endowments of the Ivies which have abandoned their educational responsibilities, choosing instead to operate like hedge funds.

Work together to expunge this rot. It took decades for this cancer to infect our colleges and universities. It will take time to eradicate it, but do not give up. React, write, speak, demand federal and state action, sue the dickens out of them, hire no student who engages in this. Draw down through taxes the huge endowments by which they have insulated themselves from all decency. They made the rules of cancel culture and it’s time we used the rules they made. 

Dark Times, Dark Outlooks in America: Is the Biden Administration Ruining Us?

posted by Ward Clark at RedStateVIP 

There can be no denying that we live in interesting times, as references the supposed (but not really) ancient Chinese curse. As we have seen all too vividly here at RedState and in other news outlets over the last month, the world's tension level has spiked, with wars now not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Middle East; Israel recently suffered an unprovoked attack in which the radical Islamic terror group Hamas committed some of the worst atrocities ever seen in the history of the modern world. 

Meanwhile, the United States, having apparently abandoned the post-WW2 Pax Americana that kept the global trade routes free and secure, is embarrassed daily by a man who is almost certainly the weakest president in the history of the republic.

Now, Iran is once again poking the eagle. Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is not amused.

Iran is delivering to the United States right now a massive national insult. I mean, we are just without dignity right now when it comes to Iran. I mean, they attacked us 28 times since the war began. Our response was to, you know, send a couple of missiles over empty warehouses coupled with an apology. Their human rights record is atrocious. I mean, these two beautiful young women, because they dared not cover their faces properly, were taken into custody. Mahsa Amini died two days later from her wounds. Armita Garawand, who was in a coma for a month, she unfortunately just succumbed to her wounds. They shoot protesters in the streets. They take dissenters and they execute them publicly. The foreign minister of Iran, we give him safe passage into our country. We protect him. He gets up in front of the United Nations, and he lectures the United States and Israel. He threatens us. And now they're the head of the Human Rights Council? I mean, this is outrageous.

Of course it's outrageous, and it's outrageous because Iran knows the Biden administration will be everything but outraged by these actions. If there is a word for the Biden administration's response to Iran's blustering and, yes, outright attacks on American servicemen, it would be this: impotent. This administration can't even seem to muster a reply to the United Nation's hideously inappropriate appointment of Iran to chair the Human Rights Council Social Forum.

What else could we expect from a doddering, confused president who can't even negotiate the stairway into Air Force One?

We see this morning that, despite all of the lawfare waged against him, despite the undying enmity of the legacy media and the hostility of many, even in his own party, former President Trump is polling well ahead of President Biden in key swing states. Polls at this point are not terribly meaningful, as not even one primary vote has yet been cast, but the trend, the trend is undeniable.

Trump leads Biden by a whopping 10 points in Nevada, six points in Georgia, five points in both Arizona and Michigan, and four points in Pennsylvania. Biden's sole lead is in Wisconsin, where he beats Trump by two points.

Biden had defeated Trump in all six states during the 2020 election. Combining the polling in all six states gives Trump a 48-44 lead over Biden.

At this point, two things about the 2024 Presidential election seem likely: President Trump will continue to drive forward in his attempt to pull a Grover Cleveland and regain the Resolute Desk, and President Biden will likely not end up being the Democrat candidate. If the Dems want to retire old Joe and pick a replacement, though, they are quickly running out of time, especially as the detestable, cackling Kamala Harris would amount to a sure loss.

The trouble goes well beyond the White House. Young idiots and Islamic extremists have staged riots over Israel's response to the October 7th attacks, to the point of smearing blood on the White House gates. These same people were, of course, silent while Syria gassed its own people, while Iraq under Saddam Hussein slaughtered the Marsh Arabs, or as China continues to persecute and imprison its (mostly Muslim) Uyghur minority.

Not a peep when Muslims were killed by their own governments. But let Israel retaliate for one of the most hideous attacks in modern history, and suddenly it's Katy-bar-the-door, because the idiots are on parade, to the point where Jews — Jewish Democrats, mind — are beginning to feel very uncomfortable with their own government. And the Biden administration is largely silent on all of these issues.

As I said, interesting times. It's not at all inconceivable that a third world warmay be on the horizon. The Democrat Party seems to be self-destructing. And former President Trump is surging.

I've never cared for the whole "The next election is the most important in the nation's history" claim. But I am convinced that the next few election cycles will set the tone for the rest of the century, and I am likewise convinced that if America falls, the world will likely enter into another dark age.

And in Washington, a befuddled, confused, dimwitted man, one of the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt political figures since Huey Long — maybe since Caligula — still has his liver-spotted hands on the reins of power.

How Wokeness Puts Its Defenders In A Chokehold — And How To Help Them Out

Since Oct. 7, leftists are finally waking up to see how their cause discards allies so easily and abandons moral axioms so callously.

posted by Noelle Mering at The Federalist

The weeks following the Oct. 7 atrocities, where 1,400 Jews were brutally killed in Israel, have been paradigm-shattering for many who had heretofore considered themselves woke allies.

The vilest acts of terrorism there were regaled here by all the usual woke suspects: Black Lives Matter and LGBT activists, college and high school students, and well-positioned college professors. The shameless celebrations on the backs of terrorism quickly pivoted to an explosion of blatant harassment of Jewish people on campuses and beyond, leaving those still living in the realm of sanity to question what this movement actually stood for all along.

For those looking to “detransition” out from woke possession, and those seeking to facilitate their escape, it is essential to understand how exactly so many were captured by it. The process of leaving the woke movement is similar to that of disentangling oneself from a cult or an abusive narcissist. You must begin to spot the lies and identify the various forms of manipulation. Once seen, such tactics are hard to unsee, and the spell breaks abruptly.

Stages of woke manipulation generally move from pity to fear to force. It starts with appeals to compassion, then preys upon fear of social or civic retribution, and finally moves to force through coercive laws, encroachments on freedom, corruption of agencies and institutions, and finally violence.

Stage One: Pity

The first stage is the most subtle. In any marginalized identity group, there are plenty of examples of legitimate injustices that ought to elicit righteous anger and compassion in response. The #MeToo movement for example had no shortage of boorish and abusive male transgressions to galvanize a societal corrective. The BLM movement capitalized on racial grievances and militarized them.

It’s easy in the moment to overlook the uncomfortable excesses amid any sort of collective correction. If slogans such as “believe all women,” “smash the patriarchy,” or “defund the police,” seemed themselves unjust, well, such rhetoric can be forgiven when people have suffered so much. Likewise, if we need to turn workplaces and schools into DEI struggle sessions and silence or amplify employees and students based on skin color, maybe that’s justified if other groups have been so privileged.

The word “privilege” is a powerful rhetorical device for this form of manipulation. It is a word used not to induce gratitude but to impugn guilt and cement a fundamental redefinition of the person. Traditionally, we have defined persons based on what unites us: We are all rational animals, or we are made in the image of God.

For the woke, we are defined not by the love of God, but by the hatred of mankind. We are defined by what divides us. The appeal to pity then holds power only as long as we see ourselves on one side or the other of this unbridgeable binary of groups who are made innocent by their victimhood and groups who are implicated by their privilege.

Stage Two: Fear

At this stage, some might start to suspect that something is amiss. Perhaps it is not actually compassionate or empowering to persuade people that they are in a permanent victim class. Despite this gnawing suspicion, many will remain silent out of fear. This stage of manipulation is implicit: Even if compassion has worn thin, most people don’t want to appear uncompassionate. Belonging is a fundamental human need, and fear of ostracism is a compelling motivator.

The movement exploits this fear through the militancy in which it demands full-throated endorsement of its tenets. For example, judging people by the content of their character — not the color of their skin — has long been understood to be a good and right goal and one endorsed by our civil rights heroes of old. But in 2020, it became not only insufficient but demonstrably evil, as colorblindness was rebranded as a sign of white supremacy.

Manipulation by fear is not only through social condemnation but also financial and civic retribution. In any given workplace there are substantial numbers of employees who sit silently through DEI trainings and begrudgingly offer their pronouns knowing that to object could cost them their livelihoods. Even if they work independently, platforms such as YouTube have demonstrated their swift and certain ability to instantly wipe away an entire channel of income. The implicit threat of this sort can encourage anyone to self-censor.

Stage Three: Force

The fear stage blends easily into force. What was normalized through weaponized compassion, fear, and silence becomes codified in law and policy.

The force stage is both alarming and hopeful. Before this stage, the movement still seems benevolent to many. It was easy enough to overlook the more militant parts of wokeism or translate them into something reasonable. Force is the acceleration stage where the social justice movement is exposed as neither social nor just.

Evidence that we are firmly in the force stage of escalation abound. The proof is in the rampant rioting and criminality in the summer of 2020, the legal persecution of pro-lifers in 2023, the forced spoon-feeding of gender ideology in grammar schools, and corporate media’s corrupt and desperate running interference in defense of all this. And if the destruction, corruption, and perversions were not enough, maybe the progression to antisemitism and terrorism is. Even if flaccid apologies roll in as institutional donors roll out, the logic of revolution is finally laid bare, and the exposure is too much to walk back.

Though this stage feels not a little terrifying, it presents an opportunity for a burgeoning political realignment. Like the feminists who felt betrayed when the revolution sacrificed them for the transgender movement, many leftists are seeing with clarity the bankruptcy of a cause that can discard allies so easily and abandon moral axioms so callously.

To welcome them and buttress a return to sanity, we need to alleviate the two greatest barriers to taking the off-ramp from wokeism: power and complicity.

Intoxicating Virtue and Power

The greatest intoxication of getting woke is that it imbues a person with a sense of great virtue and power. The movement gives perverse incentive to find one’s moral stature in claiming a victim identity. Every perpetual victim needs a perpetual culprit. This leads to a society of accusers in constant roiling conflict, unable to self-examine — incentivized to find evil everywhere around him but never within.

All are tempted to deflect responsibility, but healthy communities — from a well-ordered family to Christianity — seek to counter it through things like examinations of conscience, confession, or the natural way that the intimacy of family life can hold a mirror to our conscience. The woke movement in contrast seeks to exploit — not counter — this human tendency to deflect and accuse.

Because this habit of victim/accuser identity is hard to break, we ought to fight the woke revolution without devolving into angry belligerent blowhards who would never welcome a woke refugee into our realm. We want to be the sort of people to whom friends can sincerely admit that they bought into a fraud without feeling that we will spike the football on them.

Facing Their Own Complicity

The other obstacle to the off-ramp is complicity. How many of the woke have passionately argued for it, cast off lifelong friends over it, engaged in shameful behavior, or supported horrifying things? Even if they now have a growing awareness that they might have been wrong, it is hard to face and hard to hear. There is no truth more offensive than the one we are trying to silence in ourselves.

The urge to say “I told you so” is strong, but the goal is victory, not valorization. Those who can face their complicity and reverse course have the sort of story and courage that can build a powerful off-ramp for many others.

In this final stage of the woke revolution, it looks to be either nearly triumphant or on life support. Which way we perceive it can determine if we course-correct. Wokeism colonizes the soul by requiring people to lie inwardly so they can accept the lies they must promote outwardly. Normalizing saying true things helps stir change in others, but that groundwork is often hidden for some time. There is good reason to think the spell of ideology is breaking. Keep going.