Cabal, Mimesis, Contagion

Exploring the Rise of Wokeness -- and the Cure

We’re all familiar with the cluster of ideas and behaviors that we lump together as “Wokeness.” For those who aren’t: it’s a cup of Gramsci combined with several tablespoons of Foucault, Reich, and Marcuse and a heaping dose of Frantz Fanon, then poured over every damn thing in reach. We know all the stereotypes — fluorescent hair, pronouns in bio, trigger warnings, privilege-owning and virtue-signaling. We’ve caught George Soros, Larry Fink, and other billionaires throwing money at different Woke causes.

But there’s one question that hasn’t been answered: how did Wokeness spread so quickly?

As ideologies go, Wokeness is not an obvious winner. Many Woke ideas are self-contradictory, and Woke thinkers appear incapable of distinguishing between goals and slogans. Its loudest adherents are embarrassing even by fanatical zealot standards. It demands that its target audience engage in self-abasement rituals and tear down their ancestral shrines. At best, you might expect Cluster Woke disorders to be confined to a fringe audience — which is exactly where these ideas stayed for decades before their mainstream breakthrough.

You could argue that Wokeness was promoted by an unholy coalition of government and corporate interests, and you wouldn’t be wrong. That team-up definitely needs to be addressed and we’re going to tackle it first. But government and corporate interests acting together have generally had a rather unimpressive track record. How did the team that brought us the F-35, wind farms, and Partnership for a Drug-Free America score such a resounding success?

Let’s take a closer look.

Cabal

Faced with complicated problems, we instinctively seek the comfort of simple answers. For the Dissident Left, it’s White Supremacy. For the Dissident Right, it’s the Jews. Both are chasing shadows. But you can’t have shadows without something blocking the light.

The “White Supremacy” so feared by the Left is not so much about race or ethnicity — we’ve had multicultural White Supremacists since Charlottesville. It’s no coincidence that most of the loudest Woke activists suffer from numerous proudly catalogued physical and psychological disorders. Nor are the Vitalists wrong when they claim that Wokeness is rooted in ressentiment. What the Dangerhairs sense as White Supremacy is the social hierarchy that identifies them as bottom feeders.

The Jews serve a similar purpose for the Right. As a whole, Jews have a considerably higher in-group preference than most other ethnic groups. They work hard to protect themselves from what they see as a hostile world. They punch well above their weight when it comes to defending Jewish interests. There are lots of reasons to distrust AIPAC, the ADL, and other large Zionist organizations. But the men who taste Jews in their sandwiches see a Hebrew behind every catastrophe.

We’ve been “naming the Jew” for a good while now. Have the Rothschilds been stripped of their wealth? Did we stop sending bombs to support apartheid Israel? And have all those crusades against “White Supremacy” actually served to change the people who hold the levers of power?

“Virtue signals” are generally seen as a Left-wing phenomenon. But many Right-leaning dissidents use spicy memes the way Lefties use “In This House We Believe…” yard signs. The fact is that most of the crusaders against Supremacy (White or Jewish) are not seeking world changes, they’re seeking personal aggrandizement.

The Jew-namers and White-haters are engaging in what

Barbara Wegner

calls “the Drama Triangle.” The Jews/White Supremacists are the Persecutors, figures of unmitigated evil who are responsible for all the world’s problems. Those who have identified the problem are Saviors, come to rescue all the Victims who are so cruelly oppressed.

There’s no room for movement in the Drama Triangle. To negotiate with the Persecutors is to become a Persecutor yourself. And while the Saviors get the warm self-righteous glow of being smarter than the poor dupes, there’s far less interest in rescuing the Victims than in mocking their gullibility.

Are you offended by my words? Are you about to declare me a shabbos goy on the Jewish payroll? Stop and consider these words of wisdom from Romanian mystic and revolutionary Corneliu Codreanu:

A country has the Jews it deserves. Just as mosquitoes can thrive and settle only in swamps, likewise the former can only thrive in the swamps of our sins.

Historians will argue for centuries over who was responsible for the 21st Century’s Wokeness period. It’s a pretty sure bet that quite a few of them will blame the Jews. But who did this is less important than how it was done — and why we allowed it.

Mimesis

Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

Rene Girard, Violent Origins, 122

There are good reasons why corporations pay huge sums to celebrities. By purchasing a star’s favorite clothing, car, or beverage, fans can emulate their heroes. And those who will wear their idol’s clothes and drink their idol’s beer and generally happy to repeat their idol’s favorite slogans. The celebrities of the silver screen have been replaced by online influencers, but the game remains the same.

But while we may be influenced by the famous, we are far more influenced by our friends. When our social circle decides that X is a good thing and Y a bad one, we’re likely to go along with the flow. We fancy ourselves thinking beings who run on logical decisions. But we lack the data to make any kind of informed decision on most political and social events. We didn’t reason our way into most of our beliefs, we were socialized into them.

Today much, probably most, of our socializing takes place online. And many of the “people” we socialize with are actually automated software apps. In 2024 5th Column AI estimated that approximately 64% of the 1.269 million X accounts it analyzed were actually bots. Many of these bots perform beneficial or harmless tasks. The popular Threadreader App helps users preserve long X conversations in an easily read format.

But there are other, more unsavory bots. Botnet owners sell follows to those looking to boost their engagement numbers. In 2019 Democratic partisans and cryptocoin-clippers Ed and Brian Krassenstein were suspended from Twitter for purchasing followers. Spam bots regularly spray solicitations for pornography, cryptocoins, account recovery and other services across random Twitter feeds. And malware distributors use X bots to trick users into clicking on harmful links.

State actors regularly use bots for political purposes. In 2022 China used a botnet flood to suppress information about Chinese COVID protests. In 2024 Russian bots promoted a fake story about Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s wife buying a $4.8 million Bugatti. But anybody with a modicum of programming knowledge and some time can create their own social media bots, so we can expect bots to be part of the landscape for some time to come.

Many of these bots use sophisticated algorithms and carefully crafted posts to ensure maximum engagement. Readers may squeal with delight or gnash their teeth in rage, but they can’t help responding. As they respond, they internalize those posts as examples of what a good person should think and evidence of how bad people think. Science fiction writers looked forward to a day when machines could mimic human thought. What we got was a world where humans mimic machines.

Bots also provide a convenient escape hatch against dissenting views. Those who disagree with you are clearly NPCs and bots run by Putin, Mossad, the CIA, or your bugbear of choice. To be fair, there’s a non-trivial chance that your opponents got their ideas from a bot. To be equally fair, the same could be said of your ideas.

Bots, trolls, and provocateurs aim is to spread discord and dissension. They tell their readers that powerful and evil people are working against them. The more we see these messages, and the more our friends repeat them, the more we internalize them. Our enemies become Girardian scapegoats — vessels for our anger and fear. As Girard describes the process in The Scapegoat:

Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society. The stereotypical accusation justifies and facilitates this belief by ostensibly acting the role of mediator. It bridges the gap between the insignificance of the individual and the enormity of the social body. 

If the wrongdoers, even the diabolical ones, are to succeed in destroying the community’s distinctions, they must either attack the community directly, by striking at its heart or head, or else they must begin the destruction of difference within their own sphere by committing contagious crimes such as parricide and incest. 

Jews, White Supremacists, pedophiles, Donald Trump — we have plenty of scapegoats to choose from. We load our problems on our chosen goat and hope that things will be better once we finally drive them out into the wilderness.

So now that we know what they’re doing, it should be easy to find out who’s behind this campaign, right? First we have to figure out who is willfully lying to suit their ends and who has merely been caught up in the lies. And that may be more challenging than you expect.

Contagion

There’s no reason to suppose that the Alters/Multiple craze that has been sweeping TikTok for a while was part of some sinister plot. It was more likely started by a few deluded attention-seekers who convinced themselves they had multiple people living in their heads. They then “came out” to an audience of insecure young people in search of a kindred spirit (or spirits, as the case may be).

Whether by design or by accident, TikTok serves as a vector by which this disease spreads. And Multiples are just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll find “autistics” acting out stimming, youngsters with “Tourette’s” barking at the camera, and endless examples of newly discovered Gender Identity Disorders.

Social media thrives on engagement and clicks. Influencers gain exposure by making outrageous statements. Their bad behavior brings them more followers, which brings them more exposure. The end result is an ever-accelerating race to the bottom — and an ever-increasing celebration of dysfunctional behavior. And a quick look at other social media platforms reveals the contagion isn’t just confined to TikTok.

The phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” may be more accurate than you think. Consider this passage from progressive Substacker Thom Hartmann describing his expectations for a second Trump term:

Now licensed by six Republicans on the Supreme Court and their integration into the military, Proud Boy groups began organized attacks on Black neighborhoods, gay bars, and libraries. Dozens of people died, touching off riots in several cities — particularly Portland and Seattle — that were covered breathlessly by Fox “News.”

Trump pointed to the unrest and announced a second round of billion-dollar contracts for Halliburton to build camps where “bad people,” including those guilty of libel, violating gender conformity laws, or “poisoning the blood of America” through biracial marriages or giving shelter to illegal immigrants, could be “concentrated.”

Hartmann, and many of his fellow progressives, have convinced themselves that Donald Trump is Literally Hitler, only worse. A December 2023 Harvard-CAPS poll found that 40% of all voters strongly agree that Donald Trump will be a dictator if he wins a second term. Sure, some are faking TDS for the grift. But many more sincerely believe that we’re on the edge of a takeover by Orange Julius Caesar.

Hollywood is notoriously Jewish, so it only stands to reason that Jewish execs were in on the Wokeness conspiracy — or does it? While entertainment and advertising execs fancy themselves trend-setters, they’re also notorious trend-followers. Entertainment execs may have been casting Black mermaids and hobbits as part of a sinister global plot. Or maybe they were simply trying to keep up with the Current Thing.

What about academia and the Long March Through The Institutions? There was definitely some (very successful) plotting and planning going on there. But there were other factors that made 21st century colleges particularly ripe for a takeover. Tenure track positions have become increasingly scarce, and adjunct professors can be dismissed for any reason or no reason at all. In this weakened state, many fall prey to the contagion. The rest are too disempowered to stand against it.

So now that we’ve learned a bit about how Wokeness spread, how do we respond to it?

Containment

Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.

The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 4

Wokeness is nothing if not dogmatic. Those who stray from even its smallest tenet are subjected to vicious personal attacks and threats to their livelihood. The Tweet above is just one sample of the abuse JK Rowling receives on a daily basis for her blasphemous belief that convicted rapists shouldn’t be allowed in women’s prisons no matter what they identify as.

This has resulted in many circular firing squads. As their claims grow increasingly outrageous, those who speak out are ruthlessly shut down. This leads to other members walking away from the madness. They might not speak out against Wokeness, but neither will they speak up for it. And as the movement grows increasingly detached from reality, you’ll find fewer new members absorbing it through mimesis.

The first thing to remember about epidemics is they invariably burn themselves out. The deadliest strains kill most of their targets before they can infect others and are replaced by more virulent but less lethal strains. By promoting its loudest and looniest representatives, social media has slowed that process. But in doing so, it also sowed the seeds of a Woke collapse.

Chaya Raichik became Woke Public Enemy #1 simply by reposting the stupidest and most entertaining Libs of TikTok. Raichik has cost Woke teachers, librarians, journalists, and school officials their jobs. She has also become a leading figure in the fight against inappropriate child sexualization at school. And all she had to do was repost material that her targets made publicly available.

Because Wokeness was briefly a corporate fad, many Woke activists have come to rely on the support of large corporations. They have been shocked, just shocked, to discover that corporations only care about the bottom line. Consider the failed boycott against Hogwarts Legacy. Several gaming sites refused to review it. Trans gamer Jessie Earl implored piteously in a Gamespot article:

If you are not willing to give up a piece of entertainment in solidarity against the harm J.K. Rowling continues to enact; then how can trans people feel assured you’ll be willing to fight for us in more important areas, such as anti-trans violence, be it physical, mental, personal, systemic or legislative, especially as the discrimination continues to rise?

Alas, Hogwarts Legacy sold 12 million units within 6 weeks. There was much whining and stomping of size 13 high heels, but in the end gamers prioritized a shiny new AAA game over the desires of the trans community. And many who had been cowed into silence now saw that the trans community could safely be ignored.

Other businesses have begun pulling back from DEI initiatives in response to consumer boycotts. Ford, Harley Davidson, John Deere, and Lowes are just a few of the that have decided DEI was a drag on its bottom line. And despite the endless complaints about slope-browed racist audiences, studios are finding few takers for their diverse movies, shows, and comic books.

When you are fighting Wokeness, remember that its support is broad but not deep. Most people flaunting IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER yard signs would quickly call the police if they saw an unfamiliar Black youth walking through their lily-White neighborhood. As Jessie Earl correctly points out, those who won’t give up a game for the cause can hardly be expected to stand in solidarity when it might involve any kind of effort or risk.

But perhaps its greatest weakness is time. Fads have shelf lives, and Wokeness is reaching its pull-by date. The most dedicated among the Woke will likely move to a more militant, class-focused style of Marxism. (This is a big win for us, as old-school Reds and working-class Populists can work together on many issues). The rest will wander off in search of someone who will tell them what to say and who to hate.