The New Gatekeepers, Lengthy Read

[bonnie1962]

The New Gatekeepers

How the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it

BY

MICHAEL LIND

OCTOBER 25, 2022

 

FROM LEFT: BILL TOMPKINS/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL CIAGLO/GETTY IMAGES; ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

COLLECTION

This article is part of Wokeness, Social Justice, and Cancel Culture.

See the full collection →︎

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”

By the 2020s, at one university after another, applicants for faculty positions were required to submit “DEI statements,” listing the ways that they would personally advance this particular ideology through their work as teachers and researchers. Campus commissars were appointed to ensure that faculty reading lists and guest speaker panels had the appropriate race and gender makeup. In corporations, banks, universities, and government agencies, the relatively anodyne “diversity training” of the late 20th century, designed to minimize the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination lawsuits, gave way to DEI trainings. The goal of such exercises was not to promulgate knowledge of specific anti-discrimination rules and procedures, but to engage staff in Maoist-style struggle sessions designed to break down the personalities and identities of non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian Americans through confession of “microaggressions” and “racial privilege.”

Meanwhile, large corporations and banks, universities and major foundations, and the Democratic Party—now the party of college-educated whites and most of the super-rich—ostentatiously signaled their virtue as one new social justice cause succeeded another: Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender radicalism. Ironically, the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement became the logo of U.S. corporations and U.S. embassies, even as gay men and lesbians who questioned the new orthodoxy were hounded out of the T- and Q-dominated LGBTQ+ acronym alliance for the sin of “transphobia.”

Seeking historical analogies for this sudden revolution in American institutional life, some spoke of the Great Awokening, alluding to the two Great Awakenings that animated Anglo-American Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries. A case can indeed be made that wokeness is a secular religion, complete with its own ersatz rituals, like “taking the knee,” invoking the imminent apocalypse of anthropogenic climate change, and icons of George Floyd, a victim of police brutality who was elevated into a martyr. Suggestively, the movement has flourished in the English-speaking nations, which share a heritage of Calvinist Puritanism, while being relatively unsuccessful in countries with Latin and Catholic traditions like France or Italy.

Nevertheless, the Great Awokening is a misleading term. Woke activists are not honest missionaries; they are infiltrators, acting with the specific goal of seizing control of institutions and imposing their views on others. Unlike the Protestant evangelists of the Great Awakenings, today’s activists do not use simple language to spread their message to sinners in need of repentance. On the contrary, they camouflage radical beliefs in bureaucratic acronyms like DEI and CRT, and anodyne-sounding terms like “gender-affirming health care”—in practice, often a euphemism for castrating boys and men and sterilizing and performing irreversible mastectomies on girls and women. Where Protestant evangelists sought voluntary and whole-hearted conversion, the new activists seek submission, imposed on penalty of ostracism.

If these activists are not evangelists, what are they? They are “entryists.” The term “entryism” has been associated with the Trotskyist denomination of Marxism since the 1930s, when the exiled Leon Trotsky urged his followers in Britain to infiltrate the Labour Party and influence it from within, rather than form their own small, ineffectual party. But the tactic is not limited to the political left. In the United States there have been cases in which Protestant fundamentalists ran for local school boards as moderates and then, once they had majorities on the board, used their power for goals like teaching “creation science” along with evolutionary biology.

The center left of the political spectrum has historically been vulnerable to entryism by small, radical sects of zealots. Today’s illiberal radicals, like yesterday’s communists, have profited from a “no enemies to the left” policy among liberals. Mild-mannered liberals and progressives believe in civil rights, so therefore something called “anti-racism” must be worth supporting, even if there are a few problems here and there: Ibram X. Kendi’s sectarian lunacy thus hitches a free ride on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Similarly, adding “T” and “Q” to LGB legitimated public acceptance of radical gender ideology, as though insisting that controversial and often dangerous “gender transitions” are a natural and unobjectionable continuation of the campaign to allow same-sex couples to marry.

Wokists, then, are not the new Protestants, any more than they are the new Trotskyites. They are entryists in their methods, but not in their ideology. Such identity politics is not the kind of coalition of college students and minorities that Herbert Marcuse and other Marxists hoped for in the 1960s, after they were disappointed by the lack of revolutionary fervor among the American and European working classes. Black nationalism, the model for all racial and ethnic nationalisms on the Western left, has its roots in 19th-century German racial and cultural nationalism, not cosmopolitan Marxism. Radical feminism, which spawned gender ideology, has its own tradition as independent of socialism, even if some radical feminists have also been socialists. Indeed, real communist regimes like the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba have usually been repressively traditional in matters of sex and gender.

This, however, raises a question. The various streams of identity politics that feed into today’s radical ideology are not new. Indeed, they have existed on the margins of politics and intellectual life for generations. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, “political correctness” was ridiculed into irrelevance everywhere except on university campuses and a handful of sectarian left institutions. What exactly is it that changed in the structure of American institutions so that the new entryists were able to successfully infiltrate and capture so many major organizations and professions in the 2010s, after such tactics had repeatedly been tried and failed before?

 

One way of answering the question of who the woke actually are is by posing a historical question: Why did political correctness (PC) fail to escape from its laboratories on university campuses while becoming an object of ridicule and derision in the 1980s and 1990s, while its successor, wokeness, succeeded in capturing major corporations, banks, universities, nonprofits, and government agencies beginning around 2010? The question is all the more interesting because many of the schools of thought that have been united in PC and wokeness date back to the 1970s, the 1960s, or earlier. For example, the term “intersectionality,” used to refer to hierarchies of real or alleged oppression, was coined by the Black feminist scholar Kimberle Crenshaw as early as 1989, yet the term was obscure even on college campuses before suddenly it was everywhere in the 2010s.

Control of three gateways in particular has been critical to the success of woke entryism. The three gateways are college education, professional accreditation, and commercial services, particularly new online media platforms like Twitter, sales platforms like Amazon, and financial platforms like PayPal. All three wield variants of the same power: the power to exclude people from the economy. Good Trotsky-style entryists that they are, woke activists, knowing that they would be defeated in free elections and in open public debates, have sought to infiltrate institutions to control key chokepoints or gateways, which empower them to be gatekeepers.

Today, unlike a generation ago, young Americans typically must pass through three gateways, in order to be economically successful. They must obtain college diplomas; they must join professional accrediting organizations; and they must be able to do business via platforms in the marketplace.

The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, and the American Bar Association in 1878. Colleges and universities assumed their present form only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and as recently as 1960 only about 10% of American men and around 6% of American women had bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Of the three kinds of gateway—the professional, the academic, and the platform—the third is the newest, a product of the early 21st century. As one writer recently put it, “the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorize the larger institutional landscape.”

Waiting for people at each gateway, like trolls under a bridge in a fairy tale, are woke leftists, who demand that they recite the in-group passwords before they are allowed to pass through the gates. What makes these gateways particularly vulnerable to capture by disciplined, zealous entryists in the United States is the fact that they are mostly private and unregulated. America’s most prestigious universities are private, and they set the standards for other universities in the country, both private and public. Whether private or public, all American universities are accredited by private, nonprofit accrediting agencies and not by America’s federal or state governments.

Old-fashioned commerce and banking are heavily regulated in the public interest. But since the 1990s, Silicon Valley, helped by ample offerings of campaign cash and post-political jobs, has persuaded Washington policymakers to allow online platforms to make up their own rules—the infamous, arbitrary “community terms of service” with “community” referring to their passive, powerless customers. No “sunshine laws” control the proceedings of Facebook’s privately designed and privately appointed Oversight Board, which includes John Samples, vice president of the Cato Institute; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark; Khaled Mansour, an Egyptian writer; and Afia Asantewaa Asare-Kyei, program manager of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. It seems entirely fair to say that none of these people is in any way representative of or responsible to Facebook’s users.

Despotic power is more frightening when it is arbitrary.

[bonnie1962]

 

 

Be careful what cause you endorse because you may be making God your enemy.

Is Being Woke Christian or Antichrist?

20 August 2022

 

You’ve seen it on TV; a group of protestors is burning down a building in the name of woke ‘social justice’ and politicians refuse to condemn their behaviour because they’re ‘on the right side of history.’ In the Bible, there are many people who are condemned for their terrible choices. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus declares He hates the deeds of Nicolaitans. These former Christians are condemned for conforming themselves to the pattern of this world; they replaced the simplicity of the gospel with new teaching which shifted their eyes away from Jesus Christ and focused on the enemy.

 

 

Today, the modern religion of the world is wokeness and when you examine its heart, you find wokeness is divisive and antichrist in nature. Those who embrace woke ideology claim to be distinctly aware of social justice problems and aim to eliminate all inequality. These people ‘awakened’ by the contemporary gospel of ‘justice’ believe this can be achieved by tearing down the old oppressive patriarchal order and by embracing all forms of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE).

 

One famous woke warrior was asked about the violence and stealing within the movement, and replied, “I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store,” adding, “That is reparations, anything they wanted to take, they can take it.”

 

 

 Be careful what cause you endorse because you may be making God your enemy.

 

This woke ideology claims it can solve the problems of the world without Christ. In fact, Jesus Christ represents a problem for the spirit behind woke. The Lord’s limited definition of male and female, marriage and justice are sinful to the awakened woke warrior. For them, Jesus just doesn’t understand how discriminatory He is! How arrogant: they have ‘exchanged the truth of God for a lie’ (Romans 1:25). Apostate leaders of historic Christian denominations have also confessed the new faith and repented for their woke sins. Also, young progressive Christians have filmed themselves repenting for what they identify as Jesus’ sins of racism, bigotry and xenophobia, despite the Bible defining Christ as sinless (Hebrews 4:15).

 

According to progressive woke ideology, God is hindering true justice. The Bible’s precise description of the two sexes is discriminatory for those who identify as one of 68, 69, 70, and counting different gender expressions. The boundaries keep moving in this movement (Proverbs 22:28), but Christ is the anchor of all truth. The Holy Scriptures represent continuing symbols of the oppressive patriarchy, to those who keep inventing a new series of gender-inclusive pronouns, as their feelings or demonic beings guide them.

 

 

 

Those who ‘go woke’ have been manipulated to believe they are establishing a just order; but they end up defining themselves by what they hate. They fall out with friends, family and colleagues, and hate the country that gave them everything they possess. They believe that those who compiled the Bible, or Magna Carta in 1215, the Bill of Rights in 1689, or the US Constitution in 1787, are nothing more than deplorable, unredeemable bigots, whose thoughts should be cancelled. To embrace woke justice, the past must be killed.

 

Christians must join Daniel and resist, as we watch people compelled by judging eyes to embrace all the new acts of worship by bowing down, chanting, singing and tearing down the statues of unwoke sinners. Those flawed heroes who fought for our freedom and founded democracy are now called evil because they said something the woke spirit – the antichrist spirit hates.

Wokeness exploits a confused person’s desire to be perceived as good and compels him or her to obey progressive leaders in pursuit of an empty lie of justice. It’s about the leaders power and wealth, not justice

Those who refuse to acknowledge this new god of wokeness and sacrifice to it, are warned they will be cast out into the fire of poverty, unemployment and the loss of all things. Try to reason with the woke spirit and you’ll encounter the demonic spirit which motivated Nebuchadnezzar into rage and fury. The command is direct: obey our woke god or be condemned.

 

The religion of wokeness generates a fraudulent copy of the faith and supplants it. Wokeness demands total obedience, public confession and contrition; it expects absolute faith in its values and demands public humiliation for those who fail it. Those who sin against the woke religion must publicly confess with tears. Instead of submitting to Jesus in repentance, you must kowtow to the bullying crowds online – this is wokeness.

 

As wokeness is a faith, it additionally has a demonic inquisition of hatred. The woke belief compels you to hate those who disagree with the ‘justice’ you are bringing. You can cancel, despise, spit, harm and kill those who disagree with you because they’re evil. It provides its servants with a pass to abuse those who think differently.

Jesus said, “The time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service”

– John 16:2

The woke ideology is never wrong. The religious leaders in the woke movement also claim to be following Jesus, but they reject everything He taught about personhood, marriage, sexuality, love, mercy and compassion! Therefore, Jesus cannot be their Lord. They serve the spirit of antichrist, anarchy and a demonic agenda which seeks to expel Christ from the throne of our heart.

 

n the woke religion, Christian beliefs about justice and truth are supplanted with contemporary doctrines of equality, LGBTQ+, aggressive feminism, anti-capitalism, cultural shame, historical national sin, legacy guilt, claims of privilege, intersectionality, micro-aggression, critical race beliefs, BLM, compelled speech and inclusion of all self-identities; but there’s no tolerance for those who challenge the woke faith. The woke spirit takes a young person who desires to do good and shifts them into a hating machine, an angry, bitter person.

 

When woke ideology is confronted by facts, it is enraged and censors them. To the woke spirit, truth itself is a form of injustice: Burn the facts, throw the books away, cancel the Constitution, overthrow the rule of law, close the churches, and lock the unwoke sinner out of their social media accounts.

 

The woke ideology cannot accept that the history of the world is one of suffering for all. It doesn’t want to hear that millions of those ‘privileged’ people lived in abject poverty, were thrown into the workhouse, were slain by machine guns in their millions by war, and struggled for centuries to escape poverty and establish democracy. Wokeness creates the very hatred, racism, division and poverty it claims to be resolving! It robs people of their independent thought and the ability to rise above poverty, misery and division.

 

In the woke religion, semantics and syntax are exploited to undermine anyone questioning their faith. Words are shape-shifted to ascribe new meaning, as they manipulate the language to serve their alternative definition of worship to their god of ‘justice.’ All unwoke sinners must embrace their lexicon or they will shriek at you online or in public, and demand an investigation to cancel you. If you don’t confess their pronouns in submission, their world falls apart and you become the target for them to project all their self-loathing onto.

Thus, the woke religion empowers ideology, not people. This is why real biological women have to be sacrificed on the altar of the rights of men who feel they are women. A female athlete is therefore a bigoted sinner if she doesn’t celebrate the victory of the man who just stole her rightly earned gold medal.

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them

– Genesis 1:27

Woke is the new worship and the false god of strife demand we sacrifice the truth of the gospel to it. Those who resist must be hunted down, everything they posted online a decade ago must be exposed, until they become sacked, scorned, ostracised and unemployable. Why is there no forgiveness for alleged past errors? Is it because the Devil is a liar and the father of all lies?

 

n the woke faith, Christian heroes of the past are cast aside as simpletons of injustice, who tried to impose the gospel onto others. They replace these heroes with new martyrs, often violent criminals who suffered under a failed policing policy. These criminals’ violent pasts are washed away, as they are recast as holy, sacred martyrs to the new justice. If you dare speak about the victims of their criminal behaviour, often women and children who were cheated, abused, threatened or beaten, you just don’t understand how bigoted you are.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;

Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness;

Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

– Isaiah 5:20

The woke warrior is a victim of an unrealised injustice. He or she is being manipulated by forces they don’t understand, based on a twisting of history that casts people against each other. The woke spirit exploits their pain and turns them to hateful activism, instead of peace with Christ. In woke ideology, someone else is always to blame. In Christianity, you are responsible before God to repent, work hard, serve and support others. You help heal yourself by giving and denying self. The woke faith does the opposite, as it demands the spotlight of the world to shine on its suffering and calls for restitution.

 

On a national level, state-sanctioned wokeness uses its power to censor, persecute and undermine those who follow the biblical Christian faith. Believing your Bible is now an expression of bigoted prejudiced, xenophobic racism and hateful toward people who feel differently from you. If a man enters a female changing room in a dress, you’re forewarned to submit and renounce your faith, instead of standing up for truth.The goal of the woke spirit is to rule by demonising all doubters, destroying their platforms and demolishing their lives. Woke ideology rules by fear. If you don’t obey, you will be cancelled. As an unacknowledged religion, the woke faith evangelises the world with its own antichrist doctrines, acts of worship, commands to proselytise and protests. It replaces devotion to Christ with competing claims to alternative forms of woke repentance, bowing down, confession and antichrist atonement.

Do not go after other gods to serve them and worship them

– Jeremiah 25:6

 

Christians shouldn’t be buckling their knees to an ideology with antichrist claims. We shouldn’t be joining protestors that burn down businesses and neighbourhoods, sowing seeds of division, hate, poverty and fear. Christians shouldn’t be putting the Bible down and taking up books authored by those who hate God and embrace their unacknowledged faith. We serve God through the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of wokeness – the spirit of antichrist.

You shall have no other gods before Me

– Exodus 20:3

Portions of article removed due to length