[This story is adapted from a December 2020 interview that Keri Smith gave to Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster.]
Keri Smith’s Story
I was indoctrinated—is the way I view it—into social justice ideology.
I went to Duke University and my minor was women's studies—it's now called gender studies. I took a lot of the critical race theory, queer theory classes. It became a kind of religion. And I think it operates that way for a lot of people who are in it.
You feel like you are doing good in the world and and it gives you a moral plan for how to operate in the world now. It also contradicts itself a lot.
I was in it for 20 years, and I think it operates like a cult. I’ll try to explain what it really is versus what it says it is. It sounds a bit like a conspiracy. Someone indoctrinated you, and that makes it a little harder to criticize it. It meets a lot of the cult characteristics with the exception of having one charismatic leader.
You can look at all the other characteristics of a cult and see that it lines up with a lot of those. I mean, you're not allowed to question SJW dogma. There is a pressure to isolate yourself from people who are non-believers—to cut people out of your life if they're not in the ideology.
So it meets a lot of those characteristics. But there's no there's no shadowy room. I wasn't pulled into a gender study, women's studies office and force-fed stuff. It just it sort of happens over time. It happened to me over a period of years in college.
And what happens is that a lot of people who get into it, they start to adopt some of the tenets of the belief system slowly. It's not all at once. There were people who were reacting to religion who got into it in a big way too.
I mean, you can control people if you could control their thoughts and you can control their thoughts if you can control language. And so one of the early things they get you to do is they redefine words like racism and sexism.
But the outcome of doing that is that you now are saying that it's impossible to not be racist towards a particular race or sexist towards a particular sex. And you're also taking people—many, of whom have good intent—into it because they're trying to end racism and sexism. Well, how do you get well-intentioned people to do that? We redefine those words. So then they're not concerned about how I can treat you differently, as a white man, and it won't be called sexist. I can judge you. I can even point to your race and to your sex and and I can use slurs about it. And these theories are presented as facts.
We are told to read people like Robyn D’angelo, Kimberle Crenshaw or Peggy Macintosh. These people have it figured out. I guess it's akin to someone discovering a religion or any other kind of faith for the first time and thinking, oh, this has all the answers. It gives you a structure in the way that you see the world.
Marxism of old told us that the best way to look at the world was as a struggle between class groups for wealth. And they said it was all about who's in the oppressor group, in the oppressed group, and they believed in redistributing wealth to make things equal.
So Social Justice is sort of similar, but it says the best way to look at the world is as a struggle for power. Power is what's at the center of this belief system. They say the world is a struggle for power between identity groups and we need to redistribute power.
I used to go into interactions with people just looking for the sexism and the racism. It's like putting on glasses every day and you're trying to find it in everything. People who didn't learn about it in school or weren't indoctrinated are coming into contact with it in different ways. We are being given several things a day in the media to be outraged about.
They might seem silly if you're just taking them in isolation, but they're all a part of this belief system that tells people you need to find the hidden racism and sexism and homophobia and everything. And when you start to do that over a long period of time, it affects your self-confidence, especially if you are a person who's in one of these so-called marginalized groups. I used to enter rooms looking for racism, sexism and homophobia.
The Search For More & More Oppression
Today, people are putting in their Twitter bios, that they are depressed or have anxiety or BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder). They are claiming mental health issues as an oppressed identity. Think about that for a second. It encourages people to stay in whatever mental health issues they may have, or it encourages them to develop mental health problems because they can have this additional oppressed identity they get to claim.
It's also moved into weight. Colleges are now teaching Fat Studies. So if you're fat, you're oppressed. If you’re not fat, you're an oppressor. People put that in their social media bios and it’s just continually this navel gazing—”What are all of my multiple different kinds of identities?” It's extremely narcissistic.
But in another way, it's the opposite. For instance, the cult of social justice tells you that the solution to all of your problems are outside of you, that it's not about working on yourself or figuring out what you have control over in your life. It’s not about what you can take responsibility for and what things can you actually fix. It's about saying all of your problems stem from this oppressive, systemically unjust culture that you grew up in and that all of your problems come from patriarchy and white supremacy.
And the problem is all of these other people who haven't adopted the belief system yet. If only all of these people would get on board with this, we could have a utopia. So it's not about resolving your own issues, but assigning perpetual blame.
Women, I think, are a little more susceptible to this because women on average tend to be—I think it's in the big five—women are a bit higher on the open the scale. And also, I think on the neuroticism scale. That women are concerned with this stuff is something I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about with Camille Paglia. I was one of them.
Leaving God
I think the other thing is that in my particular case, there was a hole in my life. I was raised Southern Baptist, I was raised with a belief in God and I had walked away from that over a period of about three years. I started questioning those beliefs and questioning if I actually believe there's a God. Critical theory and social justice filled that hole. It gave me a way of interpreting the world and saying – just like a religion does – “This is the way to view the world. We're going to view the world as a struggle between identity groups for power. And the way to be a good person in the world is to try to redistribute that power.”
It's sort of a slow boil you're accepting. OK, here's the new definition of racism. Here's the new definition of sexism. And then fast forward 20 years later, you're suddenly being asked to apologize for and justify censorship and violence. And those are the things that started to wake me up. If at the very beginning I was asked to do all of all of that stuff at once, I might not have fallen into it so quickly. But it was a slow boil. And I think that's the way they get people into it.
Then 2016 came along. During the presidential election, I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos of people on the Left who were attacking conservatives. This is back when YouTube's algorithm actually recommended things that were similar to what you're watching. And, you know, I watched video after video and I didn't know that these things are happening. I mean, I saw videos of guys being bloody that were being hit with bricks for being a Trump supporter. I was left in tears, utterly shocked and repulsed because the legacy (mainstream) media had not told me this was happening. Matter of fact, they had sold me, and I had bought without sufficient evidence, the opposite narrative.
There was a girl being pelted with eggs. It was just mobs of people surrounding these Trump supporters as they were coming out of rallies. And it was more than one city. And it really emotionally affected me for a while. And I didn't wake up and I didn't become a Trump supporter that day. And I didn't leave my belief system that day. But it was the first thing that made me start to question the narrative that I had believed before. I was like, who are these people on my side? Supposedly this is my side that's doing this, that's attacking people physically…
And at the same time, I was hearing people in my own echo chamber which were almost exclusively social justice warriors.
There were the shootings of the cops at the bowling alley in Dallas, and in my social justice online echo chamber I saw a lot of people almost celebrating it. Making excuses for it and in some ways saying, well, a lot of white men are going to have to die.
It's kind of interesting because social justice says as a woman I don't have the power to be sexist. I can only be prejudiced. I can't be sexist–I don't have the power. Well, look at my career. I had the power to say yes to certain comics and the power to say no to others. And the implication was that a black man killing white cops in Dallas can’t be racist.
Waking Up
I just felt like I didn't I didn't sign up for this progressivism to support murder. To support some guy just taking a rifle and shooting a bunch of people. And it's OK because they're cops somehow. So that really stuck with me. And then I discovered a video of Jordan Peterson.
And he talked about the Cain and Abel story in the Bible. And there are these two different ways of being in that story. You can be like Cain and you can refuse to make necessary sacrifices for what you want. And you can be resentful and you can blame God and blame your brother, blame others, and that that is a path towards murderous rage.
Or you can be like Abel in this story and you can make the necessary sacrifices and you can be humble and full of gratitude, and you can be blessed. And I started thinking about that a lot and about how my ideology was really on its way to being like Cain. It's very resentful—social justice, especially ones who are living it every day, waking up, putting those SJW glasses on. You know, they're very resentful people.
There was a period of time there, about six months where my beliefs had been changing. I had even written a letter to Jordan Peterson right before the election in October 2016. It was about some of my changing beliefs. And it was called a liberal feminist’s point of view or something like that. And he read it on his YouTube channel and then emailed me afterwards saying “I read this.” I was so scared.
It mentioned that I worked in comedy. I was thinking, I'm going to lose all my clients when people find out this is me. And I told him I was scared and he said, “You have to figure out how to get over your fear.”
And I knew he was right. But it’s hard. That's why when I talk to people now who are afraid, I totally understand why people are afraid. It's that people are afraid of losing their job. They're afraid of losing their whole social circle. They're afraid of losing friends and family, their reputation, in some cases, their safety, their anonymity.
So there was a lot of fear going through me and it took me about six months after that, six months of time before I finally I wrote an essay called Leaving the Social Justice Cult.
Shortly after I left the entertainment industry. I was like, I guess I'm out. I'm going because I would rather say what I think, be able to say what I think and not work in entertainment anymore. I now work in a job where I am able to say what I believe, and it’s so so much better.
And I hear from people in the entertainment industry all the time, especially since this summer when social justice and BLM went really big. I hear from people in entertainment and academia and the media and people who feel like they're in this kind of self-censorship, like I was in. And I know what they are going through. It's hard to believe when you're in it, but I always say to them, however long it takes you to get out of it—on the other side of it, it doesn't matter. All the things that you're going to lose—and you will lose things and you will lose people—but the things that you get out of it are so much more meaningful. I don't know, it's hard to explain.
I love being able to be honest and authentic. As an observer, as someone looking at what's happened since June, wokeness has become the predominant belief system in entertainment. Their primary objective is pushing the belief system.
How did I get free?
When you first start, if you're in a cult like belief system or ideology and you first start questioning it, everything in the belief system is set up to make you think you're crazy if you're questioning it. Even after the six months it took me to get over my fear and have my (sort of) coming out, I still believed in a lot of the tenets of social justice. I've discarded most of those now.
I started questioning almost every choice I was making, even little choices throughout the day. Was this like Cain, or is this like Abel? I was open to the idea of God again.
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Keri Smith is a self-confessed former professional SJW (social justice warrior). She worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade as a talent manager and producer for comedians. In her own words, she was 'brainwashed by the cult' more than 2 decades ago but she's finally come around to her senses, found God and is seeking to make the world a better place for real. Listen to her podcast Escaping the SJW Cult on Amazon. Keri is also one of the hosts of Unsafe Spaces, and a frequent contributor there.