The danger of modern wokeness is not just expressed in chit chat by soft intellectuals, but has real world consequences. Hear these excerpts from a talk given by independent Portland Oregon journalist Andy Ngo:
What you need to know about Antifa is that they are a transnational movement that espouses an extremist, anarchist, communist ideology. They merge the worst aspects of both communism and anarchy to form a worldview that criminalizes property ownership wrongthink, and produces endless disorder and crime. . . . Antifa’s far-left theories and ideology was able to slip in[to] America through academics. Herbert Marcuse and other European Marxist intellectuals fled Europe in the last century and found a home in America’s academic institutions. So, things like critical theory, and from that, critical race theory, trans ideology, intersectionality—all that was born in America’s academic institutions, and you can see the effects of it today, in hollowing out pretty much everything that it touches. . . . I do think cities like Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis and others are possibly beyond saving. There’s a critical mass of support for violent extremism masquerading as social justice in those areas. Notice, I said critical mass. You don’t have to have a majority of people supporting what’ happening; you just have to have enough. And there is enough of it there. And they vote for the politicians that enable it. Through violence Antifa have driven out any meaningful opposition in urban liberal areas. This is a fight that liberals in the moderate left have to take on themselves. But if 2020 was any indication, that’s not something they’re willing to do. In fact, they’re more likely to join in on the protests and volunteer themselves to stand in between the rioters and police. I predict further civilizational and cultural decline in the US as the critical theorists continue their successful efforts at hollowing out every institution they touch—academe, journalism, entertainment, government, military. . . . I’m continuing my reporting from abroad, resigned to believe that my home city [Portland] is dying and that the disease killing it will continue to spread.(1)
Ngo documented rioting in American cities, and after being severely beaten by Antifa thugs spent a year recovering from a brain-bleed which could have been fatal. When a close observer like Ngo says it may be too late to save significant American cities, it is warning we are passing into nightscape.
The woke phenomenon, and its various manifestations represents a totalizing worldview. A totalitarian movement usually at last results in a one-party state that owns all of you. Not even private thoughts are permitted.
In the sadly predictive novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Winston Smith’s torturer says, “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”(2) In Orwell’s predicted future,
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.(3)
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt points out that the last century “produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history.”(4) She calls totalitarianism “the last stage in a process during which ‘science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”(5) Totalitarian organizations, according to Arendt,
Are designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven around a central fiction. . . into a functioning reality, to build up, even under nontotalitarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world.(6)
Arendt wrote in 1948, Orwell in 1949. But C.S. Lewis in 1944 warned:
The power of man to make himself what he pleases means. . . the power of some men to make other men what they please. . . the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. . . . They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean. . . . Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.(7)
Now, all these years later later, the woke hold views constituting an alternate reality. Ngo is right; they hate individual freedom, freedom of expression, and property rights. In our world, the powers that had been separated and balanced in the US Constitution are no longer so well separated. Today, big tech, big pharma, and the state have an effective monopoly on power. They control and propagate a preferred master narrative. Theodore Dalrymple understood how this worked in the totalitarian states of the previous century, and, how it works in our century:
The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.(8)
The woke are determined to reprogram us into their fictions about race, pandemic, sexuality, and morality. We now exist in a short space in time where liberty is in process of being set aside. A section of the population is embracing a fiction which is a replacement for reality, a replacement for humanity, yet which gives an atomized and morally-shattered people a superficial sense of meaning. Ngo again:
There’s a sympathy I feel for many of them, because these are people who want community, and this Antifa extremist movement ideology gives them that community, gives them meaning and purpose. It does a lot of things like what religion traditionally would do. But it also leads them down a path towards violence and some of them get seriously injured in the process of them trying to fight police or assault people. And then they’re just kind of discarded.(9)
The churches haven’t done their work. In too many cases the churches do not present a Bible version of Jesus but offer instead empty repetitions of the mainstream narrative. Whatever that narrative is, they rinse, lather, and repeat. No wonder so many churches seem powerless. God’s people must do more than read off those narrative cue-cards. We have become deeply secularized and many woke are actually sleeping.
We can do better.
I want to conclude with something I regard as hopeful: a Virginia school teacher who said, no more, and refused to continue inflicting these toxic ideologies onto children:
My name is Laura Morris. I have been a teacher in Louden County public schools for five years and a teacher for ten. In that time I have learned so much, being on the cutting edge of educational technology and working with a diverse population of students that I have loved. I have the privilege to follow my amazing fourth graders up to fifth, and I have been excited about this all summer. On the other hand, this summer I have struggled with the idea of returning to school, knowing that yet again I will be working with a school division that, despite its shiny tech and flashy salaries, promotes political ideologies that do not square with who I am as a believer in Christ. After reading about your lack of concern for the growing population of concerned citizens in this division, [it is] clearly evidenced by this empty room tonight, where you shut the doors to the public, as well as the emails sent by the superintendent last year reminding me that a dissenting opinion is not allowed even to be spoken in my personal life, going so far as to send a form to my colleagues and I, encouraging us to fill it out if we hear one another speaking against the controversial policies being promoted by this school board and adopted in this county. Not only that, but within the last year I was told in one of my so-called equity trainings that white Christian able-bodied females currently have the power in our schools, and that ‘this has to change.’ Clearly, you’ve made your point. You no longer value me, or many other teachers you’ve employed in this county.
So, since my contract outlines the power that you have over my employment in Louden County public schools, I thought it necessary to resign in front of you.
School board, I quit.
I quit your policies. I quit your trainings.
And I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas on our most vulnerable constituents: the children. I will find employment elsewhere. I encourage all parents and staff in this county to flood the private schools [mic cut-off] in the Louden area.(10)
People are standing up in some places, like this teacher. She is refusing any longer to participate in the abolition of man.
What About You?
Then, we come to us. We have to decide if we will continue to go along with the lies we are being coerced to participate in or whether we will be agents of truth. It is either truth or fiction.
If we will admit it, many of us have lost our way. Without meaning to, we have become cowards. Many are not only standing by watching the demolition of our civilization, but have actively joined in the bulldozing of it. If you are waiting for someone to come and save you from the hard work of sustaining your freedom, you wait in vain. We must each do what we can within godly principle to light the torch of truth and stop the further encroachment of wokeness in our homes and churches and communities. We ought to obey God rather than men.(11)
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. Andy Ngo, May 12, 2021, Hillsdale College, MI, “Antifa: History and Tactics | Andy Ngo,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yziRK7j0Zpw, accessed August 12, 2021.
2. George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, p. 255.
3. Ibid., p. 155.
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 9.
5. Ibid., p. 346.
6. Ibid., p. 364.
7. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 59, 60, 63, 64.
8. Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Culture; What’s Left of It.”
9. Ngo, Ibid.
10. TheFamilyFoundation, “Loudoun Teacher Resigns,” August 11, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5CG4DF2YOw&t=1s, accessed August 12, 2021.
11. Acts 5:29.
Thumbnail image credit: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group