The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Birth of the Woke Ideology

Published by Bombardier Books

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-814-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-815-4

The Victims’ Revolution:

The Rise of Identity Studies and the Birth of the Woke Ideology

© 2012 by Bruce Bawer

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Interior Design by Yoni Limor

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Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For Carol

Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Closing of the Liberal Mind

Introduction

to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Chapter 1

The Victims’ Revolution

Chapter 2

Gilligan’s Island: Women’s Studies

Chapter 3

The Ebony Tower: Black Studies

Chapter 4

Visit to a Queer Planet: Queer Studies

Chapter 5

The Dream of Aztlán: Chicano Studies

Chapter 6

Studies, Studies Everywhere

Chapter 7

Is There Hope?

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

Foreword

I first started reading Bruce Bawer in the 1990s. As well as being one of America’s foremost literary critics, he stood out in those days because he was one of less than a handful of gay Americans who were making the case for gay equality rather than gay revolutionary-ism. With A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993), Bawer was brave enough to show that gay Americans did not necessarily want the radical platforms of the far left who had taken over the movement. Most wanted equality—nothing less and certainly nothing more. In that book, Bawer took on the arguments of religious conservatives and radical leftists alike. Along with the work of Andrew Sullivan, Bawer’s work was, in its field, one of the formative works of the 1990s. As was his 1997 work, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, a book which showed that Bawer was not afraid to take on people who might have been imagined to be on his own side.

Today the arguments of these books are pretty much accepted by the majority. But that was not always the case. The fact that it is today has much to do with the calm, sensitive intelligence of Bruce Bawer.

So I was already listening. And I was struck afresh in the 2000s when Bawer took what was in some ways an unexpected shift in his focus. After the atrocity of 9/11 and the resulting attacks in Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Bali, and many other cities around the world, a dominant tendency emerged with which to ignore the issue of Islamic fundamentalism. Or at least to wish it away. Most commonplace of all was the desire of Europeans to refuse to admit that there was any connection between the increased immigration of the post-war period and the rise in intolerant Islam among certain members of its immigrant populations. Again, at this period of two decades distance, the connection between a population and its actions might seem obvious. But it was not so then. Or if it was, it required an unusual courage to point it out.

Once again, Bawer turned out to be that person. Just as he had gone for the jugular of Christian fundamentalism, so now he went for Islamic fundamentalism, a consistency that is not rewarded among all of what used to be called the right-thinking people. His book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), was a devastating, ground-breaking explanation of how mass immigration—especially mass Muslim immigration—into Europe was in the process of fundamentally altering these societies. In the years since, others—including the present writer—have taken up some of these arguments. But Bawer was one of the earliest pioneers, and undoubtedly paid a certain price for being one of the first people to state the obvious in a society that did not want the obvious to be stated. While Europe Slept was an exceptionally important book. It broke a taboo—a bubble of wishful thinking. It said what was politically incorrect but nevertheless true.

And why should he not have said it? After all, there was no inconsistency between Bawer’s work from the 1990s and that of the 2000s. Quite the opposite. Why should someone who had seen the rise of anti-gay hate crime in Europe keep pretending that this was not by then an immigrant-led phenomenon? Bigotries change, as do the people acting on them. Threats to liberal society change. Sometimes they come from one direction. Sometimes from another. The crocodiles nearest to the boat are not always the same. It requires a mind of dexterous perseverance to keep identifying that fact, wherever it comes from and whatever the brickbats that may result.

So it is with the present volume. Today there can hardly be anyone in the Western world who has not at least heard of the term woke. It would have been a good thing if they had heard of it earlier. Who knows, perhaps we would have been able to cut it off at an earlier moment. Had more people read Bawer, then we would have done. I read The Victims Revolution when it came out in 2012 and was immediately struck by the depth and precision of the intellectual surgery Bawer had performed, as well as the firsthand accounts of wading through this task that make the book so compelling.

Since the 1970s, American universities had been fostering a culture of grievance studies, a culture in which women´s studies, black studies, queer studies, and others first emerged and then came to dominate. It became a truism for anyone in the know that any discipline that had studies in the name was not doing the thing it was claiming to do. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever dared to present a course in astrophysics studies. It either is the thing or it is not. But these crock non-disciplines metastasized everywhere in America. And it became a truism of the American academy that whenever a professor retired who had actual knowledge of an actual discipline they began to be replaced by the studies professors.

Of course, the students produced from this ought to have been utterly unemployable. Many conservatives in particular complacently pretended that they would be, and that after their lesbian dance majors at Berkeley, these students would crash into the cold hard reality of the labor market. The joke turned out to be on those telling it because today the studies people have found plenty of jobs open to them. Whole industries in fact. Not least in the HR departments of major corporations, and most of what used to pass for the media. In the process, we have seen the rise of that remarkable thing that Bawer identifies in this book: the complete inversion—among much else—of what used to be the American spirit.

That spirit used to be characterized by a respect for bravery. For striding toward the frontiers. For dealing with your lot and also trying to improve it. Only in recent decades has the American—and by extension of American influence in the West—spirit been turned into a spirit that seems to deify the most oppressed person in the room. Or at least the person who claims, or pretends, to be the most oppressed person in the room. The space for charlatanry that this opens up has often been remarked upon. The devastation on a society that it wrecks has sadly been more slowly noted.

Today this whole movement tends to be known as woke. But as so many times before, it was Bawer who saw it coming, tried to warn the public of what was coming toward them, and what they might do to dismantle it. Too few people paid attention, alas, and the corruption of American higher education has continued apace.

Still, there is a virtue in being ahead of the curve. It gives other people courage. It provides untold numbers of other people with enlightenment about the issues coming their way. In time, whole cultures can be woken up. But that requires prophets. And prophets—while often said to be unrecognized—should, wherever possible, be celebrated. I am delighted to see this 10th anniversary edition of The Victims Revolution in print. I hope it is no disrespect to Bawer if I say that I hope a 20th anniversary edition is not needed.

Douglas Murray

New York 2022

Preface

The Closing of the Liberal Mind

It is my sense that most Americans today, whether they call themselves conservatives, liberals, or moderates, realize that something exceedingly important in the fabric of American society has been imperiled by the developments of the last few decades. They deplore the degradation of our culture, the polarization of our politics, and the coarsening of public debate. They understand that somewhere along the way, we lost the sensible centrism that, within living memory, defined the American public square. They understand that American history, which until not very long ago was a remarkable account of gradual progress toward the full realization of the nation’s founding values, has taken a wrong turn. But while Americans lament the loss of shared national values, many of them may not recognize the intimate connection between this loss and the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation or so—changes, specifically, in the teaching of the humanities and social sciences, that have eventuated in the rejection, indeed the demonization, of the very ideas that once defined the sensible center.

What is it that holds a nation together? asked Arthur Schles-inger Jr., the celebrated liberal historian, in a new 1998 foreword to his 1991 book, The Disuniting of America. He proceeded to reflect on the fragility of national cohesion, serving up a long list of countries that were then (and still are) in ethnic or religious turmoil. Even Canada, long…considered the most sensible and placid of nations, faced the possibility of splitting in two because of tensions between its English- and French-speaking citizens. Schlesinger quoted author Michael Ignatieff on the Canadian question: If one of the top five developed nations on earth can’t make a federal, multi-ethnic state work, who else can?

As Schlesinger observed, [t]he answer to that increasingly vital question has been, at least until recently, the United States. For two centuries, America accomplished something that would have previously seemed impossible: the creation, as Schlesinger put it, of a brand-new national identity by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782), described Americans as a new race of men—a race that, paradoxically, had nothing to do with race.

To point out the miraculous nature of this accomplishment—its utter lack of precedent in all of human history—is not to deny, among other things, the mistreatment of Native Americans and the blight of slavery and racism. It is simply to note that, in a world where violent intergroup enmity and conflict have been the rule rather than the exception, America found a way for increasingly diverse groups of people to live together not only in peace but with a strong sense of shared identity—an identity founded not on ethnicity but on a commitment to the values of individual liberty, dignity, and equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, as envisioned by its founders and understood by the overwhelming majority of its citizens, was, in an international context, and in a now outdated sense of the word, a supremely liberal conception.

In 1944 the Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal marveled at the fact that Americans of every ethnicity, religion, and color shared a more explicitly expressed system of general ideals than the people of any other country in the Western world. Although American society had yet to live up to the full meaning of its creed—that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—it was in fact the very thing that made moral progress in America not only possible but inevitable. To quote Schlesinger again: the Creed held out hope even for those most brutally excluded by the white majority and act[ed] as the spur forever goading white Americans to live up to their proclaimed principles.… ‘America,’ Myrdal said, ‘is continuously struggling for its soul.’

One of the most magnificent examples of America’s struggles for its soul was the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The goal of that movement could not have been more consistent with America’s founding ideals—which was why it ultimately succeeded. But that bright success was not without its downside. The most disastrous by-product of the civil rights movement was multiculturalism, a philosophy that teaches, as Schlesinger put it, that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups. For two centuries, Americans had been held together by a shared sense of national identity, a belief in individual liberty, and a vision of full equality—even though that vision, as many Americans acknowledged, had yet to be fully realized. Yet just when the complete attainment of that vision seemed to lie within our grasp, the very idea of a shared identity began to be challenged, condemned, dismantled—and replaced by a new conception, founded not on individual rights and liberties but on the claims of group identity and culture. This new ideology, as Schlesinger recognized, represented a betrayal of true liberalism, a rejection of the idea of a sensible center, and a profound danger to the sense of unity that had made America uniquely strong, prosperous, and free.

Schlesinger was, it should be emphasized, an icon among liberals, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of books that had helped shape social and political thought at the height of the American Century. The great chronicler and defender of Democratic presidents, in particular Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was also the author of an influential 1949 treatise called The Vital Center, in which he argued for a strong and vigorous democratic liberalism as an alternative to the then formidable temptations of communism. The Disuniting of America came as a kind of dismal coda to that book. It was published at a time when American campuses were in an uproar over the rise of multiculturalism and identity studies, and in it he warned his fellow liberals that the looming cult of victimhood, while posing as a liberal crusade, was actually an anti-liberal virus that threatened to destroy the very foundations of American democracy.

Schlesinger himself might not have put it this way, but what the new academic groupthink really represented was nothing less than the closing of the liberal mind. Armed with a new sense of mission and moral superiority, the new academic elites simultaneously balkanized and politicized the study of society and culture and wrapped their Gramscian Marxist critiques in an impenetrable jargon that only they could understand. They no longer listened to traditional liberals and held conservatives in utter contempt. Meanwhile, the multicultural dogma spread throughout society, transforming the way people think, speak, and act on a wide range of issues.

In previous books, I have examined some of the consequences of this phenomenon. While Europe Slept indicted the refusal of liberals in Europe and the U.S. to defend liberal principles in the face of Islamic radicalism. Surrender documented the abandonment of their commitment to free speech in the name of multicultural sensitivity. In this book, I have attempted to go to the root of the problem—the academy, the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.

Schlesinger understood the crucial role of education in a democracy, especially one as volatile and changing as ours. He understood the importance of the sensible center in maintaining our strength and stability and keeping the country on the right path. And he understood the role of traditional liberal education in communicating, preserving, and building upon the sensible, centrist American values that he cherished. He made a great point of the fact that primary and secondary schools, by instilling civic values in young people, were a critical element in the perpetuation of a shared national identity.

Higher education is obviously no less important. And the fact is—as many liberals themselves have acknowledged—that over the course of the last few decades, it has become the captive of a kind of thinking that imperils the American idea, and the American contract, as we have known them for more than two centuries. Among those who have most eloquently articulated the nature of this peril was the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who, twenty-five years ago, in a pathbreaking book later described by Camille Paglia as the first shot in the culture wars, warned that the intellectual relativism that was taking over the academy—and that claimed to represent greater openness—was, in fact, leading to what he called the closing of the American mind. At its best, Bloom argued, liberal education had been founded on a belief in rationality and objective truth, in vigorous and free inquiry, and in the importance of encountering the great ideas and the great books; now, however, the university—and, in turn, the culture as a whole—was increasingly under the sway of relativistic thinking and rigid political ideas that represented, ultimately, a menace to American democracy. One result of this relativism is identity studies. The problem, to be sure, is not simply a pathological fixation on group identity, but a preoccupation with the historical grievances of certain groups, combined with a virulent hostility to America, which is consistently cast as the prime villain in the histories of these groups and the world at large. If you or I had set out to invent an ideology capable of utterly destroying the America of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the melting pot, we could scarcely have done better.

The ideas that have increasingly dominated American universities since the sixties have followed the graduates of those institutions out into the larger society. The results are all around us, from workplaces where an innocuous statement can brand one as a bigot and destroy one’s career to election campaigns in which legitimate criticism of a black or female candidate can be discounted as racist or sexist instead of being addressed on its merits. Yet those ideas themselves, and the form in which they are presented in thousands of classrooms around the United States, remain an almost complete mystery to a great many otherwise well-informed and responsible citizens.

This needs to change. Americans who care about the future of their country—especially parents who care what their children are being taught—need to know what is going on within those ivory towers. They need to be aware of the truly toxic changes that the revolution has wrought in the seemingly innocuous classrooms behind those ivied walls.

A quarter century ago, Bloom’s warning was widely dismissed as a reactionary screed. In fact, it was prescient—prophetic. The sad truth is that the triumph of identity studies—and of the dogmas on which those studies are based—diminishes our sense of human possibility, and threatens to further impoverish our already diminished culture. Attention must be paid.

Introduction

to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Disney, which brought you Bambi and The Little Mermaid, creates a female Muslim superhero named Ms. Marvel and a robot who asks a transgender man for advice on female sanitary products. Larry Elder, a black GOP candidate for governor of California, is smeared by the Los Angeles Times as the black face of white supremacy for preaching a message essentially identical to that of Martin Luther King, Jr. When an eighty-year-old woman complains to her local YMCA about a biological male lurking in the women’s locker room, she’s banned for being a transphobe. The Hachette publishing group cancels the memoirs of our most acclaimed living movie director because of discredited, decades-old molestation charges. The Biden Administration sets down strict vaccination rules for those entering the country with legitimate visas, but exempts people crossing the southern border illegally.

All this insanity didn’t come out of nowhere. Since the 1960s, as I describe in chapter one of this book, the study of literature and other fields in the humanities and social sciences has been gradually transformed into something very different—and extremely distressing. An increasing focus on group identity—and on the strict division of humankind into oppressor groups and victim groups—fed the growth of such disciplines as Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. I’m not alone in calling them grievance studies, and in considering them to be inimical to the serious study of human beings as complex individuals with a variety of virtues and defects.

This book is about those grievance studies. In preparing it, I read voluminously in these fields, attended conferences, sat in on classes, and performed interviews. I knew that I was taking on: not just the entire American higher-education establishment but also the elite media that are its ideological allies. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the New York Times Book Review ran—on its front page, no less—a loftily dismissive account of my book by a purported education expert who, calling it out of date, claimed that identity studies represented a shrinking sector of academic life and that his younger colleagues at a certain Ivy League college were returning to close readings of literary classics.

Those familiar with—and critical of—the actual situation in academia recognized this as a lie, and praised The Victims’ Revolution as truth-telling, plain and simple. Calling it indispensable, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, theorized that the Times had judged the book too important to ignore, hence the dishonest review. George Leef of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal agreed. It’s revealing, Leef wrote, that the NYT editor realized that the book couldn’t be ignored, but had to be panned. And Hoover Institution fellow Bruce Thornton called the Times review a textbook illustration of how the academic establishment goes after anyone who exposes the corruption of a reactionary, failing institution.

As it turned out, The Victims’ Revolution wasn’t only right on the money about what was going on at America’s most respected colleges. It was prescient. I don’t know of any other book from 2012 that so much as hinted at what the world of 2022 might look like. But to read The Victims’ Revolution is to see pretty much every crazy social development of the last decade in chrysalis. The future of America, I wrote in its last sentence, hangs in the balance. My point was that what was being taught widely on America’s campuses wouldn’t be confined to those campuses for long. Unfortunately, I was right. The ideological toxins at the heart of identity studies escaped the academy like a virus escaping a Chinese lab. The general culture was infected. And suddenly the world was turned upside down.

* * *

To borrow from the current lexicon, the world went woke. It happened because college graduates who’d been marinated in identity studies introduced the cockamamie concepts they’d picked up in class into their new workplaces and communities. Women’s Studies? The #metoo movement, which started by bringing down serial sex offenders like Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, was soon ruining the lives of men who’d done next to nothing. The vengeful hysteria of many #metoo activists stunned more than a few observers—but wouldn’t have surprised anyone who’d read in my Women’s Studies chapter about students being fed grotesquely exaggerated rape statistics and being taught to regard men (Western men, anyway) as predatory and violent by nature.

Black Studies? The year 2018 saw the publication of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, who argued that all whites are eternally guilty of race hatred and all blacks are their eternal victims. The following year saw the publication of How to Be an Antiracist by Black Studies graduate Ibram X. Kendi and the introduction of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which attributes the American founding to racism. And 2020 saw the death of a criminal named George Floyd, who became an internationally famous martyr and casus belli. Suddenly, Critical Race Theory was everywhere, including in primary-school syllabi. For most Americans, it was all new and baffling; but every bit of it was all straight out of Black Studies, which had been founded by race hustlers skilled at guilt-tripping whites—precisely the talent to which both DiAngelo and Kendi owe their success.

Chicano Studies? Donald Trump’s call for a border wall was cheered by American workers who’d seen no wage growth for decades owing to job competition from illegals—but it sparked outrage not only among these illegals’ employers but also among the innumerable college graduates who’d learned in Chicano Studies classrooms to view the U.S. as an illegal occupier of Aztlán—that is, the regions once been ruled by Spain and then by Mexico—and to regard Chicanos, therefore, as America’s dispossessed, having far more of a right to live in the U.S. than any native-born citizen.

Queer Studies? When The Victims’ Revolution came out, gender dysphoria was an exceedingly rare phenomenon. A few years later, claims of transgender identity had become a trendy lifestyle choice and the supposed right of people to be recognized as members of the opposite sex (or of any one of dozens of other gender-identity categories) had become sacred. This and other recent unsettling developments are natural outgrowths of queer theory, which, as can be seen in my chapter on Queer Studies, is far less concerned with studying sexual orientation than with celebrating gender.

There are other obvious continuities between identity studies and current social trends. The poisonous racism of Whiteness Studies, which a decade ago was almost entirely confined to the classroom, has gone mainstream, with white children being inculcated with self-hatred and black children being trained to see themselves as victims. (Robin DiAngelo, note well, is a leading Whiteness Studies figure.) Similarly, the reality series and fashion-magazine covers that celebrate the morbidly obese can be traced directly to the medically perilous claims of Fat Studies.

In short, the book I published in 2012 about certain unsettling tendencies on American campuses is no longer just about the academy. It’s a guidebook to—and a genealogy of—the most noxious of the strange new ideas that now suffuse our mainstream culture. How lamentable it is that conservatives, moderates, and classical liberals weren’t able to keep these ideas from taking over the colleges and universities; and how alarming it is that the sensible majority of citizens weren’t able to keep them from conquering society at large, where they are now reshaping our culture and rewiring our children’s minds.

As Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho said in a September 2022 speech announcing that he would no longer be hiring law clerks from Yale—where these lethal new ideas are particularly prevalent—Our whole country has become a campus.

* * *

The question before us today, of course, is what to do now that these toxins have escaped into the mainstream.

To begin with, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t a minor or fleeting development that you or I can hope to ignore, keeping our heads down until the freak parade passes by. These changes have already begun to take root and won’t get uprooted unless the sane and hitherto silent majority of the public resolves to give them the heave-ho.

And how to do that? For one thing, speak up every time you interact with somebody whom you suspect of being a party to this madness. What does your family doctor think, for instance, about giving hormone blockers to children? Ask her. If you don’t like her answer, challenge her on it. And if she stands her ground, tell her you consider her to have betrayed her Hippocratic oath, and then walk away and find another doctor.

Remember that the main reason why so many teachers, school psychologists, endocrinologists, surgeons, and other professionals are going along with trans ideology is not that they believe it: it’s that they’re taking what is, at the moment, the easy route, because virtually all the pressure they’re feeling is coming from the woke side. They need to know that there are more people who oppose this insanity than who support it, and that those opponents can exert pressure, too—and that if they want to preserve their livelihoods, they’d better do what’s right. Some of the most inspiring videos I’ve seen in the last couple of years have been of school board meetings at which parents have eloquently challenged the woke politics that schools have been shoving down their children’s throats. If every parent could be that involved, the problems we face would be very quickly and dramatically diminished. Be one of those parents. If you don’t like what your school board members are saying, vote them off. If necessary, run for school board yourself. If these pedagogical practices aren’t nipped in the bud when your kids are still small, it may already be too late to scrub the nonsense out of their brains.

In fact, you could do worse than to get informed, and get involved, in electoral politics at all levels, from City Council on up. It’s not enough to vote for candidates who don’t parrot the woke agenda. Find candidates who are gutsy enough to oppose it passionately. And if such candidates don’t seem to be on offer in your neck of the woods, run yourself—or talk a like-minded friend into running. This is our country, and the only way to take it back from the woke brigade is to do so one elective office at a time.

Of course, institutions of higher education continue to be Ground Zero for all this drivel. Are you an alumnus of a college that’s gone woke? Do you nonetheless still send that college a check every year? If so, why? Have you ever picked up the phone to complain to the college president, or written a letter to the board of trustees, to criticize the ideological direction that your alma mater has taken? Have you threatened to cut it off financially?

Another crucial point about colleges. However appealing it might seem in the very short term, don’t let your babies grow up to be Yalies. It astonishes me that friends of mine who know very well—and deplore—what’s going on at Ivy League colleges nonetheless brag excitedly about their kids being admitted to these places. Are you one of those parents? If so, ask yourself what’s more important to you: the actual education your kid will get, or the purported cachet of a Harvard or Stanford diploma?

Don’t listen to me. Listen to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion (and a Yale graduate), who wrote recently: The educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture. Still, parents are willing to climb naked over broken bottles and impoverish themselves to send their children to this cauldron of iniquity. Or listen to Isaac Morehouse of the Institute for Humane Studies, who’s turned off not just by the Ivies but by almost all American colleges: I can’t count the number of parents I’ve talked with who recognize that college is one of the worst places to learn and degrees are one of the weakest ways to try to get hired, but who still needlessly bite the bullet and send their kid anyway—even though a college diploma nowadays only proves that you were willing to follow the crowd."

Keep in mind that a generation or so from now, either wokeism will have been vanquished, in which case diplomas handed out by the most ideologically corroded universities and colleges in the 2010s and 20s will be sources not of pride but of embarrassment, or it will have followed its natural course of development, resulting in something not unlike the Reign of Terror—in which case your highly credentialed but hopelessly brainwashed kid will eventually be the next sucker in line for the gallows. If you do want your kids to get a real education, find a state college that still hasn’t gone fully woke. Or try Hillsdale College, whose 2022 commencement speaker was Jordan Peterson. Then there’s St. John’s College in Maryland, famous for its Great Books program. Another promising new option is the University of Austin, which was founded by Bari Weiss—a liberal lesbian who left the editorial board of the New York Times because she wasn’t woke enough for her fellow editors and which is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.

As you may know, even many units of the U.S. military have succumbed to woke ideology. So if your kid wants to join the service, do some research. Will they be using boot camp to build your kid’s character, self-discipline, strength, and resilience, or to produce a woke warrior? If the latter, advise your kid against taking that route—and write letters to the appropriate military officials explaining exactly why they’ll be denied the opportunity to indoctrinate your offspring.

And what about you? Has your employer ever brought in some consultant to subject you and your colleagues to a lecture about systematic racism or sexism? Did you feel that you had no choice other than to bite your tongue and get through it? Well, if it happens again, discuss it beforehand with your colleagues. Almost certainly, most of them feel pretty much the way you do. There’s strength in numbers. Often employers arrange these lectures in the first place because one or two employees pushed them to do it. If the majority of employees refuse to participate in such nonsense, it’ll stop.

Do you feel insufficiently skilled to take on woke thinking? Let me assure you that you’re not. These people are mediocrities, and their ideas are absurd. But if you want to sharpen