For my entire life until the pandemic, I thought that the (increasingly radicalized) Left was the only good political side. Everything I was told about The Right/conservatives was that they wanted to control women’s bodies, didn’t care about the poor, and were uneducated. Since I am a woman who does not like to be controlled (who does?), a Christian who is taught to care about the poor, and a highly educated person, I didn’t see any reason to get to know what “the other side” thought at all. This is why waking up from the Woke religion is so hard.
From a very early age, I was told that it was imperative to go to college; I held extremely judgmental attitudes toward “uneducated” people. I didn’t observe until almost twenty years after my first college class that the universities in this country have become factories churning out radical woke activists for nearly 20 years.
Here are some examples of what I was taught:
I was told (only by white people) that nonwhite people who voted republican/conservative were always voting against their best interests. I was told they were either too poor to afford a real education or were in survival mode and simply trying to “pass as white.” Starting in middle school, I was trained to believe that if I wanted access to healthcare as a woman, I needed to be pro-choice. And I was shamed for asking questions at the gay pride parades I went to. I asked, “isn’t pride one of the seven deadly sins?” I was very literal as a child and, therefore, genuinely confused — this confusion was caused by the same people who claimed to be fighting “to be understood.” The message was clear: seeking understanding was “intolerant” and “oppressive;” to truly be anti-oppression, I must practice unquestioned, unthinking celebration. As a result, I have been living in mortal terror of oppressing anyone for most of my life. In fact, a few years before I woke up to the damage the Woke ideology was doing, I truly believed the most anti-oppressive thing I could do was stop taking up resources. I am white, cis-gendered, middle-class, and well-educated; therefore, I didn’t deserve to exist.
For someone like me, being a good person meant self-hatred. It meant watching violent and graphic videos of Black people being murdered by police repeatedly because that would somehow prevent more black people from being brutally murdered. It meant holding my breath so others could breathe. It meant caretaking people who verbally or physically assaulted me. It meant living in crippling anxiety about saying the wrong thing since the definition of wrong changed by the person and by the minute. At the same time, I was subjected to hateful “anti-racist” speech against me. I swallowed it all without question, blindly, in the name of justice. I was instructed that it was more important to let others “define who they are” than to define myself.
The repeated stories of how the identities people have been assigned have deeply harmed others caused me to enter a cycle of “guilt→behave→self-censor” and became a form of “trauma-bonding.” The Woke religion presents an enemy and provides an explanation for why that entity is the enemy. It then provides repeated graphic, triggering, and upsetting evidence for why their declared entity is the enemy. Land acknowledgments are one example of how traumatic evidence is ritually presented in order to refresh the sense of guilt and shame that allows the Woke religion to mold the behaviors of others at will. To resolve the angst, it proposes not only a solution but a proprietary solution. Thus, even if you fit their definition of an enemy in some way, you go along with the agenda to hopefully banish the self-loathing that the ideological trauma gave you in the first place. Combining it with claiming the moral high ground and alienating anyone who disagrees with you, you have a potent hypnotic event.
None of this was conscious, and seeds were sown long before I grew into my adult brain. These tactics are insidious and only the beginning of why it took so long to wake up. In my next article, I’ll discuss more of the tactics used to indoctrinate young minds and society at large.
