A FrontPage series by
At the heart of wokeness is a lie – the Marxist lie that human society is reducible to power imbalances between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus wokeness depends on false narratives to sell itself and smear its opponents.
Below are the Top Ten Woke Lies subverting American politics and culture.
10) The Right Wants to Ban Black History and Culture
“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” Governor DeSantis said in December 2021 when announcing the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act. “We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”
The hate DeSantis was referring to is the race essentialism of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the false 1619 Project narrative which claims that America’s founding was rooted not in liberty but in slavery and racism. The Left has injected this debunked historiography, this anti-American subversion into every level of education from pre-K through graduate school – but not in Florida, thanks to its culture warrior governor.
“We believe in education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis said at a news conference a year ago at the signing of HB 7, the “Individual Freedom” measure, which officially banned the pernicious ideology of CRT from classrooms. “We believe an important component of freedom in the state of Florida is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies opposed upon you without your consent.”
Freedom and states’ rights don’t sit well with Democrats, who also resent having their racial indoctrination of children booted out of schools. Thus, back in February on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, the titular host and left-wing propagandist sought to smear DeSantis when she asked Vice President Kamala Harris, “What does Governor Ron DeSantis not know about black history and the black experience when he says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren?”
Hold it right there. DeSantis, who worries the Left so much that he is beginning to supplant former President Trump as the new Literally Hitler™, has never declared that the history of slavery and its aftermath should not be taught to children in his state. In fact, black history is actually required in Florida’s schools and has been since 1994. And DeSantis supports that.
According to the Florida Department of Education website, the state’s African American History classes must teach “the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery” as well as “the enslaved experience,” “abolition,” and “the history and contributions of Americans of the African diaspora to society.” “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum,” DeSantis has said.
The epically incompetent Kamala, unsurprisingly, not only didn’t call Andrea Mitchell out for her blatant lie in their interview but ran with it, replying, “Any push to censor America’s teachers and tell them what they should be teaching in the best interest of our children in partnership with the parents of America, is I think, wrongheaded.” After some further blather, she concluded, “It should not be some politician saying what should not be taught in our classrooms.”
First, too many of America’s teachers do not have the best interests of our children at heart and are not working “in partnership with the parents of America,” but instead are actively concealing a woke agenda from them. The racist falsehoods of CRT and the 1619 Project are vital weapons in their brainwashing arsenal. Parents who discovered, thanks to the COVID lockdowns over the last three years, what those activist teachers have been up to were rightfully outraged about it.
Second, CRT is not black history – it is poisonous propaganda, indoctrination into a neo-Marxist worldview that does not open students’ minds but inculcates a “revolutionary consciousness” that closes minds. It does not promote racial healing and unity but intentionally provokes racial resentment and guilt. Rejecting CRT from the curriculum is not censorship; it is good governance that actually is in partnership with the parents of America, who don’t want their children subjected to any more of the radical Left’s relentless incitement of racial division.
But the lie that Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans want to censor the history of slavery in America – indeed, to outright ban black history and black culture in schools – has become the coordinated, rabble-rousing rallying cry of the leftwing media from MSNBC to The Atlantic to the moronic co-hostesses of The View. And they’re clinging to that lie – indeed, when castigated on social media and by the DeSantis team for her slanderous accusation, an unrepentant Andrea Mitchell offered up the lame non-apology that she had merely been “imprecise” in her language.
The lie that conservatives want to erase blacks and whitewash slavery from American history is just one of the many false, woke narratives the Left pushes continually to demonize their political opponents and stoke revolution. Another is…
9) The “Don’t Say Gay” Law
Gov. DeSantis has also been at the center of another leftist smear: a bill he signed into law in March 2022 targeted the Alphabet Community and sought to silence them about freely expressing their gender identity. As FrontPage Mag’s Joseph Klein reported, what DeSantis signed was the common-sense Parental Rights in Education law which protects schoolchildren younger than 4th grade from the predations of leftists pushing graphic sex education and gender ideology to kids as young as pre-kindergartners. The law also protected the right of parents to decide how their children are raised and educated, including being informed if their children are considering transitioning to the opposite sex.
“They support injecting woke gender ideology into second-grade classrooms,” DeSantis said of the radical educators. “They support enabling schools to ‘transition’ students to a ‘different gender’ without the knowledge of the parent.” It’s a sad state of affairs in our culture that such a law would even be necessary, but even before it was signed, the Left had already coordinated their opposition by falsely branding it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The evening before the bill was signed, the actress/activist hostesses of the Academy Awards show in Hollywood – Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes – predictably politicized the ceremony by delivering a shout-out about the law: “And for you people in Florida, we’re going to have a gay night.” To the delighted approval of their fellow Hollywood elites, the three proceeded to chant the word “gay” over and over again in challenge to the Florida law – as if it literally banned anyone from saying the word.
The truth is that nothing in the Florida law prohibited the word “gay” or attacked the youth of the Alphabet Community in any way. The word “gay” itself doesn’t even appear in the text of the law. There is absolutely nothing in it that could be interpreted as anti-gay or – as President Biden himself falsely characterized it – “anti-transgender” or “hateful.”
But the Left never lets the truth get in the way of its politics of personal destruction. From NPR to The Washington Post to Time Magazine to the predictably propagandist The View, the media coordinated to attach that “Don’t Say Gay” label to every report on, and pundit discussion about, the law. The aim was to fashion a unified narrative to demonize Ron DeSantis and the Right generally, in the minds of millions of Americans, as homophobic, transphobic bigots – another ugly woke lie.
8) The Right is Banning Books
A lie the Left never tires of exploiting is the claim that the authoritarian mullahs of the Right are censorship-happy.
The reliably propagandist New York Times, for example, fear-mongered last year about “A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans.” The equally left-wing Los Angeles Times claimed that “Republicans are banning books about historical truths,” referring to the false narratives of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project. National Public Radio, the taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet, warned of Republican leaders trying to ban books on race and LGBTQ issues. The George Soros-created think tank Center for American Progress impressively managed to hit Republicans with two smears in a single headline, complaining that they “have made it easier for shooters to access guns, but they’ve made it harder for students to access books.”
The left-leaning American Library Association (ALA) reported a record number of attempts to ban or restrict library books and resources in 2022: 2,571 unique book titles, up from 1,858 the previous year. The ALA fretted about “organized censorship groups” (by which they mean parental rights groups) and bills facilitating the restriction of books that have been proposed or passed in several states, including Arizona, Iowa, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma – and especially in Florida, run by the Left’s bete noire, Governor Ron DeSantis.
“A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a library’s collection so that no one else can read it,” wrote Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the library organization’s Orwellian-sounding Office for Intellectual Freedom, in a release. This is a lie; what she and the ALA and the leftist media want to obscure is that a “challenge” is not the same as a “ban.” A book can be challenged for many reasons, most often that it contains sexuality or violence or themes that are not appropriate for young readers. A “challenge” is many times simply about allowing the parents to decide when, if ever, their own children are mature enough to be exposed to such material.
Another thing the Left doesn’t admit is that they themselves often seek to ban books or intimidate authors that trigger their politically correct sensibilities: witness their stealth editing of such books as those by beloved children’s writer Roald Dahl or James Bond creator Ian Fleming, or the outright refusal to sell books questioning trans ideology, such as When Harry Became Sally or their cancel culture threats of violence and death against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
The ALA’s Caldwell-Stone went on to sniff hypocritically that “[t]he choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.”
Exactly. Indeed it should be the parent’s choice, and that’s precisely what the hysterical claims of a conservative book-banning frenzy are all about the elite Left’s belief that they are more educated (“I have a master’s degree!”) and therefore more qualified than the parents to decide what children should read. And since the agenda of leftist educators who dominate the public school system (and most private schools as well) is not education but the indoctrination of children into a woke worldview, they resist parental attempts to have any say in what is or is not appropriate for their children to read. It is these radicals, not the parents, who are the “self-appointed book police.”
As David Harsanyi wrote recently at The Federalist, “For the left, the banned book claim is a political racket, allowing them to feign indignation over the alleged ‘authoritarianism’ of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudo-histories or books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.”
The scare term “book ban,” Harsanyi concluded, is “just a euphemism for progressive administrators and teachers losing some of their power over your kids.”
This lie that Republicans are book burners like the “firemen” of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 comes not just from the left, but even from RINO party infiltrators like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney. In the wake of last week’s school shooting in Nashville in which a woman who “identified” as a male shot six little children and staff members dead, Cheney took a cheap shot at “fellow” conservatives instead of decrying the growing violence of the trans community and its allies: “If we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”
Governor DeSantis, again at the center of culture war controversy (see the previous two of the Top Ten Woke Lies), decried this false narrative as “a hoax” in a February press conference:
And they’re trying to say that because we have parental rights and because we have curriculum transparency — if you have a book that has hardcore pornography in the library that 10-year-olds can access, a parent objects to that, that does not satisfy Florida standards. It should not be in the library with those young kids. And I think 99 percent of parents agree with that… If it’s explicit and pornographic, parents have the right to object and it should be taken off [the school reading list].
DeSantis went on to outline, during his State of the State address last month, his initiative to remove these books sexualizing children from public grade schools. “We’re gonna expose exactly the books that parents are concerned about. You guys will not even be able to put it on your air because it’s gonna be so, so graphic,” he told reporters afterward.
Graphic indeed. Prior to a later press conference, DeSantis’ team played for the gathered media a video detailing some of the imagery DeSantis rightfully declared pornographic, from books found in Florida classrooms. Many of the reporters present turned off their news feeds, making DeSantis’ point about the explicit nature of the books. “I just think parents, when they’re sending their kids to school, they should not have to worry about this garbage being in the schools,” he said in the conference, emphasizing that taxpayers shouldn’t be funding such inappropriate material.
Any sensible grownup would find the content of such books shocking, but leftists aren’t sensible grownups but groomers literally hell-bent on inculcating a sexual consciousness in children to drive a wedge between them and their parents. The only thing Hollywood soap actress Nancy Lee Grahn, for example, found objectionable about the video DeSantis shared was not the graphic sexuality in books made available to children, but the fact that the governor wanted the books removed from school libraries. Grahn tweeted to her large social media following the hysterical warning that DeSantis is a “twisted sadist” who “will end up making Hitler seem nice.”
Imagine being so passionate about wanting little schoolchildren exposed to graphic images of group masturbation and anal sex that you deem your political opponent to be more evil than Hitler. That is today’s Democrat Party.
7) Critical Race Theory is Not Being Taught in Schools
“There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students,” wrote Bryan Anderson in November 2021 for the leftist propaganda outlet PBS News Hour, in a piece that suggested conservatives are paranoid bigots for fretting about it.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) – practically a household term now – is a cultural Marxist offshoot that began as a body of legal scholarship that viewed the law through the lens of racism and oppression and aimed to empower activists to dismantle that system of power. But in a matter of a few decades, CRT swept like wildfire from higher education all the way down to pre-kindergarten. Its core concepts – among them white privilege, implicit bias, and systemic racism – have also infiltrated other areas of society now apart from education: politics, business, entertainment… It’s hard to point to any aspect of our culture that hasn’t been touched, if not ravaged, by it.
The Left, of course, denies this, especially regarding its presence in education. Their three-step strategy for dismissing conservative claims that CRT is a tool for subversion in the classroom goes like this:
1) CRT in schools is nothing more than a boogeyman invented by the Right – it’s not a thing;
2) CRT in schools is a thing, but it’s not being taught like Republicans claim;
3) Republican legislation to ban or limit CRT in schools is racist!
The same formula applies, by the way, to the terms “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism”: first, smear the Right’s concerns about such terms as imaginary, bigoted, and fear-mongering. Then fight tooth-and-nail and cry racism when the Right tries to boot these ideological weapons from being taught in schools as truth.
If it’s true that CRT isn’t being taught in K-12 schools as PBS News Hour claims, as Jonathan Butcher wrote for the Heritage Foundation, “why would the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, invest in a campaign to keep the theory in K-12 instruction? That is, how could the union keep critical race theory in classrooms if it wasn’t there in the first place?”
The answer is that CRT is being taught in classrooms all around the country. But many on the Left insist that it is not, simply because it often isn’t explicitly labeled Critical Race Theory.
By the fall of 2021, bills that banned teaching certain CRT tenets in K-12 schools had already become law in five states—Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee—and had been proposed in 20 more. As the movement to reject CRT grew, articles opposing these bills started appearing in the mainstream media, claiming CRT wasn’t even being taught in schools in the first place.
“For example,” as Raymond Burns noted in an article last year at Areo appropriately titled, “Yes, Children Are Being Taught Critical Race Theory in K–12 Schools in the US”:
NBC News published an article titled, “Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms.” Similar claims were aired by the PBS News Hour, the New York Times, Salon, and various regional news outlets (while, in the UK, the Guardian stated firmly, “CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools, which teach students from five to 18 years old”). A New York Times article asserted, “Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K–12 schools.” Such articles often supported this claim by asserting that CRT is solely a legal theory—taught only in higher education—as an “advanced scholarly framework … focused on racial inequality and the law.”
“Anyone familiar with CRT knows that its core tenets are being taught to children in many of America’s K–12 schools—and taught as if those tenets were facts,” Burns asserted.
He went on to note that CRT had become so widespread within teacher training that by 2018, a four-volume set called Critical Race Theory in Education had compiled 82 scholarly articles on how to apply CRT to education.
Burns added:
In September 2021, WITF Live ran an article by Gabriela Martinez asserting that, “it [CRT] isn’t being taught in Pennsylvania.” And yet the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s “Racial and Ethnic Identity” webpage has a recommended reading list that is overflowing with works by CRT scholars… And in case that still leaves any doubt that this ideology is being disseminated in Pennsylvania schools, the webpage also has a link to “vetted resources for addressing race, racism, and systemic inequality in the classroom” that include lesson plans, activities, videos, and reflection exercises.
Thus, the woke lie: Critical Race Theory isn’t being taught in schools, you right-wing conspiracy nuts. So don’t even think about banning it!
6) Diversity is Our Strength
“The diversity of humanity is our greatest strength,” declared Mr. Wu Hongbo, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs at a recent Global Forum on Migration and Development. “Where ethnic or religious groups live side by side in harmony, diversity can spur creativity, learning, and innovation.”
This is the constant refrain from the supporters of the corrosive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement, from the political establishment to the military to human resources departments and boardrooms all across America: that variety of skin color and sexual orientation helps groups and organizations think outside the box by bringing a wider range of viewpoints to the table. Having “black” or “queer” or “differently-abled” perspectives, whatever those mean, purportedly spurs creative, innovative solutions to issues. No one ever cites an example of how, say, a specifically “non-binary” or “Latinx” angle solved a corporate problem, much less a military one, but the insistent claim nevertheless is that this approach is inherently superior to seeking solutions from a roomful of cisgender white males.
See, for example, this September 2022 speech by Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost at the Air and Space Forces Association’s 2022 Air, Space and Cyber Conference, in which she declared that diversity and an “inclusive force” are a “strategic imperative” for the U.S. military. In fact, Van Ovost stressed that it’s not enough for the U.S. alone to have a diverse military; we must also set an example for our allies to prioritize diversity as well. She doesn’t admit this, but that’s because, as National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a White House press briefing last month, the Biden administration is committed to the spread of “LGBTQ+ rights” as “a core part of our foreign policy.” So, pushing diversity is not truthfully about innovation and strength; it’s about spreading the cultural Marxist gender ideology.
The false assumption in the bumper-sticker slogan “Diversity is Our Strength” is that there is such a thing as a “black” or “queer” or “differently-abled” perspective. Anti-racist racist Ibram X. Kendi and conservative economist Thomas Sowell are both black; do they share a single “black” perspective? Do they have the same “lived experience”? Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (Democrat) and former National Intelligence Director Ric Grenell (Republican) are both homosexual; do they share a “queer” perspective? To assume that they do is collectivist thinking, not individualist. It is identity politics and identity politics is by definition divisive. Divisiveness by definition weakens, not strengthens.
Rhetorical question: does anyone think Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian mullahs are making diversity in their own military forces a “strategic imperative,” and promoting it abroad “a core part” of their international agenda?
The woke notion that diversity of skin color or sexual preference translates into strength has never been embraced by any culture or society in the history of mankind. Strength does not come from one entity atomized into many individuals whose differences are amplified, but from many individuals united in focus and aims. E pluribus unum, not plures ex uno.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with diversity of skin color, sexual orientation, or worldviews per se. But let’s not pretend that the virtue-signaling, totemic slogan “Diversity is Our Strength” has any validity in the real world. When diversity is prioritized over quality, skill, or talent purely for the sake of fulfilling quotas of racial or sexual orientation, then the team’s mission is compromised. When the mission is winning a war, as with our military, enforcing “equity” could be catastrophic.
As Christopher Bedford put it in The Federalist, “Those who preach the gospel of diversity, be it multiculturalism, critical race theory, or any other novel heresy, don’t care about what unifies us. Often, they resent it and instead, actively promote what makes us different.” The push for diversity did not stem from a sincere belief that a multiplicity of skin tones is empowering. It grew out of the radical Left’s hatred of 20th-century America’s unparalleled prosperity and power. It was spawned out of their malevolent aim to subvert American exceptionalism and dismantle the system that stands in the way of their collectivist utopia. In other words, “Diversity is Our Strength” is just another woke lie.
5) “We’re Not Coming For Your Precious Guns”
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” declared then-candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke during a 2019 presidential debate. Give him credit for that moment of honesty, because the usual dismissive response from the Left to conservative concerns about endangered gun rights is some variation of, “We’re not coming for your precious guns, you right-wing conspiracy nut!”
The Left’s insistence that they have no intention of confiscating guns but simply want “commonsense gun laws” is one of the most blatant of woke lies. First, we already have commonsense gun laws in this country. It will never matter how many more restrictions we pile on, we are never going to end all gun crime because – steady yourself, because this will blow your mind – criminals by definition do not respect the law. Indeed, the areas with the strictest gun control suffer the most gun violence. Take Chicago (please, as the late comedian Henny Youngman might add). The only people burdened by tighter and tighter gun restrictions are law-abiding gun owners.
Ah, but that is exactly the demographic that leftists want to control. Today’s pro-crime Left is completely indifferent to the scourges of gang-related or black-on-black gun crime. They never launch protests or grandstands in Congress about children killed in drive-by shootings or by stray bullets in the inner city. They have no interest in understanding, much less addressing, the cultural or moral reasons that might explain why America suffers more mass shootings now than in decades past when there was widespread access to guns. They call immediately for more gun control in the wake of a mass shooting rather than waiting for all the facts or ascertaining the shooter’s motivation because the Left doesn’t actually care about getting to the root of gun violence, but about exploiting the most-publicized tragedies to demonize gun ownership itself.
Second, the coronavirus pandemic exposed for all to see just how eagerly “liberal democratic” governments pounce on the opportunity to seize totalitarian control over a disappointingly compliant populace. Leftists crave total power, and one of the primary obstacles to aggrandizing power in this country is our historically unique Second Amendment. If they were not constrained by the Second Amendment, is there any doubt that given the opportunity, all the “Beto” O’Rourke’s in the Biden (or any other Democrat) administration would immediately impose a moratorium on all gun sales and implement a nationwide confiscation in the name of public safety (like the COVID vaccines and lockdowns)?
Leftwing smear organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center are fond of compiling the names of “conspiracy propagandists” they can demonize as (gasp!) “anti-government” and “nativist” extremists (i.e., patriotic Americans). They view supporters of the Second Amendment as brainwashed, white supremacist pawns of the National Rifle Association (NRA). It is these law-abiding Americans – not jihadists, not Black Lives Matter rioters, not Antifa thugs – whom the Left deems the greatest threat to American “democracy.”
The woke Left’s fever dream is to ditch the Second Amendment and then move to disarm these law-abiding citizens altogether – or failing that, to make gun ownership so financially, legally, and socially onerous for the average American that patriotic gun owners who believe in the right and the necessity of bearing arms to resist tyranny become a diminished minority and a defanged threat to government control.
These observations are not conspiracy-mongering; they are commonsense realism. The Left’s promise that they are not coming for our guns is just as dishonest as another woke lie with, coincidentally, a very similar phrasing: “We’re not coming for your precious kids, you right-wing conspiracy nut!”
4) “We’re Not Coming For Your Precious Kids”
During a White House speech last week honoring the nation’s Teachers of the Year, President Biden quoted one of the teachers, saying, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” He then repeated that apparently because he found it so profound, and added, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”
No single statement sums up the unbridgeable chasm between Left and Right quite like this revealing claim. The Left no doubt thinks it sounds inclusive and compassionate to suggest that we are all responsible for every child’s safety and welfare; what it actually means is that the Left believes the state is a more legitimate parental authority than the parents themselves, that state-approved educators are more capable and knowledgeable to raise your children than you are, and that any stranger in the vague collective called “the community” has just as much right to a child as the parents themselves.
This “it takes a village” approach to child-rearing goes as far back as Karl Marx, who called for the abolition of the nuclear family and the end of the “capitalist exploitation” of children. Under communism, he argued, the state would be responsible for the upbringing of children so that parents could be “free” to devote their energies to working for, well, the state.
The Left believes deeply in the cliché that children are the future. Today’s young woke educators, sporting nose rings and rainbow-dyed hairstyles that scream “Nonbinary!” view themselves not as politically unbiased teachers of critical thinking skills, but as social justice activists sowing the seeds of revolutionary consciousness. They see parents and their outdated bourgeois values as the enemy and are passionate about grooming the children in their charge into their subversive cult of gender ideology.
Their mission is to drive a wedge between the younger generations and their parents and indoctrinate them into wokeness, and to churn out uneducated drones of social justice activism long before they ever set foot on a college campus, where the brainwashing is finalized. Meanwhile, their parents will die off, and their old way of thinking with them.
But the Left isn’t coming for our children only in schools. There is a whole new cultural movement – spawned from a niche form of silly, adult entertainment – that has exploded into prominence and is zeroed in on drawing children into its web.
“Drag” shows have been around forever and no one ever cared – because they were always performed in clubs for audiences of an appropriately adult age. Even in mainstream culture, no one ever worried that a cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot, or British comedian Benny Hill, or Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire would instill gender confusion in children or sexualize them. But in the last few years Drag Queen Story Hours for children in public libraries sprouted up all over the country; children’s TV and internet programming has been laced with drag queens and other gender ideological messaging; and drag performances were suddenly and falsely marketed as “family-friendly” to draw in the children of naïve Progressive parents. Meanwhile, drag costuming and makeup have morphed into an aesthetic best described as demonic, and the sexualized nature of drag performances has become more explicit. The mainstream media and entertainment industry have allied themselves with this satanic movement to normalize and celebrate the perverse trend of “kids’ drag.”
This seductive evil is working in tandem, of course, with the metastasizing of the cancerous gender ideology now being promoted full-bore in public and many private schools. The aim is to inculcate in children as young as pre-kindergarten a sexual consciousness and a gender confusion designed to “liberate” them from biological truths and from the oppression of Judeo-Christian morality that has been more successful than any in history at protecting children from threats to their innocence and their emotional and moral development.
As with the Right’s legitimate concerns about the threat of gun confiscation (see Woke Lie #5 above), the Left rolls their collective eyes and calls arguments like the above fear-mongering and paranoia. But is the Left, in fact, out to indoctrinate the next generation? To paraphrase “Beto” O’Rourke: “Hell yes, we’re coming for your kids.”
And our response must be the same as Spartan King Leonidas’ reply to the Persian demand to lay down their weapons at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae: Molon labe.
3) Men Can Be Women and Other Lies of Gender Ideology
Is there any more disheartening evidence that wokeness has hopelessly infected our cultural and political elites than their unwillingness to define a word as basic as “woman”? Is there only a tiny handful of prominent figures on the Left who are willing to stand up to the bullying mob of gender ideologues and to reject:
- their irrational language eradicating the biological realities of male and female – “birthing parent” instead of “mother,” “chest-feeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” and “menstruating people” instead of “females,” for example;
- their narcissistic personal pronoun demands;
- their hysterical outrage over the crime of being “misgendered”;
- their obsession with where they sit on any given day along an apparently infinite spectrum of gender identity;
- their tacit approval of biological males destroying the very concept of women’s sports;
- their push to introduce a sexual consciousness in children as young as pre-kindergartners and to flood school libraries with pornographic explorations of “non-binary” perversions?
It takes a rare independence on the Left – like the kind exhibited by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling – to renounce all this cultish insanity, because doing so gets you canceled and targeted with death threats by gender terrorists. Rowling, however, is a billionaire who can afford to insulate herself against anything the woke mob can throw at her – which is not to diminish her courage in standing up to them, only to note that she is one of the rare few who can withstand their onslaught. Most people risk having their lives ruined or lost, and the woke mob revels in that power.
This madness is all the result of the insidious hold gender ideology has on our culture. This godless, reality-denying belief system has become the tip of the spear of the cultural Marxist assault on Western civilization, because if these gender revolutionaries can erase the distinctions between male and female, or at least intimidate everyone into denying them, then they can successfully fulfill Karl Marx’s imperative to abolish the family. If “male” and “female” are merely cultural constructions that we can deconstruct and redefine at will; if any temporary arrangement of consenting adults can constitute a “family”; if our children belong not just to their parents but to all of us, as alleged President Biden himself declared recently, then words that represent family relationships – mother, father, children, grandparents, etc. – will have no meaning anymore.
The traditional family unit will finally disintegrate entirely and with it every social and moral norm of Western civilization. The only anchor left to hold society together will be the State. And that, of course, is the goal.
Gender ideology is as corrosive a civilizational threat as you could name it, and it is all built upon the denial of biological, cultural, and spiritual truth. A civilization that lacks the courage and confidence to defend itself against such a decadent religion of the self is already doomed.
Speaking of doomed…
2) Man-made Climate Change is Dooming the Planet
An Inconvenient Truth filmmaker Al Gore’s net worth is estimated at $330 million. A 2017 National Center for Public Policy report noted that, at least at that time, he lived in a 20-room, 10,070-square-foot Nashville mansion which used 21 times more monthly electricity than the ordinary American home. He also owns at least two other homes, a pied-à-terre in San Francisco’s St. Regis Residence Club and a farmhouse in Carthage, Tennessee. Months before they separated in 2010, he and his wife Tipper also spent $8,875,000 on a gated, ocean-view, 6,500-square-foot villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, wine cellar, terraces, six fireplaces, five bedrooms, and nine bathrooms.
Environmental activist and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whom the United Nations has dubbed a “messenger of peace” for his work on climate change, has an estimated worth of $300 million. He is notorious for traveling many times a year on private jets and private yachts. He owns what has been called “a plethora of properties across California, from a stunning Spanish Colonial-style property in Los Feliz to a sleek beach house in Malibu.” His Los Angeles compound totals over 5 acres, with 15,000 square feet of combined living space across four houses, four swimming pools, and the obligatory tennis court. DiCaprio also owns a private island off the coast of Belize.
John Kerry’s net worth is an estimated $280 million. Kerry, “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” owns a private family Gulfstream jet that, according to a July 2022 report, emitted over 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide since the Biden administration began. In 2016, he and his wife shelled out $11.75 million for a spectacular 18-acre, 7-bedroom property in Martha’s Vineyard. That was in addition to another reported five homes.
I don’t begrudge any of these climate change Cassandras their money or houses. The point of detailing their wealth is to demonstrate that climate change alarmism is entirely the domain of wealthy white elites who jet privately around the world lecturing Western countries about scaling back dramatically on capitalist prosperity to save the planet.
This is not the space to debunk the hysteria that man’s carbon footprint will destroy all life on Earth in the next 60 days, or whatever the latest time frame is for the apocalypse. Entire books have been written taking this hoax apart in scientific terms. For our purposes it’s only important to note that globalist elites like Kerry and Gore and the World Economic Forum and the United Nations are the powerful puppeteers behind the Great Reset, the push for the common man to trade beef for insects; to trade cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy for the unreliability of “green, renewable” energy sources; to trade the comfort, convenience, security, and privacy of private vehicles for public transportation and walking in tightly-restricted, heavily-surveilled “15-minute cities”; to have fewer children, or preferably none at all, to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint, and so on.
These power-mad, self-appointed saviors of mankind who believe they can change the weather will be entirely insulated from the utopian policies they implement that will devastate the prosperous West and render undeveloped countries into killing fields of starvation and disease. Is it any wonder that these same elites are enamored of the new philosophy of transhumanism, which literally promises its adherents that they will be as gods?
1) America is a Systemically Racist Nation
Surely the most persistent and damaging lie perpetuated by wokeness is the ugly smear that the United States is a “systemically racist” nation. This demonstrably false worldview is axiomatic to the Left, which has spent decades inculcating in our youth an obsession with our country’s sins and shortcomings, and a hatred of our flawed heroes and founders, our prosperity and freedoms, our historical exceptionalism. This deeply-entrenched conviction that we are racist to our core is the lie at the heart of everything today’s Left stands for and promotes its resentment of our Constitution, its embrace of open borders, its indoctrination of Critical Race Theory, and the debunked 1619 Project narrative, its demands for “equity” and reparations for slavery, it’s tearing down of monuments and renaming of schools, its heated protests against our flag and national anthem, and on and on.
What does it mean to be systemically racist? Certainly, individuals (of all colors) can be racist (although the Marxist left, of course, claims blacks cannot be, because they are helpless beneath the bootheel of white power), but to be systemically racist means that racism is “baked into” every structure and facet of American life: the law, the economy, education, city planning, hiring practices, everything.
This term “baked into,” by the way, inevitably rears its ugly head in every discussion about systemic racism, because it is a convenient way of damning a process or policy as racist without having to actually identify where the racism in it lies, just as you can’t point to the baking soda in a cake – you know that ingredient is in the mix, but you can’t separate it from the final product or even see it. In the Left’s view, the final product – the system itself – therefore cannot be fixed; it can only be discarded entirely to make way for a completely different, and more just, system.
Our black, twice-elected former President Barack Obama even stated that America is infected with racism in its very DNA – a metaphor perpetuated by other anti-Americans such as the 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones. How can you extract a malignancy from your own DNA? As the Left sees it, you cannot. It is hopelessly corrupt.
This lie is upheld by pointing to racial inequalities that the Left believes can be explained only by racism: blacks being incarcerated at a rate far higher than their population percentage would suggest, for example. A wealthy race hustler, Ibram X. Kendi has declared, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi also says that it is racist even to suggest that such disparities might be explained by anything other than racism, such as cultural or behavioral reasons.
Has America ever been systemically racist? One could certainly point to racist practices or policies that plagued our past: slavery or Jim Crow laws, for example. But is racism “in our DNA” as a nation? Is it irredeemably “baked into” our nature? Of course not. The Founders and our founding documents laid the groundwork for freedom and justice for all, and our country’s short, volatile history has been one of continually striving to bring that promise to fruition. If anything, we are a country, unique in world history, that committed ourselves even at the cost of civil war to overcoming our racial sins and shortcomings. This is a truth that the Left cannot accept because doing so would strip their entire victimhood agenda of any legitimacy.
If America is a white supremacist nation with racism “baked into” the system, as virtually everyone on the Left openly insists, then it is the most incompetent white supremacist nation imaginable. It seems hopelessly incapable of preventing blacks and other minorities from achieving anything they strive for. Minorities currently occupy or have occupied every level of power and authority in American society, including the President.
There are or have been, to list random examples, black Secretaries of State, Congressmen and -women, Attorneys General, Supreme Court Justices, CEOs, mayors, governors, police chiefs, school principals, university deans, Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff, generals and admirals, judges, managers, surgeons, scientists, bankers, megastar athletes, and entertainers – every position of authority and influence and prestige you can name.
In fact, America is so inept at sustaining an oppressive, systemic racism, it’s almost as if – bear with me here – it’s almost as if systemic racism in this country does not actually exist.
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Wokeness, in all its manifestations – climate hysteria, Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and the rest – is a false religion. Its god is equity, which in its essence is revenge against the perceived oppressor class. Its animating spirit is an unholy trinity of jealousy, race hatred, and destruction rather than love, unity, and creativity. It is not, then, a state of social justice enlightenment as the Left would like to define it, but a state of willful Marxist deception. America has come too far as a country to allow itself to be consumed by this subversive lie.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.