How Does One Become Woke?

A Tale of Two Friends

Dear Reader,

I am publishing this piece after a long deliberation. For many reasons, which you will understand after reading, I have been hesitant to publish it, but I decided to do it because it is the perfect answer to the question asked in the title. I can accept, however, that I may be wrong in my assessment, and so, I am inviting the friend whose case study I am using in this essay to have a public debate on the topics discussed below.

NB: I used to be ambivalent about using the word “Woke” until I read this essay by Slavoj Zizek (“Wokeness Is Here to Stay”) and decided that, if a Marxist has no problem with this term, why should I? After all, it expresses a fundamental belief of the Woke: namely, that, unlike the rest of us, they have been awakened to a consciousness that entitles them and them only to free speech. https://www.compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay/ 

(I am using for the first time the audio feature Substack has introduced. Below, I am reading the conclusion of this essay.)

“Isn’t evil analogous to illusion? Illusion, when one is in the midst of it, is not felt as illusion, but as a fact. … The same is true, perhaps, of evil. Evil, when one is immersed in it, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity or even a duty.”

~ Simone Weil, Notebooks

The best way to understand any social or ideological conflict is to tell a story about the people representing it. I have already written the account of my growing up in Communist Romania with children of factory workers and peasants. The parallel narrative necessary for understanding this conflict is a tale about the woman I once thought of as my best friend, D.

Because all my life I socialized with people of many different social categories and ethnicities, the privileged background of my American friends used to be for me no more than an irrelevant backdrop; more precisely, this was the case until Woke ideology took over all America’s institutions, and I discovered that these friends were now on the other side. Suddenly, the ground in which the roots of wokeness had been planted became essential, and the fact that these friends had grown up in households of over a hundred thousand dollars a year and their parents—lawyers, university professors, CEOs, psychiatrists, artists—had offered them every possibility of access to great art only for their children to now claim that Western civilization was nothing more than a history of bigotry they felt called to denounce was not merely a detail. It was the very essence of wokeism.

I met D in the mid-nineties when we were both auditing courses in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg with world-famous professors, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Both of us were temporarily exiled from America, I from a public university in Florida, the only one where I could afford to apply as an immigrant working for a minimum wage, she from UC, Berkeley. Being the only one in my Masters’ program who had never been to France, I decided to create my own study-abroad year, and, after some research, I chose the University of Strasbourg. My university tried to convince me to apply through their own study abroad system, which would have cost me thousands of dollars, but I defied them and applied directly to the French university—this way, for a mere two hundred dollars a year paid directly to the French, I could attend however many classes I wanted. I also applied for a room in a dorm—this was a hundred fifty dollars a month. This is how I managed to live for a whole year on the $6,000 I borrowed from my university.

My friend D had chosen the University of Strasbourg because she, like all the other Anglophone friends I met through her, had already studied with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in the US where the two French professors were two of the stars associated with deconstruction and Derrida. While my decision was based on my own research and, initially, I had no idea who the two philosophers were, my Anglophone friends were there as groupies of two stars, and their decision was, even more than a personal choice, a moment on a path for the lucky few. They all came from the upper middle class: unlike my parents who had never been to college, D’s parents had graduate degrees (I recall that at least one of them was a psychiatrist) and a grandmother had been a ballerina. P, an Australian friend who had studied with Derrida and had come there at his recommendation, was from a family of millionaires; when his parents came to visit, they took him to the most expensive restaurant in the city. It was my friend D who had informed me that P’s parents were millionaires when I mentioned that P sometimes forgot his wallet when we went out for drinks: “Stop paying for his drinks! His parents are millionaires.” Another American came from a family of university professors who were personally acquainted with the famous French philosophers; after his exams, his parents took our professors out for dinner. All these Anglophone friends rented rooms in downtown Strasbourg; I was the only one living in a dorm together with students from all over the world, many of them from Africa and various Muslim countries. While my Anglophone friends only socialized among themselves or with French students, never, as far as I could tell, with people from non-Western countries, I went out with students from Ghana, Algeria, Mexico, Iran. The reason I went out with these “diverse” people was because I always took great pleasure in hearing and seeing different manifestations of the “human comedy” (in the Balzacian sense), not because I felt the need to congratulate myself on my “diversity agenda.” Like other Eastern Europeans, I have a highly developed sense of the absurd, and when you are exposed to other views you realize how arbitrary and ultimately funny all perceptions of reality are.

I remember, for instance, how my friend from Ghana tried to “convince” me that witchcraft was a superstition—apparently, he thought that all women believed in witchcraft; or how my Algerian friend never looked me in the eye when he spoke to me, and didn’t seem to have the concept of private space; or how my Catholic Mexican friend couldn’t stop making lists of all the things, vegetables included, that the Europeans had imported from his country. The fact that our ethnic backgrounds, ideas and political views were different didn’t stop us from enjoying each other’s company. There was one thing, however, that we had in common: we all came from modest environments. It is my experience that educated (and I emphasize “educated”) people from lower social classes are more open to diverse ideas than those from the upper classes, maybe because, as they move from a lower to an upper class, the former are forced by circumstances to acquire knowledge about different types of people with different types of values, and thus to be more flexible, while those from the upper classes remain in the same social circles for the rest of their lives.

Not having the organic experience of interacting with people from other classes than theirs, but feeling obligated by the “progressive” ideology of their peers to claim their “allyship” to these categories, educated people from the upper classes use those who are more disadvantaged than them as symbolic tokens for their cultural and social capital. They invoke them in their fight for “social justice,” when in reality they know nothing about these people.

Every now and then, I would talk to my Anglophone friends about these other, non-Western friends. I remember the former’s lack of interest in meeting any of the latter, and their ironic posturing (oh, that superior “irony,” typical of young American graduates of very expensive colleges!). I remember P’s dismissive grimace and the words “these people” to refer spitefully to my Algerian friend. You see, at the time, one didn’t score points by claiming to be “allies” of “non-white” (whatever that means), non-Western people, like today, so it was more than OK to despise them.  

I remembered all this a quarter of a century later during the Trump era when these Anglophone friends who, during our schoolyear together, never socialized with anyone different than them, suddenly started to show signs on social media of being very “anti-racist.” I remembered the remark about “these people” when I had a conflict on Facebook with P about Cornel West, whom I called “a demagogue.” Converted to “anti-racism,” P promptly blocked me. My friend D too had become an “anti-racist” and a trans “ally” and so, when in July 2020, 150 intellectuals of all political persuasions, including Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood, signed a letter in favor of free speech (the so-called “Harper letter”), she referred to the signatories as “trumpers.” Did my friend really believe that these intellectuals, who until yesterday were very much of the Left, were “trumpers”? My friend’s position puzzled me to such a degree that ever since I have been trying to answer this question: how can someone who is well read and naturally intelligent manage to delude themselves like this, and what are the roots of this delusion? In a way, this essay is an attempt to answer this question.

When I met D in the mid-nineties in Strasbourg, she was a charming and witty young woman, well read in several world literatures, fluent in three languages with knowledge of a fourth, sharp yet sensitive, and practiced a type of soft irony that made her seem impervious to ideology. I remember how we made fun of the visiting American student who, perfectly earnest, without a hint of self-irony, informed us over a pint of beer, that he would very much like to be homosexual, or at least bisexual, but, alas, he couldn’t help being attracted to women. At the time, she wasn’t yet a victim of the conformism to non-conformity and the ideology of normophobia (see Mary Harrington) that characterizes America’s intellectual elites. But even more than the qualities mentioned earlier, what attracted me to her was her naughty, authentically playful self, exhibited when we were shopping one day, and she confessed that she sometimes shoplifted items she thought too expensive. My own naughty self was eager to imitate her, but my immigrant, vigilant self said no. As an immigrant originally from a society known as “thief-friendly,” having the status of resident of the United States with a Romanian passport (many years before its being part of the EU), I knew that the tiniest incident could mean my expulsion back to the hell of Romania. I could not afford to be playful. Or to ironically deconstruct the capitalist market.

D and I became close friends, and enjoyed a magical school year—to date, it was the best year of my life, and the time I spent with her and P, who was equally charming, had the enchanting quality of a time-frozen sepia photograph--at the end of which, we both returned to America, I to continue my graduate studies in Florida, she to take a break from her studies. We stayed in touch and met every now and then at conferences or in NYC where she lived for a while. After we both finished our PhDs, we traded stories about being on the job market, and she casually mentioned how her thesis adviser was making phone calls on her behalf to other professors across the country. I was not even speaking to my director (why is another story) and even if I had, who would have paid attention to the professor of a Florida public university with no works in my field (“French theory”) versus a famous professor from Berkeley? Eventually, I did get a one-semester job as a Visiting Assistant Professor in French, while my friend started one of the first cultural blogs to appear on the Internet in the early 2000s.

Eventually, D’s blog caught the eye of an important New York Times cultural critic, and this attention brought her a few gigs there, which, in turn, helped her secure a permanent position as a cultural critic at one of the most prestigious American online magazines where she still works. Her trajectory is the story of someone who, through qualities of her own—intelligence, hard work and a flair for a cultural moment that inspired the creation of her blog—helped her land a position that places her within the cultural elite of the country. At least, this is what I had told myself for years. But more recently, trying to answer the question that frames this essay—“how does one become woke?”—I have been thinking that there is also another story behind the paths of people like my friend: a story of privilege, the privilege of belonging to a certain social class. Every step leading to her job was possible because she already occupied a space that had been carved for her by her background: she went to Berkeley because she came from an upper middle class family of intellectuals; she studied in France with two famous intellectuals because she had met them in Berkeley; she obtained the job as a cultural critic at a prestigious magazine because she had not only the pedigree, but also the way of thinking specific to her social class, and people with a similar way of thinking from a similar social background recognize and promote each other. These are the people Rob Henderson talks about when he refers to the class that has created “luxury beliefs.”

This is what people like my friend D are incapable of deconstructing: the fact that their values and way of thinking are mainly the result of belonging to a social class. In the binary world of American political life, they see everything in terms of Left and Right, never in terms of class—which is rather ironic, given that they think of themselves as “rejecting the binary.”

In the initial version of this essay, the following paragraph was part of it: “Dear reader, D is way too intelligent to believe in stories of men who can become women because that’s how they “feel”! She has read too much and knows enough about other cultures not to realize the absurdity of the claim that a new category of humans appeared in late 20^th century in a few Western countries. In our previous life, she was the kind of person who would have mocked and made fun of these narcissists.” But having discovered her recently published review of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I have to revise the above opinion. From it I found out something I had forgotten: that her thesis advisor was none other than Judith Butler! And so, when you ask yourself what are the conditions of becoming part of a class of people who occupy key positions in American media, claim that to believe in free speech is to be a trumper, demonize comedians like Dave Chapelle for being “transphobic,” and have decided that J K Rowling is a dangerous fascist, you need to add “having Judith Butler as a thesis adviser.”

“Whether out of interest in the project or just as an act of mercy, Judith agreed to be my adviser,” says D in her review, when narrating how, upon her return to Berkeley she was looking for a thesis advisor. Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe “Judith” agreed because by then D had on her CV the fact that she had studied in Strasbourg with the famous French philosophers, who were part of “Judith’s” network. Because in an academia in which a letter of recommendation trumps everything else, what counts most is whom you know. And whom you know is based on a series of privileges (see above). One privilege leads to another.

Butler understood the adviser’s role as a crucial cog in the bureaucracy, helping their advisees land fellowships, degrees, and eventually jobs. To that end, they offered me the kindness of welcoming me into their dissertation group, a room full of scarily brilliant (and a few just plain scary) people.

I certainly understand that one would be grateful for their former advisor’s generosity, but does my friend realize that she acknowledges being part of a class of people who are recipients of precisely the type of advantage I mentioned above? That, for instance, putting on your CV that Butler was your thesis advisor could be the essential thing in getting a teaching job or a job at certain cultural institutions? That her position in life is built not only on her personal qualities, but also on a series of privileges not many people have had, and that after having thus obtained her status, she is telling the rest of us that we don’t need free speech—why would we need it when we can simply read the opinions of “scarily brilliant” Berkeley graduates? Which graduates are, in effect, censoring the rest of us. According to statistics, about 45% of writers working at the most prestigious American magazines define themselves as very Left and are sympathetic to gender ideology. And you know what that means: it means that they are mostly graduates of Ivy League universities, and, just like “Judith” and her students, believe that those of us who oppose a late 20th century niche American ideology are fascists, and fascists don’t deserve to be heard. They don’t deserve to have all the goodies (otherwise known as “cultural capital”) that people like my friend D share amongst themselves: residencies, prizes, book contracts and the glory of being revered as a “cultural commentator” in line with the official dogma.

Like her “scarily bright” mentor, my friend doesn’t bother to explain how the “radical notion that gender could be better understood as a socially constructed performance than as a stable biological fact”—an idea expressed in Butler’s two books that have made her a star, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter—can coexist with the idea that gender is an innate feeling babies are born with, which is what gender activists claim today. Both cannot be true at the same time, yet Butler, who, as far as I know, has never repudiated her previous ideas, now supports the activists who uphold precisely the opposite.

In fact, the famous philosopher has even adopted their language, insofar as she now has “they/them” pronouns and talks of “assigned sex at birth.” For the activists, what is binary according to biologists (sex) is a social construct (arbitrarily “assigned,” rather than observed), while “gender” (a social construct) is immutable and innate. The fact that Butler doesn’t bother to analyze the difference between these two opposite visions of gender may be because her thinking has always been, like her writing, extremely muddled. This is obvious in her incapacity to distinguish between sex (defined by biologists as a binary structure based on the size of our gametes) and gender (a mental or social construct) and often uses the terms interchangeably. One wonders: when “they” go to see “their” gynecologist, how do "they” explain “their” problem? Does the doctor examine the social construct? Is the social construct taking the medication? Can a social construct give birth to one’s daughter? In that case, why couldn’t the husband do it? But what is the point of getting so technical when we can read in my friend’s review this kind of confused and involuntarily hilarious statement: “Butler observes that many non-Western languages have long had a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence outside the male/female binary.” “Forms of gendered existence”?! Like what? A chair? A cabinet? An egg? Indeed, in Romanian, a language with three genders, a chair, a cabinet, an egg and many other “forms of existence” are masculine in the singular, and feminine in the plural. The Romanian chair is non-binary (neutral), but I assure you that no Romanian has ever concluded from here that people too are non-binary. One needs to go to Berkeley to draw such scarily brilliant conclusions.

One thing is clear: whether you believe that gender is a social construct or an innate essence, “gender” (applied to humans and not to grammar) is an American notion first developed by the child abuser John Money[1], and, later, by the academic Judith Butler, a construct that didn’t exist prior to the 1960s, and which Butler and her students somehow imagine to be universal.

Maybe if they were less spiteful of people from non-Western cultures, they would know that, unless one is part of a privileged elite educated in the West, no one in the non-Western world believes in such fictions. In fact, the term for “social construct” used by the French philosophers D and I studied with in France is “fiction.” Here is a question for my friend: if gender is a social construct, that is, a fiction, why is anyone obligated to believe in it, and those who don’t are denounced by those who’ve constructed it as “right wing”? The fact that Trans people exist in non-western societies doesn’t negate my point, insofar as the practice of transsexuality is simply the result of an available technology that didn’t exist until recently—any new technology creates a new desire—and exists independently of, and without, the ideology (which is to be found mostly in English-speaking countries, where it has migrated from America). You need to be a “scarily brilliant” law professor from Berkely to believe that men can become women and be pregnant[2]. In fact, only the “scarily brilliant” Judith Butler could assert that the white Western man has indoctrinated the “Global South” into traditional notions of manhood and womanhood. How spiteful one must be of people from the “Global South”—whom “they” have probably only met in Sheraton hotels while giving conferences across the world in which “they” educate the Other—to imagine that the others had to wait for the white Western man to tell them what a man and a woman are because they couldn’t figure it on their own! Only academics who use the term “Latinx” (a North American invention that, according to statistics, is only used by 3% of Latin Americans) and never socialize with people from non-Western countries can be so deluded about the others! In fact, when Butler goes to the “Global South” (more specifically, Brazil) her theories are strongly rejected by what her disciple calls “fundamentalist groups.” Apparently, the “Global South” is worthless if it doesn’t share our opinions.

When my friend remembers that she is a writer, she abandons the wooden, bureaucratic language borrowed from her mentor to grace her readers with “poetic” kitsch: “With the swiftness of a hunter field-dressing their prey,” “Judith” spots the enemy “in the wild” and informs us about “Ron DeSantis’ attempt to institute a ‘Don’t Say Gay’ policy in public schools.” The only problem with this wild spotting is that this policy doesn’t exist. The lie of “don’t say gay” that has been propagated by the kind of echo-chamber media my friend reads has distorted a bill called, in reality, “Parental Rights in Education.” The bill about parental rights simply attempts to stop the teaching of any kind of sexuality (or “gender”) material prior to third grade. This is what the bill that has been falsely presented as homophobic actually says:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.[3]

D's review repeats the platitudes and clichés of her advisor without seriously discussing any idea: that “conservatives” are opposing gender theory because they are “authoritarians”—she never considers the authoritarianism of a society that forces people to adopt incorrect and sometimes invented grammar when someone claims that her identity entitles her not only to adopt a part of speech as a metonymic and symbolic representation of herself, but to force everybody else to use this bizarre grammatical fetish. If D socialized with gay people (not the “queer” type like her mentor) or bothered to read any news from other sources than mainstream, corporate American media, she would know that many gays and lesbians oppose an ideology that “transes the gay away” by convincing youngsters with homosexual tendencies that they are “born in the wrong body,” which they need to sterilize and mutilate to feel better about themselves. (I recommend the reading of the newly released independent review[4] from Britain, which concludes that 80% of the children advised to transition at the Tavistock clinic were homosexual or bisexual.) In France where I live, I happen to be part of a circle of friends most of whom are bisexual or homosexual, who mock the LGBTQ+ movement as a global enterprise of body commodification which, after having fought for gay rights in the 90s, has been hijacked by opportunistic bureaucrats sponsored by some of the biggest corporations in the world.

D refers in the same breath to “TERFS and the British,” as if “the British” were a category that should come with a warning sign. She uses the term “oppressors” to refer to those who oppose gender ideology—here, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So, Alta Ifland “oppresses” poor Judith Butler, who has literally managed to transform her identity into Law (Grammar is the ultimate Law). What if Alta Ifland were to invent her own theory and call “oppressors” those who resist it? Since when is the brand “Judith Butler” equivalent to a universal belief that all of us should hold? Imagine the entitlement of a philosopher who calls “fascist” anyone who rejects her theory! How about this as an identity theory: Alta Ifland believes that our sense of self is determined by the type of excrement we produce, and whoever rejects her theory is a Nazi.

Who’s to say that a gender identity is more important than an excreting identity, and what legislative body in our society has decided that an identity centered on gender (a concept inexistent in most cultures) should take precedence?

Like a political candidate giving a speech, not a graduate in comparative literature, D writes uplifting statements about “the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world.” Such a moving sentiment—truly worthy of the Ally Awards offered by the Interior Department of the federal government. I am not making this up, I swear! The American government is giving awards for “allyship” (see “the poem” “I Am Diversity”).

How about the rights of women not to be raped by men (who conveniently “identify as women” after raping) with whom they are forced to share prison cells? How about the rights of the swimmer Riley Gaines who was forced to undress in a locker room in front of “transwoman” Lia Thomas, a man with intact male genitalia, and lost a medal to him? How about the rights of women who are being forced to call “she” their rapists in a court setting?  How about the rights of Sall Grover, an Australian lesbian entrepreneur who launched a women-only app and a dating site for lesbians, which was invaded by men who “identify” as women and claim that they are “lesbians with penises” (you can’t make this up!)—Sall Grover who is now being sued by such a man?

Throughout the entire essay, D displays a state of awe at the cognitive abilities of her advisor, to the point that this reader is being forced to reevaluate her previous assessment of her friend’s own abilities. “Judith’s” unparalleled intellect reveals itself, her reviewer tells us, in her “ultimate impossibility” of defining gender, which she ends up defining as “a structure that saturates the world.” Jesus Christ! Wasn’t gender supposed to be an “identity”? How can an identity “saturate the world”? To summarize: gender is an ineffable something impossible to define, which requires its special grammar and laws, and anyone who rejects this mysterious, impossible to define thing that “saturates the world” is a fascist. Why not just replace “gender” with “God”? What is comical here is that my friend has forgotten that, a few paragraphs earlier, she wrote this: “In the right-wing imagination, ‘gender’ is nowhere and everywhere at once.” Apparently, this “right-wing imagination” is none other than Butler’s own.

The other instance that causes my friend to be in awe before her teacher’s intellect is when denouncing the British “TERFS” as wanting to own the “property” of their sex. D finds this “property”-hugging laughable and lauds the genius of her mentor. It doesn’t seem to cross the minds of either advisor or advisee that it is, in fact, them, educated at the school of American capitalism, that see everything in terms of “property.” It isn’t because anyone “owns” anything—no one “owns” one’s own body, because the rapport one has to oneself isn’t a rapport of ownership—that the British “TERFS” refuse to accept the delusions of men who pretend that they are women. If D had bothered to read some the TERFS she denounces, like, for instance the mathematician Helen Joyce, she would have found a completely different logic at play, namely that men who claim that they “feel like” a woman demonstrate through the use of the particle “like” that they aren’t women. One cannot feel “like” what one is. No woman “feels like” a woman. Only a man. It is the very logic of grammar—the fetish itself of these neo-humans—that exposes their fraudulent (non) being. Besides, why should an entire society legalize anyone’s feelings as an “identity”?  A woman is not “a feeling,” this is why the British “TERFS” refuse to accept the claims of gender ideologues, not because they think of their sex as a “property.”

The best thing I learned from Butler, says, D, is to not let your opponent define the terms of the debate—and that is a very astute point. But has she ever thought what happens when you accept the terms of your tribe without any critical distance? I invite her to reread her review and see that it is full of words like “ally,” “oppressor,” “cis,” “body politic,” “cis-on-cis sexual aggression,” “heteronormative cis people,” “transphobia.” She uses these words as if they have existed since time immemorial, when, in fact, they represent a wooden language in which academic jargon meets DEI nomenklatura meets corporate America, all of which employ the same terminology and share the same ideology of “inclusion.” By accepting this prefabricated framework, D has abandoned any desire to think on her own terms. I invite her to step for a minute outside of this logic and to hear the hollowness of this missionary language (that is, with a “mission”) of a parasitic bureaucracy. No person who reads literature or loves to read uses such language, never mind people who are “critical thinkers.”

I am convinced that Judith Butler rarely reads literature, and probably never from non-western cultures—this is obvious, first of all, in the way she writes, and second, because she would know from these books that people all over the world, from all societies, have always believed in what she calls “heteronormativity,” and that, far from being a “conservative” or “fascist” belief, this is simply a normal, common-sense worldview based on human nature and biology.

Unlike Judith Butler, my friend D has read a lot of literature, and it is sad to see that she has forgotten all she’s read. I was embarrassed on her behalf to read the following sentence: “Like a deer encountered on a walk in the woods, gender should be allowed to take off at a run to wherever it’s headed, to lead a free life without fear of unasked-for intrusion.” A deer? Gender? Walk in the woods? A free life? All I can say is that the friend I once knew in Strasbourg in the 90s would have laughed at such a grotesque attempt to present gender (an academic abstraction born in a stale office) as a wild cross between a Walden-like and a Pinkola-Estes type of misfit running with the wolves in the elegiac, undomesticated woods of the free life. People who have lived a free life in the countryside couldn’t be persuaded that one sex can turn into the other through a simple declaration, maybe because, in dealing with animals, they’ve learned that humans are mammals and not ideas or “feelings.” You could make my illiterate peasant grandmother attend a thousand classes at Berkeley, yet you’d never convince her that a man can become a woman, precisely because, unlike “Judith,” she didn’t spend her life in an office.

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Conclusion: Wokeness is a psychological defense mechanism of individuals from the upper class who have graduated from elite institutions where they have been taught that capitalism is evil, then went on to work for these “evil” corporations.

Imagine living in an environment in which your own values and those of your peers dictate that you despise capitalism, yet your company makes you read commercials on their “cultural” podcast, which are sponsored by Goldman Sachs and the like. Wouldn’t you suffer from a bad conscience, which you are desperate to alleviate? Since those who find themselves in this situation are unlikely to quit their jobs, they will adopt the age-old solution of having your cake and eating it too. They can’t denounce their class privilege because they would have to cancel themselves, and so, in order to continue the “fight,” they have turned a real privilege into fictional privileges: “racial,” “gender,” etc. This is how these upper middle-class graduates from elite institutions have created a fictional, child-like, good versus evil world in which they are social justice warriors fighting all kinds of phantasmatic windmills: “heteronormativity,” “white supremacy.” Their fiction has taken such hold of them that they don’t appear to know something any educated individual should know: that all societies that have ever existed have been “heteronormative” because heterosexual people have always been the norm, and there is nothing abnormal about that. To fight “heteronormativity” is to fight reality. They pretend that the America in which they live is as bad as a society that has slaves. Being “scarily brilliant,” they believe that you don’t need a free press because they are the press. Everything about them screams entitlement and appearance. This is, in fact, the deep reason why they support trans ideology, itself a worldview that privileges appearance versus being: just put on a wig and pretend you are someone you are not.

Woke: an upper-middle class American who has attained a state of grace (“awakening”) thanks to an innate brilliance that allows “them” to determine how everything (except said brilliance, of course) is socially constructed and needs to be deconstructed in order for Divine Justice to prevail. For this purpose, said American will undergo a special training at a corporation (misnamed “university”) where parents pay up to a hundred thousand dollars a year so their awakened progeny better denounce “capitalism” and its enabler, “the white man.” Training takes place with a special corporate consultant that has already deconstructed “themselves,” which allows “them” to denounce everybody else as “reactionary fascists.” What remains indeconstructible and represents the condition of possibility for the above dynamic is the privileged social status: of the sponsoring parents, of the corporate consultant, and, ultimately, of the awakened student. This status allows for the glory, pleasure and sense of purpose said student and corporate consultant draw from this ritual of denunciation and bonding.

Nothing gives more pleasure to this American than to revel in a state of puritan culpability when proclaiming the unending work necessary to attain Divine Justice (i.e, the end of “capitalism,” of “whiteness” and of “heteronormativity”), a state cathartically followed by the necessary denunciation of the “fascists” who refuse to join in.

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[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

[2] You can see traces of this brilliance in this video in which this Berkeley law professor calls “transphobic” the idea that men cannot get pregnant:

or in a 2020 tweet in which ACLU celebrates “men who menstruate” and “men who can get pregnant”—hopefully, not at the same time.

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/10/politics/florida-dont-say-gay-bill-what-matters/index.html

[4] https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/