“In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 

— Author unknown (commonly misattributed to George Orwell) 

American society is locked by “the wokes” in a new zealotry — the takeover of almost all of our cultural institutions with the ascendancy of social justice/secularism as the pre-eminent ideology — signaling a regression, as the goal of those claiming to be “woke” is to drag us back into the age of unenlightened dogma.

Indeed, the similarities of being an elite “woke” to a religious zealot are striking, including what one critic termed “blue-tick Twitter priests who sermonise to the ignorant masses about their original sin of racism, sexism and homophobia; purity tests, inquisitions and, most crucially, the idea that the tenets of this new religion must be accepted on faith alone.”

“The wokes” want the U.S. to emulate the Soviet Union, China and other totalitarian states, where the natives are all-too familiar with the horrific crimes that their citizens can be driven to commit when they embrace utopian ideologies that seek to replace God with Man in the pursuit of that ever-elusive goal of equality of outcome.

The inherent contradictions of the wokes’ positions are what explain the growing unease in the U.S. with — and attack on — the issue of free speech. If we allow our society to be dominated by ideologies that are fundamentally flawed, yet universally enforced, as the one true faith, we will return to the dogmatic straitjacket of medieval religiosity. 

If we have to publicly believe things which we know to be untrue, the options left to us are silence, submission or rebellion. 

This creeping authoritarianism is not an accident, it is a necessity of a worldview based on lies. The smearing of people who speak out against it is no accident either, it is the only way to suppress those who challenge falsehoods, as addressed in a quote by George Orwell: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

We agree with the view of David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, who wrote that “wokeness leads to a one-sided depiction of the present and an unsophisticated strategy for a future offensive.”

However, an even better rejection of “the wokes” in the U.S., in our view, is a quote that shows the true wisdom (and humility) of the late/great Albert Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”