#doug mann

By: Doug Mann

Published: Feb 25, 2025

Sometime around 2013 a new church sprung with, within a few years gaining millions of acolytes in the USA and its tributaries. They called themselves “woke.” Their creed was simple: take the egalitarian movements of the sixties and seventies, and exaggerate them to paranoid proportions.

They divided up the populations of the West by their core biological traits — their skin colour, their gender, and their sexuality — and assigned each group the black hat of oppressor or the white hat of victim. Of course, these traits could intersect: two or more traits could reinforce each other. And it didn’t matter if you personally were free of sin: ancestral guilt was good enough to be thrown into the moral gulag.

They went out into the world armed with this prophecy, quickly conquering academe, the mainstream media and bureaucracies, both public and private. HR officers became holy warriors, journalists party shills, and professors intersectional activists.

All of a sudden, “hate speech” was everywhere. To fight it, the end justified the means — whether it used shaming, censorship, social media mobbing, cancellation of respected leaders, arson or assault, the woke were sure that their struggle would lead to a morally just utopia.

On the less violent side, they made sure that all institutions they controlled had DEI committees and staff inquisitors to stifle dissent and guarantee that the supposed victims got lots of high-paying jobs. Diversity became big business. Race hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo became respected scholars. Pronouns and black squares were inscribed on their digital banners as they went into battle.

The political parties of the “left” abandoned working-class politics, turning to the woke creed. They also seized control of the means of mass entertainment, plunging Hollywood into a decade of racial quotas and bad scripts. They destroyed the three major science fiction franchises in America and Britain in the name of equity. Comedy and art either went underground, or kissed the ring of the new regime, becoming bland propaganda. As a result, people tuned out, and started watching heterodox YouTubers and posting caustic memes.

It all came to a head in 2020 with the Covid pandemic and the death of George Floyd. As Antifa and BLM took to the streets to burn, loot and murder, Karens took to parking lots and dollar stores to ensure that everyone was masked and socially distanced. “Safety” was the new shibboleth. Screeching and name-calling became the order of the day.

Academics and bureaucrats teamed up with social media chiefs to make sure that we were safe not only from the virus, but from “bad ideas” like government crime stats and experimental science, with its wacky notion that drugs should be thoroughly tested before being used. As for the origins of the virus, it was probably a few rogue bats or pangolin spreading the biological equivalent of disinformation: best not think about it. Anthony Fauci became one of the revered saints of the new epistemological disorder.

This went on for about a decade.

In 2017 Evergreen State College and Lindsay Shepherd showed us how the woke creed had sabotaged higher education. Saying the wrong thing on Twitter became a career death sentence. Donald Trump was president for four years, yet his reform efforts were constantly blocked by deep state operatives and women in pink hats. It looked for a while like the modern equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire, the inaptly named “progressive” left, would rule forever.

But slowly things changed.

People stopped watching the latest Disney films or CNN reports. Mainstream media produced so many hoaxes that their brands became synonymous with fake news. Joe Rogan, Tim Pool and Matt Walsh became household names in their new media spaces.

Gamers became tired of ugly gender-fluid heroes. Workers realized that their old political allies had abandoned them. At the same time, populist movements arose in North America, Western Europe and even as far south as Argentina. Though castigated as “far right”, they were in fact diverse coalitions of homeless leftists, libertarians, and forward-thinking conservatives.

Then the bell tolled.

Trump was re-elected at the end of 2024. On January 20, he sat behind a desk in the Oval Office piled with stacks of executive orders. One promised a return of freedom of speech, enshrined in the First Amendment. Two others promised the end of DEI and a freeze on gender inflation (it turns out there were only two after all).

Surprisingly, there were no mass marches of pink hats or black squares on Pennsylvania Avenue: Americans had had enough. Canadians had already indicated their love of freedom and nation in the streets of Ottawa in February 2022: the woke prince of Parliament Hill was stripped of his sanctified robes, his electoral defeat certain since the summer of 2023.

In a mythic return of the repressed, the fellowship dropped the ring of power into the volcano of democracy. The orcs of the woke left fell to their knees, tears on their cheeks, as they watched the fiery eye of their dark lord fade to black. Their time was over, and they knew it.

What was all this for?

All those charred buildings, destroyed businesses, suicides, firings, the loss of friends and spouses, the mental illness epidemic in the young? Your guess is as good as mine, though I suspect it had something to do with resentment, money and power.

By: Doug Mann

Published: Jul 28, 2025

The central mythology of contemporary mainstream media, electoral politics, and academe is that of a titanic struggle between the forces of liberalism and conservatism. The hardliners in each camp see this struggle as “existential” in nature. This struggle is an illusion, a matrix created (for the most part) by an alliance between post-2013 leftist forces within the media and universities, then amplified by political parties, then aped by corporate oligarchs.

Instead, what we really see is a collapse of the four pillars of liberalism and the arrival of a new, massive, barely self-aware legion of true believers who parallel more closely religious cults and millenarian movements such as the Levelers of the English Civil War, the Jacobins of the French Revolution, and the Bolsheviks of 1917 than they do Enlightenment liberals. They are properly called “authoritarian intersectionalists,” but to take a tool out of Wittgenstein’s ordinary language toolbox, let’s use the more vernacular and evocative term “woke.” 

What is woke? 

To simplify a bit, they are people who believe that we are morally obligated to divide people into groups based on their inherent biological traits — mostly their race, gender and sexuality — and then to assign each such group either the black hat of cruel oppressor or the white hat of saintly victim. Their second move is to then move heaven, earth and social media to make sure that the black hats are excluded from polite society and its economic rewards, all the while promoting the white hats through DEI programs and backroom deals into positions of privilege.

“Privilege,” which in reality is composed of three ingredients — money, power, and status — is one of many semantic distortions employed by the power elite to confuse those not paying attention. Others include “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “problematic”, and “systemic”. Their purpose is to distort the act of judgement, which in more traditional spheres of life aimed at the true, the good, and the beautiful. 

Indeed, despite endless claims to be successfully “fact-checking” pundits and politicians (witness the debates during the 2024 US election), woke ideologues are profoundly anti-empirical, running from verifiable statistics like antelopes from lions on the plains of the Serengheti.

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Four Pillars

Yet the arrival of intersectional ideology around 1989, ironically at the end of the Cold War, did not herald the arrival of new and better form of liberalism. Instead, it was the start of an attempt to kick out the four pillars that held up the grand palace that was the post-Enlightenment West. Liberalism, which traces back to the English Civil War of the 1640s, attempted to answer four basic questions:

What is a society?

What is the proper relation of the citizen to the state?

How much freedom should we have?

Is the state obligated to alleviate poverty?

The first question was answered by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) and John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Society is a free association of individual human beings to preserve their persons and property. To do so, they sign a real or imagined social contract and give power to a sovereign who will protect them from their nasty, brutish and short lives in the state of nature. 

The abandonment of freedom of speech in mainstream media and academe is one of the great moral tragedies of the twenty-first century.

Although David Hume brilliantly refuted any notion that the social contract was the real origin story of actual states, it can all the same be seen as a founding myth, a faith that government is by the people and for the people. This myth has largely collapsed in the 21st century.

Locke saw the signers of the social contract, whether tacit or real, as sovereign individuals who gave up a part of their freedom to the state to create peace and to protect the fruits of their labour. The citizen had inalienable rights that the sovereign couldn’t abridge. If he did, it was revolution time, as seen in 1776 and 1789. So the state is a useful mechanism to protect individual rights, with clear limits on its power. It was Hobbes’ artificial man, a wicker man made up of the sticks and twigs of individual citizens. 

What Replaced the Individual

The idea of a sovereign individual is largely dead, at least on the left, replaced by socially constructed bundle of ideologies managed by bureaucracies. Safetyism, a malignant growth from the roots of wokeness, seeks to choke that individual with the pretense of maternal love, to use quasi-authoritarian institutional positions of power to protect its wards from harsh words, intellectual challenges, and physical pain. 

It seeks to make these wards as fragile as possible to control them, to send them out into the world with social justice sunglasses that are the polar opposite of those seen in John Carpenter’s They Live. They put on these sunglasses and see a false world of omnipresent victimhood, seeing the most innocuous words and deeds as moral crimes. The effects on academic life are obvious — cancellations, ideological orthodoxy, whispered rebellions, and a student body unable or too fearful to debate fundamental issues.

Considering Liberty 

The answer to the third question is what John Rawls called the Liberty Principle. 

Its history was written by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1794 in a Jacobin jail;its fullest philosophical defense given by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859). Condorcet thought that the progress of the empirical sciences would lead us to a more prosperous, free and equal world. The villains in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind were corrupt priests and tyrannical kings. Mill picked up the baton of freedom in Victorian England, arguing:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.... Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign. (OL 14-15)

We can, of course, equivocate over what he meant by preventing harm. But elsewhere in the book he defended “experiments in living,” and argued that even if a speaker were entirely wrong, we should hear them out to sharpen our own apprehension of the truth. Of course, in the contemporary spheres of mass media and academic life, it’s rare that a prominent voice is “entirely wrong”, so that a whole apparatus of modern censorship, partly unearthed by Matt Taibbi and friends, was created to ferret out supposed instances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” This despite the fact that since 2016, these ferrets of disinformation have been caught lying time and time again. The abandonment of freedom of speech in mainstream media and academe is one of the great moral tragedies of the twenty-first century.

John Rawls formulated the Liberty Principles in his A Theory of Justice (1971), perhaps the last gasp of Enlightenment liberalism. In a nutshell, he argued that everyone should have the right to a “total system of equal basic liberties,” as long as these liberties don’t interfere with those of others within the society in question. Rawls spells out these liberties with a list enumerated in most modern bills of rights — liberty of conscience, assembly, and thought, the right to vote, the freedom not to be assaulted or arbitrarily arrested, along with the freedom from “psychological oppression.” This list of basic liberties have been systematically eroded or violated by woke progressive institutions since at least 2013, though this erosion slowed down in the US in early 2025.

What About the Poor?

The last pillar of liberalism is some form of “equality principle” that promises a degree of economic egalitarianism where excesses of wealth are seen as just only if the poorest in society have the basic necessities of life. Rawls provides a fairly radical social democratic version of this principle where inequalities are permitted only if they help the “least advantaged” in a given society, and are attached to a substantial equality of opportunity. The second half of this formulation is widely accepted by most of the political spectrum today. 

Its first half is more radical: just how we could prove that the accruing of wealth by an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos benefits the least advantaged? Having said this, Rawls’ equality principle doesn’t open up the Pandora’s box of woke identity politics as long as we see it in purely economic terms: we give resources to those who lack them, not based on their skin colour, sexuality or chromosome count, or how these biological traits condemned some to lesser lives in centuries past.

The Collapse

These pillars start to collapse in the late 1980s, with this collapse accelerating from 2013 on, being replaced by intersectional identity politics. Their collapse was accelerated by the spreading of social media and the Twitter Wars of the 2010s, along with the increasing numbers of unproductive moral entrepreneurs in universities and corporate and state bureaucracies. 

The global cost of DEI programs in 2020 was estimated at $7.5 billion, and expected to double by 2026 despite their obvious Cobra Effect. Yet those dismantling the pillars holding up the house of liberalism are not liberals themselves, since they don’t believe in sovereign individuals agreeing to live under governments that respect their rights in all but the most dire situations, one where even the most foolish and uniformed people are free to speak their mind without fear of repercussions. 

The long line of censored and canceled professors in North America universities, the Orwellian atmosphere of these schools (for instance, at Yale in 2024, leftist professors outnumber conservatives 78 to 1), along with the inability of most students to think outside of their woke ideological programming or to know things that question it, all show that the liberty principle, and thus Condorcet’s dream of a progress propelled by an energetic pursuit of the empirical sciences, is dead on campus. 

I’m not optimistic that the institutions of higher education can be reformed from within, since most tenured faculty there have too much cultural and financial capital invested in the status quo. If these are to be saved, civil society — artists, comedians, the philosophes of YouTube, along with the rebel alliance of heterodox intellectuals — must sow a new reality to chip away at the academic power elites until they are willing to once again embrace the four pillars of liberalism and understand the meaning of “diversity” and “inclusion” in a deeper sense. 

For the time being, this will be a guerrilla war punctuated by a few spectacular clashes. Still, we should remember that no one in 1988 predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that a number of small victories can lead to unexpected, sweeping changes in the public mood. 

Avenged Pentafold 2024

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