How do we reverse the past ten years of 'woke' public and educational policy? What is 'woke,' anyway, and what are its origins? 

Earlier this week, I spoke with author T.S. Dixon about his new book The Woke Mind Viruses and the strategies for "curing" them. This is not just an American phenomenon, T.S. warned, but a deliberate effort aimed at the entire West to fundamentally transform its culture of ordered liberty and self-governance through reliable institutions. This goes farther than just Critical Race Theory and DEI, although those are parts of the overall strategy behind the woke mind viruses, T.S. explains.

Below are some highlights from the transcript of our interview, edited for clarity:

Ed: You're saying 'woke mind viruses.' So I'm curious as how you break down the, I don't know, I guess the taxonomy.

T.S.: So I identify for, uh, mind viruses and by mind virus, all I mean is a lethal, dangerous political ideology that spreads rapidly through a society. That's the definition. That's my definition of mind virus. And so there are four such lethal political ideologies that have infected the West. The first is leftism. Then you have liberalism. Wokeism, which is the most popular one right now.

And then the fourth one is very hidden, very covert, it's called globalism. And so these are the four ideologies that we're contending with today. And the way an ideology works, my definition of an ideology is that it's a set or a collection of beliefs that forms a view of the world and also declares a mission, especially a political ideology. ...

Ed: I think that underlying most of these is Marxism. And that might be the most pernicious of what you would call a woke mind virus, because Marxism really undergirds most of this. And it's such a discredited, in practice, it's so discredited that it keeps having to pop up as other things...

T.S.: ... Marxism, you're dead right. So what we had, the modern world comes from the free world. The free world comes from 1776, and it was preceded by two movements, two ideological movements.

One was called the Great Awakening, which was a mass spreading of the Salvation Experience brand of Christianity, all over the United States, England, and then into Europe. And then you had the European Enlightenment, which was this new quest for truth where we were emerging from the Dark Ages, we were emerging from pseudoscience and false beliefs, and we were searching for the truth. And so that was the European Enlightenment that created the modern sciences, art, literature, education, and whatnot, and governance, modern governance.

So Thomas Jefferson took all those streams put them together and wrote the Declaration of Independence with the founding fathers and also helped write the Constitution and so that created that framework created our ideology and Created our system of government which created freedom created the modern world through the Industrial Revolution and whatnot now then there was a reaction to that in the 1800s where Society swung the other way and the people that didn't agree with these ideas of the modern free world had to form a response, an argument with Jefferson, so to speak, and his intellectual forebears.

And so I call that the Dark Enlightenment. ...

Ed: My definition of woke is that what are considered to be immutable characteristics are what define human beings, right? And in a system in which you are doing, you're doing group justice on the basis of immutable characteristics, you will always need a top-down authority to settle the disputes.

It's tribalism, which requires a top-down authority. And the more tribalism you can manage to generate out of that, the more brutal that top-down authority has to be. Self-justifying, the violence becomes self-justifying. 

T.S.: So if I go back to the source material and the Founding Fathers, so it woke starts in the 1920s in Frankfurt, Germany with the Frankfurt School, which is a group of professors that are all communists that were very upset that Germany and America and England did not fall to communism like Russia had, and I think it was 1917 roughly around there with Lenin.

And so they were trying to understand why this happened. And the reason was because Teddy Roosevelt and his counterparts had these reforms in the late 1800s that was the original Christian progressive movement that got rid of child labor, got fair wages, a 40-hour work week, and all of a sudden workers became very prosperous in the West. And because of this, when the Communists came around with Marxist theories in the West, they didn't want to overthrow the system.

They liked the system. They could afford a house and pay for their kids and But in Russia it was still very brutal, and so the workers revolted. And so they realized Marx's original theory was the idea, there's two parts to Marxism, the gospel of Marxism, is that first you need to have oppressor and oppressed, which is the proletariat, which is the underclass, versus the bourgeoisie, that's the rich oppressor, the rich versus the poor.

You need class warfare. So class warfare is the first half, And then, that's the problem, then the solution is social justice, which is sweeping in a socialist government to overthrow the bourgeoisie and give power to the proletariat through the vehicle of communism. That's the sales pitch. Well, that sales pitch failed. And so they had to come up with a new sales pitch in the Frankfurt School, and they realized in the West there were other vector points to attack.

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That's just a taste of our conversation, and of T.S. Dixon's argument on the origins and virulence of wokeness. He is actually very encouraged by Donald Trump's initial steps to deconstruct wokeness in American public policy, but argues that it's not yet enough and that it will take a very long time and concerted effort to succeed. T.S. also discusses what his book suggests has to happen to fully restore ordered liberty as the basis of Western political thought. 

The full conversation with T.S. Dixon is here:

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