How "questioning authority" gave us wokeness

The non-serious answer is that our society is fundamentally unjust and therefore all-out rejection of traditional authority is warranted. The reason this isn’t a serious answer is that the standard of “justice” it invokes is nebulous. It is the Circle Jerks howling, “Question authority. I’ll pay the price; the future belongs to me.” The implied rejection of “ownership of capital” and “rule of law” are, in that sense, the tip of the iceberg. Just as Disney favors allowing teachers to advance a sexual worldview to impressionable children, the earnest proponents of ESG favor resetting the market to allocate capital to their social engineering projects.

But the efforts to dislodge traditional authority and send it cascading towards oblivion are often self-contradictory. Those who would dispatch the old authority typically cling to its form for their own agendas.

The Covid epidemic for many Americans called into question the authority of the medical establishment, including both civil authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. We now know that the esteemed Dr. Fauci deliberately lied to the nation because he thought it was for our own good. Many Americans (including me) believe his deceptions went much further, and are now watching the CDC issue major “corrections” to Covid statistics it issued in the past. Yet these authorities imposed far-reaching public health measures on the authority of the “science.”