This has nothing to do with the dismissive attitude that contrarian MAGA-adjacent leftists have toward Trump's soft coup attempts.
The Contrarian/Anti-Woke left continue trend of Anti-Democrat/Black & Dirtbag Leftist grift
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
You're playing dumb and doing a bad job at it. The time to push Corn Pop Left is NOW. You clearly didn't pay attention to Occupy Wall Street, which me and those "contrarians" were a part of. We're not DNC simps like you guys are. Closed mouths dont get fed bruh
Go break some more windows then. Go to Tim Pool and Michael Tracey for your takes. The adults will handle the actual politics. There are no leftists that can pass Senate confirmation and you know it, epecially if Dems lose in GA. Biden is nominating people that can get confirmed, aka centrist liberals. Do you want functioning, competent government, or useless grandstanding and purity tests? I don't see anyone seriously talking about Rahm or Garcetti. They wouldn't get confirmed anyway.
Aka " I have no argument " but you're gonna keep bootlicking for Corn Pop and his Neolib cabinet. Enjoy your Brunch BlueMAGA.
What argument? No leftist or progressive can get a cabinet position with this Senate, end of story. MAGA? Its the contrarian leftists from Tulsi Gabbard to Glenn Greenwald who are cosigning and being apologists for MAGA. Enjoy irrelevance.
everyone is more mad at Neera tanden than hating trump 
I keep telling people this shyt is happening all over the place
Someone reminded me the other day that Greenwald was a stalwart defender of Matt Hale and his neo nazi terrorist cult, the World Church of the Creator. He even said that it set bad legal precedent for the family of the church's murder victim to be able to sue the church for recompense.
Told you. Now the white left is act like BLM is ungrateful 
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
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Is “Wokeness” a New Religion?
What is wokeness? It’s a word that everyone sort of understands, even though there’s no exact definition for it—you just know it when you see it, kind of like the famous definition of pornography. Wokeness is basically a neologistic catchall term for political correctness, identity politics, and social justice generally. It describes not just the content of those beliefs, but a kind of aggressive, but empty, cultural style—and, most importantly, one that must be virtue signaled. This is all pretty well-established at this point—what’s somewhat new is the tendency to cast “wokeness” as the new state religion.
For many people at this point, wokeness largely brings to mind hysterical overreactions to minor things, usually fueled by disingenuousness, narcissism, and maybe even careerism—being woke is what employers claim to want now, so it’s a savvy career move to advertise yourself as being as woke as possible. Media and entertainment companies are making it a priority to promote woke content that tells the “stories” of marginalized people and so on—so if you want a job as a content creator, being loudly woke seems like a good bet. But most people don’t really enjoy these woke culture products—ratings for woke shows and ticket sales for woke movies have been steadily declining, so clearly this is not what the general public wants or enjoys. But still wokeness continues on, seemingly getting stronger and more totalizing.
Wokeness is a paper tiger—hegemonic but nobody is buying it; discredited but all-encompassing, like neoliberalism itself, which makes sense, since wokeness is a kind of mutant ideology neoliberalism has vomited up in its death throes. Wokeness is so divorced from whatever foundations in real social theory or actual radical politics that it is largely mostly just another cynical, and rapidly failing, economic strategy that has sprung up in late capitalism.
The new line of critique against wokeness that has been developing recently, mostly by right-wingers but also by some on the left, so-called Left Heretics, calls wokeness a “new religion,” and even a state religion, since so many politicians embrace it. Since so many corporations embrace, promote, and enforce wokeness, and our society is basically a corporate totalitarian state, wokeness is hegemonic. The (clearly disingenuous) embrace of wokeness by massive capitalist corporations is what gives it its real power—nothing so mysterious as religious force, just the same old material forces of political economy.
A recent interview that self-described “dissident writer” Chris Rufo did for the “American Thought Leaders” YouTube show laid out the case that wokeness is a religion in concise, and idiotic, fashion. Rufo is affiliated with the well-funded, free-market glorifying, right-wing, Manhattan Institute, and with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Wealth and Poverty, another conservative think tank that produces material that is just typical hysteria about scary “Marxists” destroying “American values,” but with a patina of “populism” and “ethics” to make it seem like more than standard conservatism. People like Rufo, and many other well-connected, well-funded commentators like him, are using anti-wokeness to position themselves as dissidents. But that couldn’t be further from the truth—a real dissident wouldn’t be cashing checks from the Manhattan Institute. There’s this class of media personalities like Rufo and many others who need wokeness to be some kind of establishment force that they can oppose to get some kind of anti-establishment cred—and what is more establishment a “religion,” especially one that’s portrayed as being in league with the state! Oh my!
Rufo’s spiel reveals in a compact way the whole paranoid cosmology of the spectre of Cultural Marxism. Rufo begins by invoking the expertise of another right-wing “dissident” and lib-hating Twitter presence named James Lindsay: “As James (@ConceptualJames) would tell you, it [wokeness] emerges as a kind of adaptation of traditional Marxism. That divided the world into a kind of an oppressive capitalist class and an oppressed proletariat class that was divided on an economic axis, that of course has failed, generation after generation after generation since it first gained dominance in 1848. And what they’ve done since then starting with the Frankfurt School and then moving to Critical Race Theory in the 1990s, they’ve tried to basically supplant economic stratification with a system of racial stratification, and unfortunately uh it’s been a tremendously powerful narrative that has really kind of uh kind of embedded itself in our institutions.”
One thing to notice here is how contradictory and conspiratorial it all is. He claims that this whole project is orchestrated by Marxists, but then says that “they” (who?) have moved the emphasis away from class and economic and material analysis towards racial and identity issues. And if that is the case, then that isn’t Marxist at all—because Marxism is the analysis of economic relations within capitalist society. So he’s calling it Marxist and then explaining how it is anything but Marxist. That’s the contradiction. The conspiratorial part is in how he relies on this notion of some sinister “They” doing all of this. But who is the “They” doing all this? The Marxists? If they’re Marxist, why are they steering Marxism away from economic issues? But more to the point—such people don’t even exist. It’s just like when Slavoj Zizek asked Jordan Peterson at their debate to name “the Marxists” pulling all the strings and he couldn’t name a single one. So not only are there no Marxists doing this, even if there were, it wouldn’t be real Marxism. We can see this idea that wokeness is a religion is ultimately just another way to further demonize Marxism, socialism, and the Left generally—the consistent project of Claremont National Conservatism all along. Rufo is squarely part of this—he got a shoutout in an article in Claremont’s American Mind called “The Truth About America,” for his “heroic” act of urging Trump to root out Critical Race Theory from federal training sessions. So anything that serves the NatCon agenda, as the equation “wokeness = new state religion” does, will be heavily promoted. And it is especially useful because Claremont Conservatism is as establishment as it gets—it’s basically neo-Goldwaterism and neo-Reaganism, as Claremont’s American Mind manifesto “Our Declaration of Independence from the Conservative Movement” makes clear. But now that wokeness is being positioned as establishment, and religious, anti-wokeness can be made to seem like anti-establishment and anti-religious, when in reality it is just reheated Goldwater and Reagan politics, two of the most establishment and religious tendencies there are.
Rufo continues: “It’s [wokeness] religious in many ways but I think fundamentally, if you look at the kind of ideology of critical race theory and wokeness in general, it kind of establishes a new cosmology or a new metaphysics of good and evil which is translated as whiteness and blackness, and these are kind of unscientific unmeasurable phenomenon. A lot of the kind of derivative material is cloaked in the language of social science but it’s anything but scientific, it requires essentially a faith-based understanding and you can see even in the videos that you see of the kind of street protests. You see people engaging in a kind of uh religious ritual where people are kind of uh chanting, and bending over and bowing, and kind of creating a new religious and spiritual language based on the kind of core convictions of critical race theory. So you see it on a theoretical level, you see it at a kind of anti-rationality level, and you see it in practice in the streets in a kind of ritualistic formulation. And I think that you know I’m not the first person to say it and i think many people have kind of explored the religious dimension of wokeness and some people I think including James Lindsey are even calling that, you know, this is essentially a first amendment violation we are establishing a new public religion.”
Okay, lots going on here. His first claim for why wokeness is a religion is because it has an unscientific basis—that it takes goodness and badness away from any kind of measurability and changes it into just blackness and whiteness, where black is now good and white is now bad. Let’s leave aside the fact that he is objecting to this because it makes whiteness bad and blackness good, as if this is upsetting the preexisting neutral status quo in which race played no social, economic, or political role. This is, of course, a utopian fantasy with no basis in American history. Anyone with a shred of intellectual conscience would admit that the American status quo is precisely that whiteness is good and blackness is bad, and that it has always been this way—but acknowledging even this obvious truth is far too much to ask of these neo-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives, so let’s just move on. Rufo seems to be suggesting that a more valid morality than the new woke religious one would have a scientific, measurable basis, rather than an unmeasurable one. If this sounds like something that Sam Harris would have said in like 2010, you’re right. But we will return to the similarities between the New Atheists of the mid to late 00s, like Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens (who are all right-wingers) and the anti-woke New New Atheist types like Rufo, Lindsay, and others, who are also all right-wingers. The important point is that Harris kind of abandoned his search for a science of morality, and has largely moved on to talking about other things. But his utopian idea that a computer can establish morals forms the basis of the analysis of people like Rufo (and Ben “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings” Shapiro, who, despite his pretensions to a scientific morality, is also a religious zealot—see how this works?). Such people are calling wokeness a religion because it has unmeasurable things as its moral basis, and morality should be measurable, in their view, evidently. But measuring morality, what Rufo apparently is advocating, is precisely what the liberals he despises want—that’s what drives performative wokeness and virtue signaling, the stupid belief that morality can be measured in Woke Points. Rufo is calling for the same thing, but from a more objective, “scientific” place. But it is equally asinine in both cases.
Rufo’s next claim for why wokeness is a religion is that you see people chanting and bowing in groups in the streets during Black Lives Matter protests, because of their “faithful” acceptance of super scary Critical Race Theory. But you could say that about the behavior and psychology connected to American professional sports teams—indeed, a popular DVD about a sports team winning a championship was titled “Faith Rewarded.” A popular book about the same thing was titled Now I Can Die In Peace: How The Sports Guy Found Salvation Thanks To The World Champion Red Sox. Pro sports fits Rufo’s definition of religion as much as wokeness does—people chant and gesticulate in all kinds of ways, in large groups, for their sports teams. And when their teams win, they flood the streets, often causing serious damage, even death.
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The point is not that pro sports actually is a religion—it’s that the anti-woke reasons for calling wokeness a religion are so flimsy and arbitrary that they can be applied to all kinds of things. This flimsiness shouldn’t surprise us, since the claim that wokeness is a religion is just as disingenuous as the woke virtue-signaling liberals themselves are. It’s just a disingenuous way for typical conservative capitalist forces to drum up some cheap, fake populist support, a new front in the culture war, to distract from the same old neoliberal free market economic policies that benefit corporations and the rich and screw everybody else.
The most important part of religion is probably salvation, and there’s no concept of salvation to be found within wokeness—which is the critique that anti-woke people themselves make of cancel culture (which is like the enforcement arm of wokeness). So the same people who say wokeness is a religion also say that cancel culture never forgives anyone, which is true—nobody is ever forgiven by wokes, and nothing is ever forgotten. But if wokeness is a religion, then there should be some concept of forgiveness there. But there isn’t.
One of the favorite examples that people who make the argument that wokeness is the new state religion have given in recent months was from a Black Lives Matter protest in June where white cops were washing black people’s feet, and it was viewed as some kind of religious woke ritual. Laura Ingraham described it as “white cops and private citizens [who] washed the feet of black protesters in a Holy Thursday style ceremony of forgiveness… subjugating themselves to a movement,” and other conservative commentators said similar things. But the foot washing was done by a local church as part of what they called a “Unity Prayer Walk,” as part of their ministry. It was a church activity, not some woke college students on a rampage—and the cops were only there, they later said, to show support But it didn’t matter, videos and images of this incident were widely circulated and used as like the final proof that wokeness is fully religious.
Rufo relies on the mass public displays of woke Black Lives Matter protests to be his evidence that wokeness is a religion, twisting the actual events to fit his narrative—meanwhile these people go put of their way to ignore Trumpism, which to anyone with eyes is equally as religious as wokeness, and probably more so. And doesn’t Trump have more power than these shadowy Cultural Marxists, since he is, you know, the current president of the United States? What is Donald Trump if not a cult leader, and what is a cult leader if not a religious figure? Rufo critiques the role of faith in the woke worldview, but what is motivating Trumpism more than blind, unwarranted faith in Trump’s ability to Make America Great Again? After four years of incompetence and lies from Trump, what explains his enduring support other than a religious attachment? What is his reality-free campaign against “Illegal Votes” and nonexistent voter fraud, if not a religious crusade? Trump is the most anti-woke figure in modern political history, and his political power derives from a kind of religious fervor. Anti-wokeness is not only fully compatible with religion, it seems to thrive off of it, much more than wokeness does—and anti-wokeness is a religious force that currently has the White House. With no intention of giving it up.
If you are serious about analyzing the threats of a new political religion, then Trumpism would have to be at the top of the list. And this is not even to mention American Fundamentalist political Christianity, which is a very well-established, well-funded, highly organized juggernaut in American politics—and one of their most extreme zealots, Mike Pence, is the current Vice President. Jeremy Scahill said that Trump’s win would make Mike Pence the “most powerful Christian Supremacist in history.” Another one, Mike Pompeo, who described the War on Terror as a holy war between Christianity and Islam, is the current Secretary of State. Bill Barr, who The Nation described last year as “neck deep in extremist catholic institutions,”is the Attorney General. Those are just a small number—I could go on and on. All these people are far more religious and far more powerful than any woke person in the country. Any real analysis of the danger of state religion would have to talk about all of this, and people like Rufo never do. And I didn’t even mention QAnon, which is a far more organized, unhinged, and religious social, cultural, and political movement than wokeness—with a much clearer “cosmology” and set of foundational sacred texts (Q’s posts themselves) than wokeness. And QAnon has a key feature of religiosity—a fully developed eschatology based on “a coming storm” (one of the QAnon cults’ most frequently repeated mantras) that will wipe away evil from America.
Back to the New Atheist connection. It’s easy to forget now, because the George W. Bush years (2000-2008) have kind of been disappeared down the memory hole as Bush gets rehabilitated by Ellen and becomes more well-known for his portrait hobby than anything else, and the Iraq War becomes a distant memory and so on. But the New Atheists were a very prominent group of commentators during that time. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens were called the Four Atheist Horsemen of the Apocalypse for their relentless critique of the role of religion in society. We could add someone like Steven Pinker to this group, though he wasn’t as much of a culture war figure as they were back then—but he sure is now. His plea for “Enlightenment” values, and Jordan Peterson’s plea for “classical liberal values” is very much of a piece with the New Atheists. And people like Rufo and James Lindsay are continuing it. It’s no surprise that all of these people are in no way leftist. The New Atheists claimed to support reason and progress and so on, but they all supported endless war against “Islamic terror,” wherever it could be found. The neocon War on Terror needed the specific type of Islamophobia that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens peddled—they gave it a helpful air of scientific respectability and reason. But it was just low grade religious bigotry in service of feeding the endless American military-industrial complex, not unlike one of the key early rallying cries of Trumpism, the Muslim ban.
Maybe the most important lesson to draw from the history of the New Atheists is that their hatred of religion itself took on a religious fervor. Harris and Dawkins especially became more unhinged and extreme in their anti-religious rhetoric—Hitchens was the most virulent, but he died in 2011. Hitchens ended up as a pathetic cheerleader for the global War on Terror. Is there any doubt that this is happening with the anti-woke crowd—that their fervor against wokeness has itself become religious? They say that wokeness is an elite project, which is fair enough, and obvious, but they also called it a religion, so that suggests they think religion is an elite ruling class project. Is this what they are actually saying? Of course not—anyone affiliated with Claremont Conservatism does not have those opinions about religion.
The people making this point are usually religious themselves, or connected to religious groups, or at least the audience they’re appealing to usually are religious—and yet they’re trying to critique wokeness by calling it religious, as if religion is bad. But again they don’t think religion is bad, so they aren’t really calling wokeness a religion, and if they are, they mean a bad religion, like Satanism.
So it’s like another Satanic Panic—they are calling wokeness a form of Satanism. But just like the Satanic Panic of late 1980s/early 1990s America, there is no there there—it is just a useful culture war tool for conservative forces to drum up cheap popular support while continuing to economically screw over the working classes.
Let’s take a look at James Lindsay’s own explanation for why wokeness is a religion. He has rapidly turned into the go-to-guy for people to turn to and reference in this growing cottage industry of calling wokeness a new religion. I wouldn’t be surprised if he delivers this message on the Joe Rogan podcast in the near future. His background is in the sociology of religion, which is why he is an authoritative-seeming voice on this. He says that people turn to religion to make meaning and to get control, which is true. But this applies to plenty of things besides wokeness. This is what every self-care trend is about—the 2010s was about wokeness, yes, but also about a wide variety of liberal bourgeois self-care tendencies, from GOOP to ASMR and on and on, all of which can be called religious just much as wokeness. It’s not just wokeness—but that is singled out and amplified because it is a useful tool for the ruling class to use to create the fake, negative solidarity of anti-wokeness, which just obscures class dynamics.
But if you accept what Lindsay is saying about a lack of meaning and control in America, you can ask what’s causing the lack of meaning and control, and the answer is capitalist exploitation and alienation. So if wokeness is a religion, then as Marx said of all religions, it is caused by material deprivation. People are developing these religious tendencies because they have no meaning in an alienated capitalist environment and no control in a capitalist work relation. If we want to stop these undesirable religious tendencies from increasing, then ending capitalist exploitation and alienation is the way to do it. But that’s not what people like Lindsay, who inveigh against “neo-Marxism” just like Jordan Peterson and other right wing commentators do, would want. And Trumpism, again, is a much more tangible, entrenched and powerful expression of the religious effects of a lack of meaning and lack of control. People voted for Trump because their lives were meaningless and hopeless and because they felt like they had no control over the system. Supporting Trump was a vote of faith that he alone could overturn all of the things that stop them from having control and that prevented them from having meaning in their lives. Trumpism is the political religion of the age, and it has economic roots. All the talk about the religion of wokeness by right-wing commentators is just meant to obscure this, so that the ownership class can keep things going on just as they are.
It should be noted again that not all those pushing this idea that wokeness is a religion are right-wing commentators. The Left Heretics, mentioned earlier, include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, and others, but Greenwald is probably the most prominent. They are called Left Heretics because they are members of the left-liberal media class, broadly conceived, who are anti-woke, meaning they critique the influence of wokeness in politics, culture, and society. The implication is that they are heretical against wokeness—and you can only be heretical against something religious. This is basically the same role that Sam Harris and other New Atheists played 10 years ago. Greenwald himself even wrote a critique of these people, who had aspects of some kind of liberalism in their critique of tradition and so on, but were, as Greenwald said, just feeding into reactionary tendencies at the time. This is essentially what Greenwald is doing now—what are “Left Heretics” if not New New Atheists? And their new brand as Left Heretics requires something to be heretical against—which is why the spectre of the New Woke Religion must be constructed, supported, mythologized, and so on.
Wokeness exists, yes, and it is bad, as everyone knows—but it is being portrayed as a religion by institutional conservative forces eager to score unearned populist points, and by media grifters to keep their brands going.
The point is not that pro sports actually is a religion—it’s that the anti-woke reasons for calling wokeness a religion are so flimsy and arbitrary that they can be applied to all kinds of things. This flimsiness shouldn’t surprise us, since the claim that wokeness is a religion is just as disingenuous as the woke virtue-signaling liberals themselves are. It’s just a disingenuous way for typical conservative capitalist forces to drum up some cheap, fake populist support, a new front in the culture war, to distract from the same old neoliberal free market economic policies that benefit corporations and the rich and screw everybody else.
The most important part of religion is probably salvation, and there’s no concept of salvation to be found within wokeness—which is the critique that anti-woke people themselves make of cancel culture (which is like the enforcement arm of wokeness). So the same people who say wokeness is a religion also say that cancel culture never forgives anyone, which is true—nobody is ever forgiven by wokes, and nothing is ever forgotten. But if wokeness is a religion, then there should be some concept of forgiveness there. But there isn’t.
One of the favorite examples that people who make the argument that wokeness is the new state religion have given in recent months was from a Black Lives Matter protest in June where white cops were washing black people’s feet, and it was viewed as some kind of religious woke ritual. Laura Ingraham described it as “white cops and private citizens [who] washed the feet of black protesters in a Holy Thursday style ceremony of forgiveness… subjugating themselves to a movement,” and other conservative commentators said similar things. But the foot washing was done by a local church as part of what they called a “Unity Prayer Walk,” as part of their ministry. It was a church activity, not some woke college students on a rampage—and the cops were only there, they later said, to show support But it didn’t matter, videos and images of this incident were widely circulated and used as like the final proof that wokeness is fully religious.
Rufo relies on the mass public displays of woke Black Lives Matter protests to be his evidence that wokeness is a religion, twisting the actual events to fit his narrative—meanwhile these people go put of their way to ignore Trumpism, which to anyone with eyes is equally as religious as wokeness, and probably more so. And doesn’t Trump have more power than these shadowy Cultural Marxists, since he is, you know, the current president of the United States? What is Donald Trump if not a cult leader, and what is a cult leader if not a religious figure? Rufo critiques the role of faith in the woke worldview, but what is motivating Trumpism more than blind, unwarranted faith in Trump’s ability to Make America Great Again? After four years of incompetence and lies from Trump, what explains his enduring support other than a religious attachment? What is his reality-free campaign against “Illegal Votes” and nonexistent voter fraud, if not a religious crusade? Trump is the most anti-woke figure in modern political history, and his political power derives from a kind of religious fervor. Anti-wokeness is not only fully compatible with religion, it seems to thrive off of it, much more than wokeness does—and anti-wokeness is a religious force that currently has the White House. With no intention of giving it up.
If you are serious about analyzing the threats of a new political religion, then Trumpism would have to be at the top of the list. And this is not even to mention American Fundamentalist political Christianity, which is a very well-established, well-funded, highly organized juggernaut in American politics—and one of their most extreme zealots, Mike Pence, is the current Vice President. Jeremy Scahill said that Trump’s win would make Mike Pence the “most powerful Christian Supremacist in history.” Another one, Mike Pompeo, who described the War on Terror as a holy war between Christianity and Islam, is the current Secretary of State. Bill Barr, who The Nation described last year as “neck deep in extremist catholic institutions,”is the Attorney General. Those are just a small number—I could go on and on. All these people are far more religious and far more powerful than any woke person in the country. Any real analysis of the danger of state religion would have to talk about all of this, and people like Rufo never do. And I didn’t even mention QAnon, which is a far more organized, unhinged, and religious social, cultural, and political movement than wokeness—with a much clearer “cosmology” and set of foundational sacred texts (Q’s posts themselves) than wokeness. And QAnon has a key feature of religiosity—a fully developed eschatology based on “a coming storm” (one of the QAnon cults’ most frequently repeated mantras) that will wipe away evil from America.
Back to the New Atheist connection. It’s easy to forget now, because the George W. Bush years (2000-2008) have kind of been disappeared down the memory hole as Bush gets rehabilitated by Ellen and becomes more well-known for his portrait hobby than anything else, and the Iraq War becomes a distant memory and so on. But the New Atheists were a very prominent group of commentators during that time. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens were called the Four Atheist Horsemen of the Apocalypse for their relentless critique of the role of religion in society. We could add someone like Steven Pinker to this group, though he wasn’t as much of a culture war figure as they were back then—but he sure is now. His plea for “Enlightenment” values, and Jordan Peterson’s plea for “classical liberal values” is very much of a piece with the New Atheists. And people like Rufo and James Lindsay are continuing it. It’s no surprise that all of these people are in no way leftist. The New Atheists claimed to support reason and progress and so on, but they all supported endless war against “Islamic terror,” wherever it could be found. The neocon War on Terror needed the specific type of Islamophobia that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens peddled—they gave it a helpful air of scientific respectability and reason. But it was just low grade religious bigotry in service of feeding the endless American military-industrial complex, not unlike one of the key early rallying cries of Trumpism, the Muslim ban.
Maybe the most important lesson to draw from the history of the New Atheists is that their hatred of religion itself took on a religious fervor. Harris and Dawkins especially became more unhinged and extreme in their anti-religious rhetoric—Hitchens was the most virulent, but he died in 2011. Hitchens ended up as a pathetic cheerleader for the global War on Terror. Is there any doubt that this is happening with the anti-woke crowd—that their fervor against wokeness has itself become religious? They say that wokeness is an elite project, which is fair enough, and obvious, but they also called it a religion, so that suggests they think religion is an elite ruling class project. Is this what they are actually saying? Of course not—anyone affiliated with Claremont Conservatism does not have those opinions about religion.
The people making this point are usually religious themselves, or connected to religious groups, or at least the audience they’re appealing to usually are religious—and yet they’re trying to critique wokeness by calling it religious, as if religion is bad. But again they don’t think religion is bad, so they aren’t really calling wokeness a religion, and if they are, they mean a bad religion, like Satanism.
So it’s like another Satanic Panic—they are calling wokeness a form of Satanism. But just like the Satanic Panic of late 1980s/early 1990s America, there is no there there—it is just a useful culture war tool for conservative forces to drum up cheap popular support while continuing to economically screw over the working classes.
Let’s take a look at James Lindsay’s own explanation for why wokeness is a religion. He has rapidly turned into the go-to-guy for people to turn to and reference in this growing cottage industry of calling wokeness a new religion. I wouldn’t be surprised if he delivers this message on the Joe Rogan podcast in the near future. His background is in the sociology of religion, which is why he is an authoritative-seeming voice on this. He says that people turn to religion to make meaning and to get control, which is true. But this applies to plenty of things besides wokeness. This is what every self-care trend is about—the 2010s was about wokeness, yes, but also about a wide variety of liberal bourgeois self-care tendencies, from GOOP to ASMR and on and on, all of which can be called religious just much as wokeness. It’s not just wokeness—but that is singled out and amplified because it is a useful tool for the ruling class to use to create the fake, negative solidarity of anti-wokeness, which just obscures class dynamics.
But if you accept what Lindsay is saying about a lack of meaning and control in America, you can ask what’s causing the lack of meaning and control, and the answer is capitalist exploitation and alienation. So if wokeness is a religion, then as Marx said of all religions, it is caused by material deprivation. People are developing these religious tendencies because they have no meaning in an alienated capitalist environment and no control in a capitalist work relation. If we want to stop these undesirable religious tendencies from increasing, then ending capitalist exploitation and alienation is the way to do it. But that’s not what people like Lindsay, who inveigh against “neo-Marxism” just like Jordan Peterson and other right wing commentators do, would want. And Trumpism, again, is a much more tangible, entrenched and powerful expression of the religious effects of a lack of meaning and lack of control. People voted for Trump because their lives were meaningless and hopeless and because they felt like they had no control over the system. Supporting Trump was a vote of faith that he alone could overturn all of the things that stop them from having control and that prevented them from having meaning in their lives. Trumpism is the political religion of the age, and it has economic roots. All the talk about the religion of wokeness by right-wing commentators is just meant to obscure this, so that the ownership class can keep things going on just as they are.
It should be noted again that not all those pushing this idea that wokeness is a religion are right-wing commentators. The Left Heretics, mentioned earlier, include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, and others, but Greenwald is probably the most prominent. They are called Left Heretics because they are members of the left-liberal media class, broadly conceived, who are anti-woke, meaning they critique the influence of wokeness in politics, culture, and society. The implication is that they are heretical against wokeness—and you can only be heretical against something religious. This is basically the same role that Sam Harris and other New Atheists played 10 years ago. Greenwald himself even wrote a critique of these people, who had aspects of some kind of liberalism in their critique of tradition and so on, but were, as Greenwald said, just feeding into reactionary tendencies at the time. This is essentially what Greenwald is doing now—what are “Left Heretics” if not New New Atheists? And their new brand as Left Heretics requires something to be heretical against—which is why the spectre of the New Woke Religion must be constructed, supported, mythologized, and so on.
Wokeness exists, yes, and it is bad, as everyone knows—but it is being portrayed as a religion by institutional conservative forces eager to score unearned populist points, and by media grifters to keep their brands going.
Your level of bootlicking for the DNC is as pathetic as Naps is.
Trump lost. "But Trump" isnt an argument anymore. Especially as Rahm Emmanuel 's name is being mentioned. Thats a slap in the face to BLM, but it's clear you're just a bad faith shill