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Wokeism to Depotism: What's Going On?

Woke Got What It Wanted

By Victor David Hanson
Stanford University

The “woke” movement was giddy after Jan. 20, 2021. The left controlled both houses of Congress.President Joe Biden was drafted as the necessary veneer of 1980s Democratic normality to ram through an otherwise hard-left agenda.

All the major cultural, financial, economic, entertainment, and media institutions had played various roles in seeing former President Donald Trump not just defeated, but also impeached, twice. He was written off as persona non grata after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

So, academia, corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, the media, the Pentagon, professional sports teams, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in near hysterical fashion all boarded the woke train. All boasted of ferreting out “white rage” and hiring legions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” czars.


Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism

By Larry P. Arnn
Hillsdale College

Listen to Fauci on Face the Nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries. When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901. Churchill wrote:

"Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse? . . . If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible."

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