Recently the David Suzuki Foundation published an article titled “Science Matters—It’s better to be woke than to sleepwalk through life.” Right away we know it’s a rhetorical setup, to portray wokesters as the good guys (pardon the gender indiscretion), albeit in a defensive posture under widespread ridicule from “right-wing politicians, media pundits and online commenters” (i.e., Deplorables). It also tucks woke ideology under the protection of its co-opted deity, the great and powerful Science.
Thus begins a litany of charges against the anti-woke side, which read like a ChatGPT rehash, a mirror image of the very terminology rightly used against woke itself. “Weaponization.” “Meaningless statements.” “Non-arguments and insults.” “Logical fallacies.” “Deceptive statements that lack reason.” And most conspicuous, “ad hominem attacks against the character of a person rather than addressing the person’s contention.”
These are the very hallmarks of woke cancel culture, where you can be stripped of job, family and friends, social media platform, and bank account, if you like the wrong tweet or fail to kneel to the banner of the day. Where you are the one deemed racist (“benefiting from white privilege and systemic racism”) if your skin color doesn’t fall within a certain range (“racialized people”). Where your speech is deemed hateful if you don’t adhere to the latest TikTok approved pronoun protocols. Where you are killing the planet by exhaling CO2; killing grandma if you don’t jab your children with the latest Science experiment; abetting genocide if you don’t fly the flag of the war criminals on “our” side.
When it comes to rhetorical strategy, it’s all in the framing. If discussion is polarized, it’s not because of the woke agenda, it’s all the fault of the rest of us, too slow “to wake up to the real systemic injustices and issues that divide us and slow progress at a such a critical time in human history.” Racism! Fossil fuels! Colonialism! If only we could all see the Light, and work together “for equality, justice and healthy communities.” Who would dare hesitate to share a “progressive” tweet like that? The Suzuki brand seals the deal with its shining mission, “planetary health and survival.”
I smell vanilla fudge: vanilla because it sounds so pure, fudge for what it leaves out.
Let’s take a step back, opening the windows of discourse wider than this prescribed view allows. While the article grounds woke theory in race, it touches on larger issues of our time, notably Covid policy (Science) and the cult of climate change—unassailable pillars of righteousness, right? I submit that these causes serve as smokescreens to obscure other systematic forms of injustice, inequality, and unhealth in our world.
The article gives lip service to corporate profiteering but is silent on the global financialization of carbon accounting. Woke activists today advocate for transgender rights at the expense of their previous oppressed class, women. Systemic racism by whites is apparently to be remedied by systemic racism against whites.
Where is the justice when BLM riots burn cities with the blessing of politicians, but nonviolent Truckers Convoy and January 6 protestors are jailed as terrorists? What is being done to reunite communities decimated by lockdowns, forced vaxxes, and toxic propaganda from leaders like Trudeau? How can we have justice and equality under the rule of bought science and controlled media? Is it not weaponizing “planetary health” to omit mention of endless lithium mines for robot car batteries, or vast and inefficient solar and wind farms replacing real food farms?
I say wake up to the new colonization, of earth and its sleeping humans. There’s a global takeover well underway, a digital control grid being imposed on all of us—“equally”—except, of course, those behind the curtain. All others must submit, erasing the oppressions of your past identity: family, race, community, nation. Those are relics, tainted by eons of being incorrect.
“Freedom”… so reactionary, so twentieth century! There’s a new dawn of progress, and we’re all in it together. Those in charge of Science & Language will set the rules. It’s so simple: you just have to obey. You will own nothing, and you will be happy. Or else.
Nowick Gray is the author of Covid Narrative Freedom: Two Years of Dissent. Subscribe for free to his Substack, New World Dreaming.
In the forest, the energy is alive, welcoming… As if we need welcoming, being part of it as we always were. But sadly, we have forgot that belonging. Happily, our real mother/matrix (Nature) is here to remind us. Ever patiently, as her fourteen-year-old spends his youth fighting digital dragons, collecting tokens of imaginary value, telling us this is his chosen initiation.
