Michael Lind has given a great overview of the present woke phenomenon, and how it has been unquestionable embraced by the corporates, which makes it quite different from political correctness, which was not yet done at the time. What see have seen is far better organisation that occurred in the pre-internet social media days, with increasing power to the woke, who worked their way through the institutions, like the universities, even more thoroughly that the earlier generation of cultural Marxist. It has displaced the old conservative order and is now the new ruling ideology, although conservatives still like to think that they are in control. Not so. There will have to be the battle of the century to over come this, as woke has blended with Leftism to form a new creature.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-gatekeepers-woke-michael-lind
“In or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.
In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.
In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”
By the 2020s, at one university after another, applicants for faculty positions were required to submit “DEI statements,” listing the ways that they would personally advance this particular ideology through their work as teachers and researchers. Campus commissars were appointed to ensure that faculty reading lists and guest speaker panels had the appropriate race and gender makeup. In corporations, banks, universities, and government agencies, the relatively anodyne “diversity training” of the late 20th century, designed to minimize the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination lawsuits, gave way to DEI trainings. The goal of such exercises was not to promulgate knowledge of specific anti-discrimination rules and procedures, but to engage staff in Maoist-style struggle sessions designed to break down the personalities and identities of non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian Americans through confession of “microaggressions” and “racial privilege.”
Meanwhile, large corporations and banks, universities and major foundations, and the Democratic Party—now the party of college-educated whites and most of the super-rich—ostentatiously signaled their virtue as one new social justice cause succeeded another: Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender radicalism. Ironically, the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement became the logo of U.S. corporations and U.S. embassies, even as gay men and lesbians who questioned the new orthodoxy were hounded out of the T- and Q-dominated LGBTQ+ acronym alliance for the sin of “transphobia.” …
Nevertheless, the Great Awokening is a misleading term. Woke activists are not honest missionaries; they are infiltrators, acting with the specific goal of seizing control of institutions and imposing their views on others. Unlike the Protestant evangelists of the Great Awakenings, today’s activists do not use simple language to spread their message to sinners in need of repentance. On the contrary, they camouflage radical beliefs in bureaucratic acronyms like DEI and CRT, and anodyne-sounding terms like “gender-affirming health care”— …. Where Protestant evangelists sought voluntary and whole-hearted conversion, the new activists seek submission, imposed on penalty of ostracism.
If these activists are not evangelists, what are they? They are “entryists.” The term “entryism” has been associated with the Trotskyist denomination of Marxism since the 1930s, when the exiled Leon Trotsky urged his followers in Britain to infiltrate the Labour Party and influence it from within, rather than form their own small, ineffectual party. … The center left of the political spectrum has historically been vulnerable to entryism by small, radical sects of zealots. Today’s illiberal radicals, like yesterday’s communists, have profited from a “no enemies to the left” policy among liberals. Mild-mannered liberals and progressives believe in civil rights, so therefore something called “anti-racism” must be worth supporting, even if there are a few problems here and there. …
No wonder that woke entryists prefer worming their way into immense, centralized quasi-monopolies and oligopolies in the private sector instead of trying to capture the government by persuading voters and winning in thousands of elections at all levels. They are helped by the fact that, for many Americans, particularly those on the political right, the private sector equals “freedom” while the public sector indicates “tyranny.” It is no coincidence that Facebook’s board includes the vice president of the Cato Institute, which is funded by corporations and rich donors to invoke “liberty” in order to justify various kinds of despotic and unaccountable private power. Even if a platform functions as a de facto public utility, for which there is no realistic substitute or alternative, the mere fact that the agency is privately owned can be invoked to screen it from public scrutiny or government oversight and regulation. …
Piece by piece, woke activists are assembling a private version of China’s social credit system, which can cut off individuals who run afoul of ideological orthodoxy from acquiring educational credentials, practicing a trade, or engaging in political speech. While Trotskyist entryists spent decades trying to infiltrate and influence social democratic parties and trade unions, woke entryists in only a decade and a half have captured many of the leading communications, sales, and financial platforms in modern society, along with professional associations and universities. Leon Trotsky would be impressed.”
As I see it the only hope of opposing this is a mass movement of opposition, which will be difficult at first given that the institutions have all be taken over. Hence the need to build parallel communities, where people can still survive and have food and shelter, while opposing all of this. It is not easy.