The word “woke” has become a punchline.
But the underlying ideology behind it is no laughing matter.
And a university professor shockingly admitted that conservatives were right about one growing problem.
“Wokeness” defines a loose amalgam of neo-Marxist and postmodern ideas that have seeped into the mainstream of society.
All of these bad ideas of course began in the universities, and conservatives have been complaining about them for years.
Some conservatives and moderate liberals sloughed off concerns about these fringe concepts, thinking that college leftists would simply grow out of them once they encountered the “real world.”
But now the real world has become Clownworld and woke ideas are everywhere.
Now a UCLA professor is admitting that he underestimated the damage that these bad ideas would do.
The Daily Wire reported that “Russell Jacoby, author and professor emeritus of history at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), wrote a book in 1987 dismissing conservatives’ fears that students of postmodernism and critical pedagogy would wreak havoc on American culture. Now, 35 years later in an article for Tablet, he admits that conservatives were right . . . Jacoby said he wrote the book in response to a number of bestselling books in the eighties that speculated that various offshoots of Marxist-derived Critical Theories taught in universities would produce leftist activists that would bring chaos to Western civilization.”
Initially, Jacoby thought conservatives were being hysterical in their fears about what they were witnessing on college campuses.
After the Marxist revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s fizzled out with violent groups like the Weather Underground being repudiated, the radicals slowly moved into education in the 1980s.
And conservatives began to notice the turn in academia back then.
Jacoby wrote, “I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.”
He now concedes that the oversaturation of left-wing academics has forced them off of campuses and into various fields.
Jacoby continued, “It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the larger culture. The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture. They staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane programs couched in the language they learned in school. We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media.”
Jacoby is late to the party, but he is correct.
Now the challenge becomes stopping the madness before the concerns of the ‘80s conservatives reach their terminus.
Patriot Political will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
