Tag Archives: wokism

Antisemitism, the Left and 1967

October 26, 2025 humanistfreedoms

This article by Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is adapted from a chapter of the same name in Unadorned: Conversations on Antisemitism, edited by Scott Douglas Jacobsen (In-Sight Publishing / Apple Books, October 2025).

Television was still “black and white” when I entered a high school oratory contest to talk about the U.S. war in Vietnam. A young Trotskyist subsequently recruited me to join the New Democratic Youth. I immersed myself in socialist political thought.

The U.S was a colonial empire and therefore, oppressive; however, as I understood Marx, capitalism was a necessary stage before socialism and eventual communism. The newly formed state of Israel was allied with United States and was, therefore, an oppressor. I noted that the majority of socialist thinkers I had been reading – Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky, Edward Bernstein, and even Marx himself were Jews. The Jewish Left must have switched sides out of self-interest – the worst sort of traitor. The Balfour Declaration was proof that Israel was a colonial Zionist plot from the beginning of the British mandate in Palestine in 1920. Zionism was said to be a form of religious fundamentalism based on a divine mandate for Jews to occupy this particular area of the globe thus offending my newly developing humanist sensibilities.

We weren’t told that most of European Jewry had rejected Zionism. From 1919 to 1932 only 120,000 immigrated to Palestine joining the 60,000 to 80,000 Jews already present. In comparison, 280,000 to 380,000 European Jews migrated elsewhere, mainly to the Americas. After 1932, as conditions for Jews in Europe became progressively worse, western governments limited Jewish immigration to their countries. We also weren’t told that Britain had never allowed Jewish immigration to the 60% of Palestine east of the Jordan River or that in 1939 they stopped Jewish immigration to Palestine entirely. This trapped potentially hundreds of thousands who could have been saved from the holocaust. The Left has had more sympathy for non-Jewish refugees.

In an act of ethnic cleansing, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands following World War II. While the United States and France took 250,000 of them, most had no choice but to resettle in Palestine. In 1947, the United Nations offered a “two state” solution for that part of Palestine that was not already part of the new state of Jordan. The Jews accepted the plan and named their portion “Israel.” The Arabs refused the two-state solution, invaded and lost. The majority of Arabs and all of the Jews were expelled from that part of Palestine designated for the other group. Why are the descendants of the Arabs still designated as refugees but not the descendants of Jews who also lost their homes?

I learned that most Zionists were not religious fundamentalists. Zionism was a movement for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine. I still opposed Zionism for the same humanistic reason I would oppose nationalism generally – it is restrictive of minority populations who may not fit into the ethnic and linguistic definition of “the nation.” I have since learned that the leaders who established the state of Israel were from the Jewish Enlightenment tradition and they implemented a constitution guaranteeing liberal values, secularism and democracy. Three quarters of Israel’s population are Jews and a quarter of these are atheists. More than 20% of Israel’s population are Arab Muslims with full rights of citizenship. Women, gays transsexuals and religious minorities have constitutional equality. In a nod to socialism, the two hundred and seventy kibbutzim that dot the landscape are rural communes. Why would the Left abandon the only people in the Middle East that have established a democracy with at least some semblance of socialism?

In 1967 Canada got colour television and Egypt, Jordan and Syria once again invaded Israel. They lost. Israel took the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. This was also the year the Arabs from these regions began referring to themselves as “Palestinians,” as distinct from other Arabs. In defence of the Left, Nasser of Egypt, Arafat of Palestine and the Baath parties of Syria and Iraq sounded like socialists but, like Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union, they needed totalitarian methods to compensate for their lack of popular support. All were eventually replaced by Islamists bent on restoring a Medieval view of mankind with a strict fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. Humanists are opposed to the imposition of religious doctrine on subject peoples. Why did the Left support these reactionaries?

The Arab Palestinians were offered their own state with East Jerusalem as its capital in 2000 and again in 2008, but their leaders again rejected this “two-state” solution. Likud led by Benjamin Netanyahu was elected in 2009 on a platform opposed to such territorial concessions while favouring settlement expansion. The Israeli Labor Party has not had a role in government since. Why does the Left malign the Israeli Left?

With the return of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt agreed to recognize Israel as a state. In 2005 Israel ended its occupation of Gaza “trading land for peace” by forcibly removing nine thousand Jews in 21 communities from the territory. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) won elections for the Palestinian Authority in 2006 and subsequently formed the government of Gaza violently repressing opposition. Since its founding charter promised the elimination of Israel, the Israelis have maintained a blockade to prevent Hamas from acquiring heavy weapons. The Left has equated this blockade with occupation thus broadening the meaning of the term which had meant “control and administration.”

On October 7, 2023 Hamas led Gazans invaded Israel and murdered 1,200 mostly civilians, including 378 who were attending a music festival. They did not spare infants or elderly. They took 251 hostages in preparation for the inevitable counter-attack. The Left accused Israel of “genocide.”

“Genocide” is a term that was coined to describe attempts to remove a people from the gene pool. Six million Jews were placed into concentration camps and systematically murdered during World War II. The population of European Jews decreased accordingly. There has been no corresponding decrease in Muslim Arab populations, for example, the population of Gaza was 356,000 in 1967 growing to 2.1 million on 2023. In a reverse of this growth, the number of Syrian Christians dropped from 2.1 million in 2011 to 300,000 by 2022. Where is the outcry? At one time there were 14,000 Lebanese Jews but fewer than 20 remain alive today, yet no one has accused the Muslims of genocide. Hamas has reported that 300 Gazans have died of hunger since October 7, 2023 but during the same time period 100,000 to 150,000 people have died from hunger in Yemen and 50,000 to 100,000 have died in South Sudan. Where are the demonstrations on Western university campuses opposing Yemeni and Sudanese “genocide?”

Israeli forces have been targeting Hamas operatives who dress in civilian clothes and operate in civilian areas. In Ukraine the Russian forces actually do engage in indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. Why has the Left not organized mass demonstrations against Russian “genocide?”
We need to consider that Israel stands accused of genocide for defending itself from an enemy that refused to release its hostages unconditionally and who refuses to surrender. The term “genocide” was created to represent the intentional extermination of a racial, ethnic or religious group from the gene pool. To expand the definition of genocide to mean “war crimes” or even the effects of war on civilian populations, we negate the meaning and purpose of the original concept. Expanding the definition in this way equates the holocaust with other phenomenon –thus erasing the significance of the concept – a clever form of holocaust denial.

The Left claims to be anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, but they appear to have a special set of rules for the only majority Jewish state in the world; and, their “Pro-Palestinian” campaign has resulted in attacks on synagogues and Jewish run businesses. Students have expressed fear of identifying as Jews in Canadian universities. Jews only represent 1% of the Canadian population, but in 2023 there were 900 police reported attacks on Jews representing 70% of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the country. In the modern context “anti-Zionism” has become an engine of Jew hatred. At least some of the Left can trace their antisemitism to a misreading of Marx who said: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. […] In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism” (Marx, 1844/2008) .

These words were used by Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union to justify widespread purges that killed or imprisoned thousands of Jews while equating Zionism with imperialism and fascism. The American Communist Party justified Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine and North Africa while conflating Jewish financiers with plutocratic exploitation. Soviet bloc propaganda, allied with authoritarian Arab states, funded vicious campaigns demonizing Israel as a colonial outpost, and influencing the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s to adopt tropes of Jewish power and victim-blaming. Marx would not have been pleased. In the context of his writing, he was telling Jewish capitalists to give up on capitalism. His words were part of a movement that saw Jews embrace socialist and union activity in an attempt to integrate with workers the world over. But Marx’s more literal followers turned class politics into identity politics.

It began with Marcuse and the New Left in the 1960s (Coughlin & Higgins, 2019) . In an act of revisionism, it declared students and academics, as opposed to workers, to be the revolutionary class. By the 1980s it had replaced workers in another way – designated identity groups were now seen as the primary victims of oppression. In the 1980s and 1990s this not-so new Left adopted postmodern relativism with at least one important difference – while postmodernism held that all knowledge is socially constructed by people with power, the new Left held that its own ideology could not be critically examined. Pinker noted this new belief system had the trappings of a quasi-religion (Pinker, 2003) . This new religious movement that has become increasingly strident and intolerant is commonly referred to as “Wokism” (Robertson, 2021; Robertson & Tasca, 2022; Samuels, 2022) .

Any religion or ideology based on identity groups and politics will inevitably favor some groups over others thus promoting racism. The tropes used to demonize Jews from the left frequently channel those used by 20 th Century fascists. Since Enlightenment science and reason are seen as “Eurocentric” with Jews defined as ultra-white, the resultant demonization is often impervious to logic. Humanists need to consider how ideological belief that is religiously held can damage free speech, reason and, ultimately, compassion.

The media often see the Wokists as “the Left,” but there is a branch of the traditional Left who believed Enlightenment tools of science and reason could be used to address social problems and build a better society. Guided by humanist compassion, Democratic Socialists like Bernstein sought to curb the excesses of capitalism while preserving individual liberty and human rights. They rejected the authoritarianism of both the far-left and the far-right championing free speech and open discussion to overcome the bias and programing that would otherwise determine our worldview. Over the years, my views have evolved accordingly. I still do not pretend I have it exactly right and I remain open to refining my understanding through continued reflection and dialogue.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Distorts the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is illusion.
-The Moody Blues, 1967

References

Coughlin, S., & Higgins, R. (2019). Re-remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s strategy and tactics to transform America. Unconstrained Analytics.

Marx, K. (1844/2008). On the Jewish Question. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

Pinker, S. (2003). A biological understanding of human nature. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The new humanists: Science at the edge (pp. 33-51). Barnes & Noble.

Robertson, L. H. (2021). Year of the virus: Understanding the contagion effects of wokism. In-sight, 26(B). Retrieved March 1, from https://in-sightjournal.com/2021/02/22/wokism/

Robertson, L. H., & Tasca, E. (2022). Waking from Wokism: Innoculating Ourselves against a Mind Virus. Free Inquiry, June/July, 21-25.

Samuels, D. (2022). How Turbo-Wokism broke America: Oligarchs and activists are playing for the same team. UnHerd.
https://unherd.com/?p=446548tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=d6deab138c&mc_eid=bb998e3506

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Uncategorized

How Woke puritanism can lead to fatal consequences – Reflections on the death of Richard Bilkszto

January 1, 2024 humanistfreedoms

By Dr Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson

Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is a semi-retired psychologist with the University of Regina, Canada and President of the New Enlightenment Project: A Canadian Humanist Initiative. In this article he suggests that Wokism may have evolved into a puritanical fundamentalist religion or a mind virus. But whether it is a religion or virus, the antidote is to be found in valuing and teaching science, reason and compassion.

Author’s introductory note

The term “woke” when used as an adjective is often derogatory but I do not mean it as a slur. I see Wokism as a social phenomenon that combines elements of post-modernism, Marxism, Heideggerian Fascism, feminism, the 1960s civil rights movement, the 1980s self-esteem movement, Romanticism, and New Age philosophy into an evolving and often contradictory movement that gives a Gnostic feeling of superior knowing to its adherents. Cult-like, this phenomenon refuses to be named so we have to give it one so that it can be studied. My preferred name is actually “Woke Identitarianism”. In this article, I use the capitalised terms Woke and Wokism to refer to this social phenomenon.

Dawkins and the American Humanist Association

In 2021, Richard Dawkins tweeted: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a White chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.” Dawkins, who is a humanist and evolutionary biologist, was in turn vilified on social media for posing this challenging question. The American Humanist Association went so far as to revoke the Humanist of the Year award they gave him in 1996. In a subsequent article, a co-author and I (Robertson & Tasca, 2022) predicted:

‘Dawkins will be just fine. But those who aren’t humanist legends are much more cancellable. Perceived challenges to woke orthodoxy have resulted in social isolation, career opportunities drying up, campus lectures cancelled, and firings (Applebaum, 2021). There are even professors – liberal professors – who are legitimately scared of their students (Schlosser, 2015). Still other victims of the woke attack machine, most tragically, have killed themselves (Hartocollis, 2020). It’s impossible to suspect that all this carnage is an accident. The carnage is the point; it’s meant to scare us into compliance.’ (pp. 24, 25)

A story of Richard Bilkszto

This article is about the July 13, 2023 suicide of one such non-legend. Richard Bilkszto refused to be scared into compliance when confronted by statements he knew to be false. He had been a school principal in both Canada and the United States, and he had been a lifelong activist against racism and bigotry. He had retired from education in 2019, but the Toronto District School Board asked him to return as a contract principal to assist with a faltering adult education project. He was thanked by his employer for saving the project and offered an extension, but when Kike Ojo-Thompson, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainer at a mandatory staff training session, asserted that Canada was a much more racist country than the United States, Bilkszto politely stated that the record of Canada’s public schools, progressive tax system and health care system suggested otherwise.

If the DEI instructor was a humanist we would expect that she would have either acknowledged Bilkszto’s data or countered it with data of her own. Instead, Kike Ojo-Thompson’s initial reaction to Bilkszto was to say that “We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people.” (National Post, para. 8) The Post said that in this she “insinuated” that Bilkszto was a white supremacist. She told those in attendance, “Your job in this work, as white people, is to believe” (Subramanya & Blaff, 2023, para. 35). Bilkszto was silenced due to his race. The executive superintendent of education for his school board thanked Ojo-Thomson for modelling the way to combat anti-black racism. In the next of the series of four DEI sessions Ojo-Thompson told Bilkszto and 200 of his colleagues, “One of the ways that white supremacy is upheld, protected, reproduced, upkept, defended is through resistance… I’m so lucky that we got perfect evidence, a wonderful example of resistance that you all got to bear witness to, so we’re going to talk about it, because, I mean, it doesn’t get better than this.” (Subramanya & Blaff, 2023, para. 42). During this session other attendees were encouraged to criticize Bilkszto’s “whiteness”. No one dared defend him. The day after this session Bilkszto filed for sick leave.

Bilkszto filed a complaint with school officials. In August 2021, the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board awarded him seven weeks of lost pay for workplace harassment. But this did not end the matter. When informed that he would not receive any more contracts he began a lawsuit for damages. The lawsuit cited Ojo-Thompson’s “defamatory statements” and the unwillingness of The Toronto District School Board to stand up for him. It said Bilkszto had suffered “embarrassment, scandal, ridicule, contempt, and severe emotional distress”. In response to the law suit the school board made a statement of claim against the DEI training company, the KOJO Institute, for “breach of contract” in creating the conditions that led to Bilkszto’s distress (Sarkonak, 2023). Despite the strength of his legal case, Bilkszto continued to experience social media harassment and distress. His friend, Michael Teper, explained: “It was not only his job that was taken away from him, but his reputation, because those very people were assassinating his character. They claimed he was a white supremacist, that he was a racist. They knew nothing about him. They knew nothing about what he stood for or what he believed.” (Subramanya & Blaff, 2023, para 15)

We do not know how the social media campaign targeting Bilkszto was organised, but the New Enlightenment Project uncovered the Woke instructions to their followers when organising a counter-demonstration in Ottawa, Canada, earlier this year. Nowhere in the instructions was there any mention of the arguments of their opposition. Woke followers were only told they were demonstrating against “fascists” and “Nazis” when, in fact, they were demonstrating against people who did not want biological males in girl’s washrooms in school. Further, the Woke were instructed not to engage in conversations with other people but were given a list of slogans they should shout. If a reporter or another individual were to attempt to engage them in conversation they were to shout the slogans louder. Our observers at the event report that these counter-demonstrators followed the script they were given.

Like the Puritans during the “Great Awakenings” of the 18th and 19th centuries, the only thing these modern Woke need to know about victims of their mobbings is that they are sinners. The Great Awokening of the 21st century has changed the meaning of the word “racism” to “sin”. As we have seen, Dawkins and Bilkszto were not guilty of racism by any meaningful definition of the word, but they were guilty of challenging the words of those the Woke believe to be holy. In ordinary language, they sinned against the religion.

Steven Pinker and the formation of a quasi-religion

At the beginning of this century, Steven Pinker (2003) noted that a proto- or quasi-religion had formed that accepts on faith three myths: the blank slate, the ghost in the machine and the noble savage. The blank slate myth holds that we are totally the product of culture and can be moulded through the use of words, as is found in the practice of political correctness. The ghost in the machine myth holds that we are born with some essence that defines us – gender or race – as the Woke, so divine. The noble savage myth romanticises aboriginal people, but ultimately leads to the belief that modern civilization is evil and should be destroyed so that mankind can return to a “state of nature” as found in tribal societies. Since Pinker (2018) demonstrated that we live longer, are better educated, and experience less sexism, slavery, malnutrition, child mortality and xenophobia than at any other time in human history, he has run afoul of Woke dogma. They did not challenge his data but accused him of being a Nazi and a sympathizer of paedophilia. He was also accused of being a racist because he cited black authors in his work, thus appropriating their thoughts. Like Dawkins, Pinker may be “uncancellable” but as the example of Bilkszto demonstrates, the effect on ordinary people can be devastating.

In 2022, I engaged in a lengthy exchange with a Woke sympathizer on a humanist social media discussion group. She repeated the common trope that to be Woke is to simply be “awake” to racism. She saw herself as a “good Woke” who was against cancelling speakers, arranging to have people fired for expressing unwoke ideas, mobbing people on social media, or enforcing political correctness. I asked her why these good Woke failed to defend Steven Pinker when a petition was raised to have him cancelled as a distinguished fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. She replied that the good Woke were probably afraid of being called “right wing” by the not so good Woke. I believe this attitude is what ultimately killed Richard Bilkszto.

If Bilkszto really was a white supremacist, calling him one would not affect his social standing. His friends would still talk to him. Further, the slings thrown at this hypothetical white supremacist would merely be part of a larger war in which he participates. But Bilkszto found himself alone. His employer and colleagues deserted him. His solid legal case was not sufficient to protect his psyche.

Applebaum (2021) explained, “the first thing that happens once you have been accused of breaking a social code, when you find yourself at the center of a social-media storm because of something you said or purportedly said. The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic.” She said most of the victims of the Woke, whom she calls “The New Puritans,” were liberals.

Humanists, liberals and socialists are most vulnerable to the slurs the Woke use exactly because we have traditionally opposed racism, fascism, sexism and all forms of bigotry. As a result, when people are accused of these things we tend to cast a wary eye in their direction. When we ourselves are accused we tend to assume we have been misinterpreted and we may apologize for our choice of words. The Woke view all apologies as an admission of guilt, with the result that they press with even more vigour. Humanists tend to give sympathy to people who proclaim themselves to be anti-racist, and this can lead to impotence when observing a vicious attack like the one launched against Richard Bilkszto. We need to uphold the humanist valuing of science, reason and compassion. Facts are not racist, but interpretations that ignore facts often are. The silencing of Bilkszto because of his race was itself a racist act. Humanist compassion dictates that we spring to the defence of the Richard Bilksztos of the world.

It may be that Wokism has evolved into a puritanical fundamentalist religion since Pinker made his initial observations two decades ago. I have offered an alternative explanation. Using Dawkins’ (1976, 1982) concept of the meme and taking the self as a mental analogue to the body, I have shown how evolved cultural units can act as mind viruses (Robertson, 2017) and how Woke identitarianism fits such a definition (Robertson, 2021). But whether it is a religion or a virus, the antidote is to be found in valuing and teaching science, reason and compassion. Richard Bilkszto needed the support of those who share this understanding.

References

Applebaum, A. (2021, Aug. 31). The New Puritans. The Atlantic.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (1982). The Extended Phenotype: The gene as the unit of selection. W.H. Freeman.

Hartocollis, A. (2020). He Was Accused of Enabling Abuse. Then Came a Downward Spiral. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/dartmouth-lawsuit-bucci.html

Pinker, S. (2003). A biological understanding of human nature. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The New Humanists: Science at the edge (pp. 33-51). Barnes & Noble.

Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin.

Robertson, L. H. (2017). The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus. Theory & Psychology, 27(3), 354-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354317696601

Robertson, L. H. (2021). Year of the virus: Understanding the contagion effects of wokism. In-sight, 26(B). Retrieved March 1, from https://in-sightjournal.com/2021/02/22/wokism/

Robertson, L. H., & Tasca, E. (2022). Waking from Wokism: Inoculating Ourselves against a Mind Virus. Free Inquiry, June/July, 21-25.

Sarkonak, J. (2023). Principal berated for ‘white supremacy’ sues TDSB over equity training. National Post https://nationalpost.com/opinion/principal-berated-for-white-supremacy-sues-tdsb-over-equity-training

Schlosser, E. (2015). I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me Vox, (June 3). https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid

Subramanya, R., & Blaff, A. (2023). A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto. The Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/a-racist-smear-a-tarnished-career-suicide

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The views, opinions and analyses expressed in the articles on Humanist Freedoms are those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the publishers.

Americas, Canada, Uncategorized

Requiem for a Discussion Page

July 12, 2022 humanistfreedoms 6 Comments

As a follow-on to his popular article “Is Wokism a Mind Virus?” article, Dr. Robertson has agreed to share his experience as a moderator of a popular humanist-themed social media discussion page.

By Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson

In the early 1990s the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) created an on-line open discussion forum for people who believed in the free and open exchange of ideas and were committed to respecting the dignity of each individual. This forum moved to Facebook shortly after 2005, and the discussion group’s membership grew to more than 1,500. Then, in 2015 a re-branded Humanist Canada unveiled its new professionally designed Facebook page. Only board members could initiate posts on this new platform (although this right was eventually taken away from them as well). The old HAC listserve was allowed to continue. Although it was basically self-monitoring, board secretary Michel Virard was named administrator and I was named as one of three moderators. This article is about how this discussion group came to be viewed “problematic,” and was terminated.

The major part of my time as a volunteer Humanist Canada board member at the time was to research the need for ceremony in the lives of humanists (Robertson, 2017b). As a consequence, I was invited to participate in a HAC thread initiated by the Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics of Manitoba on the need for humanist ceremonies. As expected, the discussion was cordial, informative and productive. I returned to the discussion group site in 2019, but this time the language was anything but cordial. Some members were calling on the moderators to ban others they called “racists,” “alt-right,” “white supremacists,” and “anti-humanists.” I read the offending posts. No one had advocated racism, white supremacy or even conservative politics. Earlier, white academic activists who used such language to support what some called “cancel culture” had appropriated the term “woke” from black culture to imply those that did not share their views were “not awake.” I told these Woke to keep the discussion civil. A couple of weeks later I found the former victims giving as good as they got, so I admonished them all. Over time non-Woke stopped participating. With no debate, the only new threads on the old site were pleas for donations from a humanist school in Uganda that was, at the time, partially funded through Humanist Canada. To stimulate discussion, I posted an article by a police officer (Wilson, 2020) arguing against the then current campaign to defund the police. I invited comments, but as a moderator offered no opinion. One commentator stated that articles published in Quillette Magazine should not appear in a humanist forum. I set up a separate thread to discuss whether we should censor articles based on their magazine of origin.

Several articles from Quillette were posted but none promoted an ideology of racism, sexism or hate, and I refused to impugn motives based on some subjectively held notion of “dog-whistling.” One participant repeatedly expressed insult over my refusal to share my own views on the RCMP officer’s article. I agreed to do so, but under my own name outside of the moderator role. The resultant exchange was reasoned and civil.

Two posts in a different discussion thread implied, without evidence, that humanist Steven Pinker was associated with pedophilia. I viewed this as promoting hatred against an individual, and in the role of moderator, I deleted the posts. During the subsequent discussion, I informed one of the posters that he could appeal my decision to the site administrator, but he replied that he would approach “Martin,” the Humanist Canada president, instead.

During the ensuing months the HAC site generated more comments than the official Humanist Canada page despite having one third the members, and discussions were mostly civil. Then, in early August 2020, another moderator who had only recently become involved, cancelled a participant’s right to post under circumstances I challenged. The moderator explained:

The reason I blocked Ullrich Fischer form (sic) the HAC site had nothing to do with the nature of the content he was posting, but for targeting another member for harassment by systematically going through her previous comments on previous posts and replying to each one. (Sassan Sanei, e-mail, Aug. 6/20)

Ullrich had posted “five or six” replies to separate posts mostly responding to comments the other member had posted to him. For example, she had advised “Please don’t post alt-right material to a Humanist Group” to which he had responded, “Please don’t define as alt-right everything which disagrees with you about anything.” I restored Ullrich’s privileges because due process had not been followed. I explained that we could create a rule limiting the number of posts a member could make, but in fairness we would need to communicate such a rule to everyone in advance, and no one should be cancelled after a first offense. I also pointed out that the alleged “victim” here had called yet another member a “terrible human being” and had sent that member a private message calling her a “condescending bitch,” so if anyone should be cancelled it should be this alleged victim. Sassan then apologized to Ullrich admitting:

It was wrong of me to do that without informing you why the action was taken, giving you an opportunity to respond, or discussing it with other moderators. I’m sorry, and I promise you it will not happen again.

Sassan took exception to my use of the term “Woke.” While the term had been appropriated from U.S. black culture, he explained the word was now used as a slur directed against the appropriators. I agreed to use an alternate term “Identitarian Left” instead.

In early September I deleted four posts that consisted of name calling, swearing or belittling of people. In keeping with our protocol, I notified the other moderators. Sassan re-instated two of the posts explaining in an email, “The idea of a safe space does not extend to non-victimized or non-marginalized persons.” One member whose post remained deleted after calling another “a racist piece of shit,” declared that I, the moderator, favoured “raping and torturing children.” When asked for evidence, he posted that I had deleted the incriminating posts.

Brand Management: Entity over Ideology? (Image Courtesy Marketplace Valet)

At a meeting that included the Humanist Canada president, Sassan and me, it was decided to remove all reference to Humanist Canada in the old discussion group as the discussions were “hurting our brand.” I thought it odd that the site administrator had not been invited to this meeting. Nonetheless, the Identitarian Left still insisted that anything stated on the site represented Humanist Canada policy. In keeping with the discussion at our meeting, I posted:

This is not the official webpage of Humanist Canada and the opinions expressed here do not conform to any official statement or position. This is an open discussion group for humanists with a wide variety of opinions and perspectives. We ask that participants to this forum talk to each other respectfully.

One poster became so offended by this statement that he called on the president, Martin Frith, “to do something with me.” In the meantime, Sassan suspended comments on a thread in support of ex-Muslims who had become humanists, and he suspended the person who started the thread for the next 30 days with the ominous warning “if another admin approves (his posts) I will remove them.” As it had become apparent that the two moderators were following different rules, I decided to bring it to the Humanist Canada board for resolution. I proposed that Sassan and I each resign to be replaced by a former Humanist Canada treasurer who could be seen as a neutral moderator using the following rules:

No racist, sexist or hate speech permitted;
Bullying including name-calling is not permitted;
Posts that contain racist, sexist or hate speech or otherwise exhibit bullying will be removed;
Participants who have posts removed will be advised of the reason for the removal;
Persistent abuse of the rules will result in an individual losing their posting privileges.

Sassan’s response at the board meeting was to demand an apology from me for using the term “Identitarian Leftist!” The board decided to refer the matter to its social media committee. I reverted to using the term “Woke.”

Four new discussion group members identified as transgender. When Sassan posted a “trans rights are human rights” banner in the forum, one trans person accused him of appropriating trans issues to advance his organization. He replied that his post was necessary because many humanists had been posting “transphobic” and “hateful” statements. I had not seen any such statements, and I asked Sassan to produce them. He said he had deleted them, but as moderator, I had access to all deletions, and found none. Sassan subsequently deleted as “transphobic hate speech” an article written by a transwoman, that was critical of J.K. Rowling. I did not consider her call for dialogue to be hate speech, so I reposted it under my name. The initial discussion on this article was civil, but it was interrupted by an individual who called me a transphobe and a bigot without any arguments supporting those assertions. Ze also contacted me on my private messenger service with threats to have me removed as moderator. Ze subsequently posted, on the personal Facebook of another member, “You are completely uneducated. Ignorant. Privileged and bigoted.” As this individual had six similar posts removed earlier, I cancelled the member’s posting privileges. Sassan reinstated the person without contacting me. I cancelled the person again. I then discovered I was cancelled as moderator. I appealed to the site administrator but he had been cancelled too! The president suggested we sort this problem out at the social committee meeting he would schedule.

The dam burst. Transactivists and their allies attacked non-Woke with the same derision that had prompted me to become an active moderator the year earlier. Three participants defended me saying that they had searched my postings and did not find any posted by me that were anti-trans. Woke replied that I had removed the offending posts. One of the Woke organized a letter writing campaign. Sassan defended this behaviour stating, “The member(s) in question was (were) not harassing anybody. They were standing up and speaking out against the endless stream of hateful, transphobic commentary and bullying that has dominated the group in recent weeks.” No examples of such hateful, transphobic or bullying comments were given.

The HAC discussion group was shut down with the rationale that social media necessarily degenerates into such divisive name calling. I believed this was likely true at the time, but the New Enlightenment Project (NEP) established its own Facebook discussion forum in 2021, and it has proven to be a safe place in which humanists can have respectful, informative and civil conversations about controversial topics.

Sassan had not been authorized to terminate a moderator or the discussion group administrator. President Frith was determined to ensure that this matter would not be discussed by the Humanist Canada board, and he invited me to attend a “discussion group post-mortem.” After waiting for Martin who failed to attend, Sassan apologized for his actions to the cancelled administrator and myself. I thought he should apologize to the board because he had broken a board protocol, but the former administrator suggested that we should move on to educate humanists about the threat of Wokism.

This was my first direct experience observing Wokism in action. The Woke accused those who disagreed with them of being anti-humanist. People who said Canada’s first prime minister should not be blamed for things that happened well after his death were accused of favoring the torturing and raping of children. Feminists who want to ensure biological females have safe spaces were accused of wanting to deny transsexuals right to exist. Those who defended their positions were accused of harassment or bullying. There were thus two types of humanists represented: the Woke who viewed freedom of speech, science, logic and reason as “white, male ways of knowing” in opposition to their “anti-racist” narratives; and, those grounded in the Enlightenment view that we can learn about objective reality through careful observation, science, reason and logic. To these Enlightenment humanists, freedom of speech acts as an antidote to dogma and is a means of checking our own subjectively held biases. Those who coined the term “The Enlightenment” implied that those who disagreed with their approach were unenlightened, but in my book, The Evolved Self (Robertson, 2020), I argue that these values flow from the individualism inherent in having a self, and that this self is both cross-cultural and ancient. The Enlightenment was not about educating unenlightened people so much as removing cultural constraints on the powers of mind. From this lens, Wokism is a reactionary movement seeking to re-impose such constraints.

I came to the conclusion that Wokism is not a coherent ideology but amalgam of partially assimilated and conflicting belief systems (Robertson, 2021). It replaces the economic ruling class of Marxism with the racial designation “white.” It uses anti-Marxist postmodernism to “deconstruct” all beliefs with no rationale given as to why its own dogma is exempt from such deconstruction. Its attack on science and reason is copied from Martin Heidegger (1962), but it claims to be anti-fascist. It claims allegiance to social justice but ignores the egalitarian basis of the civil rights movement upon which social justice is built. The Woke claim to be anti-racist but promote the racialization of society through identity politics. They claim to be anti-capitalist while being embraced by the largest corporations in the world. They are convinced of their moral superiority, but are prepared to act unethically to defeat their opponents. These contradictions help explain the psychology of the people I observed.

Sassan had been extremely deferential to the transperson who accused him of using trans-issues to further an agenda. Sometimes referred to as “victim culture” (Campbell & Manning, 2014, 2016; Gabay et al., 2020; Haufman, 2020), Wokism establishes a hierarchy of identity groups with members of some groups presumed to have suffered greater victimization thereby acquiring greater moral entitlement. One would think that white males would be at the bottom of this hierarchy, but they are given a special role. Several times white males in the discussion group would state that they were “giving voice” to those “without voice.” This gives them a leadership position in which they engage in aggressive attacks on others as evidence of overcoming their own “whiteness.” On numerous occasions I observed Woke amending their posts after the discussion so as to make themselves appear more effective.

In periods of high emotion, Woke act as though they are subject to a moral panic, but individuals cannot sustain such energy indefinitely. I have demonstrated how complexes of cultural memes can attach to the self of an individual acting as a kind of mind virus (Robertson, 2017a), and I subsequently determined that Wokism meets this criteria (Robertson, 2021). Put simply, the Woke virus attaches itself to the selves of individuals so that a challenge to Wokism is felt as an existential attack on oneself. Like a primitive religion, Wokism protects its flock from alternate ideas by censoring individuals, declaring media it does not control to be racist, and by denying objective reality. If there is no objective reality, then science, empiricism and reason are empty culturally sanctioned performances legitimate only insofar as they promote Wokism.

Like a secret cult, Wokism may not be named and attempts to name it are deemed to be “slurs.” The Woke would prefer to be known as “Left” or “Progressives;” yet we know there are many people who identify with the Left who embrace science, reason and free speech. We also know that progressivism is an Enlightenment doctrine that peoples’ lives can be improved incrementally. By this measure a leading progressive is Steven Pinker (2012, 2018), a humanist whom the Woke have repeatedly denounced.

Every cult needs some means of identifying authentic members, and the Woke do this through the inventive use of language. For example, the word “Latinx” is not used by Hispanic people and it is not used by Woke talking to Hispanic people. It is used by Woke talking through Hispanic people to other Woke. The word “systemic” is thrown in before words like “racism,” “sexism,” and “oppression,” but it is not used as an adjective because the Woke never explain how systems work to establish these problems. The word “problematic,” is used in preference to the word “problem” so as to appear more “systemic.” Similarly words like micro-aggression, intersectionality, and cisgender are not needed for communication, but signify that the user is Woke.

*“in the final analysis, wokism is abut power.”*

In the final analysis, Wokism is about power. The Woke have taken over universities, school boards, media, non-government organizations and government agencies for the purpose of creating more Woke. Although they were successful in disabling and shutting down an open humanist discussion group, the Woke were not finished with Humanist Canada. Enlightenment humanists need to recognize the challenge to our movement and to update our understandings in light of modern conditions.

References

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2014). Microaggression and moral cultures. Comparative Sociology, 13(6), 692-726. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691330-12341332

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2016). Campus Culture Wars and the Sociology of Morality. Comparative Sociology, 15(2), 147-178.

Gabay, R., Hameiri, B., Rubel-Lifschitz, T., & Nadler, A. (2020). The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences. Personality and Individual Differences, 165, 110134. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110134

Haufman, S. B. (2020, June 29). Unraveling the Mindset of Victimhood: Focusing on grievances can be debilitating; social science points to a better way. Scientific American.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.; First English ed.). Blackwell. http://books.google.ca/books?id=S57m5gW0L-MC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin.

Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin.

Robertson, L. H. (2017a). The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus. Theory & Psychology, 27(3), 354-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354317696601

Robertson, L. H. (2017b). Secular weddings in Canada: An examination of a humanist response to the evolution of marriage. Journal of Secularism and Non-religion, 6, 1-10. https://doi.org/<http://doi.org/10.5334/snr.76>

Robertson, L. H. (2020). The Evolved Self: Mapping an understanding of who we are. University of Ottawa Press.

Robertson, L. H. (2021). Year of the virus: Understanding the contagion effects of wokism. In-sight, 26(B). Retrieved March 1, from https://in-sightjournal.com/2021/02/22/wokism/

Wilson, M. (2020, June 30). Policing in the anomie era. Quillette, June.

Citations, References And Other Reading

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