Woking Up to Independence.

• Position: On wokeism, education and religion

Many Americans who celebrate declaring our independence from the British Empire in 1776 now want independence from what the elitist, tyrannical Federal Leviathan has become. How did this happen? All civilizations must pass down their values to the young--or perish. Our educational institutions are essential for this purpose, but a cancer has invaded them.

As early as in 1951, William F. Buckley observed that Yale University no longer was producing graduates who had a commitment to fundamental American values. The triumph of wokeism (aka critical social justice ideology) in academia is obvious to all who are awake. Our universities are so infected with wokeism that conservative scholars have to pretend to be woke to maintain any type of affiliation with modem academia. The degeneracy at the top has penetrated down to kindergarten and pre-school.

The woke pseudo-religion is winning over the young as American culture becomes increasingly secular. Increasingly, young people lack a moral code based upon established traditions of faith, and wokeism fills the spiritual void within them. The woke have a cultish messianic complex; their obsessive goal is to remake society. From their perspective, those who oppose them are not simply people with a different worldview. but "evildoers."

The woke neo-religion has been ignored by those conservatives who were shielded from its malice. However, as wokeism became dominant, it started to hurt more people due to its totalitarian and censorious nature. These newly awakened sleepers now are realizing with horror the huge damage that has been done to our institutions.

There is so little viewpoint diversity in academia that students see no challenge to the pseudo-religious cultish ideology, and no factual analysis. As historian Niall Ferguson accurately put it: "North American academia is in the grip of a hideous mania, a cross between the...