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Right-wing liberals try to make people believe that Wokeism is Marxist, therefore communist, therefore neither Western nor liberal. However, Trump’s recent inauguration should perhaps spare them the rigmarole, because the world has seen that the United States has changed its official doctrine. With the visibility of such an abrupt change, we can say: Wokeism was the official doctrine of the United States of America, its secular creed. Even the closest thing to an official church in the United States – the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Church – has embraced Wokeism and has manifested itself in the figure of a female bishop who is in favor of trans children.

How did such a crazy creed gain the most powerful state in the world? This is a question that allows for more than one type of answer. Reading this interesting article by David Samuels, quoted by Alastair Crooke in this SCF, we can convey a political and practical answer: Wokism was a U.S. doctrine from Obama until January 2025. It was in force during Trump I, who did not tame the “Deep State”, and reached its peak under Biden. If we are to believe David Samuels, Obama’s strategist, a certain David Axelrod, a Jew who was an expert in electing black politicians using a marketing strategy originally created to sell unsold products. This strategy, called “permission structures”, meant that the focus was no longer on the product, but on the customer’s self-image. David Samuels does not go into much detail about how this works, and the term seems obscure even in advertising, since there is no Wikipedia article about it. However, I found this article, and I could see there the profile of the influencer: a random person on the internet who is sought out by followers and advertises products to them. The name of the strategy comes from the fact that, since consumers cannot pay attention to conventional advertising (all the commercials on TV, all the posters and newspaper ads), they need to ask for permission to sell something, creating a relationship of trust with the advertiser.

Obviously, no one needs influencers to decide to buy bread on the corner or blood pressure medicine. Influencers sell an identity, a sense of belonging to a niche. That is why the sale is more about the consumer’s identity than the usefulness or quality of the product. According to Daniels’ article, a small group of people would formulate slogans, which would then be posted on Twitter and Reddit, and, depending on how well they did, would be promoted on the big machine built by Obama and Axelrod. Suddenly, all the experts from NGOs were consulted even by the traditional media outlets and would defend the correct opinion of the day. Thus, this structure was used to interfere with the self-image of each citizen. It started with white voters voting for black people to make sure they weren’t racist, and culminated in lynch mobs wanting to punish the scoundrels who didn’t inject mRNA. Suddenly, everyone had to buy into a series of ideas and publicly support them to prove to everyone that they were good people. In fact, it was a machine that was as totalitarian as it was dumbing down.

It is also possible to give a philosophical and cultural answer to the question. That’s what I did here at SCF, in the article “After all, how did a Puritan nation end up idolizing transvestites?” There I attribute wokism to the religious background of the United States. As a historical landmark, there is the takeover of Harvard in the 19th century by Unitarians, who were promoters of theological liberalism. This is a movement so individualistic that it is practically solipsistic, since it takes sola scriptura to heart and does not accept any “external” authority, that is, any authority other than the person himself. For theological liberalism, each person must think for oneself: it is not enough to abolish the authority of the pastor; it is necessary to free ourselves from the “tyranny of opinion”, which is indistinguishable from the Inquisition. Thus, liberals politicized customs greatly and always defended the side rejected by common sense: they adopted feminism, anti-racism and, later, the defense of gays. Theological liberalism overcame denominational and even faith barriers: several Protestant churches adopted it, and synagogues too.

With the Monkey Trial, or Tennessee vs. Scopes (1925), Protestant churches were polarized between the liberals, willing to accept the theory of evolution, and the fundamentalists, who wanted to create a Science to their liking, compatible with their reading of the Bible.

In my opinion, the United States is heading towards changing Protestant currents. Fundamentalists, for example, are entirely pro-Israel, and for biblical reasons. The state was even founded to meet a Protestant religious demand, against the dominant opinion of the rabbis of the time (who considered it heretical to return to the Holy Land before the arrival of the Messiah, as we saw here).

The American state, in theory, is perfectly secular and free from any theological influences. That is why Unitarianism has been so successful: it is a church that does not see itself as a church (but rather as an association of individuals who happen to think alike), and its creed is 90% about political issues. Fundamentalists are at a disadvantage, but this can be recovered through an alliance with right-wing atheists: Science will henceforth attest that their culture is the best in the world, a move already taken, on a personal level, by the high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins. Now, Science has already decided that women have penises; deciding that the world was created in seven days would be a small thing. But the American oligarchs are atheists like Dawkins. What they can do in the future is imitate the Thiel + Vance combination, an atheist sponsor with a traditionalist religious politician. Science will not say that the world was created in seven days; instead, it will say – as it has been saying for some time – that economic liberalism is the key to the prosperity of countries, that the state is inefficient, that Ashkenazi Jews have a genius IQ, that the population of Gaza has a very low IQ, that illegal immigration benefits the economy, etc. All it takes is to increase research on the impact of healthy marriage on children, change the bias of research that compares children raised by heterosexual and gay couples, research the mental health of religious people, and voilà: you have a Dawkins-style defense of Christianity, palatable to a Thiel, a Bezos etc.

In the realm of foreign policy, a fundamentalist alliance would not be new. The best example of this is the U.S. support for Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union. When the Arab Middle East is divided between secularists and Muslims, the impetus of the Western machine is to support the latter – which is why Hamas initially had Israel’s support. The most exemplary case of this right now is the fall of Assad. The Syrian president, a doctor, dressed in a Western-style suit and tie, was presented as a barbaric dictator. At his side, his elegant wife walked around without a veil and had two bachelor’s degrees from London. Now a butcher fundamentalist has entered the fray, who, one suspects, is not exactly a feminist. But he has the same opinion on alcohol as old school puritans.