Winter 2022—Truth Untaught, Reality Unacknowledged: The New Totalitarianism Of Woke Communism

In early February of 2022, the ruling bureaucrats, politicians, and other oligarchs who control California announced through the state’s officialdom a plan to end universal public indoor mask mandates due to the “progress” made by California’s public health sector in combating the dreaded COVID-19 virus. As part of this plan, face coverings would continue to be required for those of us counted among the hated unvaccinated as well as for anyone living or working in “select settings” such as public transportation or nursing homes. Official pushes would remain in place for vaccinating even the youngest of children, strictly monitoring allowed attendance numbers at public gatherings, and adjusting bans on or requirements for entering and enjoying facilities like bars, restaurants, and gyms.

And so the COVID ordeal and accompanying trampling of American freedoms here in California is set to enter its third year, complete with all the latest shows of hypocrisy from our corrupt political elites who delight in oppressing others with rules and regulations that never apply equally to them. Democrats like Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Eric Garcetti from San Francisco have spent years forcing us Californians to mask up for all sorts of arbitrary, inconsistent, and suspicious reasons. But when a very public and very maskless photo op with basketball star “Magic” Johnson came along, both Newsom and Garcetti were so comfortable and so complacent in their own personal disregard for the rules that government had foisted upon the rest of us, they openly flaunted their rule-breaking with obviously no thought for political punishment or electoral consequence. This is quickly becoming the new normal for California, and for the rest of the country as well: a society in which the rule of law will soon cease to exist when dictatorial decrees and bureaucratic mandates serve only as weapons to be used against those of us who dare to resist the forces of conformity.

Dov Fischer, an adjunct professor of law who recently expressed his thoughts about cancel culture on The American Spectator website, had a thing or two to say about this dangerous atmosphere of coerced conformity sweeping through our society.

He explained, “I not only have practiced the highest level of multi-million-dollar federal and state litigation at the most respected national firms, but I also have been a law school professor for two decades. So many of my closest faculty colleagues retreat from their deepest beliefs, fearing to express their innermost consciences amid the Woke professional reign of terror permeating academia. American universities now curtail free expression so vigorously that conservatives who voice their perspectives cannot get hired in social sciences. The rare conservative who sneaks past these Leftist McCarthyites by remaining silent cannot win tenure later if she lets even a single word slip. Tenure protects free speech but takes seven to ten years of self-suppression to attain. Until then, a conservative may not remain merely neutral. Rather, he must ‘pay lip service’ to the Woke agenda. And many deeply conservative professors remain taciturn amid the cancel culture terror pandemic to protect their jobs, incomes, and social status. I will not pay such lip service, but I do self-censor in the workplace. That is not where I express support for Trump’s political agenda, advocate for Israel, or give voice to how much I despise Black Lives Matter for its Jew-hatred, its Marxist origins, and its anti-American and racially biased hate.”

Even with all his regretted self-censorship, Professor Fischer still gets noticed by others who are just as aware as he is of what’s going on all around them in an increasingly ideological and oppressive educational system.

“I have had students ask me privately: ‘Professor, are you a Republican?’”, reported Fischer. “I ask what prompts such curiosity. They respond: ‘Because you never try shoving your beliefs down our throats. All you do is teach law and tell great jokes and drop-dead-funny anecdotes. You are the only professor here who does not manipulate class time to attack Republicans, push an agenda about ‘systemic racism,’ promote critical race theory, or force-feed us Black Lives Matter. That means you must be conservative.’”

As a native-born Californian who works as a public school teacher in the social sciences, as someone who wearies of authority figures forcing me to wear masks or unnecessarily agonize over decisions to get mandated COVID shots, and as a former graduate student who was once told by a conservative college professor that I might never be able to attain a doctorate degree because of my politics, the relatively mundane story of Gavin Newsom taking publicity pictures without a mask and the deeply moving and personal account of Dov Fischer interacting with his curious college students are both equally profound to me. They speak to frustrations and anxieties that gnaw at me day-in and day-out. These frustrations and anxieties are the basis for this blog post, in which I contend that an insidious new brand of Woke communism is turning our country into a totalitarian police state. In this police state crafted by the American Left, truth and reality will be left untaught and unacknowledged, even as real societal problems will be left unaddressed and unsolved.

To what am I referring when I use the term “Woke communism”? In Woke communism, the government does not control everything directly or overtly, but instead uses educational systems, corporate media empires, entertainment industries, big businesses, and especially Big Tech companies and the Democratic Party to scapegoat white males and preach a false national narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy. If the court cases involving Jussie Smollett and Kyle Rittenhouse are any indications, the Woke communists among us rarely, if ever, have any objections to using cancel culture and mob violence to maintain their power or promote their narratives. In the Kyle Rittenhouse trial specifically, we saw proof that facts and truth do not matter to those who seek to uphold the Woke regime. This regime now manifests itself prominently in our news media, in our government agencies and bureaucracies, and in the ranks of leadership in the Democratic Party. This regime works toward forcing the lie upon the American people: that America is systemically racist and about to be overrun by white supremacists.

In December of 2021, the chairman of the board of directors of the Claremont Institute, Thomas D. Klingenstein, wrote that the “riots of the summer of 2020 are another example” of Woke communism at work here in America. He explained that “agitators sparked the flame that lit the riots. Their intellectual leaders justified the riots; their corporate donors gave billions to the Black Lives Matter network; their media looked the other way; and their politicians, from Joe Biden on down, fanned the flames.” The Woke narrative required all of these elements to be in place in order for the lies and falsehoods about America to be perpetuated, one way or another. Being countered with facts is inconsequential to Woke communists; as we have seen for years with topics ranging from climate change to COVID-19, facts, perspectives, and voices that run contrary to leftist narratives are usually suppressed.

This is why what happened to Kyle Rittenhouse is so scary. He was the most ordinary of everyday Americans, guilty of doing nothing more than those most American of actions: defending his community and rendering assistance and service to his neighbors. These were the very reasons the radical Left had to persecute and punish him as a representative of those old-fashioned American values that run counter to the Woke narrative. If you still embrace those values as I do, I hope you’ll agree with me when I say that we are in the middle of a cultural civil war in which those values are under attack, and we desperately need more of the so-called ordinary people to understand what is going on in our society and to understand how our enemies are operating.

Here in California, it often feels like our enemies are operating without any opposition whatsoever. I know that that is mostly an illusion, and I do not mean to disparage or disrespect the efforts of so many good and freedom-loving Californians these last few years. It’s just that in states like mine, the games of politics and government truly feel permanently rigged against conservative ideas. I’ll use my chosen profession of education as an example that especially worries me. Governor Newsom recently signed into law Assembly Bill 101, making California the first state in the Union to require ethnic studies for all high school students. Anyone reading this who still believes that we right-wingers are making things up when we warn about the dangers of Critical Race Theory needs to pay close attention to this paragraph. The law, which went into effect on January 1st, requires all public high schools and charter schools to offer a one semester course in ethnic studies by the 2025-2026 school year. The ethnic studies course will be a prerequisite to graduation in 2030. In 2017, Oregon passed a law ordering that ethnic studies concepts be integrated into existing social studies courses for K-12 students, but the California law differs by requiring a dedicated course. Enactment of AB 101 comes after two previous efforts, starting with then-governor Jerry Brown’s order in 2016 that the California Department of Education develop an elective course. That bill faced stiff opposition for its radical design, including proposed curricula that denigrated Jews, promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, and praised Pol Pot, the Marxist dictator of Cambodia who was responsible for the deaths of nearly two million Cambodians. The preface to the 900-page Model Curriculum describes the legislation as “highlighting core ethnic studies concepts such as equality and equity, justice, race and racism, ethnicity and bigotry, indigeneity, etc.” “Equity” refers to outcome-determinative quotas by which decisions are made primarily on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and gender identity. The preface adds: “Ethnic studies courses address institutionalized systems of advantage, and address the causes of racism and other forms of bigotry including, but not limited to, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia within our culture and governmental policies.” Sample topics include Black Lives Matter, police brutality, systems of power, housing inequality, Afrofuturism, the “Four I’s of Oppression,” undocumented immigrants, and “This is Indian Land.”

And in the very midst of writing this blog post, the local radio stations in my area announced that a public school district in the neighboring city of Modesto will soon be seeking to correct the “problem” of not having enough teachers in its employ who are racially representative of the student population.

As a public school teacher who has to find work in a jobs market in which future employers will be proactively considering my skin color to be a detrimental factor in hiring me, I would think the institutionalized racism of the hypocritical Left in this instance is obvious.

This is what my state and our country are coming to! In the next few years, how many schools will be able to avoid the influence of the 1619 Project curriculum, which falsely teaches that America’s foundation is slavery and that the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery? California’s ethnic studies curriculum is rooted in the principles of Critical Race Theory and the Black Lives Matters movement. These ideas and movements teach the lies that racism is systemic and that the white patriarchy brutalizes people of color on a regular and ongoing basis. Rather than bringing students together, California’s ethnic studies curriculum will focus on what divides Americans by emphasizing differences and harms perpetrated by white Americans. This law ought to be vigorously countered at every possible legal level, beginning at the neighborhood school board meeting and including political campaigns run against those bent on improperly imposing and enforcing these heinous doctrines.

All of this is made far worse when we begin to understand that real-world problems and actual injustices continue to go unaddressed by the ruling Democratic elites. Again, my home state of California is illustrative of this point. California Democrats seem incapable of dealing with an increasingly brazen crime spree sweeping across my state. My goal here in writing about this isn’t to debate crime explanations, but to offer a warning to the state’s Democrats. Unless they start dealing seriously with the latest post-COVID crime increases, they risk seeing public sentiments turn against them in a big, big way.

The nation is in the midst of a crime wave — and California cities in particular are facing a growing sense of disorder. “California’s 31 percent jump in homicides in 2020 reflected a national trend that saw the largest one-year increase since the FBI began collecting numbers in the 1960s,” the Los Angeles Times reported in late September. California’s homicide rates have gone up more than 29 percent. Data suggests that some of the state’s criminal-justice reforms (such as Proposition 47, which reduced many low-level crimes from felonies to misdemeanors) have boosted auto theft and larceny rates. Nevertheless, the state’s progressive officials — especially those in control of its biggest cities — struggle even to acknowledge the seriousness of the current crime wave. Last fall, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a weekend crime spree not only in San Francisco and Oakland, but in placid suburbs such as Walnut Creek, “where roving bands of thieves swarmed into stores, grabbed as much merchandise as they could carry and escaped in getaway cars.” Gov. Gavin Newsom described the mayhem as “unacceptable,” but since that time it’s remained unclear what specific policies the governor plans to implement to combat what the Chronicle described as thefts that are “carefully orchestrated, entrepreneurial and apparently driven by social media.” On the Los Angeles transit systems, “reports of violent crimes were up 25 percent from the same time last year and 9 percent from 2019,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Granted, ridership levels were extremely low last year because of COVID-19, but rail and bus riders are increasingly afraid. In November, “Walgreens closed five stores in five different San Francisco neighborhoods,” KQED, a radio station in San Francisco, explained. “The company claims it was because of ‘organized, rampant retail theft,’ although available information doesn’t quite back that up.” No matter what Walgreens claims, I believe retail chains are unlikely to keep iffy operations open if the cost of turning them into fortresses becomes too high. This hurts poor people the most. Criminal-justice reform efforts shouldn’t be abandoned. We must remain diligent, take the violent crime spike seriously, and prioritize public safety.

We just shouldn’t expect the Democrats to lead out in any of that.

The Democratic Party of 2022 is not interested in allowing spaces for resistance to Woke communism’s coerced conformity. Democratic leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi don’t grant credence to real-world problems like the curtailment of Constitutional freedoms, the hypocritical revival of institutional racism by the Woke activists among us, or nationwide crime waves. If you exist in a political, philosophical, or religious space outside of what Woke communists regard as the realm of acceptability, they will target you for real-world ostracism and punishment. Back in December of 2021, the Democrats in Congress proposed a $3.5 trillion welfare expansion that would have effectively banned faithful Christians from profiting from federal subsidies for separating infants and toddlers from their families. The text of the Democrats’ massive “Build Back Better” entitlement bill contained provisions that would’ve required religious child-care providers to disavow longstanding theology about sex in order to receive federal child-care funds under a massive new early childhood program. In the words of Jackie Walorski, a Republican representative from Indiana, “The Democrats went out of their way to make sure and prohibit religious care providers from receiving any of these funds, and unanimously rejected an amendment to allow all child-care providers to be eligible for grants, including religious providers.” “Build Back Better” legislation would’ve created a new federally controlled child-care entitlement available to a majority of families in the nation, but given the current state of federal “nondiscrimination” laws, this would’ve opened the door to forcing religious organizations to allow males into female bathrooms, hire transgender babysitters, and teach small children that men can turn themselves into women and that theologically condemned sex acts are in fact morally good.

Representative Walorski said it best: “The Left is at war with religion and family-centered things. They think cradle to grave, government knows best.”

I’m here to tell you that government does NOT know best. It is rare for the United States government or, in sadly too many cases, for its constituent state governments to do the right thing when it comes to respecting human freedoms and promoting opportunities for individuals to excel and fulfill the best measures of their creation. As a public school teacher who works with teenagers, I can honestly say that the future of public education in my home state of California truly terrifies me. When I think about the kids I work with in my classroom, I think of the many who struggle with depression, anxiety, and the stifling oppression of low expectations. I think about the many students I’ve had already in my young career as a teacher who have made lifestyle choices I wholeheartedly disapprove of, and yet regularly confide in me, express their trust in me, and who occasionally figure out that yes indeed, Mr. Peterson is a conservative Republican. Like my fellow educator, Professor Fischer, I have found it truly remarkable to have had so many students through the years who have trusted me as a mentor and example even when their political and cultural beliefs have been fundamentally different from mine, or even oppositional to them. And yet, I remain terrified that students like this, so many of whom are emotionally fragile and academically underperforming, have nothing better to expect from their government except a steady diet of guilt-ridden Critical Race Theory, mindless global warming alarmism, and the corrosive destruction of identity that is modern transgenderism and the rest of the LGBTQ ideological morass. Instead of teaching kids to read, write, and do arithmetic, leftist activists and morally corrupted bureaucrats are more interested in having children define themselves by their skin color, by their supposedly environmentally offensive lifestyle, and who (or what) they are told they want to have sex with.

We live in an age in which the full might and power of the government is behind the monumentally destructive lies about gender, about race, about reality itself. Who knows how long the COVID dictatorships will last? But even if they do go away, how long will it be before the next manufactured race, climate, or gender crisis will be thrust upon us all? In this leftist future we are all at risk of living through, our ruling elites will not wear their masks and will not give up their private jet flights, and they certainly will not allow men into their girls’ bathrooms.  Meanwhile, we will all be wearing masks while we are lectured at by “the experts” who say we all need to give up our gas-guzzling SUVs and make room for biological men to start crushing the ladies in women’s sports programs. If we resist, we will be coerced into silence or cancelled from the popular mindset. Truth and reality will be left untaught and unacknowledged in our grade schools and universities, even as real issues will be left totally ignored by leftist political and cultural elites who won’t have the time, attention, or electoral stakes for actually fixing what’s gone wrong. The favorite weapon used by Woke communists to enforce leftist doctrine will continue to be false accusations of racism. Never mind that the only people who would be silenced by accusations of racism are inherently NOT racist! All that will matter is that facts, perspectives, and voices that run contrary to the ruling cultural and political regime will be ignored, ritually mocked, or silenced. And please be clear: this will be happening in every segment of society, in every aspect of our lives. It will be in the schools. It will influence your healthcare options and decisions. It will wreck the quality of your favorite TV show and movie franchises. Wokeness, after all, knows no boundaries. More and more often, real problems like crime will require local solutions as we all come to the conclusion that our leftist leaders are simply not interested in keeping us safe, in enforcing anything resembling the rule of law.

I hear it said so often: “Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and leftists…we all want the same things.”

No, I actually don’t think we do.

We need to bravely and yet soberly accept that we are in the middle of a cultural civil war, and that in such a conflict there are those among us who want something different than we do. And yes, we need to be willing to admit that a small but sizeable minority of us might actually want some things that are very wrong and very dangerous. I would not use such language if precious concepts like human freedom and happiness weren’t at stake, but they are.

In America today, the Left is at war with religion and family-centered things. This post, as is often the case when I air my thoughts on social media, is a call to action. If the Left is at war with religion and the family, we all need to work even harder than ever before to embrace these things, to cling to them as fervently as a drowning man would cling to a lifeline thrown to him from shore. If the Left is at war with religion and the family, we need to champion those things. If the political and cultural elites are so caught up in Critical Race Theory and climate change alarmism that they cannot or will not see that our cities and communities are crumbling into crime-ridden zones of economic stagnation, we need to get together with our friends to offer up local solutions for our own neighborhoods and families. In the years to come, as the Left continues to punish the truth-tellers and defy reality itself, we as individuals and families need to rely upon one of the most important truths of reality…and of history…that there is: the eternal significance and strength that is manifest whenever American men and women work together as friends and as families to take care of themselves, to take care of each other, and to transcend totalitarianism in any and all of its forms.

--Christopher Peterson, February 21st, 2022