This Is Our Chance To Rein In Wokeness

AMERICA today is the closest it’s been in a decade to recovering from its collective bout of racial and sexual hysteria. Conservatives must seize this moment and advance a policy agenda that could help the country emerge from this troubling period. Americans have a window of opportunity to stop those who want to reprogram the young and implement an “ideocratic” state. We need to keep it open.

Two recent events suggest that the United States might be at a turning point. First is the public’s rejection of university students and their professors’ justifying, or even celebrating, the recent massacre in Israel.

Parents have been outraged by the reactions of their children’s schools and used Facebook groups to organize in response, demanding, for example, that university presidents discipline or fire offending professors or administrators. Indeed, many parents now wonder whether those colleges’ professors can be trusted to teach their kids.

Donors are pulling their money from colleges that refused to condemn Hamas unequivocally. Oldfashioned liberals drew the line when UC Davis professor Jemma Decristo publicly threatened violence against “Zionist” journalists. More said “enough” after Cornell University history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s carnage “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

A second event suggesting that America may be waking up to the excesses of wokeness was Ibram X. Kendi’s recent fall from grace.

Kendi’s racialist worldview was inspired by a broader menu of Marxist concepts that have influenced American culture over the last 30 years. Less than four years ago, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and other prominent outlets hailed

Kendi as a bold thought leader.

But after Kendi laid off 19 staff members at his Boston University center, leaving a much-smaller staff of 15, critics accused him of not producing any real scholarship, of having blown through at least $43 million, and of presiding over a toxic work environment.

Kendi’s demand for unaccountable exercises of government power, coupled with his call for “future discrimination” to address past discrimination, should have made people think twice before backing him, but many critics kept silent, perhaps afraid of being canceled.

Now, they’re speaking out: BU is investigating Kendi, and his colleagues are acknowledging earlier misgivings. It’s a propitious time, then, to take steps to rid our institutions of the diversity, equity, inclusion ideology.

The White House and the Senate are in Democratic hands, making it unlikely that an anti-DEI agenda will get federal traction.

Courts, though, can halt the institutionalization of DEI, such as by forbidding federally funded institutions from compelling students to affirm ideological claims.

Next year is a presidential election year, a prime opportunity to debate whether we want to continue on the current path of national and cultural self-destruction, or instead begin to free ourselves.

If a new presidential administration takes office in 2025, it should formulate a clear plan for doing so, starting on Jan. 20. Meantime, states should capitalize on the public’s anti-DEI mood to enact policies safeguarding freedom of expression.

It should be illegal to demand that a person take a political loyalty oath as a condition of his graduation, employment, or promotion.

This means supporting state efforts to make illegal any form of critical race theory, DEI, gender theory or environmental, social

Courts . . . can halt the institutionalization of [diversity, equity, inclusion].

and governance that violates the Constitution. Policymakers also should start making the case against ethnic-studies programs.

Finally, it’s time to consider investigating BLM and like-minded organizations. They’re the ones who helped set the country on a path of collective mass hysteria when they were created in 2013, a process that greatly accelerated with the riots they encouraged and led in 2020.

BLM and its leaders have always been more about global revolution than about ameliorating the lives of black Americans, as they have made clear with their support for terrorism against Jews. Ask the leaders whether they want to bring down American society and implement a Marxist blueprint. It may be legal to do so peacefully, but put them on the record about what they believe and intend.

Recent events have demonstrated to the American public what wokeism, critical race theory, and the DEI agenda really mean.

We may never have as promising an opportunity to push back against these ideas as we do now.