Why Woke People Won’t Debate You

July 31, 2020 Hunter Wallace Anti-Racism, Anti-White, PC, Progressives, SJWs, Woke Supremacy 13

I’ve noticed this myself.

You can’t debate these people or reason with them. They have no interest whatsoever in discussing their opinions. They don’t believe in tolerance. They are bigots in the original sense of the word. Woke people would always show up at our events to try to violently shut us down.

New Discourses:

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate or discussion about their views, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it for ages, probably a year at this point. Surely you’ll have noticed that they don’t tend to engage in debates or conversation?

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation. …

Fourthly, the Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible. They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. Not only that, they are willfully so, and their main objective is to defend and spread their hateful ideology in the world. If you truly believe this about the people you’ve been asked to have a conversation with, would you be about to help them do that by giving them a platform and lending your own imprimatur to them? Of course not. Such views are not even to be tolerated, much less entertained, engaged with, platformed, or amplified.

Furthermore, because of the theories of complicity in systemic evils that live at the heart of Theory, such a stain is automatically contagious, in addition to whatever real damage it does to further its advancement into the world. As they tweet, so they are: “ten people at a table with one Nazi is eleven Nazis at a table.” And not only are they supposed to endorse the platforming of that by sharing a stage with people they see this way, but they’re supposed to do it in ways that the dominant system, which is all of those things as well and their guarantor, approves of and advances its own interests through. These horrible ways include civil conversation and debate, which aren’t happening. …”

This is a huge difference between us.

I’m an “extremist” who relishes rational debate. I enjoy differences of opinion. I love the churn of people arguing with each other. I read countless people who I disagree with politically every single day. I’m constantly reevaluating what I believe and trying to make better sense of the world.

It would never occur to me to round up a lynch mob to hound Andrew Sullivan out of his job. It would never occur to me to harass Mike Adams to the point he committed suicide or to celebrate his death. You will never find me in a graveyard disturbing the dead or toppling public statues. Imagine what it must be like to have the mindset of fanatics who work themselves into a rage because they are offended by statues of people who died like five centuries ago like Christopher Columbus. My primary disagreement with liberalism is that I don’t believe its claims to be universally true. I believed that it evolved in the West when it did in the 17th century due to a peculiar combination of circumstances.

Woke people don’t simply reject our politics. They have been indoctrinated into a religious cult. They are incapable of communicating with people who are outside the cult. They don’t share the same epistemology or ethics as the rest of society. Even though I disagree with James Lindsay on all kinds of issues, the differences between us in epistemology and ethics are much smaller. Woke people reject “soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about)” as the “master’s tools.” They reject the classics, the Christian tradition and the Enlightenment which at least in my case have formed how I think about morality.

“Justice” as woke people understand it is an idea that was cooked up by Judith Butler at Berkeley a few decades ago. Similarly, Critical Race Theory which is also foundational to wokeness was developed by Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School in the 1970s and 1980s. Virtually everything they believe can be traced back ultimately to 1.) the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany in the 1920s which combined Marxism with Freudianism and translated it into a cultural critique and applied therapy 2.) the French postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who were active in the 1960s and 1970s. None of it is even a century old including the most terrible sin of “racism.”

Woke people are profoundly unhappy and much more likely to suffer from mental illness. They have been psychologically tormented by ideas which they have uncritically accepted as gospel. They are perpetually on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic couch in their own minds making themselves feel miserable about being White over made up sins and terrorizing others as an outlet to feel better.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

11 Comments

  1. Woke people reject “soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about)” as the “master’s tools.”

    Translation: math is racist

  2. Philosopher John Searle, the conservative sociologist Peter Berger and others have written about the social construction of reality. What we are seeing is the social deconstruction of reality. With the loss of reality goes the loss of the common points of reference needed for reasoned discussion. At first you’d think that this would turn into nihilistic quiescence, a sort of political Buddhism. If reality is an illusion so too would any actions or thoughts on our part .Instead what we see is frantic activity in the form of protests and violence . Perhaps this activity is a way to fill the personal void in their lives caused by the loss of reality or a way through the mantra of ‘the personal is the political” to disguise their own radical defectiveness for life.

    These and other factors lay behind Eric Voeglin’s application of the concept of Gnosticism to modern politics. The ancient gnostics held that the world was evil and posited against it a secondary reality of perfect virtue and good, In modern politics ,this same negation of reality has left a void filled by what we more formally call utopianism.,again a realm of perfect goodness and virtue. Since evil rules reality, discussion rooted in reality is itself an evil and instead any violence needed to destroy the real is virtuous. Thus no matter your madness, perversion, drug addiction or criminality you are by definition virtuous and good and your enemies an evil to be destroyed.

    Behind all this lies the money of George Soros and others. You have to had it to them that they could weaponize the lumpenproletariat when Marx thought them useless for “the revolution.” We’ll see in the long term who was right.

    • Excellent and deep comments, William. I wonder what might allow people to accept evil in the world and doing something about it, without trying to turn it into utopia. Would it be acceptance of the immutability of human nature?

    • Shared frame of reference comes from shared education. In the USA, history education is: “people of colors lived peacefully from the beginning of time until patriarchal white men invented racism and slavery. Then patriarchal white men holocausted 6 million Jews. Never again. The end.” This is all the historical education that most Americans will ever have. The only other frame of reference people have is pop culture, which is why all political developments are compared to Harry Potter or marvel superhero movies.

  3. Only an animal persecutes and torments the weak and the innocent and those who are seeking to punish innocent people who did no wrong for crimes done by others in the past are nothing more than animals and are worshipers of the animal, worshipers of the beast.

    • Freud was a fraud, from a long and storied line of tricksters, magicians, degenerates and mentally unstable crackpots. Pay him no mind, his “theories” will go the way of phlogiston, the geocentric solar system, the bad/good humor theory of disease, the four elements theory of matter, spontaneous generation, two types of electricity, the solid and indivisible atomic nucleus, miasmas spreading disease and innumerable other bad ideas. Time eventually grinds away falsehoods leaving the truth behind like a polished stone.

    • @ Robert Browning.- – Animals “persecute” NO ONE. Only a human persecutes and torments the weak. Humans who are seeking to persecute the innocent for imaginary crimes of the past are worshipers of human nature.

  4. “They have been indoctrinated into a religious cult”

    When you reject the Lord, something has to take His place. Unfortunately for them, they have chosen poorly.

  5. This describes most far lefties I’ve talked to but it can also apply to the far right. Violence is commonly employed and condoned on both extremes. Americans dislike extremes and that’s why the far right and left have never gotten traction here. Truth hurts huh?

  6. See the “philosophy” of George Berkeley- immaterialism- that tree you “think” you see out the window- it does not exist. Your eyes really are lyin’ after all, common sense is wrong. How many generations have been taught this filth? See “Against Method” by Paul Feyerabend https://tinyurl.com/y6897ks2

Comments are closed.