The End of Equity
How the Religion of Critical Race Theory Threatens Science by Denying Hard Evidence
IN MY MOST RECENT EPISODE of the Making Facts podcast, I sat down for a stimulating conversation with Colton Dues. We discussed how Critical Race Theory is a religious, anti-scientific movement that has corrupted our institutions of education. We next discussed how Wokeism and Islamic Extremism are part of a continuous, historic retaliation against science. We then agreed that we must not allow any religious capture of our institutions.
We cannot let Christian Nationalism turn Christianity into our national religion, and we cannot let Wokeism ban any reasonable public contradiction of their utopic dreams. We must preserve the separation of church and state, and we must preserve free speech.
Nobody has convinced me that my episode with Colton Dues was a bad conversation. But after I published the episode, some misleading excerpts appeared on YouTube. The next day, Southern Poverty Law Center’s FascistWatch listed me as an official secretary of the American Nazi Party. If that wasn’t enough, three anonymous members of Antifa started a GoFundMe to have me tarred and feathered.
I lay awake at night sometimes, and wonder if the extreme religious responses to this show will take my life. But I only get one life to live, and I don’t want to live it in fear. I will continue to explain the reasons for these arguments, and try to rationally convince as many people as I can that “Anti-Racism” is an irrational, religious concept. I accept that I may be harmed in the process. But I will do everything in my power to avoid that, because it is reasonable to want safety and freedom from violence and crime.
I hope that reason will prevail. I do not hope out of faith— I hope because even in these strange times, there is evidence that we can recover from our irrationality.
Reason vs. Faith
All scientific disciplines share a property: they update themselves through critical thinking. In this way, Sciences are Models of Reality That Are Disciplined By Reason. A scientific thinker uses reason to rigorously test counterexamples to their conclusions. A scientific thinker updates their model of reality with the best available evidence. Sciences thus tend to look more like reality as they develop.
Religions are the opposite kind of discipline, because religious devotion forbids critical thinking. Religions are Models of Reality That Are Disciplined By Faith. A religious believer’s faith is tested by evidence. The believer succeeds when they “take a leap,” dismiss counterexamples, and maintain their core beliefs.
Unlike sciences, which seek to update their core beliefs by testing counterexamples, Many religions explicitly announce their mission to preserve their beliefs at all costs (E.g., “Orthodox,” “Fundamentalist,” and “Extremist” denominations of major religions). Religions thus seek to maintain their core beliefs in spite of counterexamples.
Imagine: I religiously believe that the Wizard of Oz exists as a giant, all powerful green head amid a cloud of mysterious gas. If you show me The Man Behind the Curtain, I will explain The Man’s presence in a way that does not threaten the existence of The Wizard. I can argue that The Man Behind the Curtain is just a worldly, human medium for the transcendent Wizard of Oz. Or maybe The Man Behind the Curtain invites the mysterious presence of the Wizard of Oz through his rituals. This is unfalsifiable, thus meaningless, and clearly unreasonable.
Now, imagine: I’m somewhat more reasonable, but still religious. I admit that the Wizard’s head was an illusion, projected by a machine operated by The Man Behind the Curtain. However, I say, regardless of whether the Wizard of Oz is real— so long as I have faith that the Wizard is real, I am capable of achieving moral excellence. I claim that believing in the Wizard makes me capable of radical infinite love, or it gives me inexplicable knowledge of the right thing to do in a morally ambiguous situation. (Inexplicable, regardless of the fact my religion is explicitly designed to tell me what to do).
Religious believers react to counterexamples in many such ways. When you test a religious believer’s faith, some believers will react compassionately or acceptingly, and tell you how much they admire your different way of thinking. (Of course, many of the same people will privately mock you, or feel sorry for you, or pray for your sick soul).
Believers can also react violently to counterexamples. Some will call you a blasphemer, or a heretic. Maybe they will call you a fascist, a racist, or another “-ist.” Maybe they stab you on stage in front of a live audience, or behead you on livestream video. Or maybe they will threaten to tar and feather you for having a reasonable conversation.
The more extreme the believer’s reaction is to your counterexample, the more faithful the believer appears to their fellows, and their religion thus rewards the believer in proportion to the extremity of their reaction. If the believer loses their own life in the process of reacting to your counterexample, even if they intentionally die, they are given the ultimate reward for their ultimate sacrifice.
For over ten years now, public intellectuals like Colton Dues and myself have outlined the reasons why Wokeism is a religious movement that is taking over our neutral, objective institutions. Yet to our dismay, the new religious movement of Wokeism seems to be picking up speed in our nation, unlike many of the world’s old religious systems. Therefore, we must investigate and explain the religious nature of Wokeism.
Demystifying Wokeism
After my most recent podcast episode with Colton Dues, I realized why we have failed to convince more reasonable, educated people that Wokeism is a religious delusion. Education can have no effect on a religious belief until its host religion is demystified. That is what I will do, right here and right now.
If you properly evaluate my following argument, you should come to the conclusion that Wokeism uses mystical rhetoric to obscure the fact that it rests on false premises and unscientific assumptions. I will first explain what demystification is, and then I will apply the process of demystification to the religion of Wokeism.
So, first: what is Demystification?
Demystification is the rational explanation of how a faith-based religious belief system actually works. Once the explanatory theory of how the religion works is rationally presented, evidence can begin to collect around it, until the body of evidence can change the mind of an average reasonable person. Only then, can a religion fade into obscurity.
Almost no people today believe that lightning is thrown by Zeus. Soon, almost no people will believe in divine intervention or physics-defying miracles. Eventually, hopefully, almost no people will believe that all humans are equal in every important capacity.
Older world religions, as a rule, rely on beliefs in supernatural events that cannot be scientifically explained. Religions fade into history as science demystifies them. Thanks to thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman— people are less primed to believe that Moses divinely parted the Red Sea, or that God spontaneously created nature. Those religious fantasies can no longer suspend the disbelief of an average audience.
The people who believed those stories back when the stories were created believed plenty of other unreasonable stories. Over 1500 years after the bible was written, many people believed that a goat’s gallstone cured any poison. Those who died as a result of their belief in the power of “Bezoars” join countless others in vain, whose causes of death were religious belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Today, the practices of homeopathy and “holistic medicine” continue, but there is no doubt that the practices have greatly diminished— thanks to Reason.
Thankfully, science does not tolerate mysticism because science demands a rigorous explanation of the evidence to support a belief.
Imagine: a scientific thinker witnesses what appears to be Moses parting the Red Sea. That scientific thinker will not even probabilistically conclude that the Sea parted by divine intervention, until the thinker has collected a substantial amount of evidence, considered all possible explanations, and tested their theories. Reason thus protects a scientific thinker from the influence of religious dogma.
Religion is therefore threatened by science and reason, and so religion is chiefly concerned with controlling education and public speech. Proper education and free speech guarantee the exposure to evidence and scientific thinking. Religious leaders of old, outdated religions understand that their dogma is threatened by scientific evidence, and that science builds upon itself naturally through the use of reason. Religious leaders must therefore fight to dominate the exchange and discussion of scientific evidence, if they want to keep their religions from fading into the twilight of history.
Because religion is fundamentally unscientific, it cannot combat scientific evidence with other scientific evidence— thus, religion has to resort to other tactics.
The Scopes Monkey Trial is a perfect example. The revolutionary scientific concept of Darwinian Evolution contradicted the foundational religious concept of Special Creation. Due to religious opposition, scientists had to fight to present mounting empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s theory. Teachers who taught evolution in many schools were fired, ostracized, and threatened— the classic religious reaction to a counterexample. But thanks to scientists who fought for free speech and education, today the average American believes in evolution.
Just like the Scopes Trial Christians, Wokeism’s religious believers demand the removal of teachers and public speakers who contradict Woke ideology. But just what are Wokeism’s central ideological beliefs?
Today, because I am fresh from my conversation with Colton Dues, one particular dogma of Wokeism is on my mind. In fact, I already revealed it earlier, when I listed some other religious beliefs that will fade into obscurity. A core religious belief of Wokeist doctrine is That All Humans Are Fundamentally Equal In Every Important Capacity.
My demystifying thesis is this: The Wokeist belief that all humans are fundamentally equal in every important capacity is not a scientific theory; it is just an unfalsifiable religious dogma.
Now that you have been introduced to my demystifying theory, you will not be able to ignore the mounting empirical evidence that contradicts the Wokeist’s religious propositions, and you will not be able to deny that Wokeists cannot combat evidence with evidence, so they resort to standard religious reactionary techniques.
To further demystify the Wokeist methodology, I will now reveal some Woke religious reactionary techniques.
The Religious Reactionary Techniques of Wokeism, Explained
Just like religious zealots in the Scopes Monkey Trial era, many Wokeist believers today justify their demands with the rhetoric of safetyism.
Safetyism: If something makes me feel unsafe, it needs to be removed.
Wokeist believers will claim that because the presentation of scientific evidence makes them feel unsafe or offends them, the evidence should be banned, and the people who present the evidence should be restrained, so that the threat to the believers’ safety is removed.
Now, let me make something extremely clear: Safetyism is not the same thing as a Reasonable expectation of safety. For example: if rigorous, objective studies show that violent crime is high in your neighborhood, you are not a safetyist for wanting crime to be removed, you are just being reasonable about safety. Therefore, if you know based on scientific evidence that 90% of the crimes in your neighborhood are committed by black people, you are not a racist for wanting those people to be arrested, even if it means the jail will have mostly black people in it. You are just being reasonable to want to be safe from crime.
The obvious difference between safetyism and a reasonable expectation of safety, is that a reasonable expectation of safety corresponds to actual danger. Wokeists report that they feel unsafe due to the evidence they encounter as a product of education and free speech, but there is no evidence that Wokeist claims of harm correspond to any actual, objectively verifiable harm. The only real, hard evidence we have of harm are the Woke self-reports of emotional suffering, which are unfalsifiable (and thus meaningless) propositions. Meanwhile, there is undeniable evidence that living in a high-crime area increases your chances of suffering objectively measurable harm.
The economics of crime is a concrete, rigorous and empirical science. Besides self-reports of emotional suffering, the arguments made by Wokeists are pure metaphysics, and nothing else. The Wokeist arguments about Systemic Racism, Inherent Equality, and their utopia end-state of Absolute Equity, are not substantially different than arguments for heaven, hell, special creation, divine command or resurrection.
So much for Safetyism. But Wokeism uses the full, long-developed toolkit of religious zealotry to advance its causes, including the ancient religious technique of “system-level arguments.”
Wokeists believe in “systemic racism” in order to justify their conclusions and prescriptions. According to Woke system-level thinking, racism is operating on a level higher than we can empirically perceive or measure.
A cell inside of your gut that is smaller than a wavelength of light can have no meaningful concept of the way that your body operates as a whole system— its whole existence is sustained in too limited a microcosm of reality. Likewise, humans cannot have meaningful concepts of what (if anything) exists outside of our universe. We simply cannot perceive beyond the boundaries of our universe, by definition.
Religious ideologues take advantage of our limitations, and make a career out of speculating what lies beyond the limits of our possible understanding. Because these religious claims cannot be meaningfully addressed, they cannot be tested. And if a believer is not disciplined by reason into scientific belief, that believer will always have to at least concede that an unfalsifiable religious proposition could be true, because it can’t be proven false. The religious believer therefore makes themself vulnerable to religious manipulation, by considering unfalsifiable propositions meaningful.
Woke system-level arguments allow Wokeist believers to reject hard empirical evidence of genetic inequality between races, and the constant improvement of quality of life for all races and nations, because they can always place the function of racism at a level higher than any of us can measure or perceive, and appeal to some particular historians’ subjective interpretations of events. None of these arguments can be meaningfully, scientifically analyzed. But intelligence, genes, demographics, crime rates, and medical records can be meaningfully, scientifically analyzed.
I will prove my point with this example: If you look for two seconds at any photo of an American lynching, you are smacked with hard, tangible evidence of racism. That evidence no longer exists, and it is no coincidence that as the evidence of racism diminishes into obscurity, mounting scientific evidence continues to demonstrate that things are getting better for all races.
Steven Pinker and myself have belabored this point for many decades, so I am fully prepared for Wokeism’s first response. The Wokeist will respond as follows:
WOKE ARGUMENT ONE: In the past, racists could be brazen and public about their beliefs. Now, racism has become more subtle due to the efforts of Anti-Racism. Furthermore, we are disconnected from each other and our local environment, and get our information through managed filters. The racist system perverts how information gets to the average person, so it is no surprise that there is no obvious, hard evidence of racism.
DEFEATER: I am arguing that racism has all but disappeared from the majority of American life, so Woke arguments that racism has indeed receded only supports my points. But, Wokeism continues:WOKE ARGUMENT TWO: If you deny Wokeism, you make the logical fallacy of an appeal to ignorance. The absence of evidence of racism does not disprove the existence of racism.
DEFEATER: Again, this Woke argument is easily disposed of— I basically have already addressed it. I do not argue that the lack of present evidence of racism alone proves that racism has basically disappeared. I argue that one can infer that racism has basically disappeared as the best explanation based on the complete body of evidence. While hard evidence of abject racism has basically vanished, our ability to gather and analyze evidence has dramatically improved. This growing, rapidly improving evidence only continues to contradict Woke ideology, and suggest that actually, things are getting better.
There is no coherent, testable theory for why our rapidly improving social sciences are unable to produce any concrete, conclusive evidence of “systemic racism.” Meanwhile anthologies of scientific evidence contradict every Wokeist claim.
Now, I will move onto Wokeisms most dangerous and powerful claim. Any Wokeist who has gotten this far, despite their immense emotional suffering and feelings of unsafety, will already have long been brooding on this argument. They have already fantasized an argument with me, and in their fantasy they issue their their supposed hard evidence of systemic racism.Enter, George Perry Floyd, Junior.
George Floyd, The Messiah of Wokeism
The video of Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck plays the same impetus role in Wokeist religion, that the icon of Jesus’s crucifixion plays in the Christian religion.
Christian religious leaders have a distinct advantage over Wokeism. Within a short period of time of “The Death of Jesus,” there was no verifiable witnesses to Jesus’s supposed crucifixion, and scores of people eager to falsely claim that they were witnesses. As mentioned above, these ancient people would have been ready to believe in the mystical notions of resurrection, messiahs, and divine intervention, because those processes had not been demystified.
Because Christians established their founding myths early in recorded history, the Christian religion has perpetually sustained the disbelief of their following, because it is impossible to completely disprove Christianity’s remote and ill-recorded events. Thanks to a past culture that readily and willingly believed in miracles, we still struggle with this ancient religious ideology’s attacks on science.
The most vulnerable Christians— those who totally reject the discipline of reason— are still willing to believe in miracles, and many of these vulnerable people continue to self-report (always without the ability to produce hard evidence) that they witness and experience miracles. There are also less vulnerable Christians— those who have accepted reason, but hold onto their faith for sentimental/fear/power-based motivations. These Christians may admit that they cannot meaningfully believe in physical miracles, but they instead believe in spiritual miracles: that their religious practice leads to miraculous transformations of their minds.
My longtime listeners are already aware: these “spiritual” claims are similarly (1) unfalsifiable, and (2) tautological. A religious conversion is just a person’s disregard of previously observed evidence in order to hold some religious beliefs. The convert no longer deliberates about their ideology, because they have now taken the position of rejecting, rather than seriously considering, contrary evidence. The religious convert therefore seems much more convicted, self-assured, self-righteous, and willing to go to extremes for what they believe.
The behavior described above of Christians maps 1:1 onto the behavior of Wokeists around the death of George Floyd. The widespread moral panic that resulted from the viral video of Floyd’s death was totally outsized, in light of the available statistics on police-related deaths, and decades of crime economics.
But the fact that Floyd’s death was a video— not a folktale, not a rumor, not a newspaper clipping— but a video, gave Wokeism a brand new challenge. Because Wokeists can always rewatch video evidence, Wokeists need to be convinced that they saw something that they didn’t actually see in the George Floyd video.
Wokeists quickly ignited the passions of millions of young liberal elites— to excite a riot before scientific evidence could contradict their narrative. Wokeists issued numerous, panicked calls to action, to create immediate iconic protests, and control the context of a moment in American history, so that Wokeism could have an icon to reference for the coming ages.
This can only happen while Wokeism’s techniques operate mystically. Until the Woke way of seeing the world is demystified, Woke people can’t tell the difference between their mystical, ideological beliefs about what happened to George Floyd, and what actually, empirically happened to George Floyd.
Despite tremendous evidence that white people are killed at an equal rate in an identical manner by police officers nationwide, Wokeists believe they are witnessing a lynching when they watch the George Floyd video.
But more unsettling still: there is no medical evidence that conclusively proves that George Floyd’s death was caused directly or solely by Derek Chauvin, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that drugs and unforeseeable circumstances actively contributed to Floyd’s death.
Most Wokeists, however, cite the Floyd video as hard evidence of a murder. Due to Wokeism’s unshakable faith, Derek Chauvin is now serving time in prison— where he is far from safe— for a crime that was never proven. For added insult, Woke culture obsessively antagonizes police and prosecution for this exact practice of prosecuting and imprisoning people with insufficient evidence.
We have now identified the mechanism of Woke belief (dogmatic rejection of evidence), Wokeism’s core ideology (all races are equal in all important capacities), Wokeism’s reactionary techniques (safetyism and systemic arguments), and the legend that acts as Wokeism’s impetus (George Floyd’s martyrdom).
So far, I have demonstrated how Wokeism functions identically to classic, dogmatic religious ideology. This sets the process of demystification in motion, but it needs to explain one final process, and to do that we must evaluate a major difference between Wokeism and past religions. How did Wokeism capture liberal, educated elite Americans— when that class notoriously, historically has rejected other religious ideologies?
The answer is: the same way that other similar recent religions have captured the liberal elite.
The Hypocritical Elitism of Woke Religion
Orthodox Wokeism and its praxis (DEI) target elite institutions such as colleges and high-paying liberal jobs, because Wokeism is a religious ideology that targets liberal elites, just as Christian Nationalism is a religious ideology that targets the conservative poor.
Wokeists easily dismiss the conservative poor, because their elite liberal education has placed them far above their poor, conservative relatives. The fact that conservative poor Americans disproportionately suffer relative to other Americans, at least on par with poor black Americans, is beyond inconvenient for Woke ideology. Liberal elites cannot accommodate this fact so easily with their altruism of Absolute Equity— so, they have to punt. Wokeism thus claims that the rich, white American males had to resort to enslaving their poor counterparts with systemic, racist memes— as a post-civil rights era strategy for continuing to dominate and oppress other races.
Wokeism similarly dismisses poor liberal Americans, with pity. Poor, poor liberal Americans, they say. If they only had the opportunity to receive an elite education like I did, they would see the truth of systemic racism that binds them in their poor ignorance. Of course they believe in racist ideology— it’s a side effect of their oppression.
And conveniently, both these classes of poor conservatives and poor liberals tend to believe in transcendental, idealistic, miraculous old religions (most often, Christianity)— so liberal elites can look down upon them.
This is why when a poor person of color— as they often do— loudly makes statements that would immediately be considered punishable racism or “crazy” religion, the Wokeist bites their tongue and says nothing. (They don’t want to be racist). But if the exact same phrase is uttered by a white person, the Wokeist feels empowered to engage in ideological (or physical) combat.
The greatest threat to Wokeism is thus the class of people that are hardest for Wokeism to dismiss: the class of conservative elite Americans. Because they are the arch-nemesis of Wokeists, this class is given a name: The Alt-Right.
Members of the Alt-Right are educated in the same elite institutions as Wokeists; they are constantly confronted with the same evidence, and many of them claim secular belief systems rather than old “crazy” religion. Yet, the Alt-Right is somehow not compelled to believe in Woke ideology. It couldn’t be because members of the Alt-Right are disciplined to make evidence-based conclusions. So, why do educated, elite people join the Alt-Right?
Here, Wokeism invokes its signature sleight-of-hand: Wokeism claims that the Alt-Right rejects Woke arguments because people of the Alt-Right are those who have (1) accepted the programming of systemic racism, and (2) benefit from systemic racism. Many Wokeists claim that Alt-Right ideology is the philosophical manifestation of systemically racist memes. (Can you hear my dog whistle now?)
A short look at the above Wokeist rhetorical technique will expose Wokeism’s true religious foundations. Just as Christianity is part of the broader Abrahamic tradition of religions, Wokeism is a part of the broader Historical Materialist religious tradition.
Critical Race Theory, the central theory of Wokeism, is a historical materialist philosophy. Historical Materialism is an unfalsifiable, metaphysical system of explaining any possible events in human history, with the guiding principle that systemic classist motivations guide human behavior at all scales. The laws of physics incinerated the transcendent pre-modern God, but the religion of immanent Historical Materialism emerged from the dead God’s ashes.
As a form of Historical Materialism, Wokeism deals strictly in Materialistic claims, rather than Idealism or other transcendental metaphysical arguments. Thus, educated liberal elites do not need to sully themselves with the now out-of-fashion forms of religious thinking that we associate with The Crusades, Priestly Molestations, Jerry Falwell and Joel Osteen. Wokeists instead (hypocritically) claim superiority over other religious thinkers, by conflating their materialistic beliefs as evidence of their epistemic rigor.
Make no mistake: materialism is no more evidence-based than idealism. Pure ideals can be scientifically proven: E.g., mathematics. It does not matter whether you’re an idealist or a materialist— what matters is that your belief is scientific.
Historical Materialist religions like Marxism have maintained a presence in liberal education for almost two hundred years, so the seeds of Wokeism were long sown and germinated by the time that George Floyd’s martyrdom provided the fuel for the moral inferno that continues to burn down our nation’s institutions.
IN SUM, we cannot overcome whatever racism still exists in the U.S. until we stop obsessing about race. We must strive to become color-blind. Obsessively acknowledging race only empowers Wokeism’s grip on American liberal elites.
You are not a racist if you acknowledge data that shows how black people and hispanics disproportionately commit more crime in your area. You are not a racist if you want all people who commit crime to be arrested. You are therefore not a racist if, in a time where black and hispanic people commit more crime, you want more black and hispanic people to get arrested. And you are not a racist if you use scientific evidence to decide whether a murder occurred, rather than relying on the race or class of the suspects and victims.
Those of you who have completed this essay, have been exposed to the Reason that demystifies Wokeism. It doesn’t take a degree in social science to estimate that you are likely in a demographic that already understands these facts. But we cannot restore liberty, order, and sense in this country unless you do what I am doing here. Develop your reason, and exercise your right to free speech. Protect the freedom of ideas in education, and relentlessly pursue scientific evidence, even if it scares your religious opposition. Make your arguments publicly, reasonably, and unafraid.
Although these are strange times, the trend of history suggests that Reason will, nonetheless, prevail.
Thank you for being on the victorious side of history. Until then, Good Luck.
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