At the heart of wokeness is a lie – the Marxist lie that human society is reducible to power imbalances between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus wokeness depends on false narratives to sell itself and smear its opponents.

Below are the final three in a series of the Top Ten Woke Lies subverting American politics and culture. To see the first 7 lies in the series, numbers 10-4 in ascending order, click HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

3) Men Can Be Women, and Other Lies of Gender Ideology

Is there any more disheartening evidence that wokeness has hopelessly infected our cultural and political elites than their unwillingness to define a word as basic as “woman”? Is there only a tiny handful of prominent figures on the Left who are willing to stand up to the bullying mob of gender ideologues and to reject:

• their irrational language eradicating the biological realities of male and female – “birthing parent” instead of “mother,” “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” and “menstruating people” instead of “females,” for example;
• their narcissistic personal pronoun demands;
• their hysterical outrage over the crime of being “misgendered”;
• their obsession with where they sit on any given day along an apparently infinite spectrum of gender identity;
• their tacit approval of biological males destroying the very concept of women’s sports;
• their push to introduce a sexual consciousness in children as young as pre-kindergartners and to flood school libraries with pornographic explorations of “non-binary” perversions?

It takes a rare independence on the Left – like the kind exhibited by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling – to renounce all this cultish insanity, because doing so gets you cancelled and targeted with death threats by gender terrorists. Rowling, however, is a billionaire who can afford to insulate herself against anything the woke mob can throw at her – which is not to diminish her courage in standing up to them, only to note that she is one of the rare few who can withstand their onslaught. Most people risk having their lives ruined or lost, and the woke mob revels in that power.

This madness is all the result of the insidious hold gender ideology has on our culture. This godless, reality-denying belief system has become the tip of the spear of the cultural Marxist assault on Western civilization, because if these gender revolutionaries can erase the distinctions between male and female, or at least intimidate everyone into denying them, then they can successfully fulfill Karl Marx’s imperative to abolish the family. If “male” and “female” are mere cultural constructions which we can deconstruct and redefine at will; if any temporary arrangement of consenting adults can constitute a “family”; if our children belong not just to their parents but to all of us, as alleged President Biden himself declared recently, then words that represent family relationships – mother, father, children, grandparents, etc. – will have no meaning anymore.

The traditional family unit will finally disintegrate entirely, and with it every social and moral norm of Western civilization. The only anchor left to hold society together will be the State. And that, of course, is the goal.

Gender ideology is as corrosive a civilizational threat as you could name, and it is all built upon the denial of biological, cultural, and spiritual truth. A civilization that lacks the courage and confidence to defend itself against such a decadent religion of the self is already doomed.

Speaking of doomed…

2) Man-made Climate Change is Dooming the Planet

An Inconvenient Truth filmmaker Al Gore’s net worth is an estimated $330 million. A 2017 National Center for Public Policy report noted that, at least at that time, he lived in a 20-room, 10,070-square-foot Nashville mansion which used 21 times more monthly electricity than the ordinary American home. He also owns at least two other homes, a pied-à-terre in San Francisco’s St. Regis Residence Club and a farmhouse in Carthage, Tennessee. Months before they separated in 2010, he and wife Tipper also spent $8,875,000 on a gated, ocean-view, 6,500-square-foot villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, wine cellar, terraces, six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

Environmental activist and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whom the United Nations has dubbed a “messenger of peace” for his work on climate change, has an estimated worth of $300 million. He is notorious for traveling many times a year on private jets and private yachts. He owns what has been called “a plethora of properties across California, from a stunning Spanish Colonial-style property in Los Feliz to a sleek beach house in Malibu.” His Los Angeles compound totals over 5 acres, with 15,000 square feet of combined living space across four houses, four swimming pools, and the obligatory tennis court. DiCaprio also owns a private island off the coast of Belize.

John Kerry’s net worth is an estimated $280 million. Kerry, “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” owns a private family Gulfstream jet that, according to a July 2022 report, emitted over 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide since the Biden administration began. In 2016, he and his wife shelled out $11.75 million for a spectacular 18-acre, 7-bedroom property in Martha’s Vineyard. That was in addition to another reported five homes.

I don’t begrudge any of these climate change Cassandras their money or houses. The point of detailing their wealth is to demonstrate that climate change alarmism is entirely the domain of wealthy white elites who jet privately around the world lecturing Western countries about scaling back dramatically on capitalist prosperity in order to save the planet.

This is not the space to debunk the hysteria that man’s carbon footprint will destroy all life on earth in the next 60 days, or whatever the latest time frame is for the apocalypse. Entire books have been written taking this hoax apart in scientific terms. For our purposes it’s only important to note that globalist elites like Kerry and Gore and the World Economic Forum and the United Nations are the powerful puppeteers behind the Great Reset, the push for the common man to trade beef for insects; to trade cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy for the unreliability of “green, renewable” energy sources; to trade the comfort, convenience, security, and privacy of private vehicles for public transportation and walking in tightly-restricted, heavily-surveilled “15-minute cities”; to have fewer children, or preferably none at all, to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint, and so on.

These power-mad, self-appointed saviors of mankind who believe they can change the weather will be entirely insulated from the utopian policies they implement that will devastate the prosperous West and render undeveloped countries into killing fields of starvation and disease. Is it any wonder that these same elites are enamored of the new philosophy of transhumanism, which literally promises its adherents that they will be as gods?

1) America is a Systemically Racist Nation

Surely the most persistent and damaging lie perpetuated by wokeness is the ugly smear that the United States is a “systemically racist” nation. This demonstrably false worldview is axiomatic to the Left, which has spent decades inculcating in our youth an obsession with our country’s sins and shortcomings, and a hatred of our flawed heroes and founders, our prosperity and freedoms, our historical exceptionalism. This deeply-entrenched conviction that we are racist to our core is the lie at the heart of everything today’s Left stands for and promotes: its resentment of our Constitution, its embrace of open borders, its indoctrination of Critical Race Theory and the debunked 1619 Project narrative, its demands for “equity” and reparations for slavery, its tearing down of monuments and renaming of schools, its heated protests against our flag and national anthem, and on and on.

What does it mean to be systemically racist? Certainly individuals (of all colors) can be racist (although the Marxist left, of course, claims blacks cannot be, because they are helpless beneath the boot heel of white power), but to be systemically racist means that racism is “baked into” every structure and facet of American life: the law, the economy, education, city planning, hiring practices, everything.

This term “baked into,” by the way, inevitably rears its ugly head in every discussion about systemic racism, because it is a convenient way of damning a process or policy as racist without having to actually identify where the racism in it lies, just as you can’t point to the baking soda in a cake – you know that ingredient is in the mix, but you can’t separate it out from the final product or even see it. In the Left’s view, the final product – the system itself – therefore cannot be fixed; it can only be discarded entirely to make way for a completely different, and more just, system.

Our black, twice-elected former President Barack Obama even stated that America is infected with racism in its very DNA – a metaphor perpetuated by other anti-Americans such as the 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones. How can you extract a malignancy from your own DNA? As the Left sees it, you cannot. It is hopelessly corrupt.

This lie is upheld by pointing to racial inequalities that the Left believes can be explained only by racism: blacks being incarcerated at a rate far higher than their population percentage would suggest, for example. As wealthy race-hustler Ibram X. Kendi has declared, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi also says that it is racist even to suggest that such disparities might be explained by anything other than racism, such as cultural or behavioral reasons.

Has America ever been systemically racist? One could certainly point to racist practices or policies that plagued our past: slavery or Jim Crow laws, for example. But is racism “in our DNA” as a nation? Is it irredeemably “baked into” our nature? Of course not. The Founders and our founding documents laid the groundwork of freedom and justice for all, and our country’s short, volatile history has been one of continually striving to bring that promise to fruition. If anything, we are a country, unique in world history, that committed ourselves even at the cost of civil war to overcoming our racial sins and shortcomings. This is a truth that the Left cannot accept because doing so would strip their entire victimhood agenda of any legitimacy.

If America is a white supremacist nation with racism “baked into” the system, as virtually everyone on the Left openly insists, then it is the most incompetent white supremacist nation imaginable. It seems hopelessly incapable of preventing blacks and other minorities from achieving anything they strive for. Minorities currently occupy or have occupied every level of power and authority in American society, including President.

There are or have been, to list random examples, black Secretaries of State, Congressmen and -women, Attorneys General, Supreme Court Justices, CEOs, mayors, governors, police chiefs, school principals, university deans, Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff, generals and admirals, judges, managers, surgeons, scientists, bankers, megastar athletes and entertainers – every position of authority and influence and prestige you can name.

In fact, America is so inept at sustaining an oppressive, systemic racism, it’s almost as if – bear with me here – it’s almost as if systemic racism in this country does not actually exist.

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Wokeness, in all its manifestations – climate hysteria, Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and the rest – is a false religion. Its god is equity, which in its essence is revenge against the perceived oppressor class. Its animating spirit is an unholy trinity of jealousy, race hatred, and destruction rather than love, unity, and creativity. It is not, then, a state of social justice enlightenment as the Left would like to define it, but a state of willful Marxist deception. America has come too far as a country to allow itself to be consumed by this subversive lie.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.