Niall Ferguson - Woke Totalitarianism 

To all the people insulting me for lying down, please read the opening text that clearly explains my predicament and think a little bit before making heartless comments. Here is a free interview with Niall Ferguson brought to you by someone who suffered from severe, crippling pain for years and yet still worked hard to keep making films... You're welcome. Don't forget to subscribe! And if you'd like to see the full interview or just support my work, you can go here: travisbrown.locals.com/post/1227910/niall-ferguson-interview

As a student in China in 1986~87, I got to know a few former red guards from the Cultural Revolution. They were just a few years older than me, and had been barely-post-pubescent teenagers at the time, when they were ordering their elders to recite passages from Mao's little red book. (When I knew them, they were grad students at my university.) Dr. Ferguson here seems to imply that they were "driven" to this behavior by Mao's dictatorial rule, but that's not what they told me. They weren't forced to do it, they _enjoyed it._ It was a total power trip, and they got off on it. Yes, obviously it was instigated by Mao, but once it got rolling, it took on a life of its own. This is _exactly_ what seems to be happening with a lot of this cancel-culture nonsense of late. It's a self-perpetuating echo chamber of self-righteous, hyperbolic toxicity. Luckily, the _"body politic"_ seems to be mounting an immune response to the infection. ;-)

This really woke me up, if you'll pardon my words. It is spot on and the last bit about the insane racial discriminatory policies implemented to promote black supremacy, coming from a man in a mixed race marriage, really strikes home.

Love listening to Niall Fergerson. For me he isn’t on mainstream media enough he has a lot knowledge to share and is style is so calm he’d be a wonderful influence. Many young people could benefit from hearing how he delivers his thoughts and insights.

7:37 “ I sense that part of the problem with the woke project is that it is inherently divisive. Intersectionality ultimately pits different minority groups against one another.” So true!

Thanks for keeping the dialogue going, Trevor. What you are doing is very important and I share much of it.

Can I just say how inspiring I have found it coming across your video. I have suffered myself from back pain for the last 7 months which often has left me unable to walk or sit. The loss of my mobility and the ability to do things I took for granted before has left me very depressed at times and feeling I couldnt face work. Seeing you doing this despite the challenges your body faces and not letting it hold you back is a real Motivation for me. Thank You

10:50 Reminds me of when Ayaan Hirshi Ali answered a snide liberal interviewer "I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom."

By the way, your journalist who is laying on his back in pain is not the only one who relates to this rhetoric. I too suffer excruciating back pain every day. Believe it or not, I gave it my all in the capacity of a laborer, (truck driver) of 26 years. Not everybody understands this. God bless you both for this conversation. I’ll never tire of true and genuine intellect of the complexities of the human condition and what you have to offer. Satiated over the interview. May the Holy Spirit of God our Father remain with you.

Puritanism was a menace to Catholicism, and Catholicism to Puritanism. Just when we thought that we had left intolerant religiosity behind, along comes Neo-Puritanism.

I’m glad to hear Victor Klemperer mentioned in this context, since I have frequently cited him myself. His analysis of the denaturing of language to political ends in LTI foreshadows the grotesque distortions of the postmodernist lexicon. Believe in this new “language” at your peril!

What a treat to listen to someone with genuine intellect discussing such an important subject. This needs bringing to the masses.

Great content. Thought-provoking.

Part 3: Thanks for the discussion Niall and Trevor. I have a bad back too now for weeks I think. So I can totally feel your pain and it’s a nightmare for sure with a cocktail of pain killers and sleepless nights. I fell asleep for 2 ½ hours a couple of days ago standing up leaning on a settee. Get well soon my friend.

You can really tell the difference listening to a true intellectual speaking from a non emotion based historical drawn perspective. The cleanness of the points raised carry far more gravity than the angry shouty conservative bemoaners, who are increasingly sounding like their intolerant far Left counterparts. Also refreshing to see there are still academics who are ‘responsible’! Superb and uplifting interview. I shall certainly be reading some of this gentleman’s works.

What an incredibly powerful dialogue. Niall explains so well the contradictions of the woke ideology of the left. Thank you.

You’re really taking this laying down. Edit: sorry didn’t read the description first. I’m going to leave the comment for proof of my shame.

Excellent video, thank you! I was waiting for someone to corroborate what I´ve thought for a long time, that wokeness has very little to do with politics and everything to do with a neo religious cult mindset. I was brought up deep in the bowels of religious extremism in a Catholic boarding school run by a cult within the Catholic church and everything I see and hear about modern wokeness is just a page out of their book. Virtue signalling, vicious repression of increasingly minor "misdemeanors", total disregard for the very same rules they promote etc.

‘You’re either with us or against us’ is fundamentally incompatible with ‘live and let live’

Great interview, thank you!

Excellent interview!

an extremely eloquent summing up, i particularly agree with what mr ferguson says about the comparison between the so called woke movement and marxism, whilst there would appear to be some superficial common ground on examination the two 'ideologies' differ markedly, the one thing which appears to be completely absent from the current woke discourse is the question of class, class struggle and capitalism, in england one can see how the labour party has embraced many of the cultural ideas of marxism but has explicitly rejected the economic ideas, many of the lunatic fringe ideas of woke militants(especially in the field of gender) do appear to have some commonality with some of the intolerance and persecution practised by totalitarian regimes who purport to be on the left

Thank You gentlemen for such a great dialogue , i do think there is more to be said on the subject . Thanks ... I relate a lot of what was said to the UK .

All the best, Trevor! Good interview--thanks much.

Dude, i also have back pain. Just started with deep tissue massage, rolling, stretching. Has made a big difference.

Great video and some outstanding commentary by a man who is a giant in his field, Really enjoyed. Also, 😍Nora😍 !

Great interview. Interesting points made by Niall.

Wow, great interview!

What an insightful and intelligent analysis, calmly and coherently articulated - thank you.

Very good interview.

Very informative.

This should be mandatory viewing in our schools - and workplaces

We need to hear so much more from this brilliant man.

While Marxism and Cultural Marxism (Wokeism)are dissimilar in many ways, there is a connection in that both see Oppression as the final explanation of all human problems. For Marxism it's the bourgeoise oppressing the proletariat, while Cultural Marxism has white people oppressing people of color, men oppressing women, straights oppressing gays, and so on. The "marginalized" never bear any responsibility for their own condition, it's always imposed by the bad people, by the oppressors. In addition, both Marxism and Cultural Marxism believe that the only thing necessary to reach Utopia is to smash the oppressor. Smash the bourgeoise. Smash capitalism. Smash colonialism. Smash racism. Smash the patriarchy. Smash homophobia. Smash transphobia. See how smoothly it flows from then to now? And once you have smashed everything that needs smashing all problems will just automatically disappear, because the good people are finally running the world.

6:25 thank you for asking this - I had been wondering this question for a while without really finding a clear answer Edit: Gosh, and this one at 9:02

Brilliant.

Great perspective. Sad to see things that were getting really good in society take such a turn for the worse. This too shall pass.

From Crane Brinton's "Anatomy of Revolution" (1964) “This pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror in the crisis period is partly explicable in terms of the pressure of war necessities and of economic struggles as well as of other variables: but it must probably also be explained as in part the manifestation of an effort to achieve intensely moral and religious ends here on earth. The little band of violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under the influence of active religious faith” (Brinton, p. 255)

This is brilliant, this is explaining this mess to me.

Ferguson has been careful throughout the chaos of recent years. I give him high marks for seeing Trump as an agent of positive change in 2016, but a very low grade on his pandemic response and praise for vaccines. I'm glad that he's coming out with stronger language now, but I do not see him becoming a firebrand for truth the next time obvious injustice is running rampant.

Wow! My head's spinning after listening to this!

This man openly stated he voted for Biden in 2020 and now he's here lecturing you about 'Woke Totalitarianism'. Enjoy the steel boot Niall I hope you keep your comfy job at Hoover so that you can vote for 'Woke Totalitarianism' again in 2024.

Excellent.

Although James Lindsay can be occasionally hyperbolic, I think he's closer on the origins and true nature of Woke. Ferguson seems to identify Woke as, primarily, a religion and Marxism as a political or economic ideology/theory. This seems to be a false comparison: Woke is being defined by the way Woke people tend to think and behave whilst Marxism is being defined by the underlying belief system that drives the behaviour. Ask him for his definition of a religion and then ask him why that doesn't apply to the way Marxists and neo-Marxists think and act. If Woke is being driven by a distinct ideology, and that, according to Ferguson, is akin to a religious ideology - then, how does Marxism get a free pass? The dream (or prophecy) of Marxists is Progress to an Equitable, Socially Just Utopia, isn't it? Effectively, 'Heaven on earth'. Is that a religious goal/belief? If not, why not? Marx focused on the social injustice of Economics. Woke focuses on the perceived social injustices of Race, Gender, Sexuality etc. Both promote the concept of awakening to the true nature of society and the individual's place within it (and within the collective). Once awoken, there is an implicit call to action. Both types awaken to the realisation of systemic oppression. Both worldviews divide the world into Oppressor and Oppressed. Both promote a social revolution with an ultimate end-goal. Both seem to rely on a dogmatic acceptance of the underlying belief. I guess it comes down to whether you define Marxism as (limited to) the fundamental ideology proscribed by Marx (and Engels), or whether you treat it as a project that has evolved / 'progressed'? Nobody is saying that Wokeism is an economic theory. Nor are they saying Marx would necessarily recognise it as Marxism. But, I'm sure Marx wouldn't recognise a lot of what self-proclaimed Marxists espouse. On the question of totalitarianism, Woke lacks a definitive Mao style dictator at the top, but that's what makes it so insidious. It proceeds via (subtle or not so subtle) indoctrination of children and young adults. The top-down aspect is less centralised, it is Leftist social activists becoming teachers, admin officials, governors, lecturers etc. and then working within an environment that deliberately politicises education (operating under the guise of compassionate 'socialisation') in order to breed a new generation of social activists. It is a slower and less bloody form of cultural revolution - this is its greatest asset. Perhaps the best hope of Woke diminishing is simply that it becomes unfashionable. Yet, if there isn't anything more positive for the next generation to adopt, what replaces Woke may be even worse.

Great interview

Niall Ferguson is a colossus intellectual but great to listen to 😂

Very illuminating interview. I am greatly disturbed by this new form of racial and sexual domination over the society. We must not give into this abhorrent form of “social justice“. Social justice is in fact a Marxist term. There is only one form of justice, and that is blind justice that does not take into account anything else other than the application of the law. As Albert Camus rightly pointed out the more equity, the less equality, that is something for everyone to keep in mind when you hear them going on and on about equity equity equity. Equity means denying someone else their rights. Message to all leftists; life is unfair, and a struggle.

When Niall , as part of his opening gambit , says that his initial gateway into history was to gain a better understanding of the human condition, it has been through my reading of history , be that pre-ancient/ ancient/ classical and modern that I have come to the same conclusion as Bertrand Russell when he observed that earth was the lunatic asylum of the universe ..

3:13. The commonality is not at the class dialectic level. It is at the dialectic level, where race, ethnicity, gender and now climate are intermingled with old class dialectic warfare in a cornucopia dialectic.

The thing when people.complain about there being privileged and underprivileged,what they are really bugged about is that they aren't the privileged category. If they become.the privileged, they will have absolutely no complaints about the privileged - underprivileged argument any longer. Very few people are truly concerned or even capable of standing on principle.

Enjoyable.

Fergusson needs to read more Lindsay. He seems to be ignoring almost everything in the development (mutations) of Marxism since Marx's time.

First time on your channel mate....great stuff.

watching the presenter scratch his nose and beard while lying down is totally rad

He is gatekeeping the truth ❤️🙏

What an incredible interview.

The inordinate hostility towards the Western civilization, in my opinion, was an attempt at finding a common rival among those divisive groups.

Such a great interview. Why aren't there 100k views?

I automatically knew it was your back. Its terrible having to explain all the time. I had to crawl to the toilet for a year. You’re a hero to work while you have a bad back. Probably sciatica? Good luck to you sir.

❤❤BRAWO !!!❤❤❤

It's very odd that Niall Ferguson stated that Marxists emphasised "social change"... yet the Wokists don't? (He said: "Marx's concentration on economic and social change.") Sure, the economic aspect of politics isn't stressed much by most Woke. So Ferguson plays down the Marxism connection by saying that the Woke don't emphasise "class conflict". Some of them do. Perhaps not many. And certainly not as much (obviously) as Marxists. Yet social class is, after all, another "identity" to make political use of. All this has to be set within the context of the fact that Marxists have always been updating Marxism - since Bernstein in the late 19th century. Both Lenin and Trotsky had their own takes on sacred Marxist texts. And what was Antonio Gramsci doing in the 1930s? What about the Frankfurt School and Althusser?... This updating of Marxism has happened for the last, roughly, 140 years. In that sense, then, Marxism is very much like a religion which never dies. And various religions never die because they are constantly updated to meet the tenor of the times.... So no one has ever claimed that Wokism is *literally identical* to Marxism. Then again, the numerous Marxisms and Marxist groups were never literally identical to each other.

"Beauty" cannot be denied by ideology.

I wish those possessed with wokeness learn to dance--many of their worries will evaporate.

brilliant

Could anyone share a link to the Guardian article?

Niall is my love. I'd love to work woth him.

This guy was a speaker at the wef

Like most people, he confuses religion with ideology, which is the basis of the woke movement. Basically what you see is an ideology that is dead but try to stay relevant, so it's a reactionary movement. If you pay attention to groups and their life cycle, usually they will have a reason of being, a cause that defines them that is based on reality, so people join and try to correct something and build something else better and more time appropriate. That's what a revolutionary movement looks like. But what happens when a revolution wins and has nothing else to do? then it has to justify itself and it's continuous existence. There are two main ways they will usually do that, first by expanding it's scope of recruitment, and second by finding new activities. It's that second one that will confuse people, because in order to find new activities, they have to deny their original reason for being, the reason people joined in the first place but the façade stays the same. So the people who want the old movement the way it was are usually the first to be attacked because they stop the change. So once that is known, the timeframe is easy to see. You had the sexual revolution in the 60s which was at base anti-religious. It portrayed religion as an ideology and then attacked ideology. So it ended up in extreme individualism which was compatible with liberal ideology. The civil rights movement was only in the US, but it's a replica of it to some degree, but about race. Both pretty much became mainstream and accepted, so the movements had nothing to do. So they had to create something. First they diversified and joined, so that took some of their energy. They increased the scope of their recruits. Then they diversified their activities and of course, once you accept everything, they only way forward is to deny everything. So the sexual freedoms became a new puritanism, anti-racism became racism, and so on. It's totally normal of a dying institution, they all do the same. And since they are now based on a contradiction, what they pretend to be and what they actually are. They can just go back and forth and attack whatever they want, because others will always be guilty of something and the amount of infractions is infinite. So it's totalitarian in that way, but is not true totalitarianism as in an ideology that wants to control everything from the get go. It's simply the normal result of not having any principles, so it's anti-social, while true totalitarianism is social. The danger is not in the movement itself, it's in the ideas that are behind it. The philosophical underpinnings are very likely to lead to true totalitarism. It won't come directly from that movement and may very well come from those that fight against it. All they do is propagate those principles and show they are powerful. People that fight it end up adopting them, and while the woke is still liberal in some ways, the next one probably won't at all. Basically woke is the liberal end game, which at the same time proves it is not sustainable anymore, but also give the tools and justification for the next revolutionary stage. Pretty much everybody knows something is coming, just not exactly what, or even if it will be better or worst. What's for sure, the anti-reason principles are there to stay, individualism will probably go, so there won't be dialogue which needs reason. Perhaps it will be that segregation people want. Right now it is the only plausible path. There is another one, but people aren't smart enough to follow it, so it's barely mentioned.

One thing he could add is that violence as a backlash by the extremists or crazys is real. It puts target mark on these minorities regardless if they aspire to such ideology. Recent shooting in the gay club is one such example. The danger of Outburst of violence is real

He lost me a bit at ‘free society’. Given the way online tracking is going I feel anything but free to be honest!

Please be polite enough to sit up straight, be attentive and be respectful when someone as thoughtful as Dr. Ferguson agrees to answer your question. Laying in your sofa? Tells me you don't take him, or yourself, seriously

Frederick Douglass who you may interested to know had a statue of himself pulled down by students "protests" he was a former slave who also identified as a republican.

The problem with freedom is that the individual has to engage in critical thinking, which can be a painful exercise. It is far easier to blindly follow a set of ideological precepts. Freedom also demands a high degree of civic virtue, which is the antithesis of the cult of the self which lies at the heart of our modern consumerist culture.

Niall, I have to disagree with you on one point, there are others I'd debate with you, but I digress. The most striking feature of wokeism is that is doesn't come from below, it comes from media elites - which is to say, it comes from corporations and the rich and powerful. The collectivism Travis mentioned are the echos of corporate political positions, one of those is to create division among the masses. The achievements of Neoliberalism have only benefited the wealthy and has sown the seeds of discord on the left. When they claim that the establishment is working against the masses, they're correct as the establishment has turned hard towards the right. There are tidbits of wokeism that are produced by fringe independents as well. This has been mixed in the media with conspiracy theories of the QAnon "movement." This effort was created by a small group of people (probably three) that wanted to "brand and monetize" the content and sell this crap to anyone stupid enough to believe it. You mentioned comparisons with the Bolsheviks, it should be obvious to all that News Corp (Fox News) and other right wing media outlets have been running a psychological warfare operation against the United States, business models notwithstanding. Your description of the Civil Rights Movement would be called "woke" by Fox And Friends for instance. So, it should be pointed out by people like you that the basis of wokeism is propaganda that has a specific political aim targeting the left. You know full well that the pre-politics of fascism begins with a lie while deciding who are friends and who are foes. A fascist never picks an actual foe as "The Foe" because the fascist would then be obligated to defeat the real threat. They always pick a non-threatening foe - like the left wing in the USA.

High style conservative authoritarianism, straight from the sliver tongue on a silver platter.

5:44. The crux of the issue

Let's find a better word than WOKE. Being woke isn't in itself a problem. Like socialism isn't a bad thing in principle.

7:10 re: Anabaptists, well, while they may have devoured themselves elsewhere, in their main battleground - the city of Münster, which they "infiltrated" and then got besieged for 1.5 years - they were devoured by the catholic church. devoured, tortured in prison, tortured to death, their bodies put in iron cages, and these cages were then hung on the tower of "their" church as a warning to any potential future dissident. the cages are still hanging there, >480 years later, by the way. dan carlin did a 4h episode of Hardcore History ("prophets of doom") about it, which takes 1.5h just to illuminate the theo-sociological background of the immediate aftermath of Luther's schismatic revolution. very interesting to hear in depth about a "socialist" apocalyptic cult from 500 years ago. [there's a bootleg upload available, if you don't have the means to buy it from carlin's site, just google "prophets of doom soundcloud" ;) ]

You're pretty woke yourself, Niall.

Niall is very knowledgeable overall, but he is missing key distinctions among Marxists. Woke and PC come from the work of Herbert Marcuse who was a later member of the Frankfurt School. Like Antonio Gramsci in the aftermath of WWI, he had turned from the working classes believing that they were hopelessly religious and socially conservative. Marcuse moved to champion blacks, Hispanics, radical women, and sexual deviants believing that they were so repulsive to mainline European society that they would never be co-opted by capitalism and its traditional institutions as the working classes had been. Neo-Marxists of all stripes had given up on the focus on economic and class because of the successes of capitalism and capitalists' ability to buy off the working class with better pay and working conditions, and an appeal to tradition that working classes love. Starting with Antonio Gramsci and continuing with the early Frankfurt School, the emphasis switched to the culture and society's institutions. They developed Critical Theory to examine the dominant culture that saw as hindering their revolutionary efforts. These Neo-Marxists and those who came later saw the Communist movement's future was in capturing educational institutions, News and Entertainment industries and even religious institutions to make them into channels to change the minds of people and to effect change through indoctrination. Economics was still important to them, but they did not see economics as central as did Marx. PC comes directly from Marcuse's *Repressive Tolerance.* Marcuse championed the Sexual Revolution even though later, after he saw the damage it had caused to women, he backed off his support for it. Louis Althusser also pushed a similar variety of Marxism into Structuralism and Post-Structuralism that has taken over the study of English literature that found kindred souls in leftist versions of Post-Modernism. He also tied his brand of Marxism in with Lacan's psychoanalysis, which follows with the integration of Freud with Marx that we see in the Frankfurt School. We also see Marcuse and subsequent Neo-Marxists appropriate Martin Heidegger for their cause. Heidegger has been a big name on campus since the 1980's, but not the Nazi version of Heidegger but a re-reading of Heidegger that makes him capable with a variety of contemporary Leftists. These ideas had captured many in colleges in the 1960's. These students got their Ph.D's and then started taking over college facilities in the late 70s and 1980's and solidifying their hold in the 1990's. Yes, this is a type of Marxism, but not one that would be recognizable by Marx or by Lenin. But you see elements of the indoctrination and the denial of objective truth in Stalinism that is brought out in Orwell's *1984.*

Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco is ground zero.

Part 2: Obviously they face a problem in justifying anything since there are no in itself justifiers and justified and justifier. Only exchanges in the micro context. As a strategy they can go for an account t of history that has genesis events, that is events that happen in some local context that can spread and be copied and applied but the justification and legitimacy question remains closed because it rested on unity’s or origins. This I would say is the first phase of post modern critique to tear down the existing structures though the interpretation of them as tokens of bad metaphysics. And I would say they have achieved much of this in many contexts. The second phase seems to have been bizarrely to make these deconstructive projects not just on the ground but in institutions. And it seems to me what they have done is just swap the identity metaphysis with a difference metaphysics and de-privileging structures for reversal of maser slave. As such then they have it seems to me retained the old institutional structures of top down reasoning like in natural law but placed the metaphysical opposites at the apex of the pyramid. So now we can talk of a hegemony of difference and a totalitarianism for the under privileged. But what is really worrying to me is they still reject the idea of an apex and so they disseminate and network within and between institutions so no one leader is present. This they would claim is what it means to be anti-totalitarian. But rather than think of totalitarianism as reason in an external picture metaphysical institutional structure of the world, we think of reason as human account to be giving an account to be responsible and to be subject to intentional reference, then the dissemination and difference means so much complexity in nexus of institutions and levels that it becomes impossible to find agents for events there is no one there just excuse and escapes and deferrals. Anonymity and zombie institutions. No responsibility, so no authority, no legitimacy and so no bottom up consent. That is structurally like animinious materialism in the denial sense, it is also analogue with extreme free market international capitalism no being only changing equilibrium relations with its shell companies and off shore havens. But it is also like totalitarianism in this sense. Classic totalitarianism is top down but then blame is bottom up though duties that terminate only at the persona to the top. So this is exculpatory for everyone except the person at the top. So the external image of post-modern politics is the totalitarianism pyramid destroyed, in fact the complete destruction of duty with it, internally exculpates everyone. In terms of the absolute break with hierarchy duty they end up with the essence of totalitarianism that of no one responsible and he classic difference of master and slave is Schmidt’s friend enemy distinction but without even a paradoxical sovereignty. The radical slippage between language and things or subject/predicate and substance/property they hold has much in common with the semantics or normative meaning verses naturalism in analytical philosophy like Wilfred Sellers and Donald Davidson. The post modern move was to bring law and justice as a kind of ever changing regulative idea into the picture but with the paradox and dialectic conflict of justice for the whole and justice for the case for the perception of an event. The analytical philosophers focused too much on the problem of the relations between the naturalism of science and the normativity of Lange and duty and promise and contract. They concentrated on the myth of the naturalist ground for the semantic mythical given, while the post moderns took this gap of mythical given not as empirical proposition but as high level duty or principle. You see the post moderns realised early on that materialism as naturalism lie in Marx was not the battle field to die on and concentrated on disrupting the unity of justice at the top to reorganise a new kind of tyranny, not a dictatorship but a tyranny of a machine with no one there. It put me in mind of Robespierre being brought down by his own system and guillotined. This did not make people think the machine was a bad idea, rather they thought it was pure justice to capture its creator in its own law. And opposes of postmodernism love it when they occasionally fall victim to their own rules and anti-racist and anti sexist ordinances. I guess they think a poetic justice since they don’t believe in these rules any way why would they like their enemies to fall under a system they think is totalitarianism. It’s because the post moderns have got them playing their game of friend enemy just with the two under Hegelian master slave reversal like a permanent tyrannical revolution not a totalitarianism. Where analytical philosophy and say Christianity out sources its shadow of war and violence and poverty beyond the respectable discussions of reason, the post moderns play on the boarders and in the forests and mountains between reason and military strategy. They say it’s a revolution not a pick nick, but analytical philosophers have their pick nick and pay others to hold back the poor with violence.

I see the Woke project as an extension of the denazification program that was brought in by the Allies after the second world war. The Frankfort school was not only involved in the Allies need to expurgate the Nazis' mindset but also in the critique of Western values in the 60's and 70's as an Authoritarian regime. Binary terms like homophobia, islamophobia etc. create a binary framework as Niall suggests but they are not only religious or ideological but also increasingly legal terms like denazification which have real effects in terms of privilege and social reconstruction. In the end the denazification program became unworkable in Germany on pragmatic grounds. If history has something to teach us it is that the Woke project will ultimately fail for similar reasons.

Part *: Note i have added this bit as a reply note to Part 5c: So in terms of say social justice and the idea of institutional racism and reparations: what i have said here mean you only need the original difference as a kind of act at a point in time in the past. the series , the succession and the synchronic stat of affairs now is after that event and sustained as a symmetry through bodily habits and rituals both with rules as a kind of skeleton, we cannot "climb out side our own skin (Davidson) or indeed our own skeleton (me) . thus there is in the left view on this a myth of the need for a continued intentional action to make the difference, this is not the case thee is no intention over time just habit and limits of change of the rules. they make then a kind of intentional fallacy but since the left are weak on the distinction of intention and habit or reflect his is hard for them to grasp. eg they have terms like unintended racism and subconscious or unconscious bias. lie an institution apologising for its racist past . institutions do not have intentions. "They treat objects like people man"

15:54 Look at any television advert break for evidence of this.

Bro has a 150IQ and speaks in full sentences

Here in New Zealand, our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has introduced race-based laws and policies, the most obvious being the creation of a separate health system that only maori people can use.

Relationships between people are connected to basic instinct. To be the person or group granting the privilege of say - you can have the university for the day - immediately creates a relationship and may forever separate the two. If the grantor really thought the other was equal, they would just go about treating them equally.

2:32 "the origins of woke ideology" ----------> Some three letter agency perhaps? Niall: "So I think there are some other forces at work here" -------> A three letter agency involved?

Why not just NOT show the guy laying down? We don’t have to look at him, we can still hear his voice. As serious as the discussion was, I couldn’t help myself from chuckling.

Freinds don't let freinds be woke.

felt like he glossed over the fact that we have a woke government

He’s not in a “mixed race marriage”. We must get away from the the term RACISM, RACE, RACIST. Due to the fact that there is only One Race. Instead we must call out BIGOTRY for what it is, in all its forms and places. I’m not of the Black Race. I’m of the Human Race! How is it that we know a Rottweiler, Labrador, Poodle, Dachshund and Great Dane are each a DOG? Even though they are drastically different in appearance and temperament. Any two human beings are 99.9 percent identical. Prejudice and Bigotry are the issues that must be called out. Racism is a political whitewash.

What about Obama and his close association with Rev Wright and Black Liberation theology as a source for the Woke phenomenon?

This man sounds like the last drunk in a bar at 3:30 am. :-)

This almost looks like a between two ferns parody 😂

In my humble opinion, Wolk is a sick twisted combination of the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem, witch trials, and Marxism

Encouraging words, Neill. Let's hope this cult eats itself. Yes, interviewer, they love their minutiae and milli and micro and nano (hardly there) and (imperceptible) pico aggressions. In effect everything is an aggression. This will create a constant state of internal war, they will see insult everywhere and eat themselves.

A rare intellect.

The connection that Niall does not seem to make, is that the Left bases it's doctrine on division according to identity-groups. He just seems to accept as a given, that there is some categorical difference between discrimination on the basis of Class - which Marx promoted - and discrimination on the basis of race, colour or sex. I would argue that the type of identity-groups is a peripheral characteristic of this ideology, and that it is the determination to divide, discriminate and dominate that is central. From this viewpoint there is no irony at all in the Left supporting different racial groups at different periods in history. Division is their core doctrine, not equality.