Battlefield Pickup: A Field Guide to Fight the Woke
Charles Pincourt with James Lindsay show us how in fewer than 100 pages
Woke is everywhere.
Just within the past few days, there have been examples of woke projections coming from organizations ranging from a Canadian teacher's union and the California State Board of Education (where its expected to be found), to the Salvation Army and the Coca-Cola company (where its appearance is a disappointing surprise).
On November 20th, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), a teacher's union which claims to represent "almost 60,000 members across the province," announced a change to their voting rules. The new rules, it was claimed, would ensure equitable voting outcomes despite the woke's protected groups not making up at least half of the organization.
How they plan to accomplish this is a reflection of the mental gymnastics required to adhere to their ideology. Split a voting body into two groups. Not necessarily white and non-white, but "self-identifying" and "non-identifying." In other words, those that self-identify as indigenous, black, and racialized are placed into one group, and those that do not self-identify with those groups are placed in another. Once the vote is taken, evaluate the result and weigh the votes appropriately until an even split of 50/50 is reached.
The example given is a committee of 20 members, 16 non-identifying and 4 identifying, which conducts a vote on a motion to recognize George Floyd's birthday throughout the school district (Ok, it was really the Indian holiday of Diwali). The vote is 13 votes in favor and 7 votes opposed (65%-35%) and the motion fails. This is the traditional understanding of voting. One man, one vote. But based on the premise that the successful passage of the motion is important to marginalized communities, it is declared that the voices of self-identifying members were not heard, despite the equal opportunity they had to freely and fairly vote on it.
The proposed solution would take the votes of each group and adjust them until the end result is 50%-50%. In the non-identifying group, we can see that 12 people voted against the motion and 4 voted in favor (75-25). Similarly, in the self-identifying group, 1 voted against and 3 voted in favor (25-75).
In both groups we see a 3:1 split, so by some form of supernatural woke magic, we can divide 50 by 4 to get 12.5 and add it to the proportion of Yes/No votes to get our 50/50 split. Only in this way have marginalized voices been heard, according to the woke participants. An advantage of this scheme is it can account for any Larry Elders or Winsome Sears that might be found in the self-identifying group. In a video explaining the proposal, a representative for the OSSTF declared that "one person one vote" seems fair but "fair doesn't mean equitable."
The jihad for equality of outcome is here. So what can we do to stop it?
The Ontario public school system, and many other institutions around the world, is what Charles Pincourt, author of "Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combating the Woke in the University and Beyond" might cite as being in the more advanced stages of woke entrenchment. The OSSTF attempted to make an "advance," which Pincourt defines as "an attempt to reach a CSJ [Critical Social Justice] goal." Typically, the woke are quiet at first, using the least amount of force necessary to hide their encroachment until they become more established within a host organization. From there, their tactics become more overt. In the above example, the woke in the OSSTF made an advance which caused an uproar in their meeting. When called on it, they retreated to a safer position under the guise of protecting "equity-seeking groups" from "harmful and discriminatory language" which they claimed was being used in the uproar against weighted voting. The language that was so harmful?
"Reverse racism."
The woke attempted to advance a racist proposal, normal people properly accused them of racism, and the woke called the accusation of racism racist. This is the clown world of advanced-stage woke entrenchment.
In Counter Wokecraft, Pincourt and co-author James Lindsay have provided what could be the first handbook of practical and defensive tactics which can be used to slow, stop, or reverse the progress of woke ideology inside an organization. Whatsmore, upon finishing this brief but dense book, this reader came away with the sense that the woke is a wholly separate entity from the organization it is colonizing, and the leftist virtue signaling coming from large companies today reflects that colonization. It may not necessarily reflect a comprehensive agreement with those sentiments inside the organization itself.
So when Coca-Cola devotes a portion of its website to the catechism of CSJ, there is a sense that the company can be saved despite the advanced nature of its woke entrenchment. When the Salvation Army tries to graft Christian theology onto the retributive woke religion, there is hope that newly awakened woke dissidents inside the Salvation Army can find each other and start pushing back using the techniques found in this book.
When an organization "goes woke," the right typically responds with a combination of outrage and demands to boycott. It may be emotionally satisfying to take a principled stand with our money, but I suspect there are still a lot of Republican supporters out there that still watch the NFL with their iPhones while Christmas shopping with their Amazon Prime accounts. The long march through the institutions carried out by the left since the 1960's cannot be pushed back overnight. If we are as committed as the woke, we can go beyond calling for boycotts and start climbing out of the trenches to retake some lost ground.
Consisting of only three chapters - Understanding Woke, Wokecraft, and Counter Wokecraft - we learn what woke is, the methods by which they establish themselves inside an organization, and the techniques that can be used to combat them. The book is organized like a military field manual, providing the aspiring woke dissident with an easy reference guide with short enumerated sections.
As Lindsay declares in his podcast announcing the book, a complete understanding of CSJ is the price of admission in order to counter the woke directly. In the book we learn that the woke worldview consists of three main parts: it is impossible for us to know the true nature of reality, that all knowledge is socially constructed by oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and that individuals are primarily defined by their group identity. The woke see the world as a vast landscape of oppressors, and the conquest of that landscape is their manifest destiny. They will always attempt to make advances toward their goal.
Their goal, if it wasn't already obvious, is to appropriate the host organization for use in further spreading the woke ideology, and failing that, to kill the host itself.
This is why combating them is so important. There are few areas of life today that the woke have not at least partially penetrated, and if you are part of any organization at all with a bureaucratic structure such as a church, a business, a university, a department, or a community service association, your group will ultimately have to submit to the woke or risk being killed off by it. This book can quite literally help you save your organization.
One technique Pincourt strongly recommends is the use of the secret ballot when voting on proposals in meetings. The woke try to operate clandestinely, particularly during the early stages of entrenchment, preferring to signal each other using sweet-sounding “crossover words” (as Pincourt has named them) that have double meanings, one mainstream meaning and one woke meaning. For example, "inclusion" typically means to welcome various perspectives with the expectation that the final product will be better as a result. However, to the woke, it means bringing in other woke participants like themselves. This is why you will never see them including conservatives in their work regardless of their race, gender, or sexual identity. The woke's definition of inclusion specifically excludes anyone that does not share their worldview.
In a meeting or committee setting in which there is a proposal requiring a vote, the woke will attempt to make the vote public in order to use intimidation and bullying tactics to achieve their desired result. Pincourt suggests taking on a leadership role on the committee in order to enforce a secret ballot so the woke cannot target individuals for retribution. The scheme attempted by the OSSTF described above would (I would think) require the vote to be public in order to determine the appropriate weighting, and if the woke-dissident members of the OSSTF had taken Pincourt's advice, they might have been able to stop the proposal before it effectively silenced them. For those whose institutions haven't yet reached this level of colonization, this book is a welcome resource.
Finally, Pincourt's emphasis on language is of particular interest to parents. Getting back to woke crossover words, Pincourt recommends to be alert for them and to never allow the woke to add their words to any official document. They are the Trojan horse from which the woke army will emerge later. Similarly as parents, it is useful to know the list of words contained in section 3.1.4 and to have a response ready should your child ever utter one at home. Few kids have a reason to say "decolonize" or "empower" outside the context of woke orthodoxy. So if you hear a woke crossover word at home, you can be reasonably certain that your child's class recently covered a CSJ topic in school.
In the context of committee meetings, Pincourt recommends sowing doubt in the CSJ perspective, and this technique can be applied at home too. Make a distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Remind her that CSJ is just as discriminatory as the systems of oppression the woke claim to oppose. The historical track record is atrocious. Two wrongs don't make a right. And woke is the antithesis of the golden rule (this might be a good time to teach her the golden rule if you have not done so already). Pincourt lists many more.
Perhaps most important of all in the context of parenting (and this is my advice, not Pincourt's) is to undermine CSJ by teaching her that it is possible to know things. That knowledge is real and not a social construct. That right and wrong can be known and that the truth applies to everyone no matter who they are. That she is not a victim of a cabal of powerful oppressors. She is more than just an avatar of her identity group. She is a unique and special individual whose value is inherent and evident because she was made in the image of God.
As Lindsay has noted in a previous episode of his New Discourses podcast, adherents of CSJ have referred to themselves as a virus. As we all know by now, a virus is a bundle of genetic material which invades a host cell in order to co-opt its internal systems and reproduce itself. These copies then burst forth from the victim cell in order to repeat this process in other cells. Let us hope that this book serves as a primer for a new army of relentless white blood cells to rally to the defense of the rapidly succumbing host, our country.
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