Chairman Mao’s Handbag

We're going to hell in a handbag! 

Social media has decided that the Woke agenda has so much momentum that it’s unstoppable, and the world as we know it is over. If that's what you believe, or if you believe that we're the ancient Roman Empire and we're about to collapse, you can stop reading now. 

There’s plenty of content that will cater to your fatalistic side.

I am an optimist. But that is not why I believe that Woke will be defeated or will implode at some point.  Brett Weinstein recently said, when comparing Woke and anti-Woke to ‘David versus Goliath’, that those of us in the anti-woke crowd are ‘David,’ and, “I like our chances”.

So do I, Brett.

Marxists have a history of making the population at large lose hope, to believe that it’s over long before it’s actually over. Imagine a baseball game in the 2nd inning. The Marxists are losing two runs to zero but manage to convince the other team to give up because they’re “going to lose anyway”. That couldn’t happen in sports and yet it has happened in history numerous times. 

Even though many of the same techniques of intimidation that have been used by Marxists and Nazis in the past are being used by the Woke now, they are getting different results because our society is different. If you look at the two most prominent examples, China and Germany, you will see a vastly different situation than we have here in the U.S. in 2024. Take Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China throughout the 60s and 70s: Mao wanted to revive the communist revolution. Mao believed that the communists had “lost their way” ideologically in the years since taking power in 1949.   

Before that, China went from an Emperor ruling a horribly corrupt feudal system to Provinces being ruled by Warlords. Then came the Japanese invasion in WWII, and after that a Chinese Civil War between Mao’s Communist and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists which ended with a Communist victory in 1949. 

Meanwhile, Germany came into the 20th Century still ruled by a king, or Kaiser. Kaiser Willhelm II abdicated after the surrender of World War I. When the Weimar Republic took over for the Kaiser, it had a horrible post WWI economy. With runaway inflation, it never really established itself before its last Vice Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, used his power to erode Weimar’s institutions. 

Neither Germany or China had any real civic or economic stability leading up to Nazi and Marxist takeovers of those countries. Similar to the nation building we attempted during the War On Terror with Iraq and Afghanistan, we learned that Democracy cannot be quickly inserted into a culture that has no history of stability or self rule. 

By contrast, we in the United States, Canada, and Europe have a longer history than anyone in maintaining a republic and all of the institutions that go with it. We don’t have the instability China and Germany had. It’s been generations since Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown. I had a grandmother who voted for JFK due to a crush and a grandfather who once explained to me why he voted for Truman over Dewey. 

So what does that look like when the same intimidation techniques get used here? 

Let's take Covid as an example. The principal way that the Cultural Revolution pushed its ideas was that they would explain to the true Marxists that they were “sacrificing” for a better China, but that their neighbors were not sacrificing and were not working toward this new China. This focused the anger of the true Marxists on their neighbors.

During the lockdowns in the Covid pandemic people were told to wear masks, to “shelter in place”, to socially distance, and to get vaccinated. When Governor Ron DeSantis said to stop wearing masks and just go to the beach, in retrospect we see that that was actually pretty good advice. But at the time it enraged the Woke. Why?

Because the Woke were told that their neighbors who weren't wearing masks, who weren't social distancing, or worse, who were not vaccinated, were responsible for “killing grandma”. 

This is classic Marxist technique and it worked…for a while.

Imagine this Fall an announcement that there is a very deadly virus (or maybe a “Bird Flu”) that's going around and that you need to vote from home or vote remotely and you need to “shelter in place” and blah blah blah…how likely are you to believe it?  What do you think the overall reaction of most of the American public would be?

Woke politicians can use the same techniques as Marxist and Nazis but we're finding that they're getting different results.  This should give us hope and renew our faith in the way our government and culture is structured.  

That's the good news. The bad news is that if we sit on our hands and do nothing we can find ourselves in a terrible situation. No Marxist movement ever had more than 10% of the population (The Nazis getting 19% of the popular vote in the last election of the ill-fated Weimar Republic is an outlier). 

We should not take comfort in the fact that we are a supermajority, not just a majority, and that the Woke are a mini minority, not just a minority. This is a well-positioned, well-situated mini minority that has most of the administrative positions in education, almost every position in our government (both elected and bureaucratic), and they dominate the arts and culture, so they are not to be trifled with and certainly not ignored. But this is not a time to give up, this is a time for courage, and for action.

And like Bret Weinstein, I like our chances.