The Yoke of Woke: Nathan Cofnas Is Wrong about the Nature and Origins of Wokism
I admire the moral courage of Nathan Cofnas, the Jewish philosopher and race-realist. He stood out against the dominant ideology of Cambridge University and was duly punished for his crimethink. He’s also stood up for the free speech of heretics like Kevin MacDonald, even though he doesn’t agree with MacDonald’s heresies. But I don’t admire the honesty of Nathan Cofnas. It’s hard to admire something that disappears whenever Jewish interests are at stake. For example, here’s Cofnas on what you might call the yolk of woke — the central principles and origins of wokism:
To explain the appeal of leftism — which increasingly takes the form of wokism — you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability — at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities. (“Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem: To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis,” Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter, 2nd January, 2024)
Nathan Cofnas, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the internet meme Wojak
So Cofnas claims that wokism is “wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality.” He’s wrong. Wokism is not a simple phenomenon — not ideologically, not psychologically, not historically. And although I agree that the right has a “Stupidity Problem” and that anti-Semites are often “emotionally disturbed fools,” I also think that Cofnas has a dishonesty problem. First of all, wokism doesn’t in fact take “the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously,” as I will shortly show. Second, wokism’s concern about “the persistence of racial disparities” isn’t to end them but to reverse them. It wants to place favored racial groups at the top and Whites at the bottom. In his article, Cofnas doesn’t address what are perhaps the core features of wokism: its hatred of Whites and Western civilization, and its desire to harm the former and destroy the latter. That hatred and that desire can’t be explained by egalitarianism or a “background of Christian morality.” But they can be at least partly explained by Jewish activism and the longstanding resentments of Jews against Whites and the West.
The wickedness of Whiteness
Let’s take Cofnas’ claim that wokesters take “the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously.” In fact, no, they don’t. They emit rhetoric about equality while simultaneously believing in the innate evil of Whites or men and innate virtue of non-Whites or women. George Orwell called this kind of contradiction doublethink: the simultaneous holding of “two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” But wokism is increasingly less about doublethink on race and more about singlethink. It’s very easy to find wokesters blatantly contradicting “the equality thesis of race”:
A former Seattle city employee has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he was a victim of anti-White discrimination due to a “racially hostile work environment.” … As part of his RSJI [Race and Social Justice Initiative] training, the lawsuit alleges, Diemert was required to attend a two-day workshop in 2019 called “Undoing Institutional Racism,” during which facilitators declared, “white people are like the devil,” “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and “white people are cannibals.” … “Mr. Diemert’s colleagues used their work emails to berate and entertain violence against him, referring to him as ‘some a—hole,’ the ‘reincarnation of the people that shot native Americans from trains, rounded up jews for the camps, hunted down gypsies in Europe and runaway slaves in America,’ noting that it was not worth addressing his concerns because he would ‘just come back with more stupidity,’ and that someone should ‘get a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody,’” the lawsuit alleges. (Seattle City Employee Sues Over Anti-White Discrimination, ‘Racially Hostile Work Environment,’ Fox News, 29th November 2022)
If wokesters took the “equality thesis” seriously, they wouldn’t make anti-White statements like those. No, they would condemn statements like those. They don’t. The New York Times, a bastion of woke, happily accepted the Korean wokester Sarah Jeong onto its editorial board in 2018 despite her long history of spreading “hate and poison” against Whites in ways that blatantly contradicted the “equality thesis.” At American Renaissance, Gregory Hood has accurately described woke anti-racism as a “Church of the Damned” for Whites. Nothing Whites can do will ever cleanse them of their hereditary taint — their original sin — of racism. In short, wokism operates more and more explicitly on an in-equality thesis of race. Whites are innately wicked (“racism is in white people’s DNA”) and non-Whites are innately virtuous. Orwell said this in 1945:
Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. (“Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic, London, 1945)
Orwell used the terms “intelligentsia” and “intellectuals.” Cofnas uses the term “smart people.” Orwell described their racial beliefs accurately. Cofnas doesn’t. And Cofnas doesn’t mention the central role of some particularly smart people in fomenting the anti-White hatred that is central to wokism. Here is the Ashkenazi Jew Susan Sontag:
The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. (Partisan Review, 1967)
And the Ashkenazi Jew Noël Ignatiev:
Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed. (See Andrew Joyce’s “Jews, Communists and Genocidal Hate in ‘Whiteness Studies’,” The Occidental Observer, 12th June 2015)
That is the Jewish “Culture of Critique” described by Kevin MacDonald: the anti-White, anti-Western ideology created by highly intelligent Jews and taken up by much less intelligent Blacks and others. In Britain, the Black academic Kehinde Andrews is a woke hero for books like The Psychosis of Whiteness (2023), which implicitly argues for the enslavement and even extermination of Whites. After all, Kehinde believes that rational argument is useless against the psychotic whiteness that has a stranglehold on so-called Western civilization:
Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. (“The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle,” Journal of Black Studies, Volume 47, Issue 5, July 2016)
Unlike Jewish Sontag and Ignatiev, Black Kehinde is stupid. Non-Whites like him couldn’t have created and promulgated the ideology they are applying. But they can certainly adopt the ideology and base successful careers on it. Kehinde’s stupidity is apparent in the self-refuting nature of his thesis. If “whiteness” were so psychotically powerful in Britain, he wouldn’t be able to criticize it as he does. Could a book called The Psychosis of Stalinism have been published in 1940s Russia? Or a book called The Psychosis of Islam in modern Iran? Obviously not. And what would happen in modern Britain or America to a book called The Psychosis of Blackness? It would be anathematized as abhorrently racist, as a genocidal assault on “black bodies.”
What wokesters want
Well, Kehinde’s book is “abhorrently racist” by the “equality thesis of race” that Cofnas claims to be at the heart of wokism. But no wokester has condemned Kehinde or pointed out where his logic is pointing. If he is right in his claims about “Whiteness,” it follows that only physical force will successfully “overcome” its “Psychosis.” But what do wokesters like Kehinde really mean by “Whiteness”? They mean the physical existence and autonomy of Whites. To defeat the Psychosis of Whiteness, then, Whites must be enslaved or exterminated. What other conclusion is possible if rational argument is impossible and “psychosis” arises inexorably from “Whiteness”?
Cofnas says wokesters want equality. I say wokesters want enslavement and extermination. I think history is on my side, not Cofnas’ side. The Bolsheviks preached equality before they seized control of the Tsarist empire. They then practised enslavement and extermination. Here’s a chilling quote by one of the successful Bolshevik leaders: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” That was Grigory Zinoviev, who launched “the Red Terror” in 1918 after the assassination of Moisei Uritsky and the near-assassination of Vladimir Lenin. Another prominent Bolshevik, Yakov Sverdlov, promised “merciless mass terror against all enemies of the Revolution” after that attempt on Lenin’s life.
Minority rites
Many millions of Russians and Ukrainians were enslaved or exterminated by communists like those. The pattern was very clear: minorities were taking their revenge on majorities. Zinoviev, Moisei, Sverdlov and many other leading communists were fully Jewish, while Lenin was half Mongol, a quarter German and a quarter Jewish. Josef Stalin was Georgian and won supremacy partly because of Leon Trotsky’s reluctance to be the obviously Jewish leader of what was supposed to be a movement for all mankind. You can see the same over-representation of Jews in the proto-woke Weather Underground, a revolutionary movement in 1960s America that claimed to be pursuing equality but planned to enact extermination. The Weather Underground was infiltrated by an FBI agent called Larry Grathwohl, who later described a meeting at which the disproportionately Jewish Weatherfolk discussed how to secure their revolution:
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter revolution and they felt that this counter revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the Southwest where [they] would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t reeducate that are diehard capitalists and the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say eliminate I mean kill — 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious. (“Patriot Larry Grathwohl, 65, Infiltrated Weather Underground, Indicted Bill Ayers,” The American Spectator, 24th July 2013)
People with “graduate degrees from Columbia” are what Cofnas calls “smart people.” And Cofnas says that smart people “are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.” Bolshevism and the Weather Underground prove that smart people often have other and much darker motives for embracing supposedly egalitarian ideologies. The smart people preach equality, then practise enslavement and extermination.
A golem, not a shabbos goy
Jews were disproportionately involved in both Bolshevism and the Weather Underground. Like Marxism in general, communist movements like those are a vehicle for minority resentment against the majority and for minority revenge on the majority. Wokism owes much more to communism than it does to Christianity. And communism foreshadows wokism in another important way. Both movements were created by Jews to serve Jewish interests, then escaped Jewish control. Jews have recently watched in dismay as their “natural allies” among Muslims and other non-Whites have supported the wrong side in the war between egalitarian Israel and hate-filled Hamas. Wokism is escaping Jewish control just as communism did. Georgians like Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria are more examples of the way communism attracted vengeful minorities. But Jews were one of the groups Stalin sought revenge on after becoming leader. Once he had supremacy, he exiled Trotsky and murdered Zinoviev and many other Jewish communists who had learnt too late that he was a golem, not a shabbos goy. Later he murdered Trotsky too. Stalin was a resentful man who tirelessly pursued revenge. That makes him an excellent example of leftist traits identified in this academic research:
In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the relationship of left-wing authoritarianism with the ego-focused trait of narcissism. Based on existing research, we expected individuals with higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism to also report higher levels of narcissism. Further, as individuals with leftist political attitudes can be assumed to be striving for social equality, we expected left-wing authoritarianism to also be positively related to prosocial traits, but narcissism to remain a significant predictor of left-wing authoritarianism above and beyond those prosocial dispositions. We investigated our hypotheses in two studies using cross-sectional correlational designs. Two nearly representative US samples (Study 1: N = 391; Study 2: N = 377) completed online measures of left-wing authoritarianism, the Dark Triad personality traits, and two variables with a prosocial focus (i.e., altruism and social justice commitment). In addition, we assessed relevant covariates (i.e., age, gender, socially desirable responding, and virtue signaling). The results of multiple regression analyses showed that a strong ideological view, according to which a violent revolution against existing societal structures is legitimate (i.e., anti-hierarchical aggression), was associated with antagonistic narcissism (Study 1) and psychopathy (Study 2). However, neither dispositional altruism nor social justice commitment was related to left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression. Considering these results, we assume that some leftist political activists do not actually strive for social justice and equality but rather use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against others to satisfy their own ego-focused needs. We discuss these results in relation to the dark-ego-vehicle principle. (“Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,” Ann Krispenz and Alex Bertrams, Current Psychology, 2023)
Contra Cofnas, wokism is not “simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality.” Malevolence and hatred are central to wokism. Cofnas also ignores the central role of Jews in wokism. Although Jewish activism was certainly not sufficient to create and empower wokism, I would argue that it was necessary. Cofnas can’t admit that and doesn’t accurately describe what lies at the center of woke. Wokesters don’t in fact take the equality thesis of race and sex seriously. And wokism owes much more to communism than to Christianity.
If you want to remove the yoke of woke, then you have to understand the yolk of woke — the central principles that guide its adherents and power its malevolence. Wokism is driven by hatred of Whites and the West, not longing for equality. That’s why the end-logic of wokism is the same as the end-logic of communism: enslavement and extermination. We’re fortunate indeed that modern wokism has no highly competent leaders like the quarter-Jewish Vladimir Lenin and the fully Jewish Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Moisei Uritsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Genrikh Yagoda, Lazar Kagonovich, Maxim Litvinov, Karl Radek, etc, etc, etc.
Ashkenazic Afterword
Writing about the ethnocentric Ashkenazi Nathan Cofnas reminds me that I owe an apology to the alcoholic Ashkenazi David Cole, whom I criticized in my article “First-Amendment Blues.” I’ve sinned against Cole by both commission and omission. My commission came when I hacked his computer and added some embarrassingly inept insults against myself — Adolf Mentally-Unfitler, Heinrich Dimmler, Reinhard Heydick, Oskar Girlywanger, Horst Wuss-el — to the manuscript of “The Gentile-Jew Death Tango,” his reply to my article.
I knew that Cole would peer blearily at the published text through his latest hangover and attribute all those to himself “not being funny any more” rather than to malicious outside action. Sorry about that, David. I’m not a “sieg heiler” (honest), but I am good at writing like a 12-year-old. And my omission? That came when I failed to acknowledge that by Jewish standards David Cole is remarkably honest about Jewish malfeasance. I think he’s much more honest than I would ever be if I were Jewish myself. He hasn’t matched Larry Auster yet, but maybe he’ll get there in time. As for the genuinely Colean part of the anti-sieg-heiler article: yes, I like the tango metaphor, but I don’t think David has thought it through properly. Maybe he should meditate on “The Human-Mosquito Malaria Tango.” And listen for the sound of one hand clapping. Geddit?
I would suggest that it’s not merely a matter of doublethink, but also motte-and-bailey argumentation writ large. The motte (the well-defended rhetorical fortress) is the equality thesis of race and sex differences, where the right has by and large laid down its arms. If the reality of between-group differences cannot even be acknowledged, then all the attacks that follow (dressed in “equity”) will have some degree of effectiveness and legitimacy.
Having lost the high ground of the motte, we find ourselves fighting in the warrens of the bailey, against emboldened anti-white racial cutthroats, Jewish supremacists, cucked agents of demoralization, etc.
Cofnas is at least correct about the battle that must take place on the high ground — the motte must be retaken. But it is far from clear that such a thing is even possible as we are being swarmed by our enemies in the bailey — and are quite often not even willing to recognize, identify, and face them as such.
Whether his blind spots are strategic or simply an inescapable consequence of his identity isn’t clear. But whatever truths Cofnas may dabble in, he does not elucidate a viable path forward.
“Wokeism” is just the latest term for Cultural Marxism which was created in the Jewish Frankfurt School. It was called Social Justice back in 2015, with the SJWs. But the main facets of opposing White hetero Christian men whilst uplifting black lgbt women hasn’t changed.
The end goal of it all is the destruction of Western Christian civilisation.
At the psychological level, a cowardly and parasitical race who lives in constant fear of males, whites, cohesive societies. Their ideal ” society ” is popuiated by disabled, morbidly obese, lesbian, black females. They belong to the lunatic asylum.
God bless you Tobias. I don’t know how you never tire from all of this. I certainly do at times.
Lately, I’m finding that the best way to deal/respond to these harmful loons such as Cofnas, and the Michell Goldberg’s of the world and the rest is to tell them that;
‘Well, I want you to know that many, many people throughout the whole world are learning about the Talmud. They’re also learning that the “Russian Revolution in 1917, was not a revolution but a Jewish takeover of that country, led by Jewish radicals and by the time Stalin died in 1954, well over 50 million ethnic Russian Christians had been slaughtered. They’re learning all about the Frankfurt school and what it is. They’re also learning that a lot of what they’ve been taught about WWII and the roles that many of the world’s leaders played in it at the time, that much of what they’ve been taught, is false’.
I find that usually either shuts them up, or they just call it all a conspiracy theory. Either way, you can walk away from them knowing that exposure is the thing that they fear the most.
Right has a disproportion of simple minded people or those with below avg to low cognitive ability, but having a lower cognitive ability doesnt necessarily mean you are stupid. The main difference of a categoric stupid person and a less smart person is that the first misunderstood more while the second understand less. On other hand, Left has a disproportion of categoric stupid people, specially of high IQ idiots, typical from a sect or cult.
Wokism is the deviation of the main leftist goal, fight social class injustice, to a specific fights by category, specially race, sex and gender. It’s a way burgeious left found to create scapegoats and not directly blaming the rich or upper class for the ills of civilization, like, blame ordinary White Britons for colonialism crimes than British crown and merchantilistic “elite”. It’s a way to keep people divided.
Having briefly read “The Yoke of Woke” I see Tobias Lang inadvertently echoes Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism. Much as he’s correct to notice postwar Jewish subversion, he’s still promoting these Jews to an all-powerful force, much as with the ‘transposition of colour’ where non-whites are innately superior in that they are dominant and thus somehow to blame for everything. I see, as César Tort writes at The West’s Darkest Hour blog (www.westsdarkesthour.com), and as Wagner said, that these commentators simply cannot turn their gaze onto themselves and process that it’s their neochristian (secularized Christian values subsumed over generations by parental introjection) morality that allows the Jews to do this, and which keeps them otherwise weak and focussed on loving their enemy out-group, and their capitalist system that facilitates this individualistic, atomised ‘soul-saving’. He puts out his counterargument, but I don’t see at any point him dwelling on Christianity and honestly critiquing it the same way, thus sidestepping addressing Cofnas adequately. I take it it’s simply beyond most white nationalists, much as with dealing with their ancestors’ catastrophic failures in turning on Germany, and indeed their own families’ anti-Nordic miscegenation. To be honest, I grow tired of reading the entire white nationalist right continually preach on and on about Jews (especially the ‘every single time…’ line) whilst gaslighting the other, more fundamental aspects of their long dissolution. To fight back, they must first be honest enough to recognise what they are, not just what they are subjected to. They might as well be whimpering leftists otherwise, made saintly in the role of the oppressed, these conservative reactionaries. They dig their own graves. Tobias seems to suggest somehow that, as with those not solely criticising hostile Jews (as would be natural for them, being racial enemies) like he is prepossessed to do, all his opponents/oppressors are Marxists. I’d say cultural Marxists, though they do exist, are rare outside of academia and student life. What about the vast group of normies, the white everyday people, the 90%+ of society? They’re not tied to cultural Marxism. Normies would be the clearest point for expressing that our society’s values are shaped by generations of Christianity. The everyday people aren’t schooled in any of these progressive theories, and they’re not activists regardless. Still, preternaturally, they radiate egalitarianism. And it’s the same with the right. It seems like conservatives have backed themselves into a corner over this and created yet another oppressor myth to make themselves feel better (although I do not deny Jewish subversion, obviously). I don’t understand why they have such reticence to examine their own side, and their own people (as a race, and not as a political faction). I certainly don’t think whites are, on the whole, innocent victims, passively absorbing outside abuses, much as their suffering is prominent to us. Surely there is something rather narcissistic about their mantra of dogged self-defence also, as they continue to gloss over the problem. Losing the warped metaphysics and suicidal doctrines of a ridiculous long-entrenched foreign religion does nothing to physically diminish our potential as a race. You talk about subversion and yet you think basing a Western morality system on a set of gospels written by Jews is a great idea? I simply don’t understand why they hang onto it (when I think to myself on it, it’s beyond me totally), were it not for cowardice and false pride narcissism. It makes no sense to me.
Excellent, there was just one detail that you missed. “Wokism is escaping Sionist control.” That is false! Zionism is based on so-called “black propaganda,” which is to disguise its involvement; its agents must explicitly deny being Zionists.
Last year, the Israeli prime minister criticized Orbán for “anti-Semitism” due to the Hungarian’s campaign against Soros. Later, the current commander denied the previous leader’s statements, calling Soros “anti-Israel.”
Their essence is precisely to infiltrate the most diverse movements, and replace any opposition with parodies, false versions of the same project.
So, we can have a David Ricardo, a Mises, a Hayek, a Milton Friedman or a Rothbard; or we can have a Marx, a Lenin, a Trotsky, a Rosa Luxemburg or a Marcuse. And then they “”oppose”” each other.
But this “opposition” is actually the same thing, or at least points to the same place. A traditional Christian society where private property is seen as a natural right, usury (lending at interest) is seen as abominable, currencies are backed, and there is a consensus that marital relations are restricted to God-ordained heterosexual marriage?
Surely, if any Zionist thinker seriously advocates something like that, I will change my name the next day.
What their movements have done (in the last few centuries, and today) is precisely the opposite. Advocating the perversion of nature, the approval and social acceptance of sodomy, the murder of embryos (abortion), drug addiction, the destruction of the institution of family and marriage, the acceptance of unrestricted immigration, the acceptance of usury and large monopolistic corporations (globalism) merged with a bloated state, fiat money, unrestricted immigration, the reduction of the birth rate among whites in the West.