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?