I must admit that I have grown fond of this new adjective, woke.  It saves me the time of pointing out how delusional, disingenuous, intolerant, illiterate, and religiously fanatical the woke minions tend to be.  Ultimately, to be woke means both "deceived" and "deceiving," and for these reasons, it slides nicely into a linguistically fun Scottish phrase, jiggery-pokery, used to describe dishonest behavior.  Taken together, jiggery-pokery wokery is amusing enough to belittle the woke legions' cult-like comportment and cut it down to size for its mindless silliness. 

Yet it is not silly, is it?  As amusing and bemusing as its zealous adherents appear, their devotion to wokeism's edicts (I won't call them "principles") is deadly serious.  Any small business–owner who has had the misfortune of struggling to earn a living near the scene of some perceived injustice providing the pretense for Antifa and Black Lives Matter arsonists to unleash a new criminal campaign of burning, looting, and murdering in the name of "justice," knows that once the woke go berserker, no innocent person or private property is safe.  The woke love to destroy whatever they touch — culture, infrastructure, social cohesion, rational thought.  To be woke is to embrace chaos and injury as a philosophy.

From an anthropological perspective, wokeism is fascinating because its practitioners believe they are creative freethinkers while they act as lobotomized sheep.  Whatever the woke wizards posing as priests tell their needy followers, the woke herds accept as truth.  Russia stole the election from Hillary!  Man-made global warming causes earthquakes!  Black police officers killing a black suspect is proof of "white supremacy"!  These assertions, thrown out to their intended audience with all the intellectual depth of a viral internet meme, are never questioned or analyzed.  They are quickly accepted as doctrinal "truths" to be defended at all preposterous costs.  Anyone caught noticing inconsistencies — say, wondering why "my body, my choice" does not deserve consideration in a debate over forced experimental mRNA injections — is immediately branded a heretic and thrown to the wolves for not displaying sufficient jiggery-pokery wokery.  In the cult of the woke, the wokiest wonks know to comply.

If deception, violence, and obedience are all part of the woke creed, then contradiction is its life-force.  Black lives matter, but all lives do not.  Racism is abhorrent, but defining people first and foremost by their race is somehow just.  Engaging in stereotypes unjustly blames all members of a group for the actions of a lone individual, but white people alive today must be forced to pay for the crimes of people who not only lived centuries ago, but also are not likely blood-related ancestors.  When all people are treated equally, white supremacy wins.  Equity demands that we destroy systemic racism by systematically dividing the races and treating them differently.  The less white someone is, the more deserving of special privileges — unless that person has Asian ancestry, which necessarily requires discriminatory punishment when decisions about college admissions and job hiring are made.   

We must believe all women unless those women are speaking out against men pretending to be women — in which case, we must first believe all men pretending to be women, no matter how much they do not appear to be women at all.  Biological sex is nothing more than a social construct, yet a man who wears a dress and wig and demands society treat him as he desires is somehow a demonstration of objective reality.  Women's and men's sports divisions and the separation of their locker rooms recognize the reality that women and men are physically different, yet physically different men who mentally pretend to be women are miraculously physically indistinguishable from women and should be allowed to compete against them.  Furthermore, any woman who objects to the imposition of men competing in her sport or undressing in her locker room is bigoted for acknowledging a fact out loud that can no longer be acknowledged as politically correct.  Science demands that reality be based on emotion.

Women should be protected from an inherently sexist society, unless their mothers choose to abort them.  Black Americans should be protected from an inherently racist society, unless their mothers choose to abort them.  Parents should have no say over what schools teach their children but complete say over whether their children are aborted.  Men have no right to an opinion about abortion since they cannot physically become pregnant, yet anyone who claims that men cannot become pregnant is horrendously transphobic.  Menstrual products should also be placed in all men's restrooms.  Again, science demands it.

Hydrocarbon energies are bad for the environment, but mining for the rare earth elements needed for electric vehicle batteries, covering endless hectares of land with solar panels, and dotting the skyline with giant fan blades that routinely kill flocks of birds are all environmentally friendly.  Fair wages are essential, yet African and Chinese slave labor should be ignored.  Using coal and natural gas is dastardly, yet recharging electric vehicles with power generated from coal and natural gas is ingenious.  Extreme cold kills far more people than extreme heat, yet we must obsess over global warming.  The cycles of the sun, the rotation of Earth's magnetic core, ocean currents, geothermal activity, and the shifting magnetosphere all directly alter the Earth's climate, but man alone must be held responsible for changes in the weather. 

Destroying Western economies by eliminating their relatively inexpensive use of hydrocarbon energies will somehow save the planet, even while the globe's most populous developing nations refuse to follow the West's economic suicide.  Forcing impractical green solutions that increase the cost of living for everyone alive today means that more and more people will suffer from poverty and famine, yet killing people alive today is somehow preferable to risking the lives of future humans who have not yet been born (unless the unborn human is an "unwanted pregnancy").  If "kill today to save tomorrow" policies are not ludicrously woke, then nothing else is.

If we are being honest, jiggery-pokery wokery acts as both a religion and an elaborate con.  Normally, an enlightened society would frown upon bigoted discrimination, yet principles of intersectionality demand that perceptions of privilege be balanced by prejudicial bias.  Only answering discrimination with more discrimination, in other words, will somehow fix the problem.  Forcing corporate boards and investment groups to pursue environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards at odds with their legal obligations to maximize financial profits is blatant stock manipulation and fraud against investors, yet once the preferences of shareholders have been illegally swapped for the whims of stakeholders, the woke get away with all kinds of financial crimes.  Replacing principles of equality with notions of equity that justify the redistribution of private wealth is nothing but government-sanctioned theft.  If the woke mantras demanding diversity and inclusion were defined bluntly, they would simply say "anybody but white, heterosexual males — especially Christians who hold conservative political views."  Legalized discrimination, racial preference, and market manipulation do not sound nearly as attractive when stripped of their woke disguises.  Therein lies the con.

For the woke to win, they must make you feel responsible for things you did not do, while encouraging you to take no responsibility for the things under your control.  An immoral, reckless man is helpful to their cause because he has no moral compass of his own.  Abject dependence on the State is the goal.  Religious devotion to woke nonsense keeps the mind soft and the will supine.  Replacing virtue and critical thinking with a secular religion held sacred by the State turns men into sheep.  For the Marxist-socialists running the West, jiggery-pokery wokery is not only useful for exerting control, but also fraudulently divine.

Image: JMacPherson via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.