Oct. 17, 2023 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
28:22
The Roots of Wokeism: How it All Started
Dr. Jerome Corsi takes a deep dive into the origins of wokeness and who dreamed up the ideas which have eventually infiltrated Western politics and popular culture decades later. We trace the roots of Wokeism back to Italian Communist Party Founder Antonio Gramsci and his Prison Papers. which centered around both Marxist and Critical Theory. Soon after, Max Horkhemer a member and later director of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research (which, incidentally, started out as a Marxist study group) inner circle, led efforts to research and analyze Critical Theory We also dive deeply into those who continued to promote and advance what would later become Wokeism including Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida as Dr. Corsi chronicles how these Marxist and Neo-Marxist philosophers developed what would soon be simplified and packaged into what we are seeing today as a dominant force in today's Far-Left and Democrat politics.Get your FREE copy of Dr. Corsi's new book with Swiss America CEO Dean Heskin, How the Coming Global Crash Will Create a Historic Gold Rush by calling: 800-519-6268Follow Dr. Jerome Corsi on Twitter: @corsijerome1Our website: https://www.thetruthcentral.comOur link to where to get the Marco Polo 650-Page Book on the Hunter Biden laptop & Biden family crimes free online: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/marco-polo-publishes-650-page-book-on-hunter-biden-laptop-biden-family-crimes-available-free-online/Our Sponsors: MyVital https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/ Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.php The MacMillan Agency: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/the-macmillan-agency/ Pro Rapid Review: https://prorrt.com/thetruthcentralmembers/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-truth-central-with-dr-jerome-corsi--5810661/support.
This is Dr. Jerome Corse, and today it's Tuesday. It's October 17, 2023.
Thank you for joining us on the truthcentral.com. We're doing podcasts every weekday.
Today we're going to do a deep dive into woke politics.
My book is coming out, this new book is coming out, it'll be out within a few days.
It's up on Amazon now, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy, and it is exposing the Woke insanity in an age of disinformation.
It follows, it's part of a Great Awakening trilogy I'm writing.
It follows, all these books are going to look the same.
The truth about energy, global warming, climate change.
It's exposing climate lies in an age of disinformation.
This book says the left is lying about climate change.
There is not any climate change due to hydrocarbon fuels being burned.
Carbon dioxide is not the turning knob of the Earth's temperature dial.
And this book tells you why they lie.
Because what most of us don't understand, unless you've really dug into it or been in the universities really, is that the woke live in an entirely different ideological space.
They have a different perception of reality.
It's a weird perception of reality that developed out of Marxism.
It's what I call Neo-Marxism, and it combines that with cultural Maoism, and Mao had his cultural revolution.
Today I'm going to try to explain some of the pivotal reasons how this phenomenology, this view of reality, came to dominate the current generations being educated in the universities.
We're not going to defeat this unless we understand it.
And it's going to be a little bit mind-bending to understand it, so this is going to be a deep dive, and I guarantee you it'll be a little bit strange.
Now, the roots of this are the Russian Revolution in 1917, and then Mao's Long March in 1934.
They both established communist regimes.
They succeeded.
But ironically, Lenin and Marx's success were a significant setback for the theory of revolutionary dialectical materialism that Marx and Engels had first articulated in the Communist Manifesto.
So what Marx and Engels said is that out of the class struggle, In which the proletariat, identified as the workers of the world, would rise to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the wealthy capitalist class that owned the means of production.
Because, again, the idea was the bourgeoisie was exploiting and stealing the labor of the proletariat.
Stalin understood from Lenin's October 1917 revolution that a small cadre of disciplined and ideologically trained revolutionaries were necessary to win the mass support of the people.
So that you fundamentally see that they're engineering here the techniques of what it's going to take to get a population to abandon Hydrocarbon fuels to abandon capitalism, to abandon the standard of production and wealth that capitalism is allowed to justify or to produce.
A capitalist system has been the most effective system for creating wealth in the history of the world.
Now, Stephen Hicks, who writes about explaining postmodernism, pointed out that essentially that Marxist socialism Marx faced a set of theoretical problems.
Why had the predictions in 1948, Marx predicted that these European countries that were going through revolutions would produce communist states, that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie and take over the means of production, that there would be no private property and we'd all own nothing and be happy.
That's what Klaus Schwab is telling us today in the World Economic Forum.
That's a fundamental Marxist statement.
Now, the revolution didn't happen in 1848 because there was no real appetite for a revolution of that nature.
The workers wanted more.
They wanted better working conditions.
They wanted more wages.
They didn't really want to overthrow the government.
So, the exploitation and alienation, which were supposed to surface out of the class warfare that Marx had predicted, didn't happen.
And so, you know, they were perplexed by this.
After decades of waiting, hopefully, is what Hicks writes, and pouncing on any sign of worker dissatisfaction and unrest, the plain fact was that the proletariat was not going to revolt any time near soon.
Okay, then we had the labor movement and it became even less likely that the proletariat would have a revolution.
Now the next figure in this was Gramsci, and I'm going to spend a bit of time here on Gramsci, because Gramsci plays a major role.
He was an Italian communist who Mussolini imprisoned in 1926 for his revolutionary activities in Turin, Italy.
And Gramsci was born in 1891, he died in 1937, died before the Second World War.
He wrote a series of 33 prison notebooks while he was imprisoned, and unfortunately people kept these notebooks and published them.
So they began to have a great influence.
The notebooks, if you're trying to read them, have no coherent structure.
I've read them, I've studied them, they're about Italian politics, they're about events of the day, they're whatever he's thinking.
But there does run a thread through these notebooks which became identified with Gramsci Gramsci said basically there was a common sense.
In other words, the people had common sense, they had a certain understanding of how things went, and he felt that what Marx had missed was that the common sense was a culture.
That the ruling class, which is capitalist, owning the means of production, created this culture To exercise hegemony, to get control over the middle class and the lower classes, to get a cultural consensus that the bourgeoisie had a right to, in Marxist terms, exploit the workers and take the wealth of the world.
So what Gramsci was saying fundamentally had a massive impact because he was saying that the revolutionary consciousness has to be raised through destroying the culture.
And he understood that you could essentially only get this revolutionary culture by attacking and demonizing the capitalist culture.
So he had what the saying, it was not Gramsci's original statement, but he said that there had to be where Mao had his long march When he established power fighting in the revolution going on in China when he took power in the 1930s, Gramsci was said to have a long march through the institutions
To change the culture, institutions being the judiciary, the press, the Congress, all of the business establishment, all the churches.
You had to penetrate all these with a revolutionary consciousness, otherwise you weren't going to have a revolution.
Now, this got picked up by postmodernists.
Postmodernists are a group of largely French intellectuals, and we're going to come to them in a minute, but the second kind of major development out of Gramsci was a couple of things.
One is you had the rise of the Frankfurt School.
Now, the Frankfurt School is in Germany, Frankfurt, Germany, and it was a group of intellectuals that established themselves at the Institute for Social Research, established at the University in Frankfurt in 1929 during the Weimar Republic.
The Weimar Republic was a very turbulent time in Germany after World War I when Germany had to pay all these war reparations for World War I.
And hyperinflation occurred.
The German economy was suffering from the Weimar Republic, which was 1918 through 1933.
Hitler took power in 1933.
Now, the Frankfurt School was dedicated to applying Gramsci to Marx and also combining it with Freud Because the sexual revolution had begun with Freud saying that our subconscious impulses are essentially sexual impulses that are repressed by society.
And the Frankfurt School felt that if we could unleash these sexual impulses, it would be one of the ways to break the work ethic that had dominated a capitalist culture.
So, Max Horkheimer became one of the, and he was fairly wealthy, Max Horkheimer became the leader of the Frankfurt School.
They were communists.
Ultimately, the battle in pre-Hitler Germany was between the communists, who were typically dominated by Russia, believing identified with the workers of the world revolt
and they were trying to get a proletariat across the world to join an overthrowing
capitalist society versus the Nazis that were national socialists. They were both on the left. National
socialists wanted to have a strong government in allegiance with multinational companies and
they would rule the world with a little bit of socialism, a little bit of free vacations
paid for by the government and Hitler was the first to really start introducing the concept of socialized medicine.
So we basically take care of the people.
Well, the people have nothing, essentially.
The proletariat is made to feel useful, but the bourgeoisie, this oligarchy, which are the communists or the Nazis, each had the same idea.
They would control everything as a small ruling group to their benefit.
It's essentially an oligarchy, and it's a whole system constructed to be justifying of an oligarchy.
Now, The problem was it also got identified with postmodernism.
There's a French movement, and this is another very bizarre set of concepts I'm going to introduce, but the French movement Moved in a direction to, say, questioning reality.
It ultimately comes out of Kant, Immanuel Kant, who said that we perceive everything with our senses, therefore the reality perception is subjective, although Kant also had an a priori element in it, which I explain in the book, which meant you couldn't just make it anything you wanted to be.
It was something objective, even though we perceive it Subjectively, he still thought there was an objective reality.
Now, the postmodernists came along and they questioned that.
They began to think that it's not necessarily that there is any objective reality.
There's a few thinkers in this that are fairly important, and I'm going to try to touch quickly on a couple of them.
One is this guy named Derrida.
And Dorita had a major influence.
He's the guy who introduced, there's Derrida, and he was 1930 to 2004,
he was a postmodernist theorist, his name was Jacques Derrida, and he introduced the word deconstruct.
You had to deconstruct capitalist society.
In other words, you had to look at the word structure, like Gramsci, the culture, the ideas that combined to make a capitalist nation function, or capitalist country function.
So, what Dorita did is he said this construct, we learn through this construct of binary oppositions that language creates, which means we have man-woman, and all these dualities are the way thinking occurs.
But Dorita said that if somebody listens to man-woman and they interpret it as a dog whistle, About the inferiority of the culture, or the superiority of man, and they take offense.
According to Derrida, taking that offense cannot be explained by a misunderstanding of what was said.
In other words, whatever the person perceives, how it impacts them, this is where we get the microaggressions, however it impacts them, is in fact legitimate for them to feel.
And so, therefore, it's almost like schizophrenia.
Whatever you decide you are, and the dualities are denied.
We don't have anymore a male-female.
That's too simple.
So, if somebody says, wait a minute, I'm a different gender.
Well, under the deconstructing of capitalism, these dualities are, in a sense, enslaving.
And it's liberating to be allowing a person to have multiple different definitions of gender and to explore whatever one they want.
Now, another thinker in this, Jean-Francois Lyotard—and by the way, reading these guys is not easy.
This is not fun reading.
They're very dense.
But these French intellectuals and philosophers set a lot of the tone of what was happening in terms of coming up with the woke culture.
Because in postmodernist thought, what was set up by Lyotard is that he said that there are narratives, and he called them meta-narratives.
He said, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards meta-narratives.
Incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences, in that progress in turn proposes it.
The Obsolescence of the Metanarrative Apparatus of Legitimization Corresponds, Most Notably, to the Crisis in Metaphysical Philosophy of the University Institution, which in the past relied on it.
Okay, now that's hard to read.
What he's doing is essentially he's attacking the Enlightenment, which thought that reason was able to Objectively determine fact with science and we could advance by learning scientific principles.
In other words, you couldn't just will gravity to be or will gravity not to be.
Gravity was a fact and it could be measured, it could be understood, it could be made into laws and principles.
Well, Lyotard doubts that.
He thinks it's just a word formulation.
And so therefore, what he is saying is that narratives are created by words to control people and to enslave people.
So we get this whole idea of narratives, which is very important in the woke.
Religion.
That's a narrative.
Your narrative is as good as my narrative.
The narrative is made up to explain reality.
The narrative isn't reality, but it's made to explain reality.
And you can make up your own narrative, or you can get liberating narratives, which is what Woke seeks to do.
Now, when this turns into the whole idea of identity politics, which is what is at the core of Woke, You get a certain schizophrenia and it becomes absolutely, completely blurred.
So, several principles occur is all this philosophy, which is saying we're going to destroy the culture, we're going to use sex to destroy the culture, sexual revolution.
We're going to argue there's no subjective reality, that there are narratives made up in order to control us, and we're going to deconstruct those narratives to create our own narratives of liberation.
And once we do that, we will only tolerate our narratives of liberation being espoused.
If anybody doesn't agree with those, they don't have a right to speak.
So, it operates through a few key principles.
One is the blurring of boundaries.
So, essentially that there are a blurring in the boundaries that is a power of language Under postmodernism, many ideas that had been previously regarded as objectively true came to be seen as mere constructs of language.
Another philosopher, Foucault, discourses.
Foucault explained prisons by a language game.
He explored mental illness as essentially a language definition.
This was the beginning of saying we don't need the police, we don't need prisons.
So there's a loss, essentially, in the postmodern individual is not essentially an autonomous individual.
Individual is a product of powerful discourses and culturally constructed knowledge.
So they look at individuals until they are woken as being in the grips of these narratives that have been placed in their head by the culture.
And they need to be liberated from these to see beyond them.
It gets into Nietzsche, which is, again, the superhuman, the above right and wrong, above these narratives which are designed to enslave us.
So, equally, the concept of this universal These universal principles, postmodernist view essentially embraces whatever people decide are their liberating narratives, and they come down to a series of different definitions that go beyond liberalism.
The classic liberal just wanted to make sure people weren't poor, felt it was unfair.
But these people fundamentally feel that they can transcend work And they're setting up the basis for the transhumanism, that we can perfect human beings, we can advance, we can have a superior race, that a few people, the oligarchs, the Bill Gateses of the world can be in control, and they and their machines will run the world and share the resources of the world for themselves without having to share it with the worthless people who need to be essentially eliminated.
Because the vast majority, there's too many people, the vast majority of people can be seduced into this, but ultimately they're the first ones to go.
Essentially, every communist revolution, Lenin, Stalin, ended up with collectivization experiments, which took away private property, took away the farms, took away people's ability to live off the land, took away private property, and millions died of starvation in both cases.
And it was intentional.
It was a process of gaining control and wiping out a middle class.
Which is fundamental to the progress of the ruling group that wants to maintain a communist state.
The idea that they are neo-Marxists is because they no longer believe that workers are going to revolt until the culture is destroyed.
You deliberate the culture, teach people they can have unlimited sex, sex, drugs, rock and roll, unlimited drugs, nothing wrong with it, it's what you choose to do, any kind of gender you want to be.
The narrative of the United States is that we were a slave-holding country, and that we created the Constitution in order to enslave blacks, and therefore we are fundamentally, systemically racist, and the only way to cure it is to destroy the Constitution with a neo-Marxist revolution brought about through cultural Maoism, Which is where this Red Guard, they go and hold their little red books and wave them in your face, and anyone who has any institutional—teachers, priests, lawyers, pastors, anyone of any institutional security that has built a capitalist society—are demonized, made to confess their sins.
This is what went on in the Cultural Revolution in China, and it destroyed a great culture, and enslaved the Chinese people into the kind of totalitarianism in which they now live.
Now, that's a simple—I'm going to stop there and ask Chris to comment, because I think this is a lot to cover.
And you can see that it has an intellectual root, where the world in which these people live is self-created.
It's like John Lennon.
Imagine a world with no boundaries.
Boundaries are a narrative that are meant to enslave us.
Imagine a world without God.
God doesn't exist.
God's a negative narrative made to enslave us.
If you will, an obstacle maybe.
The idea is if we don't like the way something is going or if something's not going our way, let's imagine it to be the other way.
If you want to feel special or a little bit more so, then imagine something else.
But at this point, Sitting and imagining things is at a smaller level.
What they're doing nowadays, taking the philosophies that were being discussed in the Frankfurt Skill and with the, I will use the term intellectuals loosely on this one, but the idea is now the modern types are trying to force these imaginary beliefs on people.
Well, they're creating their own world.
And in this world, they imagine themselves being well-off.
They've got everything they want.
They don't have to work.
They have plenty of sex.
It's not important to have a partner, so you're not restrained by the institution of marriage.
You don't have to believe in God.
You don't have to be non-racist.
You can't have microaggressions, and people are free to define their own pronouns as to who they are, and you've got to respect it.
It's bedlam.
It's insanity.
And now they're trying to get the more powerful people and the governments of the world to enforce these imaginary realities.
And see, since it's all narratives, and the narratives aren't rooted in objective reality, when the woke say that there's a consensus that climate change is happening and we have to stop using
hydrocarbon fuels, the scientific consensus, they don't mean that true
scientists all agree on this principle.
They mean that those who are enlightened, who see the future world without hydrocarbons,
see that that's a better use of the planet's resources. And it means demonizing hydrocarbons.
Well, it's convenient that hydrocarbons emit carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but it is a minor greenhouse gas.
70% of all greenhouse gases are water vapor, but you demonize carbon dioxide because hydrocarbon fuels don't emit water vapor.
And it would be kind of silly to demonize water vapor.
Of course, it's also silly to demonize carbon dioxide because we exhale it and plants absorb it and grow.
Fundamentally, this is anti-human.
They want to be a super race.
They despise human beings and they want to be able to create their own reality.
Now, the fundamental argument that this book articulates against that is that there is objective reality.
You know, you can't jump off the roof of your house and say, I'm gonna fly.
It won't work too well.
You know, you can't say, I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and there's no basis for that succeeding.
You can't have a boat with a hole in the bottom of the boat, or the water will come in, the boat will sink.
There are fundamental principles by which this place works.
And so when you distort these ideas, And your fundamental idea is to deconstruct everything.
So we have to look at the United States and deconstruct the United States, go back to its roots, cease slavery, make everything a narrative about slavery.
The Constitution was slave owners protecting their prerogatives.
Okay, you erase all the amendments that were passed to the Constitution after the Civil War.
You erase the Gettysburg Address.
You erase all the things that were fighting slavery from the beginning.
The Founding Fathers were not all in agreement that slavery should be written into the Constitution.
They just couldn't get the South to let go of their slaves.
They formed the Constitution in a fractured way.
They knew they'd have to resolve this later in the way they resolved it with the Civil War, and that's ultimately what it took.
But that happened, and we don't have slavery today.
Okay, although the race identifications and the focusing on race means that the woke actually are introducing, again, race as a dividing concept, not like Martin Luther King said, so we have, you know, race is not an important issue.
It's an insignificant identification of human beings that doesn't really define who we are.
Last comments, Chris, and I have to wrap it up today with a little bit of time constraint, and we'll come back to this.
We'll be doing many of these deep dives because this book, I think, is extremely important, and I want people to read it.
It is an important book, but it's also important to look at the history of what these people have been doing.
Note that they're trying to eliminate our history, yet they're trying to also hide their own in one aspect or another to not allow us to understand where these roots came from.
You're not allowed to talk about the millions that were killed.
That's not permissible.
Okay, this is Dr. Jerome Corsi, and we're going to wrap up for today.
I always say in the end, God always wins.
God will win here, too.
And we will be back tomorrow.
As I always say, join me in the spirit of 2 Chronicles 7, 14.
We need to get on our knees and ask God's forgiveness for having allowed this woke to happen.
And we have to pray for God's grace, that he will heal our land.
