The Wages Of Woke Are Death

Going woke means more than, as the saying says, going broke. It also means the ultimate loss of life. The grip of wokeness on our society will eventually kill Americans.

Let’s begin with health care. Medical school students, whose learning should be focused on the healing arts, are being taught social justice ideology. Apparently, white supremacy, oppression, and structural racism must be addressed by America’s doctors-to-be, as well as the sin of being white.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion studies are being required at some schools, which of course crowds out time used in the past to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills needed to be a good doctor. Politics have no place in medical schools, but there they are.

At the same time, some schools, as many as 40, are dropping standardized testing for diversity’s sake, reports the Daily Caller. The Medical College Admission Test, which “determines an individual’s ability to problem solve, think critically, and understand concepts about medical study,” does not serve the purposes of the social justice mafia. Now there are other legitimate academic avenues to medical school outside the MCAT. But as we’ve seen in other institutions of higher learning, standards designed to demonstrate and ensure competence are being killed off.

Given these facts, it’s a certainty that many of this country’s doctors of tomorrow and beyond will not have the competence needed to keep patients alive and well. Americans will die or suffer unnecessarily because wokeness demanded that the medical community marginalize them.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine professor and associate dean who wrote “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns,” says the ​​”quiet woke revolution” that had been capturing medicine “erupted in spring 2020 into a full-blown revolution.” 

One win for the woke insurgency is the American Medical Association’s “Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.” Goldfarb says that “unlike other social justice programs, this program is lethal” and “will tangibly reduce the quality of medical care, and almost every American will suffer its side effects.” If medical schools “cut training time in biochemistry and pharmacology for future doctors” to make room for studies that are political in nature, someone is bound to die.

Wokeness is also being found at engineering schools, where DEI programs are growing. We’re told DEI programs and administrators are necessary to ensure fairness and root out exclusion, but “the real goal of the DEI brigade,” says the Stanford Review, the university’s independent newspaper, “is to politicize what should be one of the most concrete and objective disciplines: engineering.” While the “DEI brigade’s” stated goals aren’t being met as promised, progress is being made “in the real agenda of eroding meritocracy.”

Then there is diversity-themed coursework at engineering schools. Mimi St. Johns of the Stanford Review reports that it lacks rigor. Maybe that’s fine for gender studies, but we’d prefer that today’s engineering school students graduate with enough competency to ensure that the buildings and bridges they design won’t collapse. Given that this problem is not limited to only to Stanford’s school of engineering, it’s reasonable to wonder if having “safe spaces” on campus means the infrastructure of the future will be made up of not-so-safe spaces.

Wokeness is also infecting our armed forces, where the ideology “undermines military readiness in various ways,” says Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation.

“It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex,” Spoehr said last year during a lecture. “It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready. And it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness.”

In a Daily Caller article listing “The Top 7 Times The Military Went Woke In 2022,” reporter Micaela Burrow noted that our service academies teach critical race theory; the Marine Corps is “ditching male-centric training practices at” boot camps; the Pentagon has created a DEI committee; and it has also prioritized climate change.

“Under the Biden administration, the Department of Defense (DOD) pushed through a raft of policies elevating racial and gender diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as fighting climate change, as a department priority,” says Burrow, “This ‘woke’ agenda, brought on by elected and appointed leaders, counteracts the military’s culture of merit and distracts from the DOD’s primary mission to defend the U.S. from external threats, critics argue.”

Count us among those critics.

Wokeness is winning because our institutions have become cowardly and complicit; businesses are afraid they will fall behind if they don’t score well on the Corporate Equality Index, which is a Maoist extortion racket that demands prescribed behavior from companies; and the average American is scared of being ostracized and canceled for not just uttering but even holding opinions the mob doesn’t like.

Unless and until we overcome our fears, the malicious and depraved will continue their booted march through our culture and our economy. No one should be frightened to say that a system based on race, ethnicity, or gender over competence, intellect, and ability is dangerous. It is in fact mortally dangerous. 

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board