The True Meaning of “Woke”

The term “woke” entered general circulation after George Floyd’s dying and the fantastic cultural tumults that ensued.

To be woke?

To awaken to justice of the social variety.

To awaken to the mishandling of Blacks by whites, of women by men, of the sexually heterodox by the sexually orthodox.

Each governing institution of American society rubbed the sand from its previously slumbering eyes… and woke up.

Even the United States Army rechristened its installations.

Thus the former Fort Bragg is the present Fort Liberty. Thus the former Fort Benning is the present Fort Moore.

In true awakening… today men compete in women’s athletics… and clobber them in Olympic boxing.

Yet today The Daily Reckoning redefines the term “woke.”

This wokeness is not racial or sexual in nature. It is instead political in nature.

In our telling, wokeness represents awakening to the actual structures that govern us — and the means with which they keep Americans a-snooze.

Do you believe your vote truly matters, that you and your fellow citizens boss our “democracy”?

Then you remain in slumber. You are not woke.

Do you believe the Federal Reserve is federal — and not a private banking cartel?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the same Federal Reserve is a responsible steward of the United States dollar?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the United States Constitution chains down the United States government?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the Inflation Reduction Act was constructed to reduce inflation?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the stock market is a scene of honest and unmanipulated competition?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the verdicts of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the demon Putin stomped into poor little Ukraine without provocation by the United States and its NATO understrappers?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the criminal system of the United States is just?

You are not woke.

Do you believe most public servants serve the public?

You are not woke.

Do you believe American elections are truly “safe and secure”?

You are not woke.

Do you believe what The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cable News Network, Microsoft NBC or Fox News Corp. tells you?

You are not woke.

Do you believe the “deep state” is a fiction?

You are not woke.

If it is wokeness you seek, you must awaken to the deep state’s deep reality.

That is because the deep state is out to police your mind and tape your mouth.

Below, we remind you of how it does it. Read on.

The Deep State Is Real

By Brian Maher

Mr. Michael Benz once toiled for the State Department of the United States in the field of cybertechnology.

He presently directs an outfit named the Foundation for Freedom Online.

He recently related how the intelligence agencies of the United States — once restricted to overseas spookwork — have trained their sensitive sensory apparatus inward… upon the American people.

They believe democracy dies not in darkness — but in sunlight. They believe there is too much of it. They must therefore work the blinds to restrict the inflow.

Free Speech as Foreign Policy

Mr. Benz:

Because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in 1991, we quickly discovered through the efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department and our intelligence services that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums.

And free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department and our sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments… Internet free speech allowed… regime change operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishment’s State Department agenda.

The high-water mark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012, when… all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration, Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online.

We Don’t Like Free Speech After All

In 2014 free speech executed a 180-degree boomeranging. Free speech became not a saber in State Department hands — but a dagger to its jugular:

In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected countercoup where Crimea and the Donbass broke away. And they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014.

And when the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet. In the eyes of NATO… the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment.

NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov Doctrine, which is named after this Russian military general who claimed that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over Central and Eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that’s what controls elections.

An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outfit… to create psychological buffer zones. Basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies, to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.

When Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about Central and Eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward.

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!

The threat subsequently swam the Atlantic and stormed American shores. Thus American domestic opposition to elite priorities became — in essence — foreign enemies.

For instance, Donald Trump and his democracy-despising voters:

From their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse.

It became full throttle when Trump was elected… Where they took all of this censorship architecture spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DoD, the DOJ and then the thousands of government-funded NGO and private-sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate, by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.

And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy-promotion regime-change tool kit just in time for the 2020 election…

It gave rise to this multibillion-dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact-checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet…

Their whole-of-society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole-of-society effort to stop misinformation online.

COVID

The plague truly set this bunch loose:

They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high-profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these other protected VIP individuals whose reputations had to be protected online. They broke things down into narratives…

Then they plugged these into these essentially machine-learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about COVID. And whenever something started to trend bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same.

Thus elites must wreck democracy in order to preserve democracy. And in their telling, they are democracy itself:

All of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves…

What they essentially said is we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the democratic institutions? Oh, it’s us. It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs.

A Ruthless Information War

Mr. Benz continues and continues. His central thesis — in brief — is that the entire governmental apparatus perpetrates a ruthless and ceaseless information warfare upon the American people.

What separates information from misinformation? From disinformation?

Their exclusive judgment. They alone determine which pharmacological agents are “safe and effective.”

They alone determine that elections are “safe and secure.” They alone determine that which is democratic and undemocratic.

They alone determine which words are impermissible and the just punishment for speaking them.

And they do this all under the sanctioning color of law.

Natural Elites vs. Unnatural Elites

We are not against elites. Society — as Mr. Jefferson argued long ago — requires elites.

Yet he was for a “natural” elite class. That is, an elite class selected by natural talents and merits.

So are we. Alas, that is not the elite class presently in operation.

Presently in operation is an unnatural elite class that holds us in siege. We are against these particular elites.

They are elite not by adjective — only by noun.

Down with the wrong elites!

And up with the right elites.