Woke sucks...enough already.

[MrSmith]

Strip away all the euphemisms and slogans of the modern radical left... what remains?

A mechanism of psychological control that's immediately recognizable to any student of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

The bureaucratic class has made a discovery that eluded the crude authoritarians of the past: empathy, when properly deployed, is a more effective instrument of silence than fear ever was.

When corporations mandate "inclusivity training," it's not done out of kindness. It's a demand for ideological submission while packaging the demand as moral. Compliance is framed as decency and dissent is recast as violence.

The person who refuses to affirm what they know to be false doesn't just hold an unpopular opinion...they're "unsafe." They're creating a "hostile environment." The language is clinical, detached, and totalizing.

It leaves no ground on which the dissenter can stand without appearing monstrous.

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This system achieves what no secret police force ever could: millions of people who police themselves.

A 2020 Cato Institute survey found that sixty-two percent of Americans feel the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe.

A 2025 workforce study pushed that figure to seventy-four percent among employees specifically.

What the old authoritarians would have accomplished with jackboots and blacklists, the modern workplace accomplishes with a shared Google Doc and a meeting titled "Alignment Check-In."

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The result is the same: a population that has learned to hold its tongue, to scan the room before speaking, to say the expected thing in the expected tone and to save honesty for whispered conversations in parking lots.

This is not civic peace.

It's what the Church Fathers would have recognized as the annihilation of "parrhesia"

The bold, fearless speech that Scripture demands of every believer and that the early believers considered inseparable from Christian life itself.

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St. John Chrysostom, writing from exile, stripped of his episcopate and driven from Constantinople by an empress who couldn't tolerate honesty, declared that no earthly power can harm the man who does not harm himself.

The saint understood from bitter personal experience that suffering imposed from without is qualitatively different from the corruption that comes from within.

Those who speak a lie to keep their position has already lost more than their persecutors could ever take from them.

Those who refuse, even at great cost, retain the one thing no performance review can ever evaluate... the integrity of their conscience before God.