Unless you can get fired for asking it, a rather common question today is exactly what has happened in the past few years to bring society to the point that, well, you can get fired for asking a question?
In other words, how did we from zero to woke in 2.7 seconds?
The answer, as usual, is money. A lot of money. A vapor-trail of zeroes kind of money.
Oh, and of course bullying and cowardice and collaborationism and fear of social ostracization and fear of unemployment and disbelief and a human’s natural tendency to wish to be liked and well thought of and to not see evil and connivance at first blush and the comfort of quiet acquiescence and not-my-fightism and on and on and on.
But it really helps to make all of that stick if you happen to have all the money in the world to buy glue.
While “all the money in the world” may technically be an exaggeration, the actual numbers are so large it is – for the impact it creates – only technically an exaggeration.
That money is now being used judiciously and expertly to massage, modify, manhandle, manipulate, and malform as much of society, culture, and government as possible by the malign manufacturers of fear by consensus in order to extend and entrench their already interlocking international cartel of control.
Take the media, for example. No-longing-jokingly Bond villain George Soros (and his kids, all save one are in the same woke activism business he is) has spent hundreds of millions subsidizing struggling outlets and massaging the egos of industry heavy hitters via purposeful media influence and his Soros Open Society Foundation – all to ensure uncritical coverage of himself and his – admittedly open – effort to undermine the central tenants of Western society.
Instead of doling out targeted funds, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos simply bought The Washington Post to lock in positive coverage of his company and his politics.
Also a “change from within/long march through the institutions” approach has been taken; case in point: the AP Stylebook. By eliminating words that are allowed to be used, the ability to question the current cultural conundrum is ceded to controlling contrivances. It has become so problematic that even the left is starting to notice.
Those are only three examples, but they highlight a critical aspect of the success of the woke movement.
Imagine a baseball team, a good baseball team. Now imagine the team is not allowed to have a catcher and the other team is up first. No matter how perfect the pitch is, nearly each and every batter is going to make it to first base because every pitch will be wild. Again. And again. And again, scoring run after run after run without having to even swing the bat.
That is the current state of affairs when it comes to the mainstream or legacy or activist or whatever-you-want-to-call-it media. The woke team is at bat and the media is the nonexistent catcher and the game is over before it has even begun. In other words, it doesn’t matter how good you pitch if there’s no one there to catch it because Soros and Bezos and everyone at Davos kidnapped, strangled, and murdered and/or just plain bribed the catcher before the game.
Continuing with the baseball analogy, Major League Baseball is statutorily exempt from anti-trust legislation; it is essentially a federally sanctioned monopoly, a fact that the woke would find, like incestuously interlocking corporate boards, problematic.
But a look at the interconnected infrastructure of the woke class shows, in essence, a similar structure, meaning that if you don’t play by their rules you just don’t play.
Take the Tides Foundation, for example. While comparatively unknown (outside of California where it plays heavy in state and local issues,) Tides can be seen as the Ur-foundation.
The San Francisco-based group not only funds progressive causes and “non-profits,” it even provides new ones with office space and access to its network of donors and contacts (its incubator project.) Tides also provides advice to people and companies on how to spend their money via its emphasis on “impact investing,” which it defines as: “investing money to support social change while potentially generating financial return.” (And here’s a deeper dive into its evil cousin effective altruism.)
Unlike traditional charities, Tides engages in openly political activities in concert with a Murderer’s Row of the usual woke suspects. From its Wikipedia (which Tides helps pay for) page:
“(Tides co-founder Drummond) Pike along with George Soros and other Democracy Alliance members John R. Hunting; Paul Rudd (co-founder of Adaptive Analytics); Pat Stryker; Nicholas Hanauer; ex-Clinton administration official Rob Stein; Gail Furman; real estate developer Robert Bowditch; Pioneer Hybrid International-heir and congressional candidate Scott Wallace; Susie Tompkins Buell; real estate developer Albert Dwoskin; and Taco Bell-heir Rob McKay, funded the Secretary of State Project, an American non-profit, 527 political action committee focused on electing reform-minded progressive Secretaries of State in battleground states, who typically oversee the election process.[10] The Alliance was critical in getting California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie re-elected.”
Secretaries of State are the people in charge of elections.
The list of groups Tides assists is global and extensive. From the Association for Progressive Communications to Vote Early Day , Tides funds practically every sort of “justice” effort to the tune of hundreds of millions dollars each year.
By the way, as examples of their work and mission, the APC in 2019 worked on a “feminist response to environmental justice, ‘I do not want to lay down mountains to be able to use the internet: Decolonising technology as an act of care for the earth and ourselves’,” while Vote Early believes, “When Americans vote early, they ensure that last-minute problems, busy schedules, changing election laws, and voter disinformation cannot prevent us from casting our ballots.”
Even putting aside the recent “everyone and then some gets a ballot in the mail” absurdities, early voting is strongly favored by incumbent officials and political consultants because it allows for ballot harvesting, hyper-targeted messaging, and the fact that it eliminates the possibility of an “October surprise” (see Fetterman in Pennsylvania last fall).
The incestuous nature of the movement is exemplified by who sits on the Tides board and by practically every other activist/non-profit/charity/non-governmental organization board in existence.
For example, the board of Race Forward has 12 members, only two of whom work in private, for-profit industry(ish) – one is tribal consultant specializing in government relations and the other is the editor of The Nation magazine, which is only notionally private and hasn’t turned a profit in a very very long time.
The rest all work for – and get paid by – other elements of the woke state infrastructure.
For his part, Soros’ Open Society board is a parody of Big Woke and nepotism, with three family members, a former managing director of the World Economic Forum, and the chief-of-staff of former UN Secretary Kofi Annan, among others.
But the funds are not just private – they are increasingly public. The amount of taxpayer money government agencies spend on DEI initiatives, creating woke workplaces through increasingly tyrannical regulations, school curriculum changes, transgender “affirming care” health care (yes the government is paying to drug and mutilate children,) rafts of consultants, and politically expedient NGOs is so large (and at times so hidden) it is impossible to know the exact figure.
From illegal alien charities to eliminating the racism inherent in water to this “Deep Woke State” gem of recruiting woke spies , taxpayer dollars are being spent to convince those very taxpayers they are stupid and evil and must conform to change.
To simplify, imagine what is happening, the tick-like embedding of cancel culture cancer, on just one college campus and expand that to every government agency at practically every level
The single largest systematic entanglement of humans in the web of lies was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic response. The financial cost may never be known but the emotional and societal costs are already known to be massive.
Of course, Tides played and continues to play a role in ginning up a perpetual control through fear machine with its funding of organizations like Ending Pandemics, which features a board that played an integral part in the COVID-19 response and is currently focused on the not-at-all terrifying concept of global “participatory surveillance.”
The pandemic purposefully infantilized the public, empowered unbeholden putative experts, transferred huge amounts of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street, and scarred at least one generation permanently (excerpt from – The Unforgivable Request for Shamnesty ):
Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal over-reaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street. The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends. The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and just plain reasonable people like like Jennifer Say for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable – that had been tested and succeeded before.
All of that damage, intentional or not, has cleared the playing field for the eternal expansion of the power of the woke class.
Climate change hysteria – and the nascent hysterias over gas stoves and what the public is being told is the inevitable next devastating pandemic – also play important roles both financially and psychologically. As for the funds involved, that number is literally in the trillions of dollars; as for the unwarranted but extremely useful fear created, that is priceless to the effort to inculcate a state of constant and chronic unease and worry and discomfort in the public. That state of permanent panic is a tool of unimaginable power to those seeking to create an eternal underclass as making rational decisions while suffering from nervous exhaustion is beyond difficult.
Throw in the budgets of major news outlets; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors like the $10 trillion BlackRock; huge percentages of Hollywood and almost all streaming services; direct political campaign contributions; inclusive advertising and the woke algorithms of Google and Facebook; and the growth of the DEI industry from zero to $10 billion overnight and counting, and, well, nearly everything one encounters on a day-to-day basis and one can begin to grasp the magnitude of the effort and the funds behind the forced creation of 8 billion personal “great resets.”
That’s not just enough to turn heads – it’s enough to wash brains.
PHOTO: Money! Photo by Tracy O. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Thomas Buckley
Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, California and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at [email protected]. You can read more of his work at: https://thomas699.substack.com/
