{"id":603434,"date":"2026-05-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=603434"},"modified":"2026-05-18T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:00:00","slug":"so-where-does-wokeism-come-from-spoiler-alert-the-french-of-course-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=603434","title":{"rendered":"So Where Does Wokeism Come From? (Spoiler Alert: The French, Of Course!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Where Does Wokeism Come From? (Spoiler Alert: The French, Of Course!)<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.org,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

How did wokeism happen?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A French intellectual, who goes by Brivael Le Pogam on X, has written a tightly focused and brief explanation of it worthy of Eric Hoffer, putting his finger on the thinking of French philospher-historian Michel Foucault, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and French philospher-literary critic Gilles Deleuze, the first of whom claimed there was\u00a0\u00a0no such thing as truth<\/strong>, just power relationships, the second of whom claimed truth was malleable, and the third of whom made the really weird claim that seeds were greater than fully developed trees because becoming was more important than being, poor romantic devil.<\/p>\n

Married to guilt-tripping academics of the U.S.,\u00a0he explains how wokery was the result.<\/strong><\/p>\n

His tweet is in French, but Grok translate kicks in on my site, so I will post the translation below the tweet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Grok translate, (with censorship from me of one cuss word that means\u00a0merde<\/em>): (emphasis ours)<\/p>\n

\n

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).<\/strong><\/p>\n

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.<\/p>\n

We must understand what they did.<\/p>\n

Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. <\/strong>That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality\u2014everything is merely a staging of domination.<\/p>\n

Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning,<\/strong> that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme.<\/p>\n

Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree<\/strong>, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.<\/p>\n

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For here\u2019s what happened.<\/p>\n

These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. <\/strong>That\u2019s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sh**\u00a0for one simple reason<\/strong>, and it must be stated calmly.<\/p>\n

A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It\u2019s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.<\/p>\n

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them\u2014that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. <\/strong>By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.<\/p>\n

So, forgive us. And back to work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His viral tweet has been retweeted by Elon Musk, Javier Milei, and 20,000 other people on X, multiplied\u00a0many more times by Musk and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eric Hoffer used to write about these guys in the ’50s and ’60s, the earlier wave of them, French and German intellectuals,\u00a0plus numerous academics in the states, often noting that they have\u00a0never having done a day of work in their lives. He linked their relativist and nihilist radicalism to antisemitism, too. Hoffer\u00a0knew who they were and he\u00a0 had their number.<\/p>\n

So does this guy.<\/p>\n

His tweet advances to the recent wave of them, which created an unholy fusion with U.S. academics to produce wokesterism, the reason we see in our culture the inability to define what\u00a0a woman is, the collective racism charge that never, ever can be ended, and more rubbish that a whole industry has been built around.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eric Hoffer, who died in 1983,\u00a0loved those who could express ideas concisely. Since\u00a0I knew him personally as a high school and college student, I think he would have enjoyed\u00a0X.<\/p>\n

I hope we hear more from this French guy, because knowledge of this kind is power — that is why this\u00a0tweet went viral. It’s why, when I first discovered Eric Hoffer’s True Believer book as a 12-year-old kid, I hid the book under my bed, because to a kid like me, it\u00a0felt like it contained all the secrets of the universe. Hoffer has never been out of print, because what he tells is the truth. Truth like this French tweet is the same kind of truth, and the gives me the same kind of feeling: Exposes the liars is the strongest\u00a0way to stamp the wokeism\u00a0out. It’s a reminder that Western Civilization must win this\u00a0war on ideas.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 05\/18\/2026 – 05:00<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Where Does Wokeism Come From? (Spoiler Alert: The French, Of Course!) Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.org, How did wokeism happen? A French intellectual, who goes by Brivael Le Pogam on X, has written a tightly focused and brief explanation of it worthy of Eric Hoffer, putting his finger on the thinking of French… Continue reading So Where Does Wokeism Come From? (Spoiler Alert: The French, Of Course!)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":603428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,10,21,12,11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-603434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cancel-culture","category-censorship","category-civil-liberties","category-election-integrity","category-equal-justice","category-free-speech","category-religious-freedom","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=603434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/603428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=603434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=603434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=603434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}