https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/beyond-woke-mark-tapson/
Like many other linguistic irritants the left has introduced into our cultural lexicon, “woke” has become a household term seemingly overnight. It is generally understood to refer to some kind of Progressive state of self-righteous enlightenment, but what is its origin? How and why does one become woke, and what, if anything, lies beyond this condition? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this social justice religion? If you want to truly understand it and not simply dismiss it with an eyeroll, you can hardly do better than to look to writer, philosopher, poet, and former New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. Few contemporary scholars have researched the left’s totalitarian mindset more deeply, and elucidated it so thoroughly, as he.
In January of 2018 I interviewed Michael Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag here about being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology of his (at the time) fellow leftist academics. The subsequent shunning and harassment he endured from his colleagues and the NYU administration drove Rectenwald to declare himself officially done with the left. He later published a book about it titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here) from the fine people at New English Review Press. The book is a must-read for understanding how identity politics has, as Rectenwald put it, eroded academic integrity and intellectual rigor in the American university.
Rectenwald quickly went on to publish another short but vital work, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (I interviewed him about that one, which you can read here). In this book he argues successfully that the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism.