The Kampf Of The Woke
If you look at the front pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post these days, they are absolutely obsessed by race. And not just by race, but by a specific progressive take on race. It seems like just yesterday that we were told by liberals that it was slander to say that they were going to be going after statues of the Founders next. In today’s New York Times, there is an appeal by a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson to take down the Jefferson Memorial, because racism. Last week, a Times black columnist demanded that “Yes, Even George Washington” has to be cancelled. On July 4, the Washington Post published at Washington and Lee University demanding that not only the Confederate general’s name be struck from the school, but also the first president’s … because racism.
From the digital front page of the NYT now:
Look, Trump is often exactly what they say he is. But the lack of self-knowledge at the Times is infuriating. That newspaper focuses incessantly, and obsessively, on “cultural flash points” having to do with race.
And so it goes. This came out today:
“Findings suggest Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.” https://t.co/JEEKL42R5J
— Jon Ward (@jonward11) July 6, 2020
Not just Washington journalists, but New York journalists too, and all elite journalists. Remember political scientist Zach Goldberg’s amazing finds last year on the Lexis/Nexis database, of how American journalists have gone berserk writing articles using woke, identity-politics jargon? The whole Twitter thread is here. This is one of many examples:
They’re all like that. Now, let me ask you: if you saw the number of mentions of “Jewish privilege” in the US media go from around 200 in 2012 to 2,600 in only four years, wouldn’t you wonder what the hell was going on with our media? If you were Jewish, would that not make you look for the exits?
I bring the Jewish example up for a specific reason. I have mentioned in this space from time to time over the years the profound impression made on me by an exhibit I saw back in 2000 at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. It was about how the German people had been prepared for the Holocaust by a couple decades of propaganda that taught them to dehumanize Jews. I cannot find online a representation of that exhibit; if someone else can, please email a link or post it in the comments. It might have been “Deadly Medicine: Creating The Master Race,” but I’m not sure. I have never forgotten what I learned there. The gist of it was to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn’t come from nowhere — and in fact its basis preceded the Nazi Party.
Nazi propaganda presented Jews as “parasites” — but in that, they were only exploiting a concept that had been around since the Enlightenment. For example, the influential German Enlightenment philosopher J.G. von Herder wrote that the Jews were a “parasite” on Gentile nations. By the late 19th century, with the rise of Darwinism and the eugenics movement among mainstream medical authorities, people began speaking of nations as “bodies.” Jews, therefore, were characterized in mainstream media (at least in Germany) as “parasites” burrowing into the body. Around the turn of the 20th century, there was a mass “hygiene” movement in Germany — a push for healthiness and cleanliness. At the same time, eugenics dominated medical discussion, as it also did in Britain and the United States. The most progressive, science-minded people embraced eugenics, though no one did it with the fervor of the Germans.
Take a look at this:

Remember: progressive, well-meaning, scientifically disposed people embraced the hygiene movement and its eugenic aims. As Christine Rosen wrote in her stunning 2004 history Preaching Eugenics, about how religion and science intersected in the early 20th century, eugenics was a progressive cause at the time. In this 2005 interview, Rosen explained what she found in her research:
Across denominations and faiths, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who supported eugenics were overwhelmingly from the liberal end of the theological spectrum. This did not mean that they were politically liberal, of course, but they did tend to share a commitment to a non-literal reading of scripture and were optimistic about the benefits that modern science might bring to bear on the many pressing social problems they felt the country faced. Most of the religious supporters of eugenics had long ago reconciled their faiths with evolutionary theory, for example, and many of them had considerable experience in charities and corrections work, which colored their views about things such as degeneracy and poverty. Broadly speaking, why did they support it? These were religious leaders who embraced modern ideas first and adjusted their theologies later. Most of them did this because they sincerely believed, with most progressives at the time, that eugenics would alleviate human suffering.
Who opposed eugenics? Rosen:
Some of the most vigorous opponents of eugenics were Catholics and conservative Protestants. In books and periodicals, they registered their complaints about eugenics and its outgrowths—including immigration restriction and compulsory sterilization of the “unfit.” Catholic detractors usually cited natural law teaching in their opposition to eugenics, while conservative Protestants (many of whom still resisted evolutionary theory), drew on scripture. They did have some impact; indeed, Catholic lobbying efforts at the state level were successful many times in preventing the passage of state eugenic sterilization laws.
And:
What are your biggest concerns? If Preaching Eugenics is written in another 100 years, what will be the story of today’s religious communities and leaders?
The first concern I have is that so few Americans know the history of eugenics in our own country; they believe eugenics was something only Nazis practiced. But it happened here first. Related to this is the idea that just because the state is not imposing eugenics (as it did in the U.S. in the early twentieth century through compulsory state sterilization laws) that we no longer practice eugenics. But choosing the sex of your child or using amniocentesis to test for Down syndrome and then aborting the child are both forms of eugenics, and I share with many observers a concern about the expansion of this individual, consumer-driven form of eugenics. This, combined with our many reproductive technologies, threatens to upend our conceptions of the family, of the responsibilities of one generation to the next, and possibly even of what it means to be human.
How might we look back on today’s religious leaders in 100 years? I think we would find that they had almost entirely ceded authority to bioethicists – a profession that now tackles these questions from the ivory tower rather than the pulpit. And unfortunately it does not always bring to bear the same ethical and moral insights that religious leaders do. I hope to see much greater participation by religious leaders of all faiths in the future – in the public discussions about these new technologies and in the individual guidance they offer to their congregants.
The important things to remember here:
Eugenics were totally mainstream and progressive in the early 20th century
Progressive churches, and progressive institutions, embraced the movement
In Germany, the mainstream press and medical establishment began to medicalize sociology and politics, speaking of the German people as a body, and Jews as parasites on that body
As I recall making my way through that exhibit at Yad Vashem, I was deeply shocked by how the exhibit traced the slow boil of propaganda — pre-Nazi rule! — training the German people to think of Jews as a biological threat. It’s terrifying because we know where all this was heading, and what the Nazis did with something that had already been put in place unwittingly by German medical institutions, the media, and leading progressives.
By the time Hitler took power, all those years of media talk about hygiene, parasites, and the German body politic had conditioned Germans to accept Nazi racial “science,” for the common good.
One more thing. The journalist Christopher Rufo writes here about the kind of thing that is getting to be common around the country:
The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”
So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let’s go through it together in this thread.


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