Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers

Some folks may find this analysis useful in 2021

I have had two separate women in two different Culture Border War states reach out to me within the past week asking how they can stop a woke takeover of their school system.

This is a big thing in the news right now. California is doing away with algebra, calculus, gifted programs, and is going to stop grouping students by ability. Virginia is doing away with accelerated math and also doing away with student grouping. When it isn’t coming in at the state level, it’s leaking in at the local level, both in public and private classrooms, with parents afraid to oppose it for fear of being branded racist. Most of the current coverage in the press is about Critical Race Theory, or “CRT,” but CRT is only one element of the overall Woke program, and the Woke program evolves daily on the feed, so opposing any one element of it is a fool’s errand. It’s in colleges too, but we are going to focus specifically on public grade schools herein.

I’m a culture war agnostic, and will not participate in this fight, but as a culture war commentator with a deep understanding of Wokeness I can offer a plan to those seeking one.

1: Learn About Wokeness

Wokeness is an emergent pseudo religious ideology inside modern American progressivism that attempts to flatten perceived population level socioeconomic differences between identity-politics groups by weaponizing individual racial and gender prejudice against the perceived dominant group. Typically this perceived dominant group is white folks, but increasingly it’s including Jewish folks and Asian folks, because of how the program is set up. It does this at a root level by changing language itself across many fronts, for instance flipping the definition of “racism” itself upside down. This is why the Woke think the unwoke are racist, and the unwoke think the Woke are racist – they’re speaking different languages. Follow that link. And because the root mode of Woke spread is lingual, the primary Woke battleground is education. For many years it was “critical theory” programs in universities, which a parent could avoid by sending their kid to an engineering school or similar, but as the universities have started to go belly up the Woke have pivoted over to grade school as an indoctrination path replacement.

The Woke program is broad, and not just about race. It includes “trans women are women” while simultaneously “there’s no such thing as gender” while simultaneously “believe all women,” despite the obvious dissonance. It includes “healthy at any size” despite that being clearly scientifically untrue. It has “punch Nazis” while simultaneously “everyone non-Woke is a Nazi.” And the people within it do not realize that they’re part of an emergent pseudo religions phenomena because they’re getting their rapidly changing indoctrinations about what it means to be a “decent human being” from their smart phone addiction. In their view, they are the righteous ones.

2: Identify the Players

When it comes to Woke public school infiltration, you have three primary groups pushing it.

1. Well intentioned liberal teachers virtue signaling their allegiance to the progressive tribe. These are good people with liberal values who have paramount faith in a one-size fits all schooling approach with centralized curricula made by experts they trust. Do not fight these people, they’re nice people, they just largely don’t realize that the Woke program isn’t rooted in fact, and don’t realize how harmful some of the indoctrinations in it can be to children.

2. “Chardonnay Antifa,” which is Ian Prior’s description of rich, bored, attractive white women with a tremendous amount of social privilege owing to their status as a rich attractive white woman. Also sometimes their husbands, who go along with it because their wife tells them to. They have bought into the Woke narrative as a way to displace their own guilt for their own privilege, and map that guilt over onto other people through institutions they can control. They are doing this as a coping mechanism without realizing it. They cannot be turned or awakened from Wokeness, but identifying them is important because if you fight it they will attack you socially wherever they have power, such as rumor mongering, social media, home owners associations, and such.

3. Woke school board members. These are very easy to identify by their published educational background. School boards across the country are usually either comprised of some semi-retired businessperson trying to give back to the community, or someone with a Woke Studies degree (gender studies, feminist studies, white fragility studies, etc.) who spent a whole lot of debt on their education, realized there were no good jobs for this sort of stuff, and picked up School Boarding as a secondary income and as a way to save the world. They cannot be turned or awakened from Wokeness either, but they can be displaced politically.

3: Identify your Allies

Despite the common media narratives, wokeness isn’t actually all that popular in the United States. Approximately zero percent of conservatives are Woke. At most half of liberals are Woke. Very few boomers are Woke, and the first tiny sliver of demographic in the US that’s woke is Gen X. Given this breakdown, the absolute ceiling for Wokeness is 15% to 20%, and most of those don’t even realize what’s in the Woke program. Globally, 0% Asians are Woke, 0% of Africans are woke, 0% of South Americans are woke, near 0% of East Europeans are woke, and the percentage of Wokes in West Europe is questionable, given what’s going on with France’s push against them currently. You have a lot of allies, you just have to find them.

1. Jewish folks, particularly traditional Jews, are rightfully worried about attacks from the far right, but they are also the wealthiest and most successful, and are very tied to merit-based schools. Unfortunately many of them attend private school, but the ones that attend public school are likely to be in your camp to defend merit-based education.

2. Immigrants, especially from Asian countries, almost universally came to the United States because they identify the US as a meritocracy in which they can succeed. They’re also hard workers and are not afraid of a fight. The Asian Dragon Lady Moms in particular are essential to add to your coalition, because Wokeness goes against every single thing for which they stand.

3. Don’t sleep on Latino families either. They have strong family units, often work very hard, and are struggling with transferring the conservative values they brought from South America to their kids in the modern American landscape.

4. Conservative religious black folks, particularly black men who work within the community, are your allies. There is no cast of characters more frustrated with the “male privilege” narrative than black men, who verifiably get none of that privilege by any measurable metric. These groups also know exactly who the cops are going to come for first when gun control gets rolled out. They may be BLM positive, but they are very frustrated at the Woke hijacking the Floyd protests and making it about trans positivity and such throughout 2020. Black women, on the other hand, are a lot sketchier, because many of them have adopted Kimberle Krenshaw’s “Intersectionality Theory” as fact because it conveys them more virtue within the Woke system, by having two check boxes on the Intersectionality Matrix instead of one.

5. Churches go without saying, but tread lightly here. Some of the recent pivot to “contemporary” church services, which are more like rock concerts with motivational speakers than anything else, was made to bring Woke into the fold. These may be allies and may not be. Don’t write them off, but don’t count them blindly. Talk to the pastor.

6. Concerned parents, of which you probably are one if you’re reading this. But again, tread lightly here because you need to make sure you don’t accidentally approach someone in Chardonnay Antifa to join your coalition. You could end up with a mole.

4: Prepare for Social Castigation

Examine the various definitions of “racism” floating around the metasphere currently. (1) Individual racial prejudice. (2) Corporate and government systems which inadvertently produce racially differential results. (3) Subconscious racial bias. (4) Being Unwoke. You will be accused of being racist for category (4), although your attackers will Motte and Bailey their way into making it seem like you’re one of the other four. This is one reason it’s essential to get your coalition squared at the beginning, and include all the disparate non-white groups who want their children to acquire merit with which to participate in American meritocracy.

5: Delaying Operations

The Woke think that they are righteously changing the world by forcing their views into the school system. It’s part of their indoctrination set. They will view you as evil because you’re standing in the way of progress, on the wrong side of history, and such. You must not try to prove Wokeness is bad, because they cannot be turned. But you can make a very reasonable case that Wokeness is contentious, it’s claims are questioned, and the jury is still out on its claims. This is where you hang your hat on your arguments to delay rollout of Woke programs. The argument should go something like this:

“I understand that you believe (woke thing X), but there is a tremendous amount of disagreement over (woke thing X) in the literature and in society today. We should not be teaching (woke thing X) to children until that tremendous amount of disagreement has been resolved.”

You can hang your hat on this argument because it is explicitly and implicitly a true thing that is true. Delay.

6: Displace the Woke School Board Members

Because the Woke cannot be turned, the only way you can eliminate this from your school system is to remove them from a position of influencing policy. You must first identify when each Woke school board member is up for reelection, chose from among your coalition a good non-Woke replacement, and plan an election campaign to get them elected. Winning the election should not be hard in most of the country because Wokeness is not popular in most of the country. Just make the election about Wokeness, and drill on the most egregious and unpopular elements of the Woke program. Force the incumbent Woke to take a clear position on an unpopular element of Woke dogma, quote them, and stick the quote on yard signs. As a Woke, they cannot vary from the Woke program no matter how unpopular, because doing so would get them excommunicated from their Woke social circles, so kiting them into vocally supporting unpopular things should be very easy. Some of you may recognize this strategy, because it was used against Christians in the 1990s, for similar reasons.

Here’s an example. Ask a woke school board member to state whether they think a boy transitioning into a girl should be allowed to play on the girls track team and compete against your daughter. Ask a woke school board member whether they support hormone blockers for prepubescent children. Ask a woke school board member whether all whites are racist. Record their answers. Put their answers on yard signs.

The hard thing will be finding someone willing to run, because being on the school board is a crap job generally speaking, and the people who usually pursue it are doing it for ulterior reasons. But I cannot stress this enough – unless you plan on mounting an election challenge against a Woke school board member, none of the rest of this matters.

And if you live in San Francisco, just move.

There’s your game plan. It will take effort, but the road map is clear.

I won’t be doing any of this, because I have neither the time nor the drive to implement the roadmap. When I identified in 2020 that my school board was about to flip Woke, I sold my house and moved somewhere safe from it.