Darrell Castle talks about whether America is approaching peak woke and whether the pendulum is swinging back the other direction -- could this be as bad as it gets or will we continue down the same road to our ultimate cultural and national destruction?

Transcription / Notes:

COULD WE BE REACHING PEAK WOKE?

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday the 7th day of May in this the year of our Lord 2021, and today I will be looking at the question of whether we are approaching peak woke. Could the pendulum be swinging back the other direction or said another way, could this be as bad as it gets or will we continue down the same road to our ultimate cultural and national destruction.

This is Mothers’ Day weekend and in the Castle Family I celebrate my wife Joan who is the mother of the family daughter. Both Joan and I lost our mothers many years ago, so we celebrate her and the family daughter whose husband returns from over a year’s exile at the bottom of the world due to the virus, so a glorious weekend of celebration for the Castle Family.

What do I mean by the word woke? A good example of woke for Mothers’ Day is that the woke term for mother is birthing person. That’s right folks I wish I were kidding but I’m afraid not. Woke is an ideology of race and identity which holds basically that American white people are all racist because it is imbedded in their DNA.  Often, they may not even be aware of it but that racism is the reason for the lack of success of non-whites when and if there is lack of success.  I defer to Paul Craig Roberts, “The Democrats, the media, the woke intellectuals, the universities, and the public schools are hard at work preparing our doom. The United States are now the Disunited States. The blue states believe in white guilt, critical race theory, systemic racism, identity politics, and that all products of Western Civilization, even mathematics, are symbols and devices of white supremacy. The red states do not have an understanding of the ideological assault that has been mounted against them.”

Dr. Roberts has given us a very good definition of the problem that the word woke, and its proponents present to us. My theory today is that we may have turned the corner, or we are at least at the edge of the corner. I want to give you a couple of examples of how things were in a different time and how they have changed today. I recently read an article from a faculty member of one our finer universities and this professor said that it was common for university faculty to live in fear that they would say something that offended one of their students.

When I was in college and later graduate school in the mid 70’s debate was encouraged not feared. The graduate classes were small, and students worked in classes of 7 or 8 students with the professor, sometimes even smaller. There was no punishment for disagreeing with and debating a professor, and the professor did not get fired if he challenged our beliefs. The idea was to challenge us intellectually in order that we might consider other views and ideas.

I can remember one incident in a political science class that was more philosophy than politics the professor announced that he was a socialist. Today that would be normal and expected, but back then in East Tennessee, it was shocking. He told us that socialism was the best way and the only fair system. Since debate was encouraged, I said to him that since socialism was the best system, he could probably give us 8 or 10 places where it had been tried successfully. No, well then how about just 2 0r 3 places? OK then just give us one place, just one example of how it was tried successfully and where it made the lives of ordinary people better. Well, he said, the people who have tried it just didn’t do it correctly or else the CIA ruined their efforts.

The point is that debate between professor and students was seen as a teaching method and a good thi...