"Woke" ideology, in all its toxic forms, is a machine designed to make law-abiding people feel like criminals so they will accept the expansion of the punitive State. That's why the Woke are so big on forcing public confessions and apologies from high-profile targets.

Notice that a standard feature of all these coerced confessions is the ritual admission of ignorance, gratitude for receiving a politically correct re-education, and a declaration that many others are guilty of the same sins and desperately need the same re-education.

Translation: there are many other criminals like me, and the State must be given more power, and more eager assistance from loyal cadres, to find and punish them all. Many of these criminals are unaware of their crimes and must be taught to feel guilty, as I have been taught.

This is also integral to the concept of "privilege" as a type of secular Original Sin. Everyone who has "privilege" was born a criminal. Most did not make a conscious choice to commit the crime of being privileged. They must nevertheless be targeted, re-educated, and punished.

The old methods of expanding State power weren't working anymore, so the new hardcore Woke system of struggle sessions and show trials had to be imposed. Welfarism ran aground on the rocks of fiscal reality and the moral relationship between work and dependency.

To put it simply, welfarism sputtered because the War on Poverty was an obvious failure on its own merits - trillions spent with little reduction in poverty to show for it - and hard-working people grew angry about obvious corruption and abuse in the system.

Appeals to make the "safety net" of social services wider, softer, and deeper can only take statists so far. The people paying for the safety net grow skeptical. They naturally see work as morally superior to lifetime and inter-generational dependency.

The Clintonites tried recasting statism as "investments" during the 90s, but stealing the language of capitalism to promote socialism also has limits. People keep asking questions about fiscal responsibility and measuring statist "investments" against private sector performance.

The hard Left was deeply frustrated by Bill Clinton's "Third Way" scam toward the end of his tenure. They knew their power could not be increased very much by pretending the State was just another "investor" competing in the arena of capitalism.

Clinton's approach ceded too much moral legitimacy to capitalism, and therefore to the American people. So did Great Society welfarism in its original form. The 2008 financial crisis dealt a death blow to those approaches. The Left would now attack freedom itself as immoral.

That's what Wokeism is, boiled down to its essence. The original form of the Woke virus that incubated in campus petri dishes over the past 20 years was quite explicit about it. Freedom is immoral if the PEOPLE are immoral. If the citizens are criminals, they MUST be punished.

That's the whole ball game. That is what all of this is about. America is a prison, the people are criminals, and the State supplies the wardens. You're guilty even if you THINK you're a decent person who never did anything wrong. "Privilege" means your very existence is a crime.

As a nation of convicted prisoners, naturally we have attenuated civil rights. Free speech? No, the wardens can prevent you from saying things that might make the other convicts restless. Privacy? Not in a cell block. Assembly? Not if the wardens think you're a dangerous gang.

All of the Woke Left's expressions of contempt for the Bill of Rights are easily understood if you remember they view most of the population as convicted criminals who only get the prison versions of those rights. The pandemic helped them make the prison model even more explicit.

Public accusations and confessions of guilt, struggle sessions, ever-shifting speech codes, and the constant celebration of PUNISHMENT - lost jobs, destroyed businesses, canceled accounts - these are key elements of enforcing the idea of universal guilt and punitive statism.

Even the Left's indulgence of ACTUAL crime, including violent crime, fits the model. Who are YOU, guilty privileged racist sexist transphobes of Middle America, to think you can throw other people in jail according to YOUR blinkered notions of "justice?" /end