Chapter 2
Prudes, White Knights, and Freaks
Most of them aren’t Ivy League type students and social science/humanities professors, as I once thought and some conservative pundits contend, they’re predominantly White and lower middle-class. Nearly all the hate mail I’ve received since I opened my first restaurant in 2010, and especially after opening the controversially named The Soup Nazi Kitchen in 2021, are from the White lower middle class. Here are a few typical profiles of the haters, gathered from public records and their social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn:
Race: White
Sex: Male
Employment: Field technician for Comcast Cable for 16 years
Education: A few courses – English Literature and Environmental Science, at a community college
Hobbies: Member of a music band that performs locally; art; martial arts.
Race: White
Sex: Male
Employment: Short stints as barista, assembly technician, server, business outreach at a community college, and assistant property manager.
Education: High school
Hobbies: Member of a music band that performs locally.
Race: White
Sex: Female
Employment: Photographer and life coach (I suspect she has other jobs to pay the bills)
Education: High school
Hobbies: Photography and therapy
Race: White
Sex: Female
Employment: Photographer (I suspect she has other jobs to pay the bills)
Education: Community college
Hobbies: Playing music
Race: White (He I interviewed face-to-face and over messaging)
Sex: Male
Employment: Random low skilled jobs, lives with parents as a 30 something.
Education: High school
Hobbies: Cosplay, Star Wars especially.
Race: White
Sex: Female
Employment: Random low skilled jobs
Education: Low ranked state college.
Hobbies: ?
Race: White
Sex: Female
Employment: Scheduler and receptionist
Education: Community college
Hobbies: Rock climbing
I don’t think that most of the White lower-middle class are Woke — White, non-college-educated voters…favored the GOP by about 25 points in a 2019 Gallup survey,” according to the Washington Post[1] — but I suspect that most of the Woke are White and lower-middle class, the same demographic that made up most of the 1920s version of the KKK. And this demographic is large and influential enough, as the KKK was in the 1920s, to influence national American politics and culture. That’s why Woke priestess, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the college educated bartender (the worst and most pissed off kind of lower middle-class because she graduated from a decent college with a degree in economics and expected a more prestigious job after graduation), can come out of nowhere to win a seat in the House of Representatives. And as a graduate of Boston University, she’s the ideal intermediary between the lower-middles and the Woke Elite we’ll discuss in the next chapter. She may have graduated from a decent college the lower middles yearn to attend, but she’s still one of us, a bartender, the thinking goes among the White, Whiny, and Woke.
The White, Whiny, and Woke aren’t a culturally monolithic group, as the Mormons and Amish are. A few indulge in and advertise their self-identified freakiness, as Satanists with multiple facial piercings and pink hair, for instance. A surprising many are church lady prudish – no blue hair and facial piercings for them and they squirm at the sight and sound of anything raunchy. Most are somewhere in between freaky and prudish, there are especially lots of bearded and tattooed Bernie Bros who are in a band. The photographers and so-called life coaches excepted, most work enough to live better than 95% of the world, some even take vacations outside of North America. Their lives are more comfortable than they, and probably you, think. Yet they’re pissed and scared.
Who could blame them? They were lied to. They were trained to follow the rules and not get in trouble, to say “please” and “thank you” and smile all the time to get ahead. They were told to get a college degree and they’d move up and own a home, maybe even a vacation house. They did some or all of that but didn’t get what they expected. Their polite and rule following behavior primed them for careers as cashiers and baristas, not as executives. Their bullshit degrees from bullshit colleges couldn’t be converted into higher paying jobs and put them in a decade worth of debt and just outside of middle-class life. But it’s not the quality of life that matters, it’s the unmet expectations for life that determine one’s worldview and sense of self.
Types of White, Whiny, and Woke
While all Woke are neo-Marxists, Woke isn’t synonymous with Marxism. Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders isn’t Woke, even if he has White Knight tendencies. He doesn’t have a victim complex, Bernie’s driven by a concern about corporate excesses. I know of Marxists who are embarrassed by the Woke movement, they can’t stand all those temper tantrums. Others are critical of Woke ideology, like Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, who rejects intersectionality as a distraction from class centered politics. Communist and political science professor Normal Finkelstein calls Woke a “scam,” a “protective cover…because they get to say ‘look how radical we are, look how cutting edge we are’” without sacrificing anything.[2] Sure, there’s Woke Capitalism, but that’s a corporate strategy to profit from a socio-cultural fad, as 2024 GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy points out in Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (2021). It’ll pass away when it’s no longer profitable to *appear* Woke. That’s why Budweiser and Miller pulled their Woke ads.
That said, there are three main types of Woke activists: the Prudes, the White Knights, and the Freaks. They come from all generations; I’ve been surprised by how many of them are Baby Boomers. It’s as if 60s activists are reliving their youth as their retirement hobby. In any case, what they have in common is that they all 1) romanticize the past; 2) denigrate competition and the hierarchies it creates; 3) blame hardship for social and psychological ills. These commonalities will be discussed after exploring the mindset of lifestyles of each Woke type.
The Prudes
The Prudes — also known as the language police, the dogmatists, the tattletales, the messianic mob — are the stiff backbone of the Woke movement. They’re the advocates and guardians of Woke ideology and decorum:
you can’t say nigger,
you can’t call him a chink,
remember those pronouns,
or they’ll make a big stink.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung said in a 1912 interview published in the New York Times that “Prudery is always the cover for brutality.” Take for instance Victorian morality, was it a cover for the brutalities of 19th century British imperialism? Here are a few instances from the heydays of British expansionism:
- 1789 To annihilate Australian aboriginals, British military brought bottles of smallpox to infect them. Ninety percent of aboriginal population died within 15 months.[3]
- 1806 Abandonment of Spanish POWs on a barren island on the Rio de la Plata river during Napoleonic Wars to starve to death.
- 1842 To reverse its trade imbalance, Britain forces China to legalize and buy its opium, leading to an opioid epidemic that nearly destroys China.
- 1845-1849 British policies lead to Great Potato Famine in Ireland, resulting in one million dead and another million emigrating to escape starvation because throughout the famine, the British continued to export out of Ireland agricultural products, such as wheat and beef, the English wanted.
- 1857 The aftermath of the Indian Rebellion (1857–58), when convicted mutineers were tied in front of cannons and blasted, or sewn into pig or cow skins after death (for Muslims and Hindus respectively).
- 1899-1902 The roundup of Boer civilians (mostly women and children) into the world’s first modern “concentration camps” during the Second Boer War
Was the cover of messianic moral superiority used to justify the brutality and racism of British colonialism?
Victorian decorum also meant rampant censorship, with all literature—including classics like William Shakespeare’s works—cleansed of content considered to be inappropriate for children and women. In King Lear, for instance, the Fool’s song about the crotch area was eliminated, as was Goneril’s lament about the knights’ brothel activities. Same with folk stories and songs. The mid-19th century folk song, The Sea Crabb, was originally about a mischievous man who places a crab into a chamber pot to prank his wife. His wife uses the pot and is attacked by the crab. Victorian prudery sanitized this story so that the crab grabs the wife by the face instead of by her ass, as written in the original.
Children, children, bring the looking glass
Come and see the crayfish that bit your mother’s arse
The censored version replaced “arse” with “a-face.” Another example of Victorian prudery are books that covered genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings with fig leaves.
Same shit happening today, this time instigated by sanctimonious Woke Prudes who mistake refinement with prudery. Recent versions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn no longer contain the word “nigger,” which Twain perhaps used in natural speech to highlight what he saw as racism and prejudice endemic to the Antebellum South. The cover of my book, How to Suck Your Own Dick: an Alive Juice Bar Guide to Men’s Health, was taken down on Instagram and Facebook by Woke trolls led by pathetic Dipshit Doug Evans Dickhead who has a micro-penis and smells like Satan’s Ass. Even Microsoft Word’s grammar correction now alerts users to “offensive” words such as “shit,” and “fuck” and “pissed.”
The 1920s version of the KKK were prudes too, they were the ones behind the prohibition of alcohol and banning Catholic schools for corrupting the youth. Keep in mind that the 1920s KKK was different from the Reconstruction Era KKK. From The Bill of Rights Institute, on the 1920s KKK:
During the 1920s, cultural conflict and modernization helped resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Whereas the original KKK was a violent, racist organization born in the post-Civil War South, the modern Klan was driven by somewhat different concerns. Many white, lower middle-class, Protestant Americans in the North and Midwest were fearful that immigrants were changing traditional American culture, and they responded with anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.
Let’s focus on the “cultural conflict and modernization” that revived the KKK. The societal and technological tumult of the 1920s parallels what’s going on in the 2020s. The 1920s was when automobiles were becoming widespread, displacing horses as the primary mode of transportation; the modern kitchen – refrigeration and the gas stove – appeared in middle-class homes, changing how some people cooked and ate; commercial air travel became available to the wealthy; jobs were moved to the cities and professions were being displaced by the assembly line mass production. More than 15 million immigrants arrived between 1900 and 1915, which was equal to the number who had arrived in the previous 40 years combined. Many of these immigrants weren’t White Protestants, they were Jews, Catholics, and Slavs, regarded by some as unassimilable into mainstream America. By 1920, 13.2% of those living in the US were foreign born. There was also a shift in wealth distribution. Between 1919 and 1929, the share of income received by the wealthiest one percent of Americans rose from 12 percent to 19 percent, while the share received by the richest five percent jumped from 24 percent to 34 percent. Sure, the real earnings of wage earners rose by 22 percent during this time,[4] but the perception of falling behind and the widening wealth gap is what matters most – people like to compare themselves to others. Feeling poor has less to do with actual conditions than unfavorable comparisons to others. I imagine these were scary times for those struggling to keep up with the Jones’s and the rapid pace of technological and cultural changes.
Something similar is happening in the 2020s. In 2021, 13.6% of those living in the US are foreign born – most not White — about the same percentage as in 1920. People are concerned about the jobs and professions artificial intelligence will eliminate. Space travel is now available to the super rich, highlighting their unique access to advanced technology. More and more of those in the top 10% of wealth live in smart homes and drive driverless cars, increasing their productivity. Income disparities have increased so that data for 2022 shows that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 32% of American wealth. From December of 2020 to December of 2021, nominal wages and salaries were up 4.5 percent, the fastest increase since 1983. But prices of goods and services have risen even more so that inflation adjusted real wages were 1.2 percent lower in December 2021 than they were in December 2019.[5] No wonder many Americans – the lower middle-class especially after their experiences with the Great Recession of 2008-2010 — are concerned about the ongoing and predicted lifestyle and market changes.
The 1920s KKK responded to the tumult of their time by becoming crusading Prudes, pairing their gripes about increasing economic equality with sermons about national moral decay – “cultural conflict” mentioned earlier — stemming from non-Protestant immigrants. “I don’t like these foreigners because they work harder than us” isn’t an attractive way to gripe about your competition. It sounds more pleasing and is more effective to label them as infidels with bad manners and worse habits. “Wait wait,” some are thinking, “aren’t the alt-right like Proud Boys and Breitbart News the anti-immigrant build that wall the racists? Sure about that? The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, is Afro-Cuban, born to two Cuban refugees. From Breitbart’s primary writing staff of 13, I count – as of May 26, 2023 — two Blacks, two Hispanics, one Asian, and the late Breitbart himself was a real Jew unlike those fake Jews with Anglo names like Dipshit Doug Evans who pretend to be so for victim points. The so called “alt-right” showed support of Andrew Yang’s 2020 candidacy for president because he was the best at articulating their concerns, they couldn’t care less about his race. Meanwhile, it’s nearly all White, Whiny, and Woke kids who keep showing up to protest talks by Black speakers such as Amala Ekpunobi and Candace Owens, whom they wantonly label as “fascists.” Calling a Black conservative an “Uncle Tom” or a “house nigger” is so passé in Woke circles.
My analysis of the White, Whiny, and Woke is, ironically, Marxist. That is, racial and ethnic tensions are primarily due to economic competition and tensions rather than “cultural conflict.” Moral grandstanding is just a cover for either people’s greed (colonialism) or their anxiety (Whiny Woke) about their economic well-being. Not saying that culture clashes don’t exist, people tend to not like rapid change, whether it’s caused by an incoming ethnic group or a bunch of yuppies. How would you like it if your favorite dive bar of 30 years is replaced by something shiny and out of your price range? How does grandma feel about her favorite grocery store that sells Lunchables and quiche being replaced with one that sells fish heads and durian instead?
People usually don’t kill when their favorite take-out is replaced by something they’re unfamiliar with, they just move. They might become zealots of some sort if it’s replaced with something they want but don’t feel they can ever have – envy is a powerful motivator. People will, however, kill when they’re anxious about their sense of self and economic future. Take lynchings (of all races, including of Whites) in pre-World War II US, the rate of them is strongly associated with economic strains.[6] Throughout the South, low cotton prices, inflation, and increased competition for jobs and land are associated with higher frequencies of lynching.[7] In fact, lynchings were seasonal, peaking in the early Winter when it was time for landowners to settle accounts with sharecroppers.[8] During the California Gold Rush, White resentment towards more successful Mexican miners resulted in the lynching of at least 160 Mexicans between 1848 and 1860.[9][10] In 1892, Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was shocked when three of her Black friends were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. She learned it was because their grocery store had competed successfully against a White-owned one.
So while the rhetoric surrounding lynchings suggested that they usually were carried out in order to protect American civic order and the virtue and safety of White women, the actions often arose out of apprehensions about one’s economic well-being and the rapid rate of social change. Moral grandstanding is generally a cover for economically driven feelings of envy, insecurity, and anxiety. Dig deeper into the mind of the Prude and you’ll find avarice and hypocrisy, bitterness and cruelty.
The skyrocketing rise of the 1920s version of the KKK – it peaked at 4 million members in 1925, about 15 percent of the eligible population — didn’t last precisely because its leaders were revealed to be venal and greedy. The organization claimed to stand for morality, but its leaders provided the worst possible examples. For example, Klansmen sometimes seized alcohol only to drink it themselves. The two publicists who masterminded the Klan’s skyrocketing rise, Edward Y. Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, were revealed to have been arrested in 1919 for sexual impropriety and possession of illegal alcohol. At a time when per capita income in the U.S. was under $700, the Indiana Klan leader, former Socialist David Stephenson, pulled in about $200,000 annually, the equivalent of more than $3 million in 2022. He made that much because the KKK was a money-making machine monetizing popular sentiments of the time, a pyramid scheme that made money from selling shit like robes and trinkets to its members, according to Freakonomics author Steven Levitt.[11] There’s more, in April 1925, Stephenson assaulted and raped his secretary. She died a few weeks later from wounds Stephenson had inflicted on her. A jury found Stephenson guilty of rape, kidnapping, and second-degree murder. The Klan imploded after that scandal and its membership declined to 30,000 by 1930. Indeed, “prudery is always a cover for brutality.”
Look to the past to understand the present, history always repeats itself no matter how much it’s studied. The Woke prudes are no different from the prudes of the Victorian era or the KKK version 2.0. They’re all following a political and cultural movement that sounds righteous but is actually deplorable. From NPR, regarding Black Lives Matter (BLMGNF) leadership:
A group of Black Lives Matters leaders are facing questions about the purchase of a $6 million home in Southern California. It was bought with donations made to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, also known as BLMGNF. This transaction is raising questions about how the social justice organization is using donations.[12]
No wonder BLMGNF saw contributions tank in the 2021 fiscal year, from $76,872,002 in the previous year to $9,268,283. In May of 2023, several news outlets reported that BLMGNF is about to go bankrupt due to graft, mismanagement, and other improprieties. From the New York Post, May 27, 2023, in an article titled “Only 33% of BLM’s $90M in donations helped charitable foundations”:
The group filed a complaint against BLMGNF with the IRS last year for allegedly violating IRS rules prohibiting the use of nonprofit assets for private benefit, self-dealing, conflicts of interest and unlawful political fundraising…
BLM leaders using the movement as their own personal piggy bank may be one reason it has been losing grassroots support across all demographics, including Black Americans. According to a poll conducted by YouGov, Black approval of BLM’s tactics and strategies dropped from 65 percent in April of 2021 to 49 percent in May of 2022. Unfortunately, similar polls haven’t been conducted in 2023, but my guess is that the decline has continued in a more pronounced manner. Yet the White, Whiny, and Woke remain true believers as I write this in the summer of 2023.
Robert Greene, New York Times bestselling author of Art of Seduction, profiles the psychology of prudes, “The New Prude” to be exact. His definition of a prude:
…someone who is excessively concerned with appearances, with what society considers appropriate and acceptable behavior. Prudes rigorously stay within the boundaries of correctness because more than anything they fear society’s judgment.[13]
Which is fine as long as they keep their primness to themselves. But that’s not possible for those who are prude and Woke, they’re the left-wing version of the sanctimonious church ladies of the 1980s, Jim Goad notes in his 2017 book The New Church Ladies: the Extremely Uptight World of Social Justice. They’re not just concerned about their appearances, they want to make sure everyone else stays within the boundaries of their version of correctness. “It’s for their own good and the good of society,” they tell themselves and others. In truth, their stuffiness has nothing to do with benevolence, they simply like to get off on controlling others after a day at work as everyone’s bitch, just as those in power prefer to be treated like bitches by a dominatrix after their workday is over. And deep down, they’re attracted to some raunchy shit. For instance, prude Woke feminist women love getting their ass slapped red while called a fuck toy.[14] Greene, on what turns on prudes:
What marks the New Prude, though, as well as the old one, is that deep down they are actually excited and intrigued by guilty, transgressive pleasures. Frightened by this attraction, they run in the opposite direction and become the most correct of all.
Until they get drunk, then they show how freaky they really are. Otherwise, they’re superstitious and have half-witted notions of what’s good and bad. “Better safe than sorry,” is their motto. They’re the ones who are convinced that every kid under age 13 shouldn’t be home alone because they read about a 10-year kid drowning in a bathtub. Or that all dogs need to be leashed on hikes because one once fell off a ledge and had to be rescued. They’re the ones who suck the fun out of life for everyone else. The unintended consequence of their moralizing includes anxiety disorders and turning people into weak willed ninnies and tattletales, zombies really. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this obsession with coddling everyone Safetyism, and its consequences have been disastrous.
In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt, along with Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), propose that Safetism is based on “Three Great Untruths.” These untruths are:
- The Untruth of Fragility: A bad experience that doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. This untruth suggests that individuals are fragile and need protection from potentially challenging and uncomfortable ideas, experiences, and speech to thrive personally and socially.
- The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Feelings matter more than facts, which hardly exist anyway according to post-modern Woke ideology. This untruth asserts that an individual’s emotions (not to be confused with instinct and intuition) are always reliable indicators of truth and should be given priority over logic and critical thinking. It implies that if something feels emotionally distressing or offensive, it must be inherently wrong or harmful, regardless of the actual facts or evidence.
- The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. This untruth promotes a dichotomous worldview where individuals are divided into rigid categories of good and evil, with no room for nuance or complexity. It fosters a hostile and adversarial mindset, leading to polarization, intolerance, and a lack of empathy towards those who hold different opinions or belong to different groups.
Haidt and Lukianoff argue that these untruths are detrimental to individual well-being, intellectual growth, and the healthy functioning of society. They propose that embracing these untruths leads to a culture of Safetyism, where people prioritize emotional comfort over intellectual and physical challenges and open dialogue.
The authors define Safetyism as a culture or belief system in which safety (which includes “emotional safety”) has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Like, does not allowing six-year-olds to walk to school on their own to protect them from abduction and dog attacks turn them into anxiety-ridden, pill-popping cowards who can’t face any difficulties for the rest of their lives? Has the culture of Safetyism stunted young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development? Has it turned them into drug addicted and mentally ill Whiny Prudes?
The White Knights
Also known as Saviors, White Knights defend and rescue Prudes, the damsels (male and female) in distress.[15] Every time a Prude cries, they’re there to wipe the tears away and to challenge the offender to a shrill discursive duel – “you’re sexist, you’re an asshole!” and so forth and so on.
What’s wrong with being a White Knight? Shouldn’t we comfort those in distress and stand up for the oppressed? Sounds good in principle, but have you or do you know of someone – the damsel — who has pretended to be sick to get out of doing something difficult or they don’t feel like doing? I know and have, I wasted a good part of my freshman year in high school pretending to be sick because I wanted to get out of difficult activities that eventually – enough teachers called my bullshit — made me more resilient. How many women, and increasingly men, have you seen play the damsel in distress for the sole purpose of eliciting enough sympathy to avoid culpability or to spite someone? Do you think Amber Heard’s tears were sincere or an act to garner support?[16] That said, is there something sinister about the White Knight, one of the most common stock literary figures in the Western canon?
For insight into the methods and mind of the White Knight Savior, let’s tap Miguel de Cervantes and his classic novel, Don Quixote. It’s a story about a loser named Alonso Quixano — a hidalgo (nobleman with little or no land) — who, after becoming addicted to reading cheap chivalric romances, becomes fashions himself as a white night-errant named Don Quixote, determined to right wrongs and bring justice to the world. embarks on a series of fantastical adventures. In other words, he has read so many junk novels that he has lost his mind and embarks on a series of deplorable adventures that make him look like a pitiful fucktard.
For instance, he battles windmills that he believes to be evil giants and confronts shepherds he imagines as black knights. He thinks the inn he stays at is a castle that will serve him – for free – a feast fit for a white knight. Hilarity ensues in every one of his demented encounters.
Which sounds like the lives of the White, Whiny, and Woke: imagining just about everything and everyone as “racist,” or “sexist” or “transphobic,” and so on and so forth. This and that person is a Nazi just because. The chair you sit in is “fatphobic.” That AI voice recognition system is “racist” because it doesn’t understand black slang or Asian accents. This school is sexist for its “rigid gender segregation policies.” Math, scientific naming conventions, Mr. Potato Head, the shape and size of your coffee cup, your kid’s stuffed animal, kale salads – all problematic, according to the White, Whiny, and Woke. The White Knights believe it’s their job to battle these (imagined) gremlins of life – like airline seats too small for the obese — to save the world from injustice and suffering.
Back to Cervantes’s novel for insight into the mindset of Woke White Knights and how the public reacts to Don Quixote’s delusions. Some play along with his fantasies, while others exploit his delusions for their own amusement. Some of the ways Don Quixote is exploited:
- Mockery and ridicule. Some characters, upon encountering Don Quixote and realizing his delusions, openly mock and ridicule him. They play along with his fanciful notions, addressing him as “Don Quixote” and pretending to be knights, damsels in distress, or other figures from chivalric romances. They derive entertainment from his confusion and absurd behavior.
- Practical jokes: Don Quixote’s enemies and detractors sometimes devise practical jokes to take advantage of his delusions. For example, they might stage fake battles or create elaborate deceptions to trick him into believing he’s embarking on a heroic quest. These pranks lead Don Quixote into bizarre and comical situations.
- Feigned admiration: Some characters, while not openly ridiculing Don Quixote, feign admiration for his supposed chivalry and noble intentions. They flatter him and praise his courage while inwardly finding his behavior amusing or pitiable. Their insincerity highlights the gap between his ideals and the reality of his life.
- Manipulation for personal gain: Occasionally, individuals exploit Don Quixote’s delusions to achieve their own objectives. They might persuade him to assist in their endeavors or serve their interests by appealing to his sense of honor and duty. In such cases, Don Quixote’s idealism is manipulated for the benefit of others.
Same shit happens today to Woke White Knights: they’re mocked and ridiculed on comedy sites such as Babylon Bee and on social media platforms such as Urban Dictionary; check out the Feminists for Trump prank on YouTube, it’s fucking hilarious for its display of “social justice” puerility; and then there are politicians and corporate leaders who feign admiration for Woke dipshits for votes and ESG (environmental, social, governance) driven sales, investment funds, and government subsidies.[17]
If there isn’t a damsel in distress around to give the White Knight a reason to be, then he’ll invent one, as Don Quixote often does. For instance, Don Quixote encounters two monks and a carriage carrying a lady and her attendants. He thinks that the two monks are enchanters who have captured a princess, so he attacks them to save her. This confrontation ends with Don Quixote getting the shit kicked out of him (by the lady’s attendants), which happens often throughout the novel.
Let’s put the novel aside and ask what happens to people when they’re treated as damsels in distresses? Sure, some people prefer to be treated as such, but what about those who don’t? White knights believe that they alone possess the ability to rescue others from difficult situations, disregarding the agency and autonomy of the individuals they are trying to help. In other words, White Knights disempower others, and not everyone is okay with that. By constantly swooping in to save the day, White Knights undermine the confidence and independence of those they aim to assist. Instead of empowering others to handle their own challenges, they perpetuate a dynamic where individuals become dependent on their intervention. They become Woke Prudes, incapable to being responsible for their own feelings and circumstances.
White Knights also disregard consent by assuming they know what is best for someone else without seeking their consent or considering their preferences. American romance novels written for women, for instance, usually contain mild rape scenes because that’s what readers fantasize about, to the offensive to Woke White Knights. In any case, this overbearing attitude can result in disregarding boundaries and making decisions on behalf of others without their input or understanding of their unique circumstances. Not everyone wants to be treated as children.
What drives Don Quixote to be a White Knight? To begin with, he’s a hidalgo (poor noble), a loser and a lazy one at that. More broadly, it’s the result of his delusional belief in the ideals and adventures of chivalric literature popular during the time Cervantes wrote the novel, and they were popular because people from all cultures and time are born as narcissists who believe that they themselves are good and deserve more from life while others are evil and should be vanquished. Put simply, Cervantes uses the character of Don Quixote to satirize the literary and societal conventions of his time while exploring how the interplay of idealism and reality are tied to narcissism and mental illness. Cervantes wrote this novel because he saw that too many people were turning into batshit crazy, self-indulgent assholes from reading popular stories of his time. Similar vapid stories of good versus evil continue today, not just in novels, but in political discourses, especially those found on sites like Reddit, the quintessential beehive social media echo chamber. The Woke White Knights of today are the same as Don Quixote: insipid and batshit crazy due to being easily influenced by sentimental stories of good versus evil because they’re narcissistic and intellectually lazy.
So what does the White Knight really want? Are White Knights motivated by a genuine concern for justice and the issues at hand, or are they virtue signaling to bolster their self-worth vis-a-vis (imagined) increased social approval and attention? The men, do they want some highbrow pussy at the end of the fairy tale, as Don Quixote expects from his infatuation with a rough woman who works at a slaughterhouse whom he imagines as a chaste and noble beauty he will eventually save and marry?
What if it’s only the damsel’s tears, not the whole story, is the only evidence that matters to the White Knight? If that’s so, it would explain why they’re easily manipulated because they don’t pursue truth, they instead seek external validation anywhere and anyway they can find it to bolster their self-worth, especially if they’ve fucked up in their own personal lives. That validation is most easily found among Woke Prudes who claim, as a diversion tactic, to be helpless and oppressed. That’s why propagandists use sentimental stories sopping with dramatic music to manipulate White Knights into belief and action. If the Prudes are the backbone of the Woke movement, White Knights are its clumsy hands and feet.
The Freaks
And the Freaks are the std ridden genitals of the Woke movement. They’re the brashest and the most visibly noticeable of the Woke – they have the most piercings, tattoos, and colors on their heads. They wear 70s punk fashion, something like that. They showcase how morally transgressive they are. For example, one such woman who labeled herself as a “satanist and antifa” on her Facebook page announced that she *always* has sex on the first date (which many other women do too but they don’t announce it publicly). That said, tattoos, piercings and punk fashion don’t make someone Woke, just as not all Marxists are Woke. In my experience, most men who have tattoos tend conservative, and I’ve met women who are the same. The difference is that tattoos and such on conservatives is more about self-expression and sometimes sentimental and religious yearnings (for a lost dog, or faith in Jesus, for instances), rather than to showcase one’s breaking out of conventions, as I think it is for Woke Freaks.
In any case, Woke Freaks are the most harmless of the three groups mentioned in this chapter. Their primary aim isn’t craven social acceptance from peers, as it is for the Prudes and White Knights, it’s social attention directed at what they perceive as their own transgressive uniqueness. So they’re not as easily manipulated by Woke Elites, whom we’ll discuss later, and I suspect they’re more reactive than revolutionary. Meaning, if everyone has their tattoos and piercings, they’ll rebel against that, by either getting even more of them or by going straight-edge (usually the former, unfortunately). They aren’t trying to normalize or evangelize their look and behavior or even ideology because that would go against their life purpose, to appear unique. Whereas Prudes and White Knights want their ideology and way of life to be normalized and codified legally and politically, they want to profit from their delusions (e.g. fat is healthy) and personalities (e.g. victimhood compensated with reparations). They want official recognition of however many pronouns and genders they’ve come up with. They want a 32-hour work week. They want to ban whatever hurts their feelings. Prudes and White Knights do on the ground work to get their wacky and tired agenda heard and accepted, that’s why they’re dangerous. Freaks, they’re just acting out and trying to be as edgy as possible to get noticed and to maintain their identity as freaks. They’re just annoying.
Do most of the Freaks come from uptight conservative communities, as some theorize? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just pissed that they’ve turned punk culture from cool and thought provoking into something overwrought and silly. Fuck ‘em.
[1] “Why the ‘poorly educated’ might not save Trump in 2024,” by Aaron Blake.
[2] See on YouTube: Why Wokeness Is a Scam | Glenn Loury & Norman Finkelstein | The Glenn Show
[3] See Smallpox at Sydney Cove – who, when, why? by Christopher Warren in Journal of Australian Studies Volume 38, 2014 – Issue 1. Pages 68-86. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443058.2013.849750
Excerpt from Abstract: “I argue that by early 1789 the colony faced huge difficulties, from the number of indigenous people opposing the settlers, from problems with agriculture, and from the lack of marines’ capability to defend the settlement, that deploying smallpox became a viable option as a means of defense. This article concludes that, on balance, British officials probably spread smallpox as the only means left to defend the colony.”
[4] Pg. 67 from Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929, published by Library of Congress, 1999. Unfortunately, the link to book is broken.
[5] See US wages grew at fastest pace in decades in 2021, but prices grew even more from Peterson Institute for International Economics, https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/us-wages-grew-fastest-pace-decades-2021-prices-grew-even-more
[6] Beck, E. M.; Tolnay, Stewart E. (August 1990). “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930”. American Sociological Review. 55 (4): 526–539. doi:10.2307/2095805. JSTOR 2095805
[7] Hagen, Ryan; Makovi, Kinga; Bearman, Peter (December 2013). “The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynch Mob Formation and Lethality”. Social Forces. 92 (2): 757–787. doi:10.1093/sf/sot093. S2CID 55862695
[8] Willis, John C. (2000). Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 154–155
[9] Richardson, Heather (2020). “Chapter 3: The West”. How The South Won The Civil War. Oxford University Press. Audio book: 26:38 minutes in. ISBN 978-0190900908. “At least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California between 1848 and 1860, a rate comparable to that of Black Americans in the American South in the early part of the 20th century.”
[10] Carrigan, William D.; Webb, Clive (2003). “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928”. Journal of Social History. 37 (2): 411–438. doi:10.1353/jsh.2003.0169. S2CID 143851795.
[11] The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2012) doi: 10.1093/qje/qjs028 First published online: August 30, 2012
[12] Secret $6 million home has allies and critics skeptical of BLM foundation’s finances
April 7, 20225:00 PM ET, All Things Considered, by Ailsa Chang, Jason Fuller, Kathryn Fox
[13] Greene, Robert. The Art of Seduction. New York, N.Y. :Viking, 2001, pp. 152.
[14] Based on my experiences, at least.
[15] The term “white knight” is commonly associated with men who exhibit certain behaviors, but it can also be used to describe women who engage in similar actions. The issues and potential problems associated with white knights can apply to individuals of any gender. The term itself does not specify a gender, and the underlying dynamics and concerns remain the same regardless of whether it’s a man or a woman acting as a white knight.
[16] See Amber Heard|Johnny Depp trial. Johnny Depp Trial: Amber Heard breaks down crying while recounting 2015 altercation | FOX 5 DC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88w0FJpKtZg
[17][17] See Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Inc. to understand the reasons behind woke corporate marketing campaigns.
