“We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence.” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Live Not by Lies
Whenever someone encourages others to speak up and push back against the left’s Woke agenda, many will complain that it’s all well and good for people with certain secure jobs or those in ‘privileged’ positions to do so but for the everyday person, that’s just too much to ask. I think that’s an excuse to avoid confrontation and take the easy route.
I hate confrontation. It always makes me uncomfortable, and yet I seem to find myself in the middle of one confrontation or another, especially when I see freedoms being eroded and Woke ideology causing so much harm. I’ve documented this extensively in my docuseries The Woke Reformation. And when I set out to make the series and criticize Woke politics, I wasn’t in some remote, privileged position where my job was secure. I was not somehow isolated from potential repercussions.
In fact, when I started the series, I was living the Woke capital of the world, also known as Portland, Oregon. I spent 90% of my time in bed due to a back pain condition that plagued me every moment of every day. I worked a part time IT job and did film editing on the side. I knew full well that I could be harassed, lose my job or even be physically attacked for making my series. I was in a very vulnerable position, but I decided to make the series anyways because I was convinced that I needed to do whatever I could to help people push back against this new Woke cult that I was encountering everywhere in Portland and seeing all over the news.
Once I started editing the footage that my film crew had shot in late 2020, I began to wake up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep. I was sure that if I released this series while living in the heart of Portland, someone might find and attack me, or at the very least, a group of crazy Woke leftists would do whatever they could to cancel me. I decided I needed to move out of Portland for my own safety.
Thankfully, I had a number of friends and family members offer to help me move. So, even though I couldn't do much and had to lie in my bed while my belongings were moved, I was happy to have the help and to get out of Portland.
Despite moving, I still feared for my safety and reputation. I know people who had been harassed and physically attacked by antifa, and I was sure that once my series dropped that I would become something of a target. I stopped sleeping much at all, but I pressed on. I decided it was too important to not make this series and that people needed to wake up to the reality of what was going on. So, while suffering from chronic and debilitating pain and panic attacks and barely being able to sleep, I launched my series with the help of Dave Rubin. He invited me on to his show along with Peter Boghossian and Douglas Murray, who are in the series. After recording that show, I had a severe panic attack and wasn't sure if I could even keep going. Was I the type of person who could have something of a public profile, especially one like this - in opposition to many of the popular moral trends of the day?
I reached out to a therapist I had been speaking to and to some supportive friends to express my frustrations and fears. Many encouraged me to keep going and sympathized with the position I was in. I was also put in touch with a counselor at Helen Pluckrose’s Counterweight, Jen Friend, and she offered advice and guidance as I dealt with the fear of retaliation and of my own safety.
Once we had nearly completed the first episode of The Woke Reformation, I announced a launch date. My anxiety grew, and my sleep worsened. I was sure something bad would happen. To my surprise, after my appearance on the Rubin Report went live, I began to see overwhelming support. I started to receive private messages and emails from people asking if they could help me in some way. I was blown away. Despite my ever-present fears of cancellation and even physical harm, I was starting to experience the opposite. People all over the country and even in other countries were reaching out in support. I was even sent gifts, and the private messages and positive comments kept rolling in.
Of course I was called a white supremacist online and many other negative things. I was also accused of pushing far-right propaganda. And now I'm thought of as a bigot by certain 'friends' in Portland, and some places won't let me rent their film studios. Some refuse to work with me. That has all been upsetting, but it didn’t stop me from continuing my series and continuing to speak the truth as best as I could. One of my therapists suggested finding my ten favorite comments or messages and to read those every time I had doubts about what I was doing. So that’s what I did. For a while, I read them every day, and anytime I found someone saying something nasty to or about me online, I would go back to those positive statements. I slowly started to realize my fears were overblown, but my fear of antifa was the most difficult to overcome. I started using an exposure technique, which meant spending about 15-20 minutes imagining the worst case scenario – antifa finding where I lived, harassing me, kicking in my door and physically attacking me and killing my little dog, Nora. It was horrible to imagine, but then I’d spend the next 15-20 minutes imagining how I’d cope with it if I survived. I did this for weeks. I dreaded doing it but eventually found that some of my fears reduced, and my overall level of anxiety went down. I started to generally sleep a little better.
I write all this because I’m hoping to encourage more people to speak out about the Woke lies that are being pushed on them and believed by those around them. I wanted to give a full account of what I had gone through so as to not sugarcoat anything. In hindsight, I had much less to be afraid of than I realized at the time, and I think that’s generally true for most of us. Now, obviously there are people who can lose their jobs for speaking out. There are people who get canceled and harassed for saying things like “men aren’t women” or for using innocuous terms that someone deems as racially insensitive or harmful when they’re clearly not. That does and can happen, but most of the time it doesn’t. Besides, is it better to live in silence and be surrounded by lies and allow everyday people, corporations and politicians to do harm in the name of the new moral order and let this all go by while knowing it’s wrong? Or is it better to speak the truth and push for what we know most people believe in? The reality is that activists help steer the narrative, and they speak the loudest, but they are the smallest in number. When you decide to speak up and say the truth at your company, at your school, or in your social group, people you may not expect will support you, even if it’s privately. The more who speak out and push back against Wokeness and its ills, the more others have a chance to see that they’re not crazy and the more likely we are to encourage others to do the same.
This is how things begin to change.
We have to determine if not speaking up and allowing the encroachment of terrible ideas and behaviors is worthwhile in order to keep in good standing with certain people, to not out ourselves as nonbelievers or to potentially lose a job. We have to ask: is that job worth it if you can’t be yourself? Are your friends really your friends if they turn on you for disagreeing with them? And would you rather go along with lies just to be seen as virtuous (which is inevitably temporary)? That decision can only be made at the personal level. I’d just encourage people to think about how they’ll feel about themselves and how their loved ones would see them if they knowingly went along with lies and didn’t speak up when they could have.
My upcoming series is called “Combating Woke Myths” and is designed to encourage people to speak the truth and to know what to say when Woke assertions are made. Despite whatever repercussions I might get for making the series, I’m going to keep doing what I can to help others push back against a caustic ideology that leaves everyone worse off.
