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[This is second in an expository series on how “Woke” works, see here for the foundational essay on what woke is]

1) The claim

“Woke” is not a single policy or a stable tribe. It is a portable political form: a way of converting friction into identity, and identity into a special way of knowing.

A practical diagnostic:

• Ontological grievance: the dispute becomes about who we are and what is being done to us.
• Positional knowing: standing determines what can be known; dissent becomes suspect.
• Self-sealing loop: objections are reinterpreted as proof of corruption.

When those stack, persuasion decays into control-seeking.

2) The Left, steelmanned (and where the machine bites)

Start with the best version. There are reasonable claims on the Left:

• Institutions can have blind spots that matter in real lives.
• Listening to marginal voices can correct systematic inattention.
• Some norms exclude people unnecessarily, and reform can reduce that.

That’s ordinary liberal reform.

Machine activation begins when “correction” turns into “jurisdiction.” Disagreement becomes “harm,” procedural neutrality becomes “violence in disguise,” and the argument becomes uncorrectable because argument itself is reclassified as aggression.

You can see the pattern in soft-power settings where programming becomes legitimacy warfare. The Adelaide Writers’ Week / Randa Abdel-Fattah controversy escalated into resignations, withdrawals, cancellation, institutional apology, and a promised reinvitation. The conflict stopped being “who should speak” and became “who has moral authority to decide who speaks.” (ABC)

Now the policy-adjacent version (harder, more consequential): Canada’s Bill C-9 (Combatting Hate Act). Steelman: protecting people’s access to religious/cultural spaces from intimidation and addressing hate-motivated conduct are serious public-order aims. (Canada)
But the same machine-shaped risk appears in the surrounding rhetoric: once “speech boundary” disputes are treated as a moral sorting test (good people vs haters), it becomes harder to argue about scope, definitions, and safeguards without being read as suspect. Civil-liberties groups explicitly warn about Charter impacts and overreach risks. (CCLA)

The point is not “hate laws are woke.” The point is: when moral urgency turns into epistemic privilege, the debate stops being corrigible.

3) The Right, steelmanned (and where the machine bites)

Start with the best version. There are reasonable claims on the Right:

• Borders, civic trust, and state capacity matter.
• Institutions sometimes overreach and launder ideology through “neutral” language.
• Recent years have trained people to doubt official narratives too easily.

That is not conspiracism. It’s ordinary suspicion in a messy age.

Bridge sentence (the crucial distinction): distrust becomes machine-shaped when it flips into a total explanatory key, where suppression itself is treated as evidence of truth (“they don’t want you to know”), and disagreement is recoded as complicity.

That’s the turn that makes replacement-style narratives so sticky: anxiety about cohesion gets converted into a unified dispossession story with hidden directors. Watchdogs and explainer sources describe “Great Replacement” ideology as a white nationalist conspiracy frame, often with antisemitic variants, and as a driver for radicalization. (Al Jazeera)

(One more steelman note: people can argue about immigration levels, integration, and public confidence without endorsing any of that. The machine is not “caring about borders.” The machine is the sealed metaphysics move.)

4) Shared outputs (what the form produces on either side)

Once the form locks in, the outputs converge:

Friend–enemy sorting
People are judged less by arguments than by whether they accept the frame. “Ally” becomes an obedience category.

Exception ethics
Rules become “context.” Double standards become “justice.” Coercion becomes “self-defense.”

Platform war
Institutions become terrain: universities, HR offices, granting bodies, publishers, professional colleges.

A Canadian micro-case: the York University Student Centre dispute around MP Garnett Genuis shows how a procedural venue decision can become a symbolic censorship war, with different accounts emphasizing policy requirements versus ideological suppression. The ambiguity itself becomes fuel. (CityNews Edmonton)

5) The discriminator (reform vs machine)

Reform politics says: we can be wrong; show what would change our mind.
Machine politics says: disagreement proves you are contaminated.

That shift is the warning. Not that every Left claim is woke, or every Right claim is woke, but that any movement becomes uncorrigible once it adopts the form.

When that happens, societies stop arguing and start purging. 🧯

Glossary

• Ontological grievance: a complaint treated as core to being, not a fixable dispute.
• Positional knowing / standpoint: the view that social position determines access to truth; some “lived experience” claims function as trump cards.
• Self-sealing loop: a reasoning loop where objections become confirmation.
• Friend–enemy sorting: political classification that treats opponents as existential threats.
• Exception ethics: moral rules are suspended because “we’re under siege.”
• Platform war: institutions become the main battleground for power.
• Corrigible: open to correction by evidence and argument.

Endnotes

1. James Lindsay, “What Woke Really Means” (New Discourses podcast, Jan 21, 2026).
2. Adelaide Writers’ Week controversy: ABC coverage and Adelaide Festival statement (apology + 2027 reinvitation), plus reporting on cancellation after withdrawals. (ABC)
3. Bill C-9 (Combatting Hate Act): Government summary + bill text; civil-liberties critiques and legal-professional analysis. (Canada)
4. York University Student Centre / Garnett Genuis dispute (policy vs free-speech framing). (CityNews Edmonton)
5. “Great Replacement” explainer coverage describing it as a conspiracy frame and discussing radicalization risk. (Al Jazeera)