ROGER SIMON: How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War.

The other day I wrote that “Woke” was the new conformism.

It is, of course, but I undersold it. It is much more than that and more dangerous.

As Tal Bachmann notes at Steynonline, it is now our state religion, a state religion in a country that—constitutionally and for good reason—is not supposed to have one.

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“Woke” gains adherents much in the manner of “est”—the cult-like Erhard Seminars Training—that I attended in the 1970s at the behest of a movie producer interested in making a film about it. (It never happened.)

If you’re too in, you’re out.

For est, several hundred people sat in a large conference room listening to the “training” for hours under instructions not to get up, even to go to the bathroom, until they raised their hands signaling they “got it” (i. e., effectively joined the cult). Nature’s calling being what it is, most eventually did.

Although operationally similar, “woke” is exponentially more perilous than the now defunct est training. Our position in society, our livelihoods, our childrens’ educations and futures are being held over our heads, not our mere use of a rest room.

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

It is a psychosis approaching mass hallucination. In Franco’s Spain, they shouted “Viva la muerte!” (“Long live death!”). Here we are asked to proclaim just as loudly “Black Lives Matter,” to display signs saying as much on our lawns, although we never thought otherwise, always thought (naively, we are told) that all lives mattered.

Earlier: John McWhorter on how to respond to the woke: ‘We need to start telling them no.’ “‘We have to understand that you can not reason with people like this,’ he said. ‘It’s very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion and this is a religion. And so to try to talk these people down doesn’t work. All they know is that you’re a racist and that’s all you’re going to get. So the idea is not to try to have a dialogue with them about these sorts of issues…I think we simply need to start telling people like this no.’”