Jay W. Richards is director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, executive producer at The Stream, and adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America. Dr. Richards is a prolific author of books, including The New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); Money, Greed, and God, winner of a Templeton Enterprise Award in 2010; The Privileged Planet, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez; and The Human Advantage. His most recent book is The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe.
Is ‘wokism’ intended to replace religion with its false gods?
‘Woke’ ideology, since I can find no other term to define this sum of cultural Marxism, postmodernism, and what comes after postmodernism—and which is clearly totalitarian—I define it as a replacement ideology. The West had a cultural background based on Christianity and adhered to a deep understanding of reality and purpose, but a lot of that was destroyed by the materialist sources, like Darwin, Marx, or Freud. This is a new ideology that seeks to control popular culture and is very destructive. For me, as a conservative, it is very worrying, and I think gender ideology is its most radical manifestation.
If you read Paul VI, he said in the 1960s that contraception would lead to terrible consequences and many people thought that was ridiculous. Today, we are seeing the consequences. In the United States, teenagers are being sterilized because of gender ideology; it is terrible and a disaster. And this was not a prediction: Paul VI knew that separating procreation from the act of union of marriage would lead to all these things, and here we are.
Fortunately, more and more people, certainly in the United States, are waking up and realizing that something terrible is happening. And I can measure this in the difference in the marriage debate a few years ago. In 2015, when the Supreme Court struck down state laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, the only people who objected were conservatives. Eight years later, with gender ideology sterilizing boys, there is a very broad and diverse group against it: Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, atheists, even lesbians and feminists. To me, this is a sign that this ideology is coming to its bitter end and its implications are becoming obvious. That is an opportunity. It is much more obvious now that it is a fundamentally anti-human ideology, much more so than it was ten years ago.
Years ago, the first TV reports on inclusive language in American universities provoked laughter in Spain, but today our governments use inclusive language. Do you think that what this movement represented was not taken seriously, or did it develop very quickly and unexpectedly?
It seems unexpected, but if you analyze, for example, gender ideology, you see that there are gender books in schools that teachers read to five-year-old pupils. Having a book in a public school library is a ten-year process. You have to write it and publish it, hold award ceremonies, basically to get the book awarded, and then the school adapts the book to its curriculum. Unfortunately, it takes parents too long to realize what these books say. Intellectually, this is a concerted effort of at least 15 or 20 years, and the actual effects have been slow and gradual; many parents have suddenly realized what was going on when their children told them they are of the opposite sex.
In a sense, the confinements have been helpful because parents have been able to see what their children are being taught in schools. They have seen what was going on for a long time behind the scenes, and so I think we are in a better situation because it is clear what is happening.
You say there is an opportunity now. How can we seize it?
I will use Paul VI again as an example. In the United States, there was a famous case, the Griswold case, where the Supreme Court decided that married couples could have contraception, and Catholic conservatives warned that this would lead to more divorces and worse. The moment we are in now has somehow arrived, and it is clear that gender ideology did not fall from the sky: it was a development of cultural events. If we want to defeat gender ideology, we cannot fight it where it started, but where we are now because it is an easier battle to win. In several European countries—such as Finland, Sweden and the UK—they have seen the evidence of these ‘sex changes’ and are changing their policies. Sweden and Finland are very liberal and progressive countries, and Norway is also changing course. This shows that once you systematically review the evidence you find more and more children who want to ‘detransition,’ and in the next year they will number in the hundreds in the United States: the other side is going to have a very hard time defending their arguments.
Recently, at a congressional hearing, a gender ideology advocate claimed that the surgery was only performed on adults, and he did so in front of a girl who had her breasts amputated at the age of 15. It is very difficult to lie when you have hundreds of victims. It’s not like abortion, where the main victim has disappeared: here there are many young victims who are waking up and are very angry. That’s why it’s so important to advocate for this, because there is a huge consensus of people who realize that this is wrong. And then it will be time to discuss what has brought us to this. I like to compare it to a train that goes through different stations: the sexual revolution train that has brought us here from contraception, free love, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender for adults, and the last station at the moment transgender for minors. A lot of people are getting off the train here, and it’s time to look back to see where the mistake was made.
Gender ideology still has a huge propaganda apparatus, but I recently saw a film with a radically opposite message, Nefarious. Don’t you think this is also the key to reaching young audiences?
Absolutely. I know the author, Steve Deace, very well, and the book is above all a dialogue that makes you ask yourself a lot of questions. The pressure of fluid transgender propaganda is very strong, but polls show that even those who are politically on the Left generally don’t like it. I think a lot of people who initially thought this was a great idea now see how toxic and serious it is. Gender ideology is nothing more than a manifestation of an increasingly radicalized ‘woke’ ideology that is spreading not only in state departments, but also in private companies. The case of the Bud Light advert, whose sales collapsed, starring Dylan Mulvaney, who is a man pretending to be a woman, has been one of the best known. Bud Light knows who their customers are, and they are not men pretending to be women—so how did they make that mistake? They did it because an organization called the Human Rights Campaign scores companies on how “lgbtfriendly” they are—and they wanted to get a high score, even at the risk of destroying their brand. This is an example that there is a limit to how far these things can go.
‘Wokism,’ like communism, is based on lies, and there is a limit to how far you can deceive others or even deceive yourself.
So there is. ‘Wokism’ is a softer and more complex form than classical Marxism. Soviet communism was very simple: the state owned, managed, and controlled everything. But this system doesn’t have a kind of socialist state; it has companies and corporations. It’s hard to predict what will happen, but yes, it’s also based on lies, and it’s also going to need a lot of us to stand up to it to bring it down.
