I have written a new book, this time a parody of an “anti-woke” book by a right-wing pundit who claims to be silenced. The ostensible author is a character I have called Dr. Peter B. Jordanson, who is concerned that the fabric of civilization is being slowly unraveled by the noxious presence of Marxism, DEI, etc. in our society. Dr. Jordanson’s book is a manifesto on behalf of the canceled. It is called The Silencing of Me: How Feminism, Wokeness, DEI, Marxism, Transness, and Several Other Things Brought Western Civilization To Its Knees, Ruined My Marriage, and Made Me Late For Work. 

There is an astonishing number of “anti-woke” books out there now. It really is a whole cottage industry. On Amazon, we at Current Affairs were able to find the following titles:

• Actively Unwoke

• Anti-Woke

• Awake Not Woke

• The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness

• Beyond Woke

• Bullies of Woke

• The Cost of Becoming Woke

• Counter Wokecraft

• The Dictionary of Woke

• The Dictatorship of Woke

• Go Woke, Go Broke

• How Woke Won

• If It Ain’t Woke, Don’t Fix It

• Left is Not Woke

• Notes From Woketopia

• The Origins of Woke

• School of Woke

• Stay Woke, Go Broke

• Unwoke

• War on Woke

• Why Do Woke People Hate You So Much?

• Woke Brands

• Woke Capitalism

• Woke Church

• Woke Culture

• Woke Fascism

• Woke

• Woke, Inc.

• Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity

• Woke Ourobouros

• Woke-Proof Your Life

• Woke Racism

• Woke Religion

• The Woke Supremacy

• The Woke Warpath

Note that those are just the ones with the word “woke” explicitly in the title! 

Anyway, most of this stuff takes a similar line: political correctness is wrecking everything, the left hates free speech, DEI is undermining the meritocracy, et cetera. While writing The Silencing of Me, I found that this stuff is very fun to parody. Dr. Peter B. Jordanson is a disgruntled divorced dad who spends his time ranting about everything from how antifa is taking over the cities to how fruit is too small these days. He thinks the fact that women don’t seem interested in speaking with him is a sign that feminist dogma keeps them from recognizing the depths of his insights. I have combined elements of many different blowhards to create Dr. Jordanson, including Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher, Bret Stephens, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, and countless others. 

You may know someone quite like Peter B. Jordanson. You may have someone like him in your family, even. And if you do, I hope you’ll give that person a copy of The Silencing of Me. See how much of it they find themselves agreeing with before realizing that Dr. Jordanson is, in fact, quite unhinged. 

The serious point of this project actually is to show just how dangerously far adrift from reality one can get while being completely convinced that one is rational and righteous. Dr. Jordanson alienates everyone around him, and is a bigot with no real knowledge of the subjects he holds forth on, but he sincerely believes that he is saving Western civilization from forces of destruction. I hope this book can show people just how easy it is to make a pseudo-rational argument in favor of the objectively indefensible. 

An excerpt of the book is below. 

Introduction

They won’t let you read this book.

They have done everything in their power to stop these words from reaching you. When I submitted a partial draft of the text (12,000 words) to the New York Times, the editor told me that they “don’t usually publish anything this long, or, frankly, this vituperative”—“long” and “vituperative” being obvious euphemisms for “out of step with prevailing leftist dogmas.” I approached forty-three publishers with the full manuscript, and forty-two of them didn’t even give me the courtesy of a rejection notice, which I can only conclude was because they could not refute my arguments. The forty-third publisher did offer an “explanation” of a kind, namely that they “only publish cookbooks,” a transparent falsehood since several of their titles, such as Golfing for Cats, have nothing whatsoever to do with cooking or cookery. Powerful elites use transparent lies to conceal their true motives. My further attempts to elicit an explanation resulted in further incoherent excuses, such as “your repeated, oddly ominous emails constitute legally actionable harassment.” 

By ignoring me, they are shackling you. They will stop at nothing to ensure that nobody, even you, reads this book. We will see if they let you finish it.

The rejection of my book had nothing to do with its quality, as anyone who reads it will see. The reasons must therefore have been political. All mainstream publishers are part of the Wokist Nexus, or Axis of Woke (a term I coined), and anyone who questions or subverts the nexus is ruthlessly “canceled,” meaning criticized. Look at what happened to esteemed film director Woody Allen. Despite multiple Academy Awards, Allen’s memoir was unceremoniously dropped by Simon & Schuster over what I assume was some trivial accusation. (I have not looked into the case closely.)

I have survived, but barely. Truth tellers are punished for their beliefs. It is ever thus. I am too modest to compare myself with Socrates or Jesus Christ, but the similarities between their cases and my own are striking. Socrates pointed out that the elite of Athens only pretended to possess knowledge, and that their philosophies were stupidity itself. For this, they hemlocked him to death. I have pointed out that today’s woke elite believe in their own kind of nonsense, such as the multiplicity of genders and the existence of racial injustice. For this, I have been hounded out of “respectable” life. (I cannot set foot in the Harvard Club without having awkward looks cast my way.) I have become a stranger in my own country. (I now summer in the Principality of Liechtenstein.)  

Yes, I have suffered for my ideals. Just last year, a stranger (who hid behind an obscene username) referred to me as “the termite” in an online post that went “viral.” I was also called “mantis-like,” which offended me somewhat less, because it must be admitted that my physique is uncommonly spindly. A youth once threw a Pringles® can filled with fecal deposits at my garage door, an act I am certain was revenge for a column I had recently penned criticizing the concept of  transgender poetry evenings. (How can poetry “be” transgender?) I take consolation in contemplating the fate of Galileo, persecuted by the Inquisition for daring to defend scientific reality—though my fate is not the same as his. In fact, in many ways mine is worse, for Galileo never experienced the braying of a Twitter mob. And yet eppur si muove (“still, yes, it moves”).

My fight for truth has taken its toll on my personal life. I am no longer on speaking terms with my several adult children, my marriage has ended, and many of the women I try to date make it clear within minutes that they are unwilling to allow me to correct basic misconceptions they hold about the world. This is not a rational response, I explain to them, at length. One should welcome corrections, for they help us to see more clearly. To reject my gentle constructive suggestions is to reject reason itself. Yet they seem unbothered by their manifest unreasonableness, and I remain alone. 

But I do not complain. We are turning into a nation of whiners, and so I suffer in silence, confining my observations to newspaper columns, television appearances, public lectures, and several dozen books. True, in daily life I am apt to complain to management about poor service, and have gotten more than one barista terminated from their post for writing a rude variation of my name on the side of a disposable coffee cup. And, yes, if I see a septum piercing on a checkout girl, I will place a sternly worded note in the suggestion box on my way out. Sue me! (Please do not.) But that is a matter of enforcing basic standards of decency, without which the foundations of Western Civilization would rot.

Ah, the West! Wellspring of all that is worthwhile. America, Britain, Europe (except the decadent French), Australia, and possibly Latin America, I’m not sure. (Maybe the white people there?) The West has wobbled lately, and we must keep it from wobbling, perhaps by wedging a piece of ideological cardboard under one of its legs. We are becoming a nation of feather boa-wearing, show tune-whistling, avocado toast-munching, flamingo-worshiping, multi-gender boulevardiers.

What happened, for instance, to the classical masculine physique? To even mention it these days is to risk being carted off to Gender Jail. But I remember a time when men looked precisely like men. I could gaze at their glistening pectorals and feel a swelling pride in the physical form of my fellow heterosexuals. These days, I can’t even tell whether I am looking at a man or not. Several times I have found myself attracted to someone I thought was a woman, only to find out that by my definition she was not. When the feeling of physical attraction does not dissipate upon the revelation, I am left confused, and therefore angry. 

The classical male physique

We live in an age governed by emotions. Young people say to me things like “I think this…” or “I feel like…” I cannot help but correct them, as loudly as I can so that others nearby can learn from the example. “Oh, you THINK, do you? Why not tell me a FACT or two instead?” It is obvious from their expressions that they have never even heard of a fact, which shows you what the teachers have done to the schools. It requires every ounce of my self-control to contain my rage when I see people defiantly declining to behave rationally. The refusal to put facts over feelings makes me so furious that I want to punch a hole in the wall. 

Woke dementedness comes in many forms. At a local restaurant recently, I saw that the “men’s” and “women’s” signs had been taken off the bathroom doors, leaving me completely unsure what I was supposed to do. I resolved the dilemma by urinating in the sink, since, after all, apparently anything goes now. Needless to say, I shall never be returning there, and not just because I am barred from doing so by a judge. 

At other establishments, the situation is even more dire. At Outback Grill, one of the bathrooms is emblazoned with a cowboy. In the past, we would all know immediately—that’s the men’s room. But ever since Toy Story 2, which convinced the world that women could be cowboys (sorry, “cowpersons”), the situation has gotten all mixed up. A ten gallon hat no longer tells you anything about a person’s genitalia. Madness. 

How many of you have applied to college, only to be told that you’re not allowed to go because you’re “too white”? It happened to my son. Despite a stellar high school badminton record and multiple summers spent in Africa uplifting the benighted, plus a great grandfather who went to Yale (to say nothing of my own august credentials), Parker was rejected from the entire Ivy League. What happened to the idea of being rewarded for merit? He was forced to enroll at a major public research university, bringing shame on the family. 

Other things have gone wrong. Oranges have gotten smaller, for instance. Smaller and drier. When I was a youth, the oranges were aggressively plump and juicy. Now they are as weak and shriveled as our culture itself. So-called “safety oranges,” bioengineered to make no mess (a project of the World Economic Forum, no doubt), and surely pumped full of estrogen, take the thrill out of eating. I cannot even touch fruit anymore. It is too leftist. 

It is time to acknowledge that there are woke vitamins. “C,” for instance, is a soft, feminine vitamin, one that men should avoid. Vitamin E is fine, the E standing for Excellence, all too often missing in our culture. The broader point, however, is that only a diet of raw boar kidneys is compatible with the masculine virtues. Desserts are gay, strawberries are very gay, and the moment you start eating asparagus you might as well surrender your civilization to the barbarians. Nobody can feel like a man whilst nibbling a plum. 

Do not let them tell you what you should or should not eat. I discovered to my horror that my personal physician of 30 years was a cultural Marxist, after he told me my diet “would lead to a heightened risk of scurvy, rickets, anemia, and beriberi, and is therefore completely ill-advised and senseless.” The left, you see, uses scaremongering in an attempt to convince you to stray from the path of righteousness and common sense. I had the sound instinct to terminate my doctor’s services and enroll with a more ideologically compatible practitioner, with a degree from a leading online university. (He has since been arrested, but so has Donald Trump, and criminal charges prove nothing in a society governed by a corrupt cabal of child-eating mobsters.) In retrospect, I should have suspected something was wrong when my doctor wore a surgical mask during a pandemic. But I am far too open-minded and trusting of people.

I do not consider myself a conservative. I am perhaps the last of that dying species, homo liberalus classicus. I believe in shrinking the state and expanding the military. I think people should be left alone to pursue their lives as they see fit, so long as they conform precisely to existing traditions. I am a staunch defender of free speech and diversity of thought, which is why the left academics opposed to these things should be ruthlessly purged from their posts and possibly jailed. I don’t think the government should be telling me what diseases I should or should not be allowed to spread in my community, nor should it infringe upon my right to prevent a woman from ending her marriage to me. Above all, I believe in consistency. 

But it seems there is no place for a moderate these days. It seems I am constantly being asked to quiet down or leave, or met with such officious injunctions as “Please, Dr. Jordanson, the children are trying to sleep,” or “Sir, you are disturbing the other patients.” I am muzzled. Censored. Silenced. I persist, however, because I love America, even if I loathe nearly every single one of my individual fellow Americans. 

This book is for the free thinkers. When we see a dogma in the wild, we mercilessly execute it, knowing that inconvenient animals must be put down. When we hear that our children’s teacher is reading a book about rainbows in class, we march down to the schoolhouse and demand to see if the book contains oblique metaphors for anal intercourse. In so doing, we soil the tree of liberty to ensure it may grow large and leafy for future generations. The road is not easy, the persecutions are severe. Occasionally, or even daily, a milkshake is thrown on one’s suit, and my lectures are routinely disrupted with cries of “Boooooring” and “war criminal!” (I will repeat for the umpteenth time that my advisory role in 1980s Guatemala focused purely on basic free market reforms.) One will even be subjected to the carping of one’s spouse, who interjects incessant simplistic questions like “Why are you so invested in this?” and “Can you please close Twitter and come to bed?”, or “Honey, you have got to let this go, don’t you understand what it’s doing to you?” or “Can’t you even see what you’ve become?” It is not always easy to ignore them. But nobody said doing the right thing was easy.

How Things Used To Be 

The America of my youth was an Eden. One knew one’s place. The pies were crisp and golden, the elevators never broke down, and women were svelte and/or buxom. It was rightly considered shameful to be unattractive. There was only one kind of cheese: American. The hats had wide brims, the lawns were verdant, and professors knew that their job was to teach Tacitus and Themistocles, not to make fun of the President of the United States. We would never think of “pasteurizing” our milk, which was considered French and unseemly. 

Men did not go bald, sperm counts were high, water hadn’t gone woke, and there was no such thing as ants, making picnics a joy. The CIA knew to keep its darkest misdeeds closely under wraps, so that we could preserve an unspoiled image of an innocent and generous nation. The economy was operating the way God intended it, meaning that you couldn’t just sit around in leather chaps watching online pornography all day while collecting a government stipend. You had to get a job, and the jobs were real. A man could expect to be a zinc miner, boot washer, paste hauler, or nail hammerer. You didn’t work at a desk performing vague “services” or “coordinating” so-called “operations.” You worked with your hands and occasionally chopped off your fingers. It was difficult, dangerous labor, but we understood that the risk of a serious injury at work builds character. (Actually being injured, of course, is a sign of weakness and femininity.)

In the America of my youth, you could milk a cow without having to fill out a form. The nanny state didn’t check if you were “feeding” and “clothing” your children. It didn’t inspect your meat to determine whether it was “safe.” What deadly bacteria I put in my body is none of the government’s damned business. Klaus Schwab hadn’t shown up to invent the mRNA vaccine, and Marilyn Monroe’s ample bosom was the great symbol of American womanhood. We had exactly the right number of genders (2) and people’s races were invisible and undiscussed. 

When my father came home from work, he had a big mountain of dirt in his briefcase, which he would dump on our kitchen table and point to. “You see this, son? This is the meaning of hard work.” I grasped precisely what he meant, and I have carried the lesson with me always. I did the same with my own sons, although since I do not work with dirt I used cold soup. The lesson was the same, although in their case it was depressingly unsuccessful, since I have raised four abject failures (a “civil rights” lawyer, an elementary school teacher, a public health official, and an acclaimed theater director). 

People did not do crimes in the America of my youth. Nobody would have dared to graffiti a lewd symbol on the side of the local cathedral, or blow a violently loud raspberry at a visiting lecturer in the middle of his speech to disrupt his flow. The idea of a man wearing an earring—unless he was a pirate—would have given the average person a case of the horrors. It would have been obvious to anyone that if a wife did not take her husband’s last name, the husband was gay. Children’s toes were tinier and more adorable then. Nobody would make you bake a cake at gunpoint. Cars ran on gasoline, like they are supposed to—nobody was trying to build a four-story station wagon that ran on marijuana smoke. The idea wouldn’t even have occurred to them. Natural law, not relativistic cultural preferences, governed all things. 

The sixties killed all of this. In a short span of time, the country was utterly ruined. Photos of Jesus in post offices were switched out for the smiling visage of Mao Zedong. Students started egging and pantsing their principals, almost always deliberately. At least one-quarter of elementary school pupils began to self-identify as housecats. Creative acts of public fornication were considered a healthy, zestful pastime, and children were encouraged to take up heroin use. Liberation theologians declared that God wanted you to kill your landlord and redistribute his wealth, after which you should kill God himself. It used to be that if you looked inside a cereal box, you’d find a little toy like a decoder ring or yo-yo. The last time I had a box of Cheerios (featuring, unsurprisingly, a mixed-race family on the box, smiling brightly as if to taunt me: “Just try taking your country back”), I found a tiny little statuette of Lucifer inside, with an inscription reading “Do As I Say.” This sort of thing has just become normalized in America, and it’s no wonder we can’t win a war anymore.

For more of Dr. Jordanson's insights, get your copy of The Silencing of Me today.