The author argues that 'woke' functions like a religion’s signaling system: people signal moral virtue and, via self‑deception, convince themselves the signals reflect truth. Because this equilibrium runs on reputational incentives, neither logical refutation nor cutting state support will end it.
— It reframes anti‑woke strategy from argument or law to changing incentive structures that reward or punish signals.
Matthew Yglesias
2025.12.03
86% relevant
Yglesias argues that CRT/identity left practices function less as policy or analytic tools and more as ritualized, status‑based signaling that substitutes moral posture for argument — a claim that maps closely to the existing idea that 'woke' operates like a virtue‑signaling religion and persists via reputational incentives.
Matthew Yglesias
2025.12.03
68% relevant
The article treats land acknowledgments as ritualized virtue signaling that functions politically (concession to activists) rather than as substantive policy — matching the existing framing that 'woke' operates like a signaling religion shaping elite behavior.
Adam Rowe
2025.12.01
62% relevant
The article explicitly locates Burns’s failure in the era of the 'Great Awokening' and argues his liberal, reverent stance now reads as an ‘amorphous sentiment’—a description that maps onto the existing idea that woke functions like a ritualized virtue system that reorganizes cultural authority and shapes which historical claims are admissible.
Steve Sailer
2025.11.30
50% relevant
Sailer treats the social‑constructionist account as an elite intellectual posture with moral performance (denouncing 'racist' Eurocentrism while asserting universalizing claims), which connects to the idea that some contemporary ideological positions function more as status signalling than as neutral scholarship.
2025.10.07
100% relevant
TLDR claims that Hanson’s Elephant in the Brain and Trivers’ self‑deception explain woke’s spread and resistance to reason/policy pullbacks.