The wokeness disease

 Bruce Pardy:

“Willfully blind and recklessly misleading.” Those are just two of the aspersions that law professors have levelled at the Free North Declaration, a call to arms to protect civil liberties in Canada from COVID-19 irrationality and overreach. Launched on Nov. 12 and profiled recently in the Epoch Times by Lisa Bildy (one of its creators, along with myself and two others), the declaration has now been endorsed by over 400 lawyers and 45,000 concerned citizens. No surprise that it has also attracted condemnation from academics and other woke COVID apostles. After all, the COVID debacle is in large part a crisis born of wokeness itself.

Rather than simply rebut what they oppose with evidence and argument, which would be entirely legitimate, the woke instead seek to scandalize and shame—and in the case of the declaration, not merely its content, but its very expression. For instance, 10 benchers (governors) of the Law Society of Ontario who have signed the declaration have been accused of breaching their code of conduct, for which the Law Society should impose discipline. The declaration is not merely mistaken, but illegitimate. Those who agree with it are not simply misguided, but guilty of professional misconduct. Better to cancel than debate, is the woke philosophy. Shut them down.

Sometimes erroneously dismissed as a passing fad of hypersensitive university undergrads, wokeness, or social justice as it is also known, is an anti-Western ideology in which intellectuals and elites sneer at the foundations of their own society. It has become Canada’s secular religion.

Derived from “critical theory,” an academic discipline that seeks to collapse and reconstitute “oppressive” Western institutions, wokeness is an infection that has spread into the bones of Canadian society. It rejects Enlightenment values such as open inquiry, individual autonomy, free speech, scientific skepticism, and even reason itself. It pretends to champion equality, peace, and social co-operation, but instead promotes identity politics, political theatre, elitism, and centralized control. It is, at its core, an authoritarian doctrine that demands fealty to its premises and directives.
...

The woke are not into a rational argument to decide issues.  They decide issues and impose them like a religious requirement.  Their reaction to opponents of CRT is a tell.