FNC’s Hilton: ‘We Need to Overturn Wokeism with Our Own Revolution’

Sunday on FNC’s “The Next Revolution,” host Steve Hilton opened his show with a call to take on so-called “wokeism,” a phenomenon he argued was being led by the country’s elite institutions.

Hilton said it was something Americans must fight back against “wokeism” on levels of society, including at the local levels.

Transcript as follows:

HILTON: On this Easter Sunday, there’s a new religion stalking our land and it is rapidly becoming the dominant religion, certainly the most powerful one.

Just in the last year or so, it seems to have taken over nearly every part of our ruling class, Corporate America, establishment media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and of course, the Democratic Party, which now controls the Federal government.

This new religion is wokeism. It has core beliefs like think the worst of everyone. The world is out to get you. Victimhood is sainthood.

If you’re not a straight white male, you’re oppressed.

It has sacred texts, like “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, and “How to be an Antiracist” by Ibram Kendi. Wokeism has its own version of the 10 Commandments: thou shalt not think for yourself, thou shalt not hold an opposing view, thou shalt definitely hold false witness against thy neighbor, if thy neighbor is not woke.

The punishment of a non-believer is cancel, cast out into the wilderness, financial and social ruin. And of course wokeism has its own distinct woke-cabulary, speaking your truth, your lived experience, microaggressions, being an ally.

We should think about it as a religion because that’s how its adherents think about it. It’s not really about a set of policy ideas, you cannot reason with them. It’s not like conservatives and liberals, it is much deeper than that.

Wokeism is the biggest threat this country faces because as we’re about to show you, it is the product of a hundred-year-long effort to undermine and tear down the values and ideals and freedoms that this country was built on.

It is the real enemy within.

So it has to be confronted and defeated, but to do that, we must know our enemy. Where did all this come from? Did it just spring fully formed from AOC’s Twitter account? Was it something to do with the death of George Floyd? No, really. No.

What we’re seeing today is not a fleeting cultural moment. It is the realization of a planned and patiently executed campaign to destroy our society that began a century ago.

It started here in Germany in 1923 at the Institute for Social Research, part of Frankfurt University’s Goethe Institute. A group of Marxist philosophers got together to debate a central question: why did the working-class revolutions predicted by Marx and Engels as the inevitable consequence of the capitalist system? Why did those revolutionary ideas not sweep the world?

A Hungarian philosopher, Georg Lukacs was one of the key figures trying to understand why the proletariat didn’t rise up everywhere.

Their main conclusion: that it wasn’t all about economics as Marx had argued. In reality, the proletariat were held back by other forces that destroyed their class consciousness.

These other forces, not just capitalism were standing in the way of the worldwide communist revolution. What were those forces? The philosophers of the Frankfurt School concluded that it came down to three in particular: family, religion, and culture.

In their view, family, faith and culture were the building blocks of bourgeois society used by the elite to keep the masses oppressed. So they invented a new theory, which explained all this and explained how to dismantle those building blocks. It was called Critical Theory.

For around a decade, the Frankfurt School pursued these radical ideas. In Germany, many of them eventually made their way across the Atlantic, to New York where they took up residence at Columbia University’s Sociology Department.

The leading figure became this man, Herbert Marcuse, whose work was massively influential in American academia from the 1960s onwards. It changed the whole approach of academia. Instead of studying the world, universities should aim to change it. The entire purpose of higher education must shift from education to activism.

Especially influential was Herbert Marcuse’s book, the “One Dimensional Man.” This laid out a blueprint for the social revolution, and for the first time, added a racial component. The idea was that an alliance of racial minorities, the liberal intelligentsia and violent outside agitators would take power.

Marcuse also pushed something he called repressive tolerance. The idea that violence by the radical left must be tolerated, but such tolerance should never be extended to the right. You can see how that played out just in the last year.

One of his students was Angela Davis, who went on to be one of the most radical activists of the 1960s and 1970s involved with the Black Panther Party in California.

Critical Theory became Critical Race Theory. It grew and spread throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to become dominant on-campus ideology that we see today.

One of its leading champions was Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School who was later involved in controversy over his influence on Barack Obama. Then came the next big move to unite all the various oppressed and marginalized groups into one overarching theory of social justice, and the person who did that was Kimberle Crenshaw who invented the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe how different parts of your identity, race, gender, sexuality, could intersect and compound your oppression.

What is the point of telling you all of this? When we see Biden on his first day, pushing for boys to compete in girls’ sports, restoring racist training for Federal employees, canceling education about American History, when we see deranged calls to defund and abolish the same law enforcement agencies that protect us every day, when we see our leaders preoccupied with a woke virtue signaling while a humanitarian crisis spirals out of control, we need to know that these are the fruits of trees planted a hundred years ago.

One of the reasons they’ve been so successful is their mastery of language. They hide their vicious intolerant ideas behind words like diversity, equity and inclusion.

Of course, in their true meaning, those are good things. Diversity is part of nature, and we should love it for that reason alone. It is important to make sure everyone is included in the amazing opportunities America offers and it’s obvious that hasn’t always been the case in the past.

But these positive truths have been hijacked by hateful dogma, in service of its radically destructive mission to replace family, faith and culture with allegiance to the new ideology.

So, when your local government, your health provider, your corporate H.R. department starts mouthing the woke-cabulary and forcing workers to denounce themselves and each other for their whiteness. When your grandchildren return from university talking and behaving like Red Guards from Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when your children come home from school and tell you that they now know that they are actually racist.

When you see this — this evil, fanatical religious terror creeping into every aspect of your life, destroying careers, friendships, relationships, realize what it is, it is not going away like some fad, wokeism has been marching forward for a hundred years, marching through our institutions, marching through our power centers, marching through our culture and society.

It has all the hallmarks of the worst, most authoritarian regimes in history. But it is more insidious and more dangerous. It is the enemy within and right now, it is winning.

We need to wake up. We need to overturn wokeism with our own revolution. Bite it wherever you see it. Stand up to that cancel culture, call them out. They are wrong and we are right.

Send this message to your boss, your kid’s schoolboard, everyone you know so they know we’re on to them whether they are true believers or just cult members brainwashed by Instagram posts that the useful idiots in wokeism’s advance just the latest stooges in a hundred-year ideological war on family, faith and culture.

We must unite and fight back.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor