My new book, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism (Bombardier) is out May 14 in the US and Canada. It seeks to explain the woke phenomenon and what to do about it.

The UK/World version is called Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum, June 20). The reason there is no link for the former until publication date, and the reason it releases early, is because the former is pay-to-publish while the UK version is printed conventionally and available for pre-order.

The book does not have a simple through line, so cannot be summarized in a sentence. I hope to sketch out a number of the book’s arguments over the coming two months, but for the detailed data and arguments (lots of both), you’ll need to read the damn thing! (For those outside North America, any pre-orders of Taboo will help the book make an impact.)

One of the key arguments is that I place the responsibility for woke more on left-liberals than cultural Marxist radicals. That is, ‘liberals’ who are motivated by guilt and compassion toward minorities and a catastrophizing fear of majorities, are the engine of the system. Radicals who want to overthrow the system to achieve utopia and who gave up on class in favour of identity groups furnished some of the ideas (i.e. Critical Race and queer theory), but wouldn’t have gotten far without backing from mainstream left-liberals.

Rather than a planned ‘march through the institutions’, what occurred is something more similar to evolution: people with no plan followed simple rules (reproduce - leading to natural selection, ‘majority bad, minorities good’) which resulted in an emergent phenomenon (higher life forms, woke takeover). That is, woke is largely a complex adaptive system. In the video below, I explain how this ideology functions like a flock of birds, a classic example of a complex system in which no bird has the master plan.

What this means is that woke is not a departure from the western liberal order, but an extension of it. It simply won’t do to say we had things right but somehow let the radicals make a wrong turn and silence the sound majority.

However, before the postliberals among you jump in calling for a scrapping of liberalism, the book defends classical liberal principles as sound, while arguing that in reality liberalism has moved toward egalitarian-humanitarian extremism.

Final thing: this video will only be released once the book comes out on May 14 so I’d appreciate you not circulating it or this blog until then. Thanks!