Lies, Damn Lies, and the History of Capitalism

Modern historians have rarely told the truth about the history of capitalism, especially about the early days of the Industrial Revolution. In this Guest Post, Wanjiru Njoya reckons it's time to set the record straight...

Lies, Damn Lies, and the History of Capitalism
by Wanjiru Njoya

Mark Twain popularised the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It could equally well be adapted to depict the role of socialist narratives taught as “history”—narratives that wreak even more economic havoc than outright lies. Lies can be debunked with facts, but socialist narratives appeal to political and moral ideologies that are less easily dislodged once they take root.

The socialist view of economic history teaches that capitalism is based on exploiting the poor. It alleges that Western nations are rich due to colonising the Third World. As the economist Peter Bauer observed:

The principal assumption behind the idea of Western responsibility for Third World poverty is that the prosperity of individuals and societies generally reflects the exploitation of others.

The industrial revolution is said to have been powered by theft from poor countries, with white nations acquiring wealth by subjugating other races. Bauer details the essential facts proving these beliefs to be false. He also identifies some of the reasons why these types of anti-capitalist narratives are so influential, arguing that “acceptance of emphatic routine allegations that the West is responsible for Third World poverty reflects and reinforces Western feelings of guilt.”

These guilt narratives, which masquerade as “historical facts,” are more pernicious and more difficult to defeat than blatant lies because, much like statistics, they are assumed to be objective and factual—even when they bear no relationship to the truth. Bauer describes them as “not only untrue, but more nearly the opposite of the truth.”

These myths have fed the prevailing tendency to view “capitalism” as a catch-all phrase denoting cruelty to the less fortunate. In his book Capitalism and the Historians, Hayek explains that this hostile view of capitalism is based on false history:

Who has not heard of the “horrors of early capitalism” and gained the impression that the advent of this system brought untold new suffering to large classes who before were tolerably content and comfortable? We might justly hold in disrepute a system to which the blame attached that even for a time it worsened the position of the poorest and most numerous class of the population. The widespread emotional aversion to “capitalism” is closely connected with this belief that the undeniable growth of wealth which the competitive order has produced was purchased at the price of depressing the standard of life of the weakest elements of society.

That this was the case was at one time indeed widely taught by economic historians.

Hayek argued that despite the “thorough refutation of this belief,” it has not lost its influence—“Yet, a generation after the controversy has been decided, popular opinion still continues as though the older belief had been true.” He warned that this “socialist interpretation of history,” and in particular economic history, had “governed political thinking for the last two or three generations.” Like Bauer, he emphasised that it has no basis in truth:

Most people would be greatly surprised to learn that most of what they believe about these subjects are not safely established facts but myths, launched from political motifs and then spread by people of good will into whose general beliefs they fitted. . . most of what is commonly believed on these questions, not merely by radicals but also by many conservatives, is not history but political legend.

These political legends are depicted as merely descriptive of historical reality. Hayek attributed this in part to the claim of some historians to be objective:

One reason for this probably is the pretension of many modern historians to be purely scientific and completely free from all political prejudice. . . . There is indeed no legitimate reason why, in answering questions of fact, historians of different political opinions should not be able to agree. But at the very beginning, in deciding which questions are worth asking, individual value judgments are bound to come in.

Lacking a huge amount of time for independent study, many people rely on historians for factual analysis. When professional historians push their ideology over as “history” their readers are often none the wiser. Hayek saw this as a major reason why socialist ideology had become entrenched:

The remarkable thing about this [socialist] view is that most of the assertions to which it has given the status of “facts which everybody knows” have long been proved not to have been facts at all; yet they still continue, outside the circle of professional economic historians, to be almost universally accepted as the basis for the estimate of the existing economic order.

Why are false claims that have “long been proved not to have been facts at all” still taught as historical reality? It is not necessarily because socialist historians deliberately try to promote their own ideology—although that is sometimes the case. The more serious issue is failure to appreciate that interpretation of history requires selection and interpretation. As Hayek put it, value judgments necessarily influence historical interpretation:

And it is more than doubtful whether a connected history of a period or a set of events could be written without interpreting these in the light, not only of theories about the interconnection of social processes, but also of definite values—or at least whether such a history would be worth reading.

Further, the dissemination of historical narratives is not confined to formal study. When a historical narrative is dominant, in the manner described by Hayek, it is embedded as part of the general culture and generally accepted as being “obviously true.”

. . . it is via the novel and the newspaper, the cinema and political speeches, and ultimately the school and common talk that the ordinary person acquires his conceptions of history. But in the end even those who never read a book and probably have never heard of the names of the historians whose views have influenced them come to see the past through their spectacles.

Hayek emphasised the importance of getting the facts right, as “we can hardly hope to profit from past experience unless the facts from which we draw our conclusions are correct.” And one could certainly provide the detractors of capitalism with the facts about productivity and economic progress. Bauer’s work on economic development is a great resource for that purpose.

But it is not a simple matter of presenting the facts. Given people’s prior understanding of what they assume to be meant by “capitalism,” which reflects the commonly accepted narratives, any defense of capitalism merely reinforces their moral and ideological objection. Such defenses seem to be saying “yes, the rich brutally exploit the poor, but it’s worth it.”

To illustrate this point, take the example of Bauer’s observation that colonialism in fact introduced economic progress. He explained:

In the early 1890s there were in the Gold Coast no railways or roads, but only a few jungle paths. Transport of goods was by human porterage or canoe. By the 1930s there were railways and good roads; journeys by road required fewer hours than they had required days in 1890. In British West Africa public security and health improved out of all recognition over the period. Peaceful travel became possible; slavery, slave trading and famine were practically eliminated, and the incidence of the worst diseases greatly reduced.

You would expect that to settle the matter for anyone who is genuinely concerned with the facts. But, on the contrary, socialists respond with yet more mockery —“just because you built railroads does not mean colonial brutality was acceptable.” They miss the point entirely, because they cling to their erroneous view of what capitalism is in the first place. Propaganda is based on false ideology and cannot be displaced by highlighting the facts. The underlying ideology itself must be countered: pointing out that capitalism itself is the only system allowing wealth and riches to be attained without exploitation, that the trader principle of capitalism allows each party a win-win, and that it is the only political system protecting an individual's rights.

Nor is it enough to inform people of the correct definition of capitalism, because socialist ideology cannot be displaced by semantic debates. Rather than merely informing socialists that they do not understand what “real” capitalism is, it is necessary also to defeat the underlying ideology, by defending the foundational principles of civilisation—private property, individual liberty, voluntary exchange, and limited government.

* * * * 

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute, and the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (2023), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law.”
    Dr. Njoya earned her Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge (UK) and taught law for over 20 years at a number of UK universities, including the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

    Her article previously appeared at the Mises blog.

"Is the concept of personal responsibility foreign to Maori? I don’t believe it is.

"The latest 'Salvation Army State of the Nation Report 2026' presents a litany of excuses for the sorry state of New Zealand’s social statistics, in particular, those relating to Maori. ...

"'The over representation of Māori tamariki and rangatahi in state care [is said to] reflect ... the enduring impacts of colonisation and breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi ... disproportionate inequities are due to current systems and the lasting impacts of colonisation ... and institutional racism...'
    '[T]angata whenua experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness, ... disrupts connections to te ao Māori and limits the ability to exercise tino rangatiratanga. ...'
    'Colonial policies, land alienation and the imposition of state justice systems that do not represent partnership have had long‑lasting effects that continue to shape Māori experiences in the criminal justice system today.' ...

"The [report's] 'Maori lens' response run to pages. ... 

"[I]s the concept of personal responsibility foreign to Maori? I don’t believe it is. ...

"In the face of this report the best response the government could make is to defund the Salvation Army for being part of the problem."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'A litany of excuses'

"Te Pāti Māori’s obsession with dividing people by ancestry belongs in the past. The rest of us should be focused on equality before the law."

"Te Pāti Māori’s obsession with dividing people by ancestry belongs in the past. The rest of us should be focused on equality before the law, something that the so-called colonial system has [had?] already delivered better than anything tikanga-based governance ever could."

~ Matua Kahurangi from his post 'David Seymour exposes the fraud of the anti-colonial crusade' [hat tip HomePaddock]

"This is why I focus on prosperity-building instead of complaining all the time about the past."

"Whenever I say colonialism isn't why Africa is poor today, people rush to say 'but it's neocolonialism.'
    "The truth is we are 'neo-colonised' because we are poor. We are not poor because we are neo-colonised.
    "In today's world, nations either create prosperity or they live under someone else's rules. This is why I focus on prosperity-building instead of complaining all the time about the past.
    "It's the only way out."

~ Magatte Wade from her post 'Why Is Africa Poor?'

Stolen Land?

"The 'stolen land' argument is a selective, weaponised narrative used only against select nations. Those who invoke it exploit history to undermine the very societies they seek to join. 

    "Nations change, borders shift, and history moves forward—leaving no one innocent. Let’s learn to live together in harmony wherever our ancestors originally hailed from, and let’s respect the right of countries to make reasonable laws about who and how many can move in to stay."

~ Johann Anwar Ryan Smith from his post 'Stolen Land? It’s All Stolen Land: Exploding the myth of settler colonialism'

'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

"THE TERM TYPICALLY USED to denote advocates of globalisation is 'globalists,' which has emerged primarily as a term of abuse, especially on the far right. 'There is no more left and right [says one]. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.' ...

"[T]his essay’s definition of globalisation is the relatively free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders. .... A consequence of increasing globalisation is an increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange. ...

"There is a vast amount of evidence that documents the impact of reducing barriers to trade, travel, and other forms of exchange across borders. Much of it is presented in other essays in this series, such as Johan Norberg’s 'Globalisation: A Race to the Bottom—or to the Top?' Contrary to some critics of globalisation, the results have been spectacularly positive for the world’s poor, as wages have increased, jobs have become safer, and the use of children for labor has plummeted. Increasing wealth, in turn, is strongly connected to improving health, and the global spread of improvements in medicines and technologies has improved health outcomes even in regions that have not participated as much in the exchange of goods. ...

"People agree to exchange because they expect to be better off by exchanging than by not exchanging. Making it possible to exchange with more people is beneficial to those whose range of potential exchange partners has increased. Adam Smith titled the third chapter of his 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' “That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” a thesis that he illustrated by demonstrating the greater prosperity and progress in the ancient world for those nations with proximity to the sea and to navigable rivers. Due to the lower friction of transportation over water compared to land, that proximity facilitated exchange with much larger areas and with many, many more people. To the extent that policies of governments erect barriers to exchange, it is analogous to making transportation deliberately more difficult, which would generally be understood to be harmful to the vast majority of people. ...

"Globalisation is not limited to the exchange of goods and services across borders; it also encompasses the exchange of ideas, as well as scientific, economic, artistic, and other forms of cooperation. ...

"Ever since Plato’s assault on the open society, critics of globalisation have tended to view cultural innovation and exchange as a pure loss rather than as the emergence of new forms of human life that increase the available store of possible human understandings and experiences. ...

"PEACE AND HARMONY ARE consequences of trade.

Cultural exchange is foundational to living cultures. Pasta, for which Italian cuisine is famous, has origins in Asia, whether it was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, as folklore tells, or earlier, and the tomatoes that form the base of many Italian sauces are cultivated from plants brought from Meso-America by Spaniards. Food has been globalised for millennia, but somehow that has not stopped it from developing an amazing diversity of identifiable cuisines, styles, and dishes with many distinctive characteristics. The same can be said of architecture, traditions, mores, religions, and every other element of human culture. ...

"The key to such peace is not merely the movement of goods and services across borders but voluntary exchange. ... Freedom to trade refers to the voluntary transfers of goods and services and not to state trafficking in tanks and missiles, the sale of products of forced labour (such as the products of Uyghur labourers imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party), or the sale of nationalised products (such as the oil and gas resources that were confiscated by Putin). Exchange and transfers organised by conquest are mutually impoverishing, as Adam Smith demonstrated of the British Empire ...

"SINCE PLATO'S TIME, OPPONENTS of globalisation have sought to protect established orders from the voluntary choices of those who live in them. Increasing the opportunities for exchange, cooperation, communication, and travel is enriching for the majority, although it may threaten the hold on power of the rulers. Some prefer war over peace, because 'making bigger profits in peace' is worse than war. Reasonable people should think before embracing such attacks on globalisation ...

"Rigorous thinking and empirical research refute, one by one, attacks on globalisation in the name of morality. The world is better when barriers to free and voluntary cooperation are reduced. The world is better because of globalisation."

~ Tom Palmer from his article 'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

Perhaps if MPs did have an actual argument, they would use it?

"When did it become permissible for Members of Parliament to treat select committee submitters with condescension, disdain or thinly disguised contempt? ... for men and women with impeccable professional reputations and years of service to the New Zealand community to expect their appearance before a parliamentary select committee to serve as an excuse for MPs to hector and insult them, and to ignore completely the content of their submissions?
    "Sadly, the answer to those questions would appear to be ‘right here, right now’. ...
    "All the evidence required to construct the case is readily accessible in the official video recordings of the Justice Select Committee’s hearings on the Treaty Principles Bill, particularly in the reception given to retired District Court Judge, David Harvey, by MPs representing Labour and Te Pāti Māori. ...
    "Why submit oneself, or one’s ideas, to such dismissive treatment? ...
    "Some have written-off [a 2021] incident [involving Deborah Russell] as just one more example of covid-induced madness.
    "But, if that is the explanation, then how is the extraordinary rudeness towards David Harvey and other submitters in support of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill to be accounted for?
    "Why would Labour’s Willie Jackson feel free to chide a former District Court judge, whose career is as distinguished as it is free of professional and/or personal blemish, as if he were some errant legal backwoodsman, unaware of the intellectual powerhouses ranged against his unsophisticated opinions?
    "Why would Te Pāti Māori’s Rawiri Waititi imply that the submissions of a judicial officer backing Seymour’s bill largely explain the ongoing legal oppression of his people?
    "Why would the Labour MP for Christchurch Central, Duncan Webb, a former law professor, show no interest in addressing the legal arguments contained in Harvey’s submission? ...
    "The kindest construction one could put upon the conduct of the three MPs in question is that they are unshakeably convinced that the “European colonialist” ideology contained in the Treaty Principles Bill poses such an existential threat to the future of Māori in Aotearoa that any serious consideration of arguments submitted in support of it cannot be countenanced. Those offering such support do not deserve to be taken seriously and should not expect to be. ...
    "To rule out even the possibility of compromise can only hasten the transformation of select committee hearings into the 21st century equivalent of Soviet-era show trials, the sole purpose of which would be to demonstrate publicly the adverse consequences of wrong-think."

~ Chris Trotter from his post ' When parliamentary hearings on controversial bills become hostile echo chambers'

'Decolonisation' is about embracing 'original sin'

 

"Settler colonialism is ... the idea that countries founded by European colonialism—primarily countries like the United States, Canada, [New Zealand] and Australia, and then often by extension, Israel—are sort of permanently shaped by the original sin of colonisation. So that the countries, even hundreds of years after the original settlement, remain shaped by this settler colonial experience. And that a lot of the injustices and problems, as critics see it, with those countries can be explained by reference to that European settlement. ...
    "[A] settler colony would [originally] be a colony like Algeria or Rhodesia where Europeans had come to settle but had not displaced or replaced the native population. ... But, in the 1990s, settler colonialism came to be applied to countries with a very different history and situation, [like NZ,] Australia and ... North America. ... And, thinking about those countries as settler colonial societies means something very different. ... you can't decolonise the United States in the same way that you could decolonise Algeria by getting rid of the settlers. ... instead it means that you want to acknowledge that the country was sort of founded on the 'crime' of colonialism, of settlement, and change things about it that are directly related to that. And, it lines up with a lot of Progressive critique of the United States and other societies. So, people talk about the environment, about capitalism and inequality, about gender relations--but framing them as the results of settler colonialism. ....
    "[It] is such a flexible term that it can be applied to almost anything that one wants to criticise; and it puts social critics in a powerful position because you can say, 'Anything that's wrong with our country, it's a settler way of being. That's how we explain it, and we have to do penance for it.' ...
    "[T]here's an odd similarity with evangelical Christianity ... acknowledging that one is sinful, of saying: I've inherited this original sin, just as in the Christian doctrine of original sin. It's not something that I personally did. I personally didn't settle this country, but I've inherited it. I'm a settler by inheritance, and that the first step to curing yourself of this condition or purging the sin is to acknowledge that you are a sinner, to acknowledge that you're 'fallen.' ..."

~ Adam Kirsch in his interview with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast episode: 'Understanding the Settler Colonialism Movement (with Adam Kirsch)'

'Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning'

"The suggestion that colonial systems are based on white supremacy is a generalisation that infects much of the debate about colonialism and colonisation. It suggests that 'white supremacy' ... was what motivated colonialism and colonisation. It did not, although there were times when, during the colonial experience, it manifested itself. ...
    "In 2017, [Nigel] Biggar initiated a five-year project at Oxford University ... to scrutinise critiques against the historical facts of empire. Historians and academics widely criticised the project ... 
    "Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, examines the morality of colonialism. ... conced[ing] in the Introduction to the book that the subject matter and his approach were both contentious. ...

"Many commentators of colonialism approach the topic from a critical theory perspective, seeking out any evidence to then suggest that all colonial activity was inherently evil. Biggar does not. His is a more nuanced approach and is that of an ethicist.  ...
    'Biggar’s argument is that the development of Empire and what is called colonialism was an institution that developed over centuries and no one could say that it was wholly good or wholly bad. Biggar cites examples from other imperial activities. The empire of Islam demonstrated examples of racism regarding those from Northern climes (it was too cold to be intelligent) or the tropics (it was too hot to be intelligent). ...

"He commences with the proposition that empire is not an historical aberration or a departure from historical norms. It is part of the natural order of a world that, until recently, lacked stable frontiers formalised by an overarching scheme of international law. The armed migration of peoples in search of resources might serve to unlock the riches of the world and spread knowledge and technical competence, processes which potentially benefit all mankind.
    "Certainly colonialism severely disrupted existing patterns of indigenous life. It was often achieved or maintained through violence and injustice. In the final analysis, all states maintain themselves by force or the threat of it.
    "Governments, imperial or domestic, have always involved light and shade, achievement and failure, good and evil. Biggar’s point is that it falsifies history to collect together everything bad about an institution and serve it up as if it were the whole.

"There are three major points that Biggar makes by way of mitigation when it comes to the legacy of Empire.
    "To begin with many of the worst things that happened were not the result of an ideology or a preconceived and calculated policy. There were abuses. They were recognised and were addressed although not always with the greatest success.
    "Secondly, along with the disruption that was caused to communities there were also benefits. Practices such as slavery, cannibalism, sati and human sacrifice, which were by any standards barbarous, were eliminated. The ground was laid for an economic and social transformation that lifted much of the world out of extremes of poverty.
    "Thirdly and finally not only did colonialism bring disruption but it brought order. The British brought the Rule of Law, constitutional government, honest administration, economic development and modern educational and research facilities, all long before they would have been achieved without European intervention. ...

"There can be no doubt that the British Empire contained evils and injustices but so does the history of any long-standing state. But the Empire was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent as a general proposition. It could correct errors and sins and importantly it prepared colonised peoples for liberal self-government.
    "What colonialism did bring to the table in the final analysis were liberal, humanitarian principles and endeavours that should be admired and carried into the future. Imaginary guilt should not cripple the self confidence of the British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders as pillars of the liberal international order."

~ A Halfling from his post 'Colonialism - A Moral Reckoning'

UPDATED: "The richest 20 per cent of the world’s countries are now around 30 times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. Why? Differences in a society’s institutions."

"The richest 20 per cent of the world’s countries are now around 30 times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. Moreover, the income gap between the richest and poorest countries is persistent; although the poorest countries have become richer, they are not catching up with the most prosperous. ... Why? ... [D]ifferences in a society’s institutions. ...
    Europeans’ colonis[ed] large parts of the globe. One important explanation for the current differences in prosperity is the political and economic systems that the colonisers introduced, or chose to retain, from the sixteenth century onwards. The laureates demonstrated that this led to a reversal of fortune. The places that were, relatively speaking, the richest at their time of colonisation are now among the poorest. ...
    "In [these] colonies, the purpose was to exploit the indigenous population and extract natural resources to benefit the colonisers. In other cases [however], the colonisers built inclusive political and economic systems for the long-term benefit of European settlers. ... [These] settler colonies – needed to have inclusive economic institutions that incentivised settlers to work hard and invest in their new homeland. In turn, this led to demands for political rights that gave them a share of the profits. Of course, the early European colonies were not what we would now call democracies but, compared to the densely populated colonies to which few Europeans moved, the settler colonies provided considerably more extensive political rights. ...
    "[T]hese initial differences in colonial institutions are an important explanation for the vast differences in prosperity that we see today. ...
    "[This year's Nobel laureates in economics] have uncovered a clear chain of causality. [Mercantilist] institutions that were created to exploit the masses are bad for long-run growth, while ones that establish fundamental economic freedoms and the rule of law are good for it."

~ from the 'Popular Information' released by the Nobel Prize Committee, awarding this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024 to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. [Hat tip Conversable Economist]

UPDATE: Not everyone's happy that the Prize has gone to what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls "a B+ statist": 

McCloskey of course has her own answer to what caused the prosperity that Acemoglu et al ascribe to good institutions: a cultural change before the Industrial Revolution she calls the "bourgeois revolution." Her ideas are debated here. For what it's worth, I'm in agreement with the great Joel Mokyr who says, "Ideas mattered, but so too did institutions."

'Why liberal capitalism opposed imperialism and colonialism'

“The whole Idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilisation placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them . . . If, as we believe, European civilisation really is superior to that of the primitive tribes of Africa or to the civilisations of Asia – estimable though the latter may be in their own way – it should be able to prove its superiority by inspiring these peoples to adopt it of its own accord. Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilisation than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword?
    “No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid to waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia [was] absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy....”

~ Ludwig Von Mises from, his 1927 book Liberalism. Hat tip Stephen Hicks, who points out (in his post 'Why liberal capitalism opposed imperialism and colonialism') that while "imperialism and colonialism are older than human history, and across the centuries virtually every culture in every part of the world practiced it," it was the culture of the Enlightenment that ended it — movements arising to abolish slavery and the second- or third-class status of women. "Keep in mind," he says, "that 200 years is a blink of an eye in human-historical terms. It normally takes many centuries to change cultural mindsets and long-established practices. The Enlightenment’s liberalism and capitalism relatively quickly undercut and did away with millennia of conquest-and-control baked into human traditions."

 

Some "practical advice” to “decolonise” a "settler colonial institution" — and to destroy higher learning in the process

Two alleged scholars from the University of Canterbury were invited by London's Times Higher Education Supplement to “provide practical advice” to “decolonise” a settler colonial institution. and to describe “what decolonisation means.”

Noting, naturally, that decolonisation itself is “a very promiscuous term" and thus best avoided (of course), they instead aim to "offer insights into how we, as tauiwi (non-Indigenous) scholars, can work to unsettle the settler colonial university."

Settle back then as these two (one a senior lecturer in educational studies and leadership, the other an associate professor in the School of Teacher Education) help to destroy what little is left of New Zealand's tertiary sector's international reputation. Som highlights:

• "..in a country such as New Zealand [they say] the effects of colonisation are ongoing and ... , in the words of Indigenous climate activist India Logan-Riley, 'land back, oceans back' is yet to be realised. Unless the university is fully engaged in land back, oceans back, decolonisation will be used by the settler colonial university to justify settler occupation of stolen land, water and knowledge ..."
• "... to engage in anticolonial, feminist practice, we must address the systems that produce violence and exploitation"
• "Rather than offer how-to tips for 'decolonising the university,' we suggest a [six-point plan] as a call for collective action to change things that are unjust ­– inside and outside the university:

"We must actively engage in the disruption of oppressive, settler colonial and patriarchal practices. ..."

"....recognising and respecting Indigenous epistemologies and, where possible, engaging these as central to its curriculum while also peripheralising European and settler knowledge ... [noting however that] there is a fine line between incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and cultural appropriation"

"...build collaborative partnerships and alliances with other marginalised communities, acknowledging the intersections of colonialism, racism, sexism, homo-transphobia, ableism and other forms of oppression. ... Adapt feminist and collaborative writing practices; refuse symbolic service requests and instead strategise and work towards systemic change: unionise, organise for a living wage and improve institutional practices ..."

"Anticolonial praxis requires institutional transformation at all levels.... In the institution, we need to critically examine and restructure policies, procedures and practices that perpetuate settler colonial regimes of power. [Whatever that means?] ...Name it; make it explicit.

"Anticolonial and feminist praxis requires constant self-reflection and a commitment to unlearning. ... Connect, resist and organise."

"Finally, we must dare to dream beyond the university. ...'May we find each other…beyond the university, and unite in our irreverent lines of flight'."

Evolutionary scientist Jerry Coyne has been watching this nonsense from afar. He observes that, bad as this is for our universities, these teaching institutions "are seen as mere staging areas for society-wide transformation":

When you read something like this, you wonder about not only the philosophy of 'Times Higher Education,' which decided to print what is largely an incoherent (and incorrect) set of assertions and accusations, but you also wonder about what will happen to New Zealand. The authors, after all, are 'settler-colonialists' [themselves], calling for their own decimation.
    What is happening in New Zealand—with all the many official attempts to create equity only serving to provoke tirades like the one above—is the world’s most far-reaching attempt at ideological capture of an entire country by the people who consider themselves entitled to run the whole country: the descendants of the original Polynesian settlers. But the world has moved on, and who can deny that 'settler colonialists,' by bringing with them their knowledge, medicines, free national healthcare, and inventions, have improved the lives of most people in New Zealand. It is not as if colonialism has been an unmitigated evil.
    I think the person who sent me this screed is right: this movement is unstoppable, and it’s going to ruin New Zealand. Apparently the Luxon government is either ignoring this stuff or doesn’t care to stop it. Soon it will be too late, if it isn’t already. I pity New Zealanders who want to get a good college education in the face of people like [these], whose programme will sink New Zealand to the bottom of the academic ranking of comparable countries.

The Martyrdom of Jimmy Lai [updated]

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong's greatest freedom advocate is the political hero whose plight you didn't know about. As Jon Miltmore explains in this Guest Post, in his quest to save Hong Kong’s rapidly fading freedom, Jimmy Lai has sacrificed his own. The entrepreneur and media mogul currently sits in a Chinese prison, charged with “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.”

Jimmy Lai addresses the camera in a still from the documentary: “Anything I have is this place.” 2023.

The Martyrdom of Jimmy Lai

by Jon Miltimore

When Jimmy Lai was a child working the streets of Canton (Guangzhou), China, in the 1950s, he received a bar of chocolate as a tip for carrying a man’s bags at a train station.

Poor and hungry, he immediately bit into the treat. He had never tasted anything like it, and he asked the traveller where he was from.

“Hong Kong,” the man replied.

Lai had never heard of Hong Kong, but he knew it was a place he wanted to be. So a few years later, at age 12, he stowed away on a fishing vessel and escaped mainland China for Hong Kong.

Lai immediately realised there was something different about the territory. He had never seen so much food or wealth before, and he quickly found work at a factory. Over several years, he worked, saved, and invested, and eventually as a young man Lai scraped up enough money to purchase a bankrupt clothing company and started manufacturing sweaters.

Lai’s entrepreneurship paid off. He prospered and diversified. He bought properties in Canada, and in the early 1980s launched the popular clothing brand Giordano (a name he picked up from a napkin from a New York City pizza joint). He later started newspapers, including the popular Next Magazine, which he founded in 1990, and the Apple Daily, which for years was the only pro-democracy daily newspaper printed in Chinese.

By 2008, Lai had become a billionaire and was on Forbes’s list of the wealthiest entrepreneurs. But at some point in his rags-to-riches story, Lai realised that wealth was not his ultimate goal.

Preserving the freedom of Hong Kong had become his life’s mission. “Without freedom, we have nothing,” Lai has often said.

In his quest to save Hong Kong’s rapidly fading freedom, however, Lai has sacrificed his own. The entrepreneur and media mogul currently sits in a Chinese prison, charged with “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.”

Lai’s story was the subject of a 2023 documentary produced by the Acton Institute. How it will end remains unclear.

A Brief History of Hong Kong

To understand the political persecution of Jimmy Lai, one must first understand the history of Hong Kong.

In 1898, following years of colonial rule under the British Empire that began after the First Opium War (1839–1842), China leased Hong Kong to Great Britain for 99 years. For the next century, the small peninsula and islands that jutted into the South China Sea operated under British rule.

This changed in 1997, when the United Kingdom’s claim on the territory came to an end. But during its 156 years under British rule, Hong Kong developed a distinctly Western character. Property rights, free speech, and free markets helped turn Hong Kong into one of the most prosperous places on earth, a land far wealthier than neighbouring Communist China.

“In 1987, Hong Kong…had a per capita income of $8,260,” author Robert A. Peterson observed prior to the handover. “Just a few miles away, across the Sham Chun River — in Communist China — people of the same racial stock, living in the same subtropical climate on shores washed by the same South China Sea, were able to produce a per capita income of only $300.”

As Jimmy Lai would say, the British didn’t give Hong Kong democracy. But they did give Hong Kongers valuable institutions of freedom: free markets, the rule of law, free speech, and other human rights. And much like West Germany became a destination for immigrants seeking to flee the yoke of socialism following World War II, Hong Kong became a destination for Chinese immigrants following Mao’s takeover of China in 1949.

From Freedom to Authoritarianism

Because of how diametrically different these two systems were, there was always some uncertainty about what would happen to Hong Kong when the British handed it back over to China. Technically, the agreement made Hong Kong a special administrative region (SAR) of China, which came with certain guarantees, including a democratically-elected legislative system, constitutional rights, and the promise of Hong Kong autonomy for the next 50 years.

The idea was “One country, two systems,” a concept that stretched back to the 1980s, that granted Hong Kong would its own economic and administrative system separate from Communist China. But even as the ink on the handover agreement dried, China began to encroach on Hong Kong’s autonomy. And in 2012, following the rise of Xi Jinping, Communist officials began to secretly circulate a policy known as Document No. 9 (the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere), which said the Chinese government must wage war against “Western values,” including free speech, media freedom, and judicial independence.

This did not bode well for Hong Kongers.

“Hong Kong’s bad luck was that it exemplifies all those Western values in a Chinese form,” said Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong.

As if to demonstrate its commitment to this war on “Western values,” the government in Beijing soon arrested Gao Yu, a female journalist who was accused of publishing Document No. 9. She was found guilty in a secret trial and sentenced to seven years in prison for “leaking state secrets” to a Hong Kong media organization.

The crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong continued, eventually prompting the Umbrella Protests of 2014. Further protests in 2019–2020 were sparked by a bill that would allow Beijing to extradite to mainland China Hong Kongers accused of crimes.

The state’s violent crackdown on the 2019 protests garnered international attention and spawned the National Security Law that criminalized what the Chinese government defined as secession, subversion, and collusion. This included “subversive” messages suggesting that Hong Kong is a separate system from China that should be ruled democratically.

“The law was really about ensuring Beijing’s authority over Hong Kong and making sure it wasn’t subject to the same threats it was during the 2019 protests,” Michael Cunningham, a Research Fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center who lived in mainland China when the 2019 protests erupted, told me.

‘Hong Kong Is Dying’

As Hong Kong slipped slowly into authoritarianism, Jimmy Lai did something extraordinary: he continued to resist Beijing.

Wealthy and politically connected, Lai could have continued to speak out against Communist tyranny from London or New York or some other city with strong free speech protections. But he refused to abandon his fellow Hong Kongers, and remained committed to peaceful resistance.

“If we use violence, we’ll lose the moral authority we have,” Lai said.

While many Hong Kongers were scrubbing their online profiles of pro-democracy sentiments, Lai and journalists at the Chinese-language Apple Daily continued to publish and speak out against the Chinese government’s encroachments.

“He did all this knowing he was in the crosshairs,” said Cunningham.

Amid the global chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party saw its opportunity to take down the face of Hong Kong’s freedom movement.

On August 10, 2020, Hong Kong Police raided the headquarters of the Apple Daily. Some 200 officers wearing masks searched the offices of the popular pro-democracy tabloid, collecting journalists’ documents, and arresting several people, including Lai.

Lai, whose arrest was live-streamed, was frog-marched out of the office by police in plain clothes. He was charged with colluding with a foreign country and then released on bail. Several months later, he was arrested again.

Even with Lai behind bars, the Apple Daily continued to print, and the newspapers flew off newsstands. In response, Beijing seized the newspaper’s funds (and Lai’s), and on June 23, 2021, the Apple Dailyprinted its last newspaper.

There’s no question that Lai’s imprisonment and the collapse of a free press in Hong Kong mark a turning point in a territory once noteworthy for its prosperity and commitment to classical liberalism.

“It feels like Hong Kong is dying,” one anonymous Hong Kong resident says in the documentary.

To make matters worse, many of the leaders who might help lead resistance against Beijing have fled, since they are now targets of the state.

“I was wanted by the Hong Kong court for joining the June 4 candlelight vigil,” said Sunny Cheung, a Hong Kong activist now in exile.

Cheung has no intention of returning. If found guilty, he would face a maximum sentence of life in prison for attending that vigil.

“This isn’t a legal system in any sense that we understand,” said David Alton, a member of the British House of Lords and human rights advocate, “because it’s a foregone conclusion you’re going to be convicted.”

‘The Rest of His Life in Prison’?

Jimmy Lai’s future is unknown.

The 76-year-old freedom fighter remains in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison after receiving a nearly 6-year sentence in December 2022 on various charges. But he is still awaiting trial on charges related to China’s National Security Law, and a Hong Kong appellate court recently upheld a ban that prevents his British counsel from participating in the trial.

As I watched the Acton Institute’s incredible documentary on Lai — first once and then a second time — I felt a wave of emotions. And the same thought kept hitting me. How hadn’t I heard about this before?

Lai’s life and dedication to freedom is one of the most powerful stories I’ve watched in years, yet somehow it was a story I knew nothing about. The lack of international outcry over Lai’s political persecution is something I can’t get my mind around, and I’m not the only one. Many of Lai’s supporters expressed similar sentiments.

“Why haven’t the United Kingdom and the United States tabled resolutions in the United Nations?” asked Alton.

George Weigel, a senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, was also perplexed.

“It’s a great puzzle to me why the Vatican [for example], which is constantly emphasising the rule of law in international affairs, is not more vocally concerned,” said Weigel.

The lack of attention Lai’s imprisonment is receiving is troubling. Lai’s words make it clear that he is risking his life to save Hong Kong based at least in part on his belief that others care as much about liberty as he does, and they would be spurred to action by his persecution.

“[Hong Kong] gave me freedom. I owe freedom my life,” says Lai. “The more pressure I have, the greater the voice I should have so the world will pay notice.”

Lai has done his part. After suffering years of intimidation, state spies, and attacks that included a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home, he is currently a political prisoner in a Chinese cell. But the world is not doing its part. We are not doing our part.

No groundswell movement demanding freedom for Jimmy has managed to take hold. No social media campaign has gone viral. As someone who follows the news and works for an organisation dedicated to economic freedom, I feel embarrassed and convicted that I knew so little of Lai, who in 2021 received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Cunningham told me that Lai’s imprisonment is receiving more international attention than it is in the US, but there are some doubts about what exactly the international community can do regarding China’s Lai’s imprisonment and encroachment on the rule of law in Hong Kong.

“They need to be held to account for violating the British sign-over agreement,” he said.

Whatever political leverage or groundswell movement that can bemustered to influence China must be found quickly. If not, Jimmy Lai could end up paying the ultimate price for the West’s ambivalence.

“He may very well spend the rest of his life in prison,” says Benedict Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch.

‘The Book Changed My Life’

Anyone who watches the documentary on Lai’s life is likely to find himself asking a question: Would I have the courage to do what Jimmy Lai is doing?

The answer is likely no, if we’re being honest. This is not so much an indictment of our own courage, but the recognition that the world is witnessing martyr-like bravery from Lai, who became a Christian in 1997.

The Bible was not the only book that shaped Lai, however. He credits another: F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

“The book changed my life,” Lai says of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s magnum opus.

This should perhaps come as no surprise. In a sense, Lai didn’t just read The Road to Serfdom. He lived it.

As a child, Lai saw the poverty and cruelty of the Communist system that took everything from his once-wealthy father after Mao claimed power in October 1949. Lai was able to flee that system and prosper in a free-market economy, only to watch, in a cruel twist, the CCP usher in its policies of serfdom into his adopted land.

This, I think, is what fortified Lai with such rare courage. He isn’t just fighting for freedom in an abstract sense. He’s fighting for freedom in the most practical of senses, the freedom that allows a poor child in China to reach a nearby land of opportunity — just like Lai did when he escaped to Hong Kong aboard a fishing boat after tasting a bar of chocolate.

“By saving Hong Kong, you are saving the value of the free world,” Lai says.

Lai doesn’t just believe these words are true. He knows them to be true. This is why he’s risking his life for freedom. And his remarkable life shows that heroes still walk among us.

The world right now isn’t paying attention to his sacrifice. But I believe it will. And CCP officials who think they can lock Jimmy Lai up and throw away the key would do well to remember a bit of wisdom the Apple Daily shared in its final printing:

“When an apple is buried beneath the soil, its seeds will 

become a tree filled with bigger and more beautiful apples.”

* * * * * 

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org and a Senior Writer at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). 

His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

His article first appeared at the AIER blog.

UPDATE: For updates on Jimmy Lai's plight you can follow the Support Jimmy Lai website and the Support Jimmy Lai #FreeJimmyLai account on Twitter, run by his son Sebastian, who has not seen his father for over 3 years. Asked by interviewer Christian Amanpour  Sebastien Lai , 

what he would say if he could see him tomorrow, Sebastien replies: "That I'm immensely proud of him." 

"[T]here has been a popular exaggeration of the supposed benefits of empire.

"[T]here has been a popular exaggeration of the supposed benefits of empire. Paddy O’Brien who held the Readership in Economic History in Oxford and then a chair at the London School of Economics ... concluded in 1988 that though many individuals made gains from the empire, ‘the massive public expenditure upon the apparatus of imperial rule and defence was neither sufficient nor necessary for the growth of the [British] economy from 1846 to 1914.' The great Adam Smith told everyone this in the 'Wealth of Nations', published in 1776."

~ Lawrence Goldman, from his post 'Empire, the Slave Trade, and Britain’s Wealth: A Reply to Will Hutton in The Guardian'

"Colonial empires do not come cheap."

"In recent years, we have seen a renewed interest in Britain’s imperialist past: the British Empire, the slave trade and the Caribbean slave labour plantations. More precisely, we have seen a revival of the idea that the wealth of the Western world – and Britain’s in particular – was originally built on slavery and colonial exploitation.
    "There is a lot to be said for a ‘warts-and-all’ approach to history, which does not gloss over or relativise the darker chapters of a country’s past. But the problem with the above narrative is that it is bad economics. ... [I]t is quite possible that the empire was a net loss-maker for Britain....

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great bulk of Britain’s economic activity was domestic. Even then, Britain’s most important trading partners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not its colonies but other industrialising powers, such as Britain’s Western European neighbours.
    "Colonial empires do not come cheap. The acquisition, defence and administration of overseas territories require huge upfront investments and ongoing maintenance costs. This is why, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain and other colonial empires had higher levels of military expenditure than their less imperialist neighbours and, consequently, a substantially higher tax burden.
    "The economic benefits of empires are often overstated. Empires boost trade between their constituent parts, but they are far from the only determinant of trade volumes. At least some trade between Britain and India, for example, would have occurred anyway, even if India had never been colonised, or even if it had been colonised by some other European power.
    "The cost–benefit analysis for other European colonial empires is similar. ....

"The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution.’

"Not all Western countries were major colonial powers.
    "Some had only minor colonial possessions, some had only short-lived colonial empires, some only acquired colonies very late in the day, and some never had any colonies. [Yet] those minor players in the colonial arms race industrialised at roughly the same speed as the major colonial empires, so if there was an ‘empire bonus,' it is not visible in the macro data.

"The claim that colonialism and slavery made the Western world rich is often accompanied by the claim that colonialism and slavery made the non-Western world poor. This companion thesis stands on stronger ground. There is indeed evidence for the long-term scarring effects of colonialism and slavery - [especially places that were once subject to short-termist colonialist extraction] — since these corrupted the institutional development of the affected regions."

~ Kristian Niemitz, from his new monograph 'Imperial Measurement: A cost–benefit analysis of Western colonialism' 

 

"The British Empire: a Force for Good"

 

"The British Empire: a Force for Good, a new book, is a refreshing antidote to the current zeal for decolonisation, [a movement] which encourages us to reimagine history as 'a morality play in which white men are the baddies.'
    "Author John McLean ... tells the stories of Britain’s 101 colonies established over 400 years, capturing the boldness and zeal of the pioneers who built the empire. ...
    "British colonies were the building blocks of the British Empire, spreading the English language, customs, law, property rights, and Christianity to more than 100 locations around the globe, creating much of the developed world that we live in today. That is one reason why McLean can write ... that the British Empire was a force for good.
    "McLean provides further evidence of this force for good in twenty pages on slavery, and on the sustained efforts Britain took, at great expense, to stamp it out.
    "Slavery was made illegal in Britain in 1772, the Slave Trade Act 1807 made it illegal for British ships to transport slaves, and from 1808 to 1867, Britain spent 1.8 percent of its GDP every year to seize slave ships and free slaves, McLean writes.
    "Britain’s role in reducing slavery is now hardly mentioned while former British territories where slavery had existed hundreds of years ago are claiming trillions in compensation ...
    "McLean [also] shows the extent to which independence was a disaster for many colonies. ... [the] story of armed conflict, atrocities, looting, and 'white flight' after Britain granted independence to numerous colonies [was] repeated many times. Such [he writes] is the legacy of [much] decolonisation."

~ Mike Butler from his review of 'The British Empire – a force for good' [Editor's note: the book is recommended as an antidote to much modern silliness, but with errors, most especially the chapter on American independence.]

 

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.