Dear H,
Sometime during the 14th century people began wondering if the Black Plague was our fault and started whipping themselves. Of course the Black Plague was our fault, but not for the reason they thought. It wasn’t so much that we were filthy on the inside, but that we were filthy on the outside.
The Black Plague needed antibiotics, hand washing, and public sanitation — things we weren’t quite ready for yet. What we were actually responsible for, the sloth and envy, rapes and murders, pride and gluttony, ungratefulness and ungodliness — these things we have always needed to repent of and never quite did. We had been deserving worse than the Black Plague forever and we finally got it; and when we got it we blamed things that had nothing to do with it.
The problem with the people who whipped themselves — they were called the Flagellants, I think — is that there wasn’t really any way to atone for your sins by beating yourself up physically. What we needed was to just quit sinning. And there isn’t any way to whip yourself and “share in the sufferings of Christ.” That would mean living for other people and getting yourself killed. Combined, these two things were unpalatable and impossible: and that’s the whole reason Christ had to die for us. Simply put, the best most of us could do was walk around punching ourselves, and all that did was make us look worse. Instead of cleaning up something nasty we put a clown nose on something beautiful — and made both repentance and the cross themselves look stupid.
But there are some times when something like the Flagellants are really genuinely helpful, and I think one of those cases is when you’re proving you’re not Woke anymore. Because being Woke is not a political position: it is a spiritual condition. And repenting of it isn’t just necessary to salvation: it is necessary to partake in civilization. Like Communism, Wokeness is so backward, so destructive, so tasteless, so joyless, so artless, so lacking in reason, so Satanically deranged, that what we need to hear from leftists isn’t “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” We need such an irrefutable one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround that nobody could possibly mistake them as infected. I mean kissing pictures of C.S. Lewis and Teddy Roosevelt and Steve Jobs and Ingrid Bergman: proof that they love real religion, discipline and masculinity, innovation and capitalism, and real white beauty. Hell, at this point I would even take a sincere conversion to Prosperity Gospel, or even weightlifting.
Why? Because I have photo evidence that what they put us through requires either a baptism in water or a baptism by fire: that they are unfit for friendship, parties, weddings, countries, companies, schooling, parenting, publishing, modeling, filmmaking, engineering, gatekeeping, burger-flipping and quinceañeras — bad for love and a worse fit for life; and, barring repentance, should pretty much be locked out of everywhere but church. There we could possibly accept them, but only if they’re there to learn, and only if they say “sorry” before they get baptized. Otherwise we’ll just have to kick them out. (In times like The Age of Faith, they would probably have been exorcised or burned as witches).
As such, here is the evidence: a garbage-fire far bigger than Gehenna; a sewage stream more odious and toxic than the Cloaca Maxima; a monument of irrefutable cruelty and perversity and insanity, which I will forgive (when apologized to) but never forget, and which deserves our deep-seated, full-throated, fire-and-brimstone contempt.
What I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, is an album, almost a thousand pictures large, of The Woke Era.
The Woke Era: A history in pictures.
Yours,
-J
September 22nd, 2026
P.S. One thing I noted after such a gross and disturbing archive is that the women on the extreme left in the US mirror, in some key aspects, the women of the extreme right in the Middle East. In each you see them in horrible clothes, terrible shape, screaming in the streets, eyes full of rage. The crazies in the US have no shame; the crazies in Iran have no teeth. Both have a messianic complex, and neither have brains.
Whether you set them too free or cover them up and beat them, the extreme ends of women are ugly and hysterical.