In an essay published September 25 on American Thinker, writer Jeremy Egerer makes an argument that is less a policy critique than a theological indictment: wokeness, in his telling, is not a political position at all. It is a spiritual condition — one he describes as “satanically deranged” — and repenting of it, he writes, is necessary not only for salvation but for participation in civilization itself.
The piece, titled “Woke 1.0: A history of the world’s most Satanic movement in pictures,” builds its case through a long historical analogy before arriving at its central demand: that the left demonstrate an unmistakable break with what Egerer calls “The Woke Era.”
A plague-era analogy
Egerer opens with the Black Death. During the 14th century, he notes, people began to wonder whether the plague was their own fault and took to whipping themselves in public acts of penance — the Flagellants. The plague, he concedes, was indeed humanity’s fault, but not in the way they imagined. The real culprit was filth on the outside, not the inside: the disease required antibiotics, hand-washing, and public sanitation, none of which the medieval world possessed.
The sins they should have repented of, in his framing — sloth, envy, rape, murder, pride, gluttony, ingratitude, ungodliness — went unaddressed as before. People blamed the wrong things, he argues, and deserved worse than the plague all along.
But Egerer is not using the Flagellants as a cautionary tale about misplaced guilt. He is using them as a model. Sometimes, he writes, something like the Flagellants is “really genuinely helpful” — and one of those cases, in his view, is proving you are no longer woke.
‘An irrefutable one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround’
The essay’s core claim is that mere political repositioning will not suffice. Egerer compares wokeness to communism in its supposed backwardness and destructiveness, stacking up a litany of adjectives — tasteless, joyless, artless, irrational — before concluding that what conservatives need to hear from the left is not the concession that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”
What would satisfy him is more theatrical. He calls for such an “irrefutable one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround” that no one could mistake a former adherent as still infected — describing, in his words, former leftists kissing pictures of C.S. Lewis, Teddy Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, and Ingrid Bergman as proof of devotion to religion, discipline, masculinity, innovation, capitalism, and what he terms “real white beauty.” He adds that he would accept even a sincere conversion to the Prosperity Gospel, or to weightlifting.
The proposed standard is deliberately maximalist, and Egerer does not pretend otherwise. The point is not a checklist of acceptable views but a public performance of renunciation — penance as civic entrance exam.
Who gets to belong
From there the essay turns to exclusion. Egerer writes that he has “photo evidence” that the woke era’s participants are “unfit” for a sweeping list of ordinary human pursuits: friendship, parties, weddings, countries, companies, schooling, parenting, publishing, modeling, filmmaking, engineering, gatekeeping, burger-flipping, and quinceañeras. They are, he concludes, bad for love and worse for life, and — absent repentance — should be “locked out of everywhere but church.”
Even the church exemption comes with conditions. Egerer writes that the woke could perhaps be accepted there, but only if they come to learn and only if they say “sorry” before baptism. Otherwise, he says, “we’ll just have to kick them out.” He speculates that in what he calls the Age of Faith, such people would likely have been exorcised or burned as witches.
The scale of the alleged offense is described in similarly grandiose terms: a garbage fire larger than Gehenna, a sewage stream more toxic than the Cloaca Maxima, a monument of cruelty, perversity, and insanity that he says he will forgive — once apologized to — but never forget, and which he argues deserves “fire-and-brimstone contempt.”
The supporting artifact he promises is an album of nearly a thousand pictures documenting the era, presented as the visual evidence for the case he has laid out.
What the essay actually argues
Stripped of its rhetoric, the piece advances three connected claims. First, that wokeness is a spiritual affliction rather than a set of political beliefs — which is precisely why, in Egerer’s logic, a change of voting habits or issue positions cannot resolve it. Second, that the appropriate response is public, ritualized repentance of a kind that leaves no ambiguity about the penitent’s transformation. Third, that until such repentance occurs, former adherents should be excluded from civic, professional, and social life, with the church as the sole — and conditional — exception.
It is a maximalist position, and Egerer presents it as such, framing the essay’s demands as deliberately disproportionate to any ordinary political disagreement. The comparison to communism does the work of establishing wokeness as a system beyond the pale of normal partisan contest, while the plague-era framing casts repentance as a matter of survival rather than etiquette.
Whether readers find the argument persuasive or repellent, the essay is notable for how openly it states its premise. Much of the contemporary debate over wokeness centers on specific policies, curricula, or workplace practices; Egerer skips past all of it to declare that the underlying condition is demonic, that apologies are owed, and that the price of readmission to polite society is a conversion visible enough to be photographed.
The piece closes not with the argument itself but with a solicitation: a note that American Thinker relies on reader donations to pay its staff and keep its ideas heard.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/woke-1-0-a-history-of-the-world-s-most-satanic-movement-in-pictures/