There’s an old cliché that knowledge is power. This three-word saying is believed to have originated from Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher and scientist that devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge, inventing many scientific techniques that allowed us humans to know more about the natural world.

There's never been an age where we know more about things than this one. Not only that, but the arrival of the internet allowed us to learn about pretty much anything in the world at pretty much any time. If you lived three thousand years ago, your world was very limited, and you could learn pretty much learn everything one could know in a few years. Now you can spend your whole life learning new things and not even make a dent in the remaining backlog of things to know.

And yet all this knowledge hasn't made us feel powerful but the opposite: we often feel disempowered by unlimited knowledge. I'm 24 years old. My peers and I grew up in an age where we can know anything by looking it up online. And yet my generation is the most depressed generation ever to exist.

I recently read Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, which I reviewed here. Shrier examines just how the language and practices of therapy have permeated the lives of young people both online and offline. The main point that Shrier makes is that our therapeutic culture actually harms kids more than it helps them—if it ever helped them at all. Shrier is one of the most important cultural commentators today, first with her timely exposé on the rapid onset of rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria a few years prior, and now with her new book on the toxicity and brokenness of therapy culture.

Every chapter of Shrier’s new book pulls back the curtain to the increasing proliferation of therapy-speak: in our schools, on the internet, and in everyday parlance. And the more therapeutic practices used, the more depressed and anxious people get. It's even possible that therapy causes people to develop mental health conditions they would not have had otherwise. Then there's the profit motive: therapists want clients to reframe as many events as traumatic as possible so that clients need to keep going back to “unpack traumas.”

When I talk to middle-class left-of-center people my age, they often talk about going to therapy—sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously. Ask someone who’s been in therapy how they’re feeling and they may reply with something like

As I journey through my inner landscape, I'm carefully exploring the remnants of past traumas that have shaped my experiences. It's like navigating through the depths of my subconscious, uncovering the layers of unresolved emotions and memories. By bravely embracing vulnerability and facing discomfort, I'm slowly untangling the knots of my past. Setting healthy boundaries and prioritizing self-care provide essential support along the way. It's a journey of healing and growth, where acknowledging past wounds becomes a pathway to inner peace and self-discovery.

Basically, therapy jargon with vaguely-New Age sentiment. How did contemporary culture end up like this?

As someone currently in graduate school researching the sociology of religion, I’ve done quite a bit of research on the rise of New Age spirituality in the 1960s, a phenomenon that arose in large part out of the decline of the Mainline Protestant establishment in Western countries. Mainline Protestantism set America’s national morality since our founding, giving moral authority behind causes like the abolition of slavery, temperance, and ending child labor. After WWII, belief in God went into decline throughout the West, but no group experienced decline harder than Mainline Protestants. 

This vacuum led to the rise of many alternative belief systems, chief of which was New Age spirituality, which took Protestant ideas about the importance of the individual (the idea that a person is saved through individual faith alone is deeply Protestant) and created new belief systems that essentially turned humans into their own gods, deciders of their own fates.

While the libertarian choose-what-you-want ethos worked for some people (Burning Man seems to attract big crowds every year), the decline of a national morality has led to many people feeling aimless in life. And this is where one can see how the proliferation of choice has led to more misery, rather than less. Marketers and advertisers all know the paradox of choice: when a shopper is presented with too many options, the shopper is actually less likely to buy something and often second-guesses their eventual purchase. Look at this handy illustration of jam choice:

The same goes for today's never-ending stream of information pouring in from all directions. The average Zoomer grows up carrying around a device that contains all the knowledge ever produced in the world. But humans can't handle all that knowledge. We don't know which knowledge is right or wrong. We went from having to choose between two flavors of jam to having to choose between infinite flavors of jam—and now we’re the ones stuck in a jam.

It's kind of hard to be our own gods when we don't have the powers that are attributed to God. We don't know everything. We're not all-powerful. Is it not a surprise that in an era where we can know as much as possible, we’re actually mentally worse because of it? Keep in mind that some parents will let their kids have unrestricted internet access before they even hit kindergarten. Kids will go from being only given information by their parents to being bombarded with everything, everywhere, all at once.

No wonder my generation is so depressed. Despite all the rah-rah libertarian sentiment about how no one can control us, many people desire an authority that will tell them what to do. We don't need to stand in the aisle forever looking for the right brand of jam if we get someone we trust to pick our jam out for us. This is where therapy comes in. Instead of trying to figure out our problems by ourselves, we outsource authority to a therapist. We pay someone to tell us what to do. But because we pay them, therapists often sugarcoat things for us. They tell us what we want to hear so that we’ll keep coming back. So the paid authority figure isn't even authority figure. It's all fake. We pretend like it's real because of all the fancy jargon being used. It's science! “Trust the science!” 

Knowledge is not necessarily power. The rise of therapeutic culture can be explained in part due to the need for some sort of moral grounding in a world where there are unlimited options to choose from. Throughout the West, there has been a turn away from liberal democracy among young people on both Left and Right. Many people are tired of having to figure things out in an age where there are just too many things to have to figure out. They would rather give up on democracy and hope for a benevolent sovereign to take charge. Forget Plato’s philosopher-king ideal—they want a therapist-in-chief. I don't know if we'll ever reach that point. But what I can say for sure is that the generation that grew up with unlimited amounts of information is also the most anxious and depressed generation to ever exist. Maybe some degree of ignorance was bliss after all.

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I am currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Religion. As some of you already know from my essay in The Free Press (which Substack analytics tells me a third of my readership also subscribes to), both my parents are pastors. Both my parents have graduate degrees in divinity (the study of Christian theology), so while other Christian kids were reading children’s Bible stories, my parents were reading the stories while also teaching me how to perform Biblical exegesis (critically interpreting the Bible through various lenses). Religion is something I’ve grappled with all my life.

Now, I’ve always been a major political junkie. I remember my teenage self watching Mitt Romney debate Barack Obama and being fascinated with the way politics worked as an institution, and I’d go around telling (and annoying) my classmates about libertarianism, my chosen political philosophy at the time (I am very far from libertarian today). Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similarities between theology and political theory. I’m not the first person to ever link the two—Carl Schmitt, for example, (in)famously argued that the two are inseparable.

Lately, it is in vogue to say wokeness is a form of religion.. Over at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis has an essay titled How Social Justice Became a New Religion. In the Washington Examiner, Josh Christenson discusses The false religion of wokeness, implying that wokeness is like a religion but not an actual religion. Christenson was criticizing John McWhorter’s use of the word “religion” in McWhorter’s book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Here’s a quote from Woke Racism in which he discusses wokeness:

I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. Language is always imprecise, and thus we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today.

I agree with McWhorter that wokeness is a religion, and that concepts like Ibram X. Kendi’s1 version of “antiracism”, or the idea that people have “gendered souls” different from their sexes that even kids somehow “just know”, are religious beliefs. However, McWhorter’s analysis of religion itself is lacking. Despite being a linguistics professor, McWhorter never properly defines the word “religion”.

From my personal study, I know that the word religion comes from the Latin word religio, which referred to a drive—either resulting from internal or external forces—to act in a manner deemed virtuous. There needed not a belief in divine or supernatural beings to enforce religio, but simply a feeling of obligation or duty. The theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith uses the early Latin phrase religio mihi est (religion is for me) to describe how religion was seen in the early Greco-Roman world as a personal matter: one was religious if one had a duty in life, a purpose, that had to be fulfilled. Gods could be invented and worshipped at will to symbolize such a purpose.

It was not until the invention of the Christian Church—the ecclesia—that religio took on structural form, at least in the Western context. Christianity was unique in that it required adherents to believe only in Christ.2 Much of the Roman persecution of Christians happened not because of Christians worshipping Christ, but from the fact that Christians only worshipped Christ instead of putting Jesus on the ever-growing pantheon of gods.3 From this distinction, there had to be a word that could be repurposed to distinguish between belief systems: religion.4

So if we were to use the original definition of religio, then yes, wokeness can be construed as a religion. But that’s not how the term is used in our modern Western context. In Woke Racism, McWhorter doesn’t describe wokeness as any religion. He talks about religion as composing certain elements that woke people, or as he calls them, The Elect, have:

• The Elect have superstition.

• The Elect have clergy.

• The Elect have original sin.

• The Elect are evangelical.

• The Elect are apocalyptic.

• The Elect ban the heretic.

• The Elect supplant older religions.

However, those aren’t the doctrines of any religion. There is no original sin in Judaism. Or Islam. Or Buddhism. Original sin is a Christian doctrine. Only Christianity covers all seven tenets McWhorter lists. McWhorter’s example of White people feeling guilty for the “original sin” of being born White isn’t just any religious belief, but one derived from Christianity. It is no surprise, then, that wokeness is almost nonexistent outside historically Christian nations—because wokeness needs Christian concepts like original sin to already exist to get people to believe in it. This is why many of the wokest people are “ex-vangelicals”—because former evangelical Christians that become “atheists” already have the mental foundation it takes to accept wokeness: I’m sorry for being born as an Evil Cisgender Straight White Male. I repent of my privilege and will Do Better so that I can achieve the salvation of being on the Right Side of History.

So, then, what does it mean to call wokeness a religion? In the vein of the question “If trans women are women, what is a woman?”, one can ask, “If wokeness is a religion, what is a religion?” What are people trying to say when they say that wokeness is like a religion or specifically like Christianity? How helpful is it to think of wokeness in a religious context and outside a religious context? Can religious beliefs be separated from political ones? Are all political beliefs religious? What is a religious belief? What is a religion?

These are questions anyone who compares wokeness to a religion must answer, and something I’ve been pondering a lot about in my studies. In the meantime, feel free to give your definition of religion in the comment section below. People will all have different definitions, and one’s personal definition can say a lot about their relationship to religion.

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In Hannah Barnes’ book Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children, she describes how clinicians at the Tavistock, the UK’s only clinic for gender dysphoric youth, noticed an alarming trend:

There were even young people presenting at GIDS [Gender Identity Development Service] who didn’t just identify as another gender, but as another ethnicity too. ‘There were several cases in the service where a young person identified as a different nationality, usually East Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,’ Bristow says. Anna Hutchinson confirms this was the case. They would have ‘quite specific ideas about transitioning and then taking on this East Asian identity as well as a different gender identity’, Bristow recalls. It’s hard to imagine quite what must be going on for some of these young people. The fact that they also viewed themselves as a different race was sometimes pretty much parked, and they were assessed for their gender identity difficulties as if the other identity issues were not important, or an indication that perhaps this young person might be struggling more generally.

Transracialism wasn’t the only phenomenon that routinely appeared in patients:

Whereas most of the literature on gender non-conforming children was about boys who had a lifelong sense of gender incongruence, GIDS’s waiting room was overpopulated with teenage girls whose distress around their gender had only started in adolescence. Many of them were same-sex attracted1 – the same was true for the boys attending GIDS – and many were autistic. Their lives were complicated too. So many had other difficulties – eating disorders, self-harm, depression – or had suffered abuse or trauma. How could such different lives and presentations lead to the same answer – puberty blockers?

How indeed? It should have been obvious to anyone who worked at the clinic that there was something off about the entire operation. Just a decade ago, almost all cases of gender dysphoria were found in boys that displayed signs of it when they were very young, and those boys did not have any other comorbid conditions. Suddenly, nearly all the patients were teenage girls with vast clusters of comorbidities. The Dutch protocol used to treat gender dysphoric children quickly grew outdated as patient demographics drastically changed, prompting Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, the U.K., and the Netherlands to all reverse course from their previous affirmative pathways.2

Last year, after mounting evidence of what was shaping up to be the biggest medical scandal to ever hit the UK—or perhaps the entire history of the world—the government’s health service ordered the closure of GIDS. It still operates today, although it no longer accepts new referrals, and will fully close next year.

In my last essay, I examined a spike in teenage girls identifying as transracial, especially as East Asian. As it turns out, there are children that identify as both transracial and transgender. Yet while the clinicians at the Tavistock proceeded with their “affirmative model” on gender, they cast the race element to the side. This creates a contradiction to identity-affirmation: why is “being born in the wrong body”-type rhetoric accepted for gender but not race? Why didn’t the Tavistock clinicians recommend “race-affirming” surgeries or melanin transfers? Why hasn’t anyone threatened their parents with canned lines like “would you rather have an Asian daughter or a dead one?”

As far as I know, there is no big demand to be seen as Black or Indian or White. From what we’ve seen in previous high-profile cases of transracialism, there is a uniform rejection by the public.

The NBC News article about transracialism that I linked to last time featured “experts” that tried to explain why transracialism wasn’t possible:

Experts agree race is not genetic. But they contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.

David Freund, a historian of race and politics and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, corroborates the idea that a “biological race” does not exist. What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations, he said. In addition, Freund said, the modern concept of race is inseparable from the systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making. Simply put, changing races is not possible, because “biological races” themselves are not real.

Changing races isn’t real because biological races aren’t real… but wait, isn’t what they say about gender? Don’t they say that race and gender are both social constructs? Furthermore, they say one can’t change race due to “systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race”. This means that one must say that patriarchy has never existed and does not exist in order to justify changing genders.

Most teens affected by what I’m going to call rapid-onset racial dysphoria (RORD) want to be East Asian. As I mentioned previously, this is because they internalize stereotypes about East Asians that match their own introverted personalities. It is important to note that these teens don’t just identify as any East Asian group, but specifically Japanese and Korean. Why didn’t the children identify as Chinese or Vietnamese or Mongolian? It’s simple: follow the media consumption. Anime has been popular for decades, and in recent years, Korean pop music (K-pop) has gained a large Western fanbase, particularly among teenage girls. For some, being a fan of Korean culture isn’t enough. Listening to K-pop isn’t enough. Even learning the language isn’t enough. They actually have to be Korean.

Even after their attempts to race-change-to-another, there is no big movement to “affirm” transracials. People like Rachel Dolezal and Oli London have been roundly mocked for their attempts to change race, and accused of cultural appropriation for even trying. As transracialism snowballs in size as a phenomenon, it will be clearer and clearer that this is a social contagion driven by depressed teens trying to fix their mental problems via trying to be someone they’re not. Trans activists are currently stuck between a rock (or perhaps a ROGD?) and a hard place. They have two choices: affirm transracialism or twist themselves in knots to deny a link between the two. The first choice might open the door to even more identities: trans-species, maybe. The second choice will spawn a whole cottage industry of thinkpieces from “race experts” desperately trying to figure out a way to resolve the contradiction.

Transracialism isn’t the only social contagion not being “affirmed” by “experts”…

Earlier this year, The New York Times published a longform piece titled How Teens Recovered From the ‘TikTok Tics’, about how teenagers were developing tic disorders such as Tourette’s Syndrome after prolonged periods spent online watching other people display tics:

Over the next year, doctors across the world treated thousands of young people for sudden, explosive tics. Many of the patients had watched popular TikTok videos of teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. 

Most of these new patients did not fit the mold of a typical case of Tourette’s, which generally affects boys and begins in early childhood. Tourette’s tics tend to be simple movements — like blinking or coughing — and they wax and wane over time. In contrast, the new patients were often rushed to the emergency room with tics that had appeared seemingly overnight. They were relentless, elaborate movements, often accompanied by emotionally charged insults or funny phrases.

What group was most at risk for developing such tics? The answer will shock no one:

In new research that has not yet been published, the Canadian team has also found a link to gender: The adolescents were overwhelmingly girls, or were transgender or nonbinary — though no one knows why.

An overwhelming number of patients had a history of mental health conditions. Two-thirds were diagnosed with anxiety and one-quarter had depression. One-quarter had autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Roughly one in five had a prior history of tics.

Eighty-seven percent of the patients were female, a sex skew that was also found in previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness.

At a conference on tic disorders last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, doctors from several countries shared another observation: A surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary. But without hard data in hand, multiple attendees said, the doctors worried about publicly linking transgender identity and mental illness.

“These kids have a tough enough life already, and we don’t want to inadvertently somehow make things even worse for them,” said Dr. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, whose adult daughter is transgender.

Looking at a sample of 35 patients with the TikTok tics, the researchers found that 15 of the adolescents — 43 percent — were transgender or nonbinary, compared with 12 percent of their patients with Tourette’s or with no tics. (An estimated 1.4 percent of the general population of adolescents in the United States identify as transgender.)

Other neurologists told The New York Times that they had also seen a disproportionate number of gender-diverse adolescents with the sudden tics. At a London clinic, about 11 percent of patients were transgender or nonbinary. The head of a large clinic in Paris said 12 percent were gender diverse. At a clinic in Hanover in Germany — the only country where many boys developed the sudden tics, probably because of the popularity of a young male influencer with Tourette’s there — the figure was 6 percent.

Dr. McVige, the neurologist who treated the girls in Le Roy, said that four out of her seven patients with TikTok tics were transgender, nonbinary or had gender dysphoria. Dr. Gilbert estimated that among his 200 patients in Ohio, 25 to 30 percent were transgender or nonbinary.

I recommend reading the whole article and letting the sheer amount of denial by these doctors radicalize you. It is truly mind-boggling that the entire article is about how all these teenage girls don’t actually have Tourette’s, that they are being swept up in a social contagion, and that vast numbers of them are also identifying as trans—while refusing to even state the possibility that all these teens identifying as trans could also be a social contagion. As the article states, Tourette’s was usually observed in very young boys before the last few years brought a torrent of teenage girls into clinics, especially those with autism and depression—the exact same pattern as gender dysphoria.

Hearing Dr. Gilbert’s reason for refusing to make the obvious connection between the two is heartbreaking. Even while he sees the parallels, he refuses to link the two because his own child identifies as trans. If he allowed his child to receive irreversible hormonal or surgical procedures, then he will never be able to make the connection. He will have no choice but to deny it forever, because the possibility that he harmed his own child would drive him to suicide.

So this is the bizzaro world we are living in. We are to accept that there are three different phenomena that all appeared in large numbers among autistic and depressed teenage girls over the past few years. We are to accept that transracialism is not real, it’s racist, and it’s a social contagion, thus we should not be trying to affirm them. We are to accept that tic disorders are real, but not in such large numbers, that the current wave is a contagion spread via social media, and that those teens don’t really have Tourette’s, so we should not be trying to affirm them.

And finally, we are to accept that transgenderism is real, that it’s the civil rights crusade of the 21st century, that anyone who self-IDs should have access to any single-sex space, that there is no sex advantage in sports, that not giving kids puberty blockers is trans genocide, and that we must affirm everyone who identifies as such.

Can such a contradictory ideology hold up against serious scrutiny? I doubt it. Poll after poll show that Americans are increasingly dropping their support—especially among Gen Z. Developed Western European countries have all abandoned their old models and set strict limits on puberty blockers in the face of an explosion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. Will America follow their lead or go off the deep end?

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The Asian American literary canon is filled with stories about self-loathing. The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan, perhaps the most famous Asian American novelist, once wrote a story titled “Fish Cheeks”, in which she describes her hatred toward her physical features (and channels her inner Dusty Springfield):

I fell in love with the minister's son the winter I turned fourteen. He was not Chinese, but as white as Mary in the manger. For Christmas I prayed for this blond-haired boy, Robert, and a slim new American nose.

When I found out that my parents had invited the minister's family over for Christmas Eve dinner, I cried. What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas? What would he think of our noisy Chinese relatives who lacked proper American manners? What terrible disappointment would he feel upon seeing not a roasted turkey and sweet potatoes but Chinese food?

Note her desire for a “slim new American nose”. She was born and raised in America, so when she says American, she actually means White American, and thus implies that she saw herself as “less American” for being Asian. She felt deeply insecure over her Asian appearance and wished that she could look White, just like Robert and his family. She is definitely not the only Asian person to ever feel this way. You can find thinkpieces by Asian authors with titles like I went to bed every night wishing I could just wake up white, all filled with teenage angst.

This desire to change one’s body to fit a different beauty standard, and one’s nose in particular, isn’t new. Decades ago, it was not uncommon for teenage Jewish girls in America to receive rhinoplasties in an attempt to appear more in line with WASP beauty standards.

So when I saw a story titled Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race, I knew I was about to step into a world of deep self-loathing. However, these cases did not involve wanting to be White, but wanting to be Asian:

Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.

Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”

Alia, 14, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born Egyptian but wants to be Japanese and Korean. She said that after she let YouTube videos featuring images of monolid eyes and ambient music play on repeat while she sleeps, she thought her eyes had developed monolids and she lost roughly 2 pounds overnight.

Some people said they were initially drawn to RCTA because of a special connection with a race or an ethnicity different from their own. Alia, who goes by the Japanese name Sayaka Hashimoto online, said that she has always felt connected to Japanese culture and that she was elated to discover RCTA last year.

Alia said that growing up, she was mocked for being Egyptian: “I’ve had many people call me ‘fiery’ or that I get angry quickly just ’cause I’m Middle Eastern. It might also have been a reason why I transitioned.”

Although a person can in theory be motivated to try to change into any race or ethnicity, the overwhelming majority of the RCTA community wants to be East Asian, and similarly, most race-related subliminals aim to transform listeners into East Asians.

So the reason these teenage girls want to be Asian is because of a strong affinity to various East Asian cultures, primarily after prolonged exposure to social media. And in order to become Asian, they change their names to something Asian-sounding, as well as try techniques to make their eyes look more stereotypically Asian.

The defining features are:

1. A strong sense of feeling inadequate in their own bodies, especially as a result of not fitting stereotypes on how they are supposed to act

2. Prolonged exposure to social media, where videos are made offering tips on how to “transition”

3. Shedding their birth name for a name in line with their newfound identity

4. Actively trying to alter their physical features to look like a stereotype of their newly chosen identity

5. Mostly teenage girls being affected

Sound familiar?

I remember reading Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and being struck by the way she described being a teenage girl in America. After all, I’d never been one, so I have no idea what it’s like. But from her book, I gleaned that body image issues impact girls far more than boys:

To understand how some of the brightest, most capable young women of this era could fall victim to a transgender craze, we should begin by noting that adolescent girls today are in a lot of pain. In America, Britain, and Canada, teenagers are in the midst of what academic psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called a “mental health crisis”—evincing record levels of anxiety and depression. Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25 percent. The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37 percent between 2005 and 2014. And the worst hit—experiencing depression at a rate three times that of boys—were teenage girls.

Lest one assume that these girls are merely reporting their depression in greater numbers (and not necessarily experiencing more of it), Haidt points out that the average rates of self-harm reflect the same spike: an increase of 62 percent since 2009—all among teenage girls.

What happened? podcast host Joe Rogan asked Haidt. Why the sudden spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm? “Social media,” was Haidt’s immediate reply.

Teenage girlhood in America is practically synonymous with the worry that one’s body does not measure up. In eras prior, ideal beauty may have taken the form of a few girls in your class: the ones who could not help being beautiful, leaning into their lockers, tossing their hair, and—most inexplicable to me—knowing when to smile and keep their mouths shut.

Social media personas—that is to say, the “friends” most relevant to today’s teens and with whom they spend the most time—admit no such imperfection. Carefully curated and “facetuned,” their photographs set a beauty standard no real girl can meet. And they sit constantly in a girl’s pocket, feeding fears of inadequacy, fueling obsession over her perceived flaws—all the while vastly exaggerating them. Even under the best of circumstances, teenage girls have been cruelly unforgiving critics of their own bodies—and each others’. But today, social media supplies the microscope and performs the math.

So when I read about Alisa and Alia wanting to be Asian, I can imagine the inner turmoil the two are likely going through. Alisa is from an Ukrainian immigrant family, and I know firsthand that growing up in an immigrant family can be rough. A lot of kids (like Amy Tan in the beginning of this piece) struggle to reconcile their ethnic identity with their American identity. There is often a nebulous feeling of being “stuck between two sides”: too American for the home country, but also too foreign for America. This can cause an identity crisis, a feeling of discomfort in one’s skin that may manifest in a desire to discover a new identity on the internet. A few decades ago, this may have involved wearing a lot of black, cutting their wrists, or throwing up in the bathroom.

And as for Alia, she “transitioned” to East Asian because she did not live up to stereotypes about Middle Easterners. She internalized the stereotypes about her identity, and instead of accepting that she did not have to live up to being “fiery”, she simply chose a racial identity that did not have such stereotypes.

Lisa Selin Davis has written about how teenage girls that acted in stereotypically masculine ways—tomboys—were once common, but are vanishing now as they increasingly identify as trans. Instead of breaking gender stereotypes, transgender ideology reinforces them, and transracial ideology does the same.

It makes sense that most “transracials” are identifying as East Asian. When I think about how many non-Asians in America perceive East Asian people like myself, certain stereotypes come up: quiet, shy, introverted, bookish. In short, the same traits an introverted teenage girl that spends all her time on the internet would have. Those that want to be Asian are those that have picked up on Asian stereotypes in Western society, and are thus reinforcing such stereotypes by trying to identify as Asian.

This is exactly the kind of racism I've been trying to address all my life. I am Asian. I was born this way. I cannot be a different race. I know that there exists stereotypes about Asian people. And I know that there are Asians that internalize these stereotypes and think that being Asian means being nerdy and obsessed with anime and bubble tea. I don’t care about these stereotypes. Just because I don’t watch anime doesn’t make me any more or less Asian. “Asian” is not a feeling. “Asian” is not a set of stereotypes. Those out there trying to force their eyes to look monolidded will never be Asian. A common racist gesture against Asians is squinting one’s eyes or pulling them back, now apparently that’s what “transracials” do to be Asian.

I will not “affirm” these “transracials”, and neither should anyone else. These kids are deeply depressed and think that their problems will all go away if they identify as Asian. It’s not happening. They need someone to tell them that it’s normal to be insecure about their identity and appearance at that age, and that there is no magic transformation that will make their mental anguish go away. Thankfully, there isn’t any “race-affirming surgery” or “melanin replacement therapy” yet. But in times like these, who knows what will magically become the next civil rights crusade?

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The article also claims that “it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race”, while also saying that “it is a disservice to transgender people to compare the two”. I will discuss the ridiculousness of this claim in part two. Like, share, and subscribe.

There’s this running gag about hipsters and their love of workwear. The brand Carhartt is especially valorized among this set. The idea is simple: hipsters are usually well-off people by way of their parents’ trust funds, but pretend to be poor as they believe that being a “real artist” is being poor. Cue them buying as much workwear as possible as they romanticize the idea of being a blue-collar man at a manufacturing plant while simultaneously looking down on actual trade work.

I live in Brooklyn, the hipster capital of the East Coast.1 Speaking of capital, that’s something most hipsters have. I mean this in both an economic and social sense. The average hipster is flush with economic capital from their hedge-fund-managing parents, and flush with social capital from their low-paid-but-high-prestige job as a tastemaker at Pitchfork or some other cultural publication I don’t even know about because it’s too “underground”.

Now, I may live in Brooklyn, and I am a writer, but I am not a writer in Brooklyn. I am aware that being a “writer in Brooklyn” has certain cultural connotations. Most writers in Brooklyn are transplants. If you’ve ever watched Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls, about four twenty-something bohemian-type transplants in Brooklyn, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And even when a “writer in Brooklyn” is not a transplant, they typically come from one of the affluent areas of Brooklyn: Park Slope, Williamsburg (minus the Hasidic side), and Cobble Hill.

Instead, I live in the working-class immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park. I’ve rarely seen anyone walking around my neighborhood wearing Carhartt. Many instead wear workwear that is even cheaper, as Carhartt is one of the costliest workwear brands (and well worth the asking price to be used for manual labor). Much like how it is normal for a professional photographer to spend $3000 on a new lens but seen as a splurge to a photography hobbyist, the fact that Carhartt is a costly workwear brand reinforces its value as a status symbol to hipsters. Working-class people who recognize the high quality of Carhartt pay its prices out of necessity, so it isn’t seen as a splurge, while hipsters pay Carhartt’s high prices to look cool.

When I take the subway (the L train, usually) to one of those hipster neighborhoods, that’s when that orange Carhartt logo starts menacing me everywhere I go. You’d think those hipsters would have an aversion to orange after they spent four years raging at a certain politician.

When I saw an article just published in The Nation2 titled “You Can’t Even Tell Who’s Rich Anymore”, I knew it was going to be about clothing. In the article, the author (a professional architectural and cultural critic) bemoans the fact that rich people no longer dress like what we think rich people should dress like:

If I had as much money as a Zuckerberg or an Arnault, I would leave the house every single day in impeccable and expensive outfits. I would rock vintage Chanel and wear long gloves and big sunglasses and the weird statement jewelry they sell at art museums. I would own Miu Miu shoes. I would have a personal tailor and a closet the size of my living room.

You used to be able to look at someone and tell that they were rich. Clothes have always been an important class signifier. The magnates of old all had personal tailors, custom suits, beautiful shoes, and exquisite yet curated jewelry. A child asked to stereotype a rich person will tell you they wear a fancy suit or a ballgown with a pearl necklace. But even when I was a child, the richest people in the world no longer dressed like that. Formality has long been equated with wealth, but wealthy people, off the red carpet, no longer embrace formality. What a waste!

What is lost when sartorial symbols of labor—be they working-class-coded such as Carhartt and Dickies or the technical gear necessary for doing certain jobs or activities—are appropriated by rich people? You might be thinking, “But, Kate, doesn’t this signal that we will soon be dressing in a newly aesthetically classless society?” Haha, no! That’s what I find most interesting about all of this: If we look beneath the surface of high fashion, the added insult to injury (beyond Tiffany’s selling NFT bling) is that the rich’s appropriation of “ugliness,” “normalcy,” and working-class aesthetics is inherently ironic because they are rich and sometimes, in the case of such trends as over-articulated ugly dad shoes, that irony is explicit.

First of all, perhaps the author doesn’t realize that the fact that rich people don’t spend their money splurging on designer clothing is how they got rich in the first place. Indeed, rich people (especially in tech) have developed such a reputation for dressing plainly that looking unkempt is now a heuristic for technological brilliance.

And second of all, not every workwear enthusiast with callus-free hands is actually some hipster trying to be ironic.

Take, for example, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. I’ve written about him before in regards to his race with celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz. I saw many photos of Fetterman in Carhartt, and I remember looking him up on Wikipedia and finding out that he grew up well-off, that his father was a partner at an insurance firm that Fetterman was supposed to take over, and that he had a Master’s degree from Harvard paid for by his wealthy family. In short, he was exactly the kind of guy that would wear Carhartt hoodies.

There were a lot of accusations of inauthenticity during the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race. Oz had the accusation of being a snake-oil salesman that made questionable supplements fly off nutritional store shelves. And Fetterman had the accusation of pretending to be working-class by wearing Carhartt.

But how do we know for sure that Fetterman was only wearing the hoodies to try and pretend to be working-class? I just spent a lot of time talking about how hipsters have appropriated the Carhartt aesthetic. Considering that the concept of Carhartt is now associated with people that have never worked manual labor in their life, it’s impossible to say if he was pandering or not. Perhaps he just likes how the clothes look.

But there is another major takeaway from his Carhartt discourse. As affluent people have moved on from displaying their status via conspicuous consumption, they now display status through other means. The status signaling value of designer items has decreased a lot with this shift. Wearing clothing or carrying bags with designer logos is now considered be tacky: a sign of gauche nouveau riche mentality, or even a sign of poverty. And the symbols that once signified one's status as a manual laborer, like Carhartt or Dickies, are now worn by trust-fund kids across the world.

Some people lament that one cannot tell who is rich anymore. I disagree. Sure, it’s now harder to judge by the clothes one wears. But you can still tell by the way one talks and the views one holds.

A common theme in my work has always been that certain beliefs are held by certain people, and that whether or not one espouses those beliefs can reveal their socioeconomic position.

In my earliest essay on this Substack, I discussed how affluent Asians often hold a different set of values from poor Asians. I expanded on this for an article I wrote for Tablet. The wealth gap between the top 10% of Asian Americans and the bottom 10% is the highest gap for any race in America. Asian Americans seem to come in two stereotypes: the affluent doctor and the poor restaurant delivery driver.

In Jay Caspian Kang’s book The Loneliest Americans, he discusses how

Before the “Chinese virus,” I’d always come across assimilated Asian men venting on social media about the time one of their white neighbors in buildings just like mine mistook them for deliverymen, which was always followed up by a firm statement of their credentials, something like, “I guess he didn’t know I am a journalist/doctor/lawyer/hedge fund manager!” It’s embarrassing for both sides when this happens, but the implication has always felt so bizarre to me—the real offense is being mistaken for being poor. Every immigrant group engages in these sorts of differentiations. But what sets modern, assimilated Asian Americans apart is that our bonds with our “brothers and sisters” are mostly superficial markers of identity, whether rituals around boba tea, recipes, or support for ethnic studies programs and the like.

Many affluent people are scared of being seen as poor. But wearing the right clothes is no longer a symbol of wealth. People now have to show their status in other ways. For the affluent Asian, this usually involves expressing support for policies that actively harm poor Asians. One may wonder how any Asian could support affirmative action when it is literally institutional anti-Asian racism. But consider the fact that affluent Asians know the right things to say and the right extracurriculars to participate in to get into good colleges, while the poor Asian has no choice but to brute-force their way in by getting their kids into a top public school and then score as high as possible on the SAT. The affluent Asian can afford to support affirmative action, which earns them brownie points from their fellow liberal elites, while pulling the ladder from poor Asians.

Generally speaking, if someone supports something that seems to negatively impact them, then that person is showing off the fact that they can self-criticize and not be harmed by its effects. Have you ever heard of Race2Dinner?

The concept is simple. Eight to ten White women pay a total of $2,500 to have a two-hour dinner with “antiracist” activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. During this dinner, they are told about why being White is bad and read excerpts from Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

Now, you may think, who would pay good money to go to a dinner where you are criticized for two hours straight? Not poor White people. This act of ritual self-flagellation is meant to signal the high socioeconomic status of the White women who attend, because only rich people could and would pay for such an event. It is also a signal of being “with the times” or on trend, as “antiracism” programs are all the rage these days. I don’t think a poor White person living in an opioid-ravaged Appalachian town cares much for the sneering elitism of Robin DiAngelo’s work, nor being seen as trendy by participating in “antiracism” classes, as their primary concern is putting food on the table.

It’s no surprise then to learn that progressive activists, a group that most hipsters would fall under, and the group that is now colloquially called woke, are composed of some of the wealthiest people in America:

[P]rogressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affluent and highly educated people who call others out if they use “problematic” terms or perpetrate an act of “cultural appropriation.” But what the vast majority of Americans seem to see—at least according to the research conducted for “Hidden Tribes”—is not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority.

Many people have also wondered why affluent Latinos keep using the word Latinx when it is clearly unpopular among the overwhelming majority of Latinos. But its unpopularity is its selling point. If Latinx was a popular term, it would no longer hold elite status. By using a word so garish and offensive to the average Latino, elite Latinos are able to signal their status by just changing a single syllable.

Many views woke people espouse are only accepted by a small number of people, as shown in the widely-criticized NPR tweet below claiming there is “limited scientific evidence” for sex differences in sports. Again, the unpopularity ends up proving their elite status, as they can imagine that everyone else is stupid for not being as “enlightened” as them.

As outward markers of social status such as clothing have now become unreliable indicators of class, expect virtue signaling to rise even further. Perhaps we should go back to the days when rich people were obviously rich just by looking at them. At least then they wouldn’t have to virtue signal all these policies that actively harm poor people.

Bring back robber baron outfits.

I saw a video going viral on Twitter a few days ago. In it, a panel is discussing the question of whether or not immigrants should assimilate to American culture. The clip in question is the answer from an Asian American man discussing what it means to assimilate. He rattles off a list of things that he claims Asian Americans are doing to assimilate: having stable families, not having kids out of wedlock, attaining education, not committing crime, etc.

Then he says, “Well, if that’s so-called assimilation: having a nuclear family, buying a house, going to school, whatever it is, then yeah, okay, call me pro-assimilation then.”

Watch the video and observe the reactions of the other Asian Americans. As he is talking, the people around him react in shock and horror. They know that what he is saying is considered a conservative talking point, and the other Asians are all liberal. He is in fact a conservative: Vince Dao is his name, and he bills himself online as a conservative commentator.

And here is where things get turned upside-down.

In American discourse, the idea is that cultural assimilation is something conservatives claim to favor, while liberals claim to favor multiculturalism and a celebration of cultural differences.

But what if it was the opposite way around?

Consider this scenario. Let’s say you meet a Latino person that identifies themselves as “Latinx”. Would you assume that this person is unassimilated or assimilated?

The answer is, of course, that this Latinx person is far more likely to be assimilated into mainstream American culture than Latinos that refuse to use the term. I live in a heavily-Latino neighborhood myself. Most people here are immigrants. It’s a working-class neighborhood. Some people here are undocumented. Some can only speak very basic English. Every Latino I’ve talked to here has recoiled at the use of the term Latinx. They view it as a colonization of the language. I guarantee that you won’t find a single person here that would ever utter Latinx.

So where can you find Latinx? Looks like there’s a book called Finding Latinx.

The author is Paola Ramos. I knew way before I looked at her Wikipedia page that she must have gone to America’s most exclusive colleges. And sure enough: Ramos graduated from Barnard College with a BA in Political Science and Government and earned her Master in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

She describes how she feels about Latinx in her book:

It was a word I couldn’t recognize but one that seemed to know exactly who I was. That addendum, the “x,” set free the parts of myself that had deviated from the norms and traditions of the Latino culture I grew up in in a way that, interestingly, made me closer to, not further from, my own community. A word that wasn’t familiar but one that seemed to tout the uniqueness and diversity that had defined the sixty million Latinos living in the United States. One that felt it aimed to awaken not just a few of us, or half of us, or 90 percent of us—but every single one of us. Even those who had never been seen as “Latino” to begin with. And I wasn’t alone in feeling this.

She wasn’t alone in feeling this way? I suppose that’s true. After all, 3% of U.S. Hispanics use the term, while most of the rest hate it with a burning passion. If my calculations are correct, 3% is slightly more than 0%.

Her book wants to “redefine Latino identity” via “finding Latinx”. In other words, she wants to take a language and culture that has traditionally used gendered nouns and turn it into a language that bends the knee to the cosmopolitan elite that want to erase cultural differences in language. In short, Latinx is used only by the people educated at America’s most elite schools. (I wrote a whole essay about how colleges manufacture and promote awkward neologisms as a way of creating a new elite language, take a look)

And that’s the consistent pattern of those who use Latinx: they are overwhemingly the product of America’s most elite colleges and social milieus. These are the spaces that many immigrant parents have worked hard to achieve for their children. And it worked, as now their children are assimilated. They’ve literally ditched Latino identity in favor of one that marks them as an official member of the educated, affluent, and urban professional-managerial class that controls our media and our academies of higher education.

Let’s go back to what Vince Dao was saying about how educational attainment was a sign of assimilation. He’s right, but not in the way he thinks he is right. The Asians that act shocked are assimilated Asians. One can even argue that they are even more assimilated. The man in the video that wears the green shirt is Ziad Ahmed. He is the son of a wealthy banker, and he made the news a few years ago when he got into Stanford by writing #BlackLivesMatter a hundred times in lieu of a college essay.

This isn’t a surprise. Having grown up wealthy, Ahmed knew how to speak the language of the coastal elite. While working-class immigrant Asian parents are forcing their kids to take test prep and piano lessons thinking that it’ll help their kids get into a better college (it won’t, those kids will just look like bland copy-and-pastes to the admissions officers), the wealthy Asian elite have already cracked the code. People like Ahmed know that signaling that one has the “correct” beliefs is what is needed to gain entry to America’s most prestigious colleges. They are the assimilated ones.

The show of surprise from Ahmed is mandatory, of course.

Ahmed and the purple-haired woman on the panel know that in order to assimilate into the American elite, they need to say all the right things. They need to abandon ethnic identity and culture in favor of a monoculture that seeks to gain total power over American society. Sure, they’ll pay lip service to being “Asian” via shallow declarations of loving bubble tea and Everything Everywhere All At Once, but their cultural milieu is entirely informed by the beliefs of the managerial elite.

Young Asian Americans show signs of this more than others, After all, their own parents pushed them to excel academically. Their own parents told them that Harvard and Yale were the best. And once they get into Harvard and Yale, they assimilate. They come back home to their parents and suddenly call their parents backwards. Their parents may have left impoverished countries to give their children a better life. For some Chinese and Vietnamese (and for Latinos, Cuban and Venezuelan) immigrants, their parents may have fled an authoritarian communist regime. But then their kids go to college to learn that the United States is a fundamentally imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal system that perpetuates structural, systemic, institutional, and hegemonic violence against marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ bodies. To be an elite college grad is to affirm these beliefs. To be assimilated, one must “do the work” of “unpacking” “intersecting identities”.

So if getting an education at an elite college is a sign of assimilation, then it isn’t conservatives that support assimilation. It’s liberals.

And that is the irony of assimilation. Conservatives (more so of the David French flavor and not the Sohrab Ahmari types) support the freedom to practice and preserve many different cultures. Liberals want to turn all cultures into one homogenous blob chanting whatever the media (which is controlled by fellow members of their class) tells them is the newest trend to support.

And yet conservatives claim to be pro-assimilation and liberals claim to be pro-multiculturalism.

Dao claims that values commonly attributed to Asians are assimilationist values. I disagree. Asians score higher on standardized tests than everyone else for reasons that have nothing to do with “assimilation”. If Asians were truly trying to assimilate, we’d get lower test scores. Same with having fewer out-of-wedlock births and lower incarceration rates. If the goal is assimilation, Asians should have more kids out of wedlock and go to prison more.

And what of affirmative action, a policy that essentially legalizes anti-Asian discrimination? Let’s see:

Our new research shows that the divide among Asians is generational. Based on the 2016 National Asian American Survey, we found that Asian immigrants are least likely to support affirmative action. By contrast, Asians born in the US with parents who were also born here – the so-called later generation – are most likely to do so. In fact, later-generation Asians are more likely to support affirmative action than Asian immigrants by a factor of three.

The assimilated Asian supports affirmative action because that’s what their fellow liberal elites support. The immigrant Asian that lives in an enclave doesn’t support affirmative action because they don’t care about virtue signaling. They just want their children to not be discriminated against.

And that’s the irony of American assimilation. Assimilation isn’t conservative-coded. It’s liberal-coded.1

We see this pattern play out politically. Asian immigrants are voting Republican at higher and higher rates. But their children, the ones that went to the fancy colleges their parents worked hard for them to get into, are mostly voting Democrat. Same with Latinos. Legacy news publications everywhere are increasingly noticing the Latino and Asian shift away from Democrats over the past few years, mostly among the working classes.

Democrats were once the big-tent party. But the liberal elites in charge have enforced ideological purity. One cannot support one issue without supporting them all. As a popular slogan goes, “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”. Many would-be supporters of one issue are turned off when they realize they have to support them all.

Times are changing here in American politics. The realignment is happening. Democrats have increasingly become the party of the cosmopolitan elite that seeks to enforce its orthodoxy on everyone else. Republicans have increasingly become the big-tent party, where evangelical Christians work with Orthodox Jews and Muslims to preserve religious freedom. Where Asian, Latino, and African immigrants can keep their cultures and values without assimilating into the homogenous Borg perfectly captured by this sign:

If an immigrant puts that sign up on their lawn, that’s how you know they’ve assimilated.

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Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay series where I explore what it means to assimilate in America. Like and subscribe.