In my last two posts I described Macron as a gear spinning in a vacuum, and I laid out the four axioms of the progressive operating system. Man is born good and society corrupts him. Outcomes are explained by structures, not individuals. Equality of outcomes is the measure of justice. The State is the benevolent actor that corrects it all. Now here's the part people miss: wokism isn't a foreign body that infected this system. It's what you get when you run those same axioms to their logical conclusion. Wokism changes just one variable: the unit of analysis. The individual becomes the identity group. Take the first axiom. If society corrupts, wokism names how: patriarchy, systemic racism, heteronormativity, colonial legacy. The corruption is no longer vague. It has a structure, a vocabulary, and a guilty party. The second axiom. If structures explain outcomes, then every disparity between groups is proof of discrimination. Not a possible sign, proof. And when you can't find the discrimination, it's because it's systemic, unconscious, invisible. The theory can't lose. Evidence confirms it, and absence of evidence confirms it too. That's the signature of an unfalsifiable belief. The third axiom. If equality of outcomes is justice, then equality before the law isn't enough. You need equity: treating people differently according to their group so results converge. The universal principle that the rule is the same for everyone gets quietly replaced by a ledger of debts and credits between groups. The fourth axiom. If the State is the great corrector, wokism provides it with a new mission and a new army: diversity offices, mandatory trainings, speech codes, compliance departments, university bureaucracies. It's statism extended into language, hiring, culture, and eventually thought. Each axiom, pushed one step further, gives you a pillar of wokism. That's why it spread so easily through institutions that already believed the premises. It didn't need to convert them. It just needed to finish their sentence. But the most revealing part is what happens to punishment. I said progressivism can't punish. That's not quite true of wokism. Wokism punishes, and hard. It just redistributes punishment. Status in this system is determined by your place in the hierarchy of victimhood. If you belong to a group defined as oppressed, your actions are explained by context, and holding you accountable becomes suspect. If you belong to a group defined as oppressor, a joke, a tweet, a clumsy word from ten years ago is enough to end a career. No due process, no proportionality, no forgiveness. So it's not the absence of consequences. It's consequences detached from acts and attached to identity. What you did matters less than what you are. René Girard saw this coming. He argued that our civilization's concern for victims, which is one of its greatest moral achievements, could be turned into a weapon: victimhood becomes a form of power, and persecution now happens in the name of victims. The scapegoat mechanism doesn't disappear. It gets a moral alibi. Which brings us back to Macron. He has publicly criticized American campus theories and the racialization of social questions. I believe he's sincere about it. But you can't fight a conclusion while keeping its premises. As long as you believe outcomes are explained by structures, that justice means equal results, and that the State is the enlightened engineer of society, you're building the infrastructure that wokism will move into. You're just annoyed by the tenant. That's the deepest problem with technocratic progressivism. It thinks it's the reasonable center, standing against the excesses of the radicals. In reality it's the same operating system with a nicer interface. The radicals aren't betraying its axioms. They're the only ones taking them seriously. You don't defeat wokism with better communication or a speech at the Sorbonne. You defeat it by going back to the axioms. Individuals are responsible for their actions. The law is the same for everyone. Unequal outcomes are not proof of injustice. And the State is not a god. Everything else is fighting the smoke while feeding the fire.