[CLIP] Jennifer Sey: Wokeism Is a Costume Elites Wear to Pretend They Care About Social Justice

I worked at Levi's for almost 23 years, a brand and a company that people around the world love. I love the product. I'm wearing it now. But in 2020, I pushed back on the school closures in my city of San Francisco. This went against the woke ideology and the democratic leadership, both in my city, state and at the national level. And this was considered unacceptable. I pushed back and back and back for two years and ultimately was pushed out of the company because of woke capitalism, essentially, because I was foolish enough or perhaps courageous enough to say this is a lie. This is a lie. This is benefiting no one and in fact is harming many, many people, many children. But, you know, I was a traitor to this what has become almost like a religion, and certainly was a traitor to my class, which maniacally upheld these ideals that COVID restrictions were for the good of the masses, when in fact, they were doing such great harm. So there's something about you that was already different. For example, you were sending your kids to public school, which was atypical of your peer group. Yeah, it was really atypical. I mean, not just of my side to side peers. I mean, I think probably two, three levels employees below me, below me in the corporate hierarchy. You couldn't find a single soul who sent their kids to public school, not in San Francisco. They perhaps moved to a wealthier neighborhood across the bay, where they might feel comfortable sending their kids to public school. But by and large, I was in the vast minority. And so, you know, over the course of my two years of kicking and screaming about how wrong this was and how children were being harmed, my peers all sent their kids back to school, because their kids went to private school. That's when I thought the light bulb would go off and people would see the hypocrisy, if I just made it clear in a calm, nice way. But they didn't, because the hypocrisy, in a sense, is the point. This pose of wokeness, it's a cloak they wrap themselves in to signal virtue, to say, to kind of hide greed, corruption, keeping all the good stuff for themselves. It's this costume that the left liberal elite wraps around themselves to say, I care about social justice. I care about all these causes. I am a good person. If you threaten to expose that, you need to be banished. And my pushing back on this one very simple thing, which now seems so obviously like not that crazy of a thing to have done, let's open schools for public school students, that risks exposing the entire fraudulent operation. As we've seen of late, Sam Bankman Freed, the now notorious founder and CEO of FTX, he said it. He said it in a DM exchange with a Vox reporter. He said, it's a game. We woke Westerners' play so that people like us. I couldn't say it any better than that. He said it himself. That was fascinating when I came across that, because you don't see it verbalized very often. It's interesting, though, because he thought he was talking to someone that was in his cohort. Why would she expose it? She's in the press. They're buddies. They're both up to the same game. He didn't think she would release that. Add to that, he doesn't really think there's anything wrong with it. They don't think there's anything wrong with it, because if you only ever talk to people who agree with you and think the same thing, it's very hard to think that there's anything wrong with that. That becomes your morality. That becomes your religion. That becomes the way you think. You don't let anything pierce that. He shared it with her as a fellow member of this woke tribe. Why would she expose it? She'd risk exposing herself. But she saw the hypocrisy and exposed it. That's a fascinating take. There's so many areas to cover here. I want to start with when you first noticed something was off. March 13, 2020, the day that everything locked down in San Francisco. It was off from day one. I could say it was even before that because we felt it coming in San Francisco. We knew this was coming. The fear and the panic was already being generated. But I was obsessively reading the data along with my husband that was coming out of Italy, which the median age of death was over 80. Nobody was bothering to look at actual data or adhere to the pre-pandemic playbook, which said, you never shut schools down for more than a couple of weeks. My alarm bells went off from the very beginning. It was from day one that me and my husband, we both said, hell no, this is wrong. People are going to be harmed. I had kept my advocacy to children in schools. It wasn't because I wasn't opposed to other things like lockdowns and business closures and keeping old folks in retirement homes from their loved ones and sick people in hospitals from the comfort. I was opposed to all of this. Then the upcoming vaccine mandates for a vaccine that we now know does not even work. People were fired. I was opposed to all of this. But I did try to manage my outspokenness to children and schools and restrictions on kids. I thought that would be something we could all reach some agreement on, that we should not harm children, but I was wrong. It was all of a piece. But it took quite a while for your exit from Levi's. Yeah, it did. It took actually quite a while because I was outspoken from the very beginning, like I said, March 13th. It wasn't until September of that year, so a full six months until somebody raised it with me at work. It was our head of corporate communications and she said, you might want to maybe think about maybe not doing this. When you speak, you speak on behalf of the company. The implication being there would be reputational harm to the company caused. I would argue their bigger concern was reputational harm to them, my peers themselves who had adopted this pose, this virtuous pose to say, I stay home all the time because I care about people. Meanwhile, in September of October or October of that year, they all began to send their kids back to private schools. I really believed at that point the fever would break and people would see the hypocrisy and there would be a rising up of people to say, we need to open the schools, we need to open businesses. At this point, playgrounds in San Francisco were closed. I thought people are going to definitely argue about, they're going to say we need to open the playgrounds, but there wasn't. It was so oppressive in San Francisco. It's sort of like the further left leaning a city, state or town was, the more oppressive and the more intense the restrictions were. By December, when I started to lead rallies with my husband and a few friends, they were sparsely populated. People were afraid to push back against this religion. They were afraid because you experienced tremendous reputational harm if you did. You were called everything from a teacher killer to a racist, a eugenicist. Nobody wants to hire a person or give a person like that a job. Who would? From the first time that I got talked to in September, it was just constant for the next year and a half. I was so angry because a sane person might say to me, well, why didn't you just stop? I couldn't because the hypocrisy, it was so great. I was so angry that these people would dare to say to me while sending their own kids to in-person school, you can't advocate for poor children to be in school.