A vow to destroy the “woke mind virus”

In his biography of Elon Musk published last year, Walter Isaacson revealed one of the major reasons that led to Musk’s $43 billion purchase of Twitter—“deep concern about the dangers of what he called the ‘woke mind virus’ that he believed was infecting America.”

According to Isaacson, “Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition.” Isaacson said that Musk was initially “sanguine” about the news, but his child, who is now legally known as Vivian Jenna Wilson, “became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him.” Musk said he has tried to reconcile with his child but Wilson doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.

“He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles,” Isaacson wrote. “Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices.”

This much about Musk’s sad, public falling out with his son is well-known. But last week, Musk added heartbreaking new details. In an interview with Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire, Musk said he was deceived by medical providers into consenting to his then-minor son’s transition. “I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier,” he told Peterson. “This was before I had any understanding of what was going on, and we had COVID going on, so there was a lot of confusion, and I was told Xavier might commit suicide.”

Musk now views this counsel from medical providers as “incredibly evil,” adding that any providers involved in harmful “transitions” of minor children should go to prison. He says he vowed to eradicate the “woke mind virus” that had effectively killed his son.

Musk’s antipathy for transgender propaganda and wokeism is well documented. Elsewhere, he has warned that this virus is “one of the biggest threats to modern civilization.” He has said that it is “divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people … a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”

Musk defines this virus as a form of cultural Marxism and “very divisive identity politics … [that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite. … It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves.” Musk said that the woke mind virus is essentially “communism rebranded.”

No parent can watch Peterson’s interview with Musk and not be saddened by what he reports about his family. But the problem is much bigger than many people understand. The manipulation Musk experienced from medical providers concerning his son has been happening to countless other parents across the country and around the world.

In her book Irreversible Damage (2020), Abigail Shrier reported, “Suicide rates are often cited by gender therapists as a reason to immediately affirm a child or adolescent’s stated gender identity and sometimes even as a reason to allow them to medically transition.” Shrier also noted that the research doesn’t support this manipulative tactic. Nevertheless, providers continue to wield suicide rates as a bludgeon against parents who are reluctant about their child’s transition. “It’s a weapon so highly coercive, one would think a mental health expert would only brandish it, if ever, in a grave emergency,” Shrier wrote. But that is not what is happening. It’s routinely used to force unwilling parents to ignore their instincts and go along with harmful therapies such as puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and surgical removal of healthy organs.

For Musk, compliant parental consent to such procedures is the consequence of being infected by the woke mind virus. It is a sickness of the mind that causes people to turn away from common sense to embrace destructive medical interventions in the name of “healthcare.” It tells people that a person is whatever they construe themselves to be, even if it goes against what is clearly revealed in nature.

In the interview with Peterson, Musk described himself as a materialist. He claimed that physics provides us with the only ironclad rules for the universe. So even though he calls himself a “cultural Christian,” he is by no means any kind of orthodox Christian. Nevertheless, even he recognizes that something is wrong when the body’s organization for reproduction is suppressed for an ideology that is at odds with nature. He is right to oppose this. And with broken hearts and prayers for Elon Musk and his family, Christians must oppose it too.