Episode Details

Malcolm Collins drops a bombshell: modern “woke” culture didn’t come from the Puritans — it evolved directly from the Hicksite Quaker movement. In this explosive Based Camp episode, we trace how a 17th-century religious group birthed today’s urban monoculture, complete with performative morality, call-out culture, virtue signaling, and a parasitoid mindset that kills its host.

We dismantle the sanitized schoolbook version of Quaker history with hard stats: Quakers owned slaves at dramatically higher rates than Southern colonies or Puritans, yet rewrote themselves as the heroes of abolition. We compare them to Calvinist Puritans, explore “justicle” (morality based purely on feelings), the origins of deplatforming, child moral authorities, bureaucratic meeting-house governance, and why this “super virus” spread so effectively through the U.S. education system.

If you’ve ever wondered why progressive spaces feel like a mix of endless rules, theatrical protest, and zero accountability for results — this is the deep historical root.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing how what we today call woke evolved out of the Quaker. And a lot of people have posited many potential starts to woke them as a metaphysical framework, as a moral framework, as a collection of behaviors and patterns.

And they’re just wrong. They’re just wrong. Like there’s a very clear. Trace of where the movement emerged, specifically from the Hicksite Quaker movement, Uhhuh how it grew, how it used the Quaker foothold was in the Northeastern education system in the United States and the West Coast education system in the United States to indoctrinate a generation and how it killed its original host generations ago.

At this point, the Hicksite Quaker tradition is dead. And it we’ve mentioned it. Some of those things is woke as a cultural parasite. [00:01:00] It’s parasitoid it. Does not care about the host surviving it. You know, a parasitoid, if you’re not familiar, is like, have you ever seen one of those worms or insects where you can see like the worms crawling underneath its skin and then it explodes?

It’s a parasite that doesn’t, that that goal is to kill you as part of its lifecycle. So, while all of this evil came from the Quaker movement, we still have to mourn what happened to it as well. All right. And I will just be reading from one of our books, I think our best book, the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion.

And it’s at the end of the section on how you determine what is true and what isn’t true.

Simone Collins: Question though are you going to address what if all hiss. Strong assertions that it was the Puritans and not the Quakers.

Malcolm Collins: And to, to say that woke is evolved from Puritanism requires a cartoonish understanding of history.

Simone Collins: Oh, gauntlet throne. Should we have a debate with him?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no. You need to [00:02:00] believe that Puritan culture was the culture that the urban monoculture framed it as. And one of the things that we’ll be going over is the urban monoculture, which came downstream of Quaker cultural framings simply lied about the cultural sensitivities of the Puritans.

The Puritans were example were extremely likely to like they wrote so sexually graphically. That up until the 19 hundreds, Puritan works had to be censored. Puritan, like a lot of the things that people think about puritans are just. Untrue. But if you are talking about which group was famously insanely prudish.

It was, it was

Simone Collins: the Quakers. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They were so prudish this, the quote that often loves is they women would describe everything from their breasts to their, what was