People who study these things point to the Ferguson protests of 2014 as the discernible moment when CRT/woke ideology broke into the mainstream. I describe in Lawless how the pandemic accelerated that trend toward perceiving our nation as racially intolerant, particularly as cultural influencers retreated to their laptops. The killing of George Floyd threw gas onto that fire, as institutions decided to radically restructure themselves overnight, centered on "antiracism." Everyone all of a sudden needed a vice president or associate dean for DEI.
Indeed, the pandemic was a boon to bureaucratic leviathans wishing to crawl even further into normal life. Anything could be justified as long as it was labeled a public-safety initiative. Any questioning of regulations would be labeled thought crime. In the resultant atmosphere, institutions seemed like organs of disorder and illogic, so it's little wonder that anarchic elements arose that questioned the very foundations of law and order.
