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 it? To their ankles

Simone Collins: from basically their neck to their ankles. If there was something wrong, it would be my stomach. It doesn’t matter if it was like their heart palpitations or they had severe, you know, me

Malcolm Collins: cramps.

They were just uncomfortable mentioning everything here.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:03:00] That’s my stomach, which is sort of antithetical to the way the puritans approached it, which is just say, we look full bodied at the sins of man, and only through overcoming them have we proven mastery by hiding from them. We haven’t proven mastery.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. One of the other patterns of like, pedestal children is these wise sage.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we’ll get into all

Simone Collins: that moralizer. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Let’s get started here.

Okay. What about the Quakers? Weren’t the Quakers morally ahead of their time and super nice, weren’t they leaders of the abolition movement or something? This is certainly the version of Quakers we learned about in the school system that was dominated by the urban monoculture. So we were shocked upon our review of the actual stats, and maybe more than a little bitter, because we felt misled.

Around 42% of Maryland Quakers in early America owned slaves. And this is from Carol kl, 1983. This sample was taken from Maryland wills between 1669 and 1750 among Quaker leaders in [00:04:00] Philadelphia at 70% owned slaves. This sample was taken from the Philadelphia yearly meeting, 1681 to 1705. Even if you go with the lower number, this is, so, that’s 42% of Quakers own slaves.

This is higher than the rate of slave ownership of slave ownership of. Any culture or group in the 13 colonies?

Simone Collins: Wait, wait. Even more than like, the southern colonies

Malcolm Collins: dramatically higher than the southern colonies.

Simone Collins: I forgot about this.

Malcolm Collins: At the Southern colonies only around 20% to 5% of household owned slaves.

Simone Collins: Oh, right. ‘cause it was really a rich person thing there. Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: With Quakers it was 40%. Oh, no.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: the reason I go into this is and, and if, if you have this view that like, if you’re like, wow, this is really different than the version of the Quakers I learned about in school. And the reason is, is because Quakers, if, if it was.

Quakerism that the urban monoculture [00:05:00] evolved out of. It would make perfect sense that it would maintain this trait of trying to constantly frame the Quakers as morally decent when they were anything but morally decent. They were the most morally repulsive founding group within the Americas. By, by an order of magnitude because not only did they practice things like slavery at a higher rate but they then acted like they didn’t do it.

Which to me, I just have this, I immense a moral respo res, you know, disgust. That if you’re going to do a sin, at least own it. Don’t pretend like you were leading the abolitionists when you were not. Almost all of the leading abolitionists were Calvinists which we’ll go into and puritans more specifically.

There, I think there was like one or two Quakers, but we’ll go into this more. So, contrast this with Puritan communities, which wa while less attested, seemed to have a slave ownership rate between 0.5 and 2%. This is from Rowan R 2021 0.5 to 2% versus [00:06:00] 40%. Suffice to say the tale of the whale ship of Essex tells us what happens to Bipoc who put themselves in the same boat as Quakers or any gele of today for that matter, despite the incessant self framing as the quote unquote good.

Guys hint, the moment things went bad. The Essex, Quaker sailors ate their bipoc compatriots. First, they claimed their, this uncanny skew was a product of a series of random draws. So just imagine,

Simone Collins: oh, no. Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: A boat gets lost. It’s a, it’s a Quaker group and they had some Bipo wisdom from various groups.

I think some Native American subs were blacks and et cetera. Okay. And they, they frame it to them in the way the urban monoculture always does. It’s just a random draw of the straw. I’m sorry.

Simone Collins: Totally fair. 100% fair. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: That’s just a hundred percent fair. Four people and they all, oh, that doesn’t sound statistically likely.

But by the [00:07:00] time it’s to the last one, you can’t really do anything, can you? Because we are the nice ones. We are the Quakers. No, I, I think this is important to know, right? People go off on, on me always. I rip on when people are like, oh, Malcolm, you dig so hard into Jews. You dig so hard into Catholics.

Speaker: Why isn’t anyone attacking him?

Speaker 2: It’s freezing out.

Speaker: No, I think it’s the sign.

Speaker 2: Well, the sign from diehard three was clearly racist,

Speaker: obviously. But I think we went too broad. Everybody. I mean, who is that offending

Speaker 2: everybody.

Speaker: Ah,

Malcolm Collins: I always say the OG culture that I have a hate boner for is Quakers. And you really see it in our books. It was the number one culture. I was just from the get go. Like, these guys are evil with the face of goodness. Actually, you know, the AI thing where it’s like the smiley fac...

Quaker Slave Ownership Rate 2X the South (How They Hid It & Birthed Woke)