The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) hosted an event at its Budapest campus about the subversive effects of wokeism in academia on Monday, 22 September. The apropos, to borrow a French word given the topic, was the French academic publisher Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) suspending the release of a book titled Face à l’obscurantisme woke (In the Face of Woke Obscurantism) in March.
The book eventually did get published, and one of its co-authors, Xavier-Laurent Salvador, was at the MCC event to speak about his experience writing and publishing it.
However, before he took the stage, Head of MCC’s Center for European Studies Rodrigo Ballester addressed the audience. He started by saying that while wokeism is not prevalent in Hungary, that does not mean that we should not study and talk about it here. This ideology has real dangers, since, as we sadly learn from the case of Charlie Kirk, ‘cancel culture kills,’ as Mr Ballester put it. He then led a minute of silence for the recently buried American conservative activist, who was ‘killed just because he engaged in debate,’ he added.
As we wrote above, Mr Salvador spoke next. He stated that the goal of his book was to ‘document woke obscurantism’. For these efforts, he had to face significant backlash in French academia, and the publisher even had an office building vandalized. Despite its initial cancellation, Face à l’obscurantisme woke was released in April 2025, and has already sold 30,000 copies, the author noted, which he believes is a testament to the public demand for publications about the topic.
Mr Salvador explained that he sees the woke movement as ‘elitist, totalitarian, and systemic’, which ‘reduces the reality to a handful of slogans’. These slogans include things like the patriarchy, decolonization, rape culture, and intersectionality. ‘Systematic’ is another term often used by woke academics and activists, which the author has turned on them and describes their ideology as such, given that it is being supported by a network of European institutions.
The most prevalent of these institutions is, as the author pointed out, the European Commission’s Horizon Europe, which only gives out research grants to projects that comply with progressive doctrines such as ‘inclusive language’ or ‘the mainstreaming of gender equality’. The former issue, ‘inclusive language’, has caused quite a stir in France when it tried to make the inherently gendered French language gender neutral. Mr Salvador has shared that some French municipalities, including the capital city of Paris, have adopted in their official communication, despite the pushback even from the generally liberal French academia.
Near the end of his speech, Mr Salvador declared that wokeism ‘is not just an academic, but a civilizational problem.’
After their speeches, Mr Ballester and Mr Salvador were joined by Leonardo Orlando, visiting fellow at MCC, and moderator Yann Caspar for a panel discussion.
Mr Caspar first inquired about the infamous opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, which seemed to mock the famous painting The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci. Mr Orlando has described the incident as a ‘key moment’ and ‘the embodiment of woke’, and also pointed out that one of the main creative people behind that performance, Patrick Boucheron, is actually a highly regarded progressive historian in French academia.
During the panel discussion, Mr Ballester brought up the ‘Queers for Palestine’ movement as an example of the absurdities of the woke ideologues. However, he also drew attention to the one similarity between progressivism and Islamism: they both hate the West. And thus, by extension, if you are a Western person, ‘the woke want you to hate yourself,’ the speaker stated.
Mr Salvador spoke about another problem with the funding of academic projects in Europe, which is that about 15 per cent of research funding goes to human resources. Then, in turn, HR uses those funds to recruit more young people to the woke progressive movement. Meanwhile, near the end, Mr Orlando has declared that in today’s Europe, ‘in order to be a professor, you have to be a coward,’ in reference to having to comply with woke dogmas in academia.
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