According to the National Review, conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk has recently added the name Baruch Spinoza to a list of enemies that includes so-called “cultural Marxists” Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

Derrida and Foucault are familiar enough names, especially to anyone who remembers the political correctness debates of the 1980s, in which postmodernism was declared the enemy of reason and even America. But Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch rationalist, seems distinctly out of place and nonthreatening. At least initially.

One of the things that distinguishes the current panic over “wokeness” from the earlier political correctness debates is that, while the latter was about defending the Western canon against postmodern identity politics, today’s culture warriors increasingly trace the roots of ideas like what they call critical race theory back to fixtures of Western philosophy like Immanuel Kant — a view that was recently repeated in Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Now, it seems, Spinoza has joined a centuries-old conspiracy to destroy our Western values with something called “social justice.”