Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed.
Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present.
The so-called white male heterosexual victimizing class was collectively to be held responsible for their sinful triad of white “rage,” “supremacy,” and “privilege.”
Class considerations became passé. The Duchess of Sussex, and the billionaires Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, shared grievances against all whites, whether they hailed from Martha’s Vineyard or impoverished East Palestine, Ohio.
A bicoastal elite would draft the woke agenda and the oppressed would follow as ordered.
That top-down blueprint would embrace massive multibillion-dollar reparations to blacks.
In lockstep, all victims would rally around a Green New Deal that mandated high energy costs to discourage consumption of fossil fuels.
The new transgender canon mandated three sexes. Sex is socially rather than biologically determined. And there is a large, oppressed, and transgender population: this presents the next great civil rights struggle for America.
Historical wokeism lodged a list of grievances against the supposedly flawed American past. Indicting the dead required statues to be toppled. Names had to be changed. Histories were to be rewritten. Even the foundational date of America was to be reconsidered and altered.
Yet, the rainbow fabric of woke is now fraying—and for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, woke took off after the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic, the devastating lockdown, the 120 days of violent rioting and looting following the death of George Floyd, and years of endemic Trump Derangement Syndrome. Most of those catalysts are waning. Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving. Millions of the comatose are waking up to normality—and don’t recognize their own country.
Two, woke is retrogressive, reactionary, and anti-civilizational. Decriminalizing the legal code, defunding the police, failing to apply norms to the homeless population, and destroying meritocracy have all hollowed out our major cities.
San Francisco was a far cleaner, safer, and kinder city 20, 40, or 80 years ago than it is today.
A woke FBI, Pentagon, or airline industry becomes a matter of life and death.
Three, in modern America, class is now a far more accurate metric of oppression than race or gender.
It is one thing to restrict fossil fuel development if you are in the upper one percent income bracket, quite another if you commute 50 miles a day in a used car. If there are to be reparations, why include Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, but not indigent Hispanics, Asians, and poor whites?
The multimillionaire, and prep-school and Ivy-League educated Barack Obama may castigate the unwoke Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) for his absence of victimhood. But from which of his three enclaves does Obama do so—the Kalorama mansion, the Martha’s Vineyard estate, or the restricted-access beachfront retreat in Hawaii?
Four, religions also trump race. Hispanic-American Catholics and Middle-Eastern-American Muslims have more in common with so-called white Christians than they do with an atheist, or agnostic woke elite who pushes the lie that the anti-religion Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a mere charity group.
Muslim-American communities in Michigan do not want children seeing drag queen shows or the pride flag flying with equal status to the American flag. The Catholic Hispanic community of Los Angeles has little tolerance for lurid anti-Christian motifs that preview a Los Angeles Dodgers game.
Five, wokeism is cannibalistic. Even the children of woke architects with perfect SAT scores and 4.0 grade point averages are being rejected on the basis of their race at their coveted Ivy League schools.
Neither the mansions of Beverly Hills nor estates of Presidio Heights qualify as sanctuaries from violent criminals, who are now exempted by the anointed from legal consequences.
The wokest of Hollywood celebs will soon lose movie roles and be disqualified for film awards on the basis of their race.
Even the most left-wing of movie directors do not want to be ordered by Soviet-style commissars to hire their crews, actors, and writers on the basis of race.
Six, wokeism is a dangerous diversion of American resources.
The United States may have sponsored gender studies programs, flown pride flags, and bragged of George Floyd murals in Kabul. But meanwhile its military suffered the most humiliating defeat in a half-century, as it skedaddled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars in deadly arms for terrorists.
Our elite work to ban plentiful natural gas, subsidize transgendered activism abroad, and lecture on sexual identities in the military. China’s elite builds dozens of coal and nuclear plants, and doubles the size of its navy, while preparing to absorb Taiwan.
Americans are rejecting wokeism because they finally are realizing that if they do not, they will not have a civilization left.
Once again perfectly put. I pray our Nation’s people will wake up and do the right thing.
If this was true, what a wonderful day it would be, but it is not. “Woke” people are tripling down on their insanity (transanity?), not rejecting it. As usual, regressive worshippers of skin color, the weather, and mutilated genitals have cast the title of “woke” aside and deemed it racist. The Zoomers are ugly, ignorant, angry AND arrogant, the worst combination ever. So, so many of my gen X peers have utterly failed as parents, and act just as foolishly as their rainbow-bedraggled simpleton prodigy. Besides, our esteemed government has finally picked an enemy to wage a war against that they can actually win. The problem is that it’s against US. So forgive me for choking on this “black pill”.
Beautifully done…..thank you.
Dear Dr. Hanson:
I hope you are correct! I fail to see the awakening from my perspective. The whole country seems to be dazed and confused. The woke elites will not give up their new-found power without a fight and I don’t see any opposition leaders that are ready to stand up against them because Mr. Trump is their warning. The level of commitment required to defeat them will be on the level pledged by our founders. You know, the pledge of willingness to give up “lives and fortunes!” Most gave up at least their fortunes! As I have said before, the useful idiots will be the first to be eliminated once and if they do wake up. Anyway, does the person driving the used car 50 miles to work each day really care if some billionaire’s child does not get into Harvard or some woke celebrity fails to get an Oscar because they are white? Do the billionaires and celebrities really care either? As long as they can remain rich and insulated, they plan to go on their merry way. They have been begging for this for decades!
Awake not woke – Good slogan
Another one, heard in an English pub
Wise or Woke
You can’t be both
Excellent, as always, Dr. Hanson. IMO, the greatest charge against the left is that they allow, and even encourage, the homeless disgrace in SF and other major cities. They could solve those issues and clean up those cities in a heartbeat, but they refuse to do it. An equal mystery is why the citizens of those cities don’t oust the leaders who have allowed such nonsense, and then demand that it all be fixed and kept fixed. Why do they allow such a disgrace?
In order for there to be a grand, nationwide celebration of ‘victimhood’, there must be a nationwide audience of guilt-ridden sympathizers.
Otherwise, it’s simply a con. Few enjoy being duped.
(To extend the idea to today’s global stage, substitute ‘Western Civilization’ for ‘nation’.)
Granted It’s a bit dark, still, looking across the ‘fruited plain’, there seems to be no sign, not one, of a guilt-ridden sympathizer.
Woke is another iteration of victimization. The problem with the cult of victimization is that uses the techniques of guilt, shame, and other negative emotions to force it will upon the unsuspecting and the gullible. It claims, like the religious missionary, to want to save us from ourselves, to protect us from an evil that only the very few can see and never clearly define. Yes, we have trouble in River City and a Boy’s Band won’t solve the problem.
Amen…
I have no data regarding the fraction of people awakening from woke but not everyone is. I live in a university town and am more than tired of hearing this common phrase — “I just love what Biden is doing for our country.” It most often comes out the mouth of a member of our large cohort of left-wing white women. To ask questions about what they mean, or give an example, produces either nothing in response or some impertinent gibberish about making us popular with the rest of the world or stopping the assault on minority groups.
These people were broken by TDS and/or covid hysteria. They aren’t coming out of it.
Yours is also my experience. Infecting mostly female under 45.
You got that right.
Excellent, as always. I would like to hear your thoughts on how all of this is likely to play out: worsening race relations, a bitterly divided political landscape, outright dishonesty in media, a failed education system, the war on gender, etc. Do we have a chance of surviving all of this relatively intact as a country?
We are under a full blown attack, it is a bizarre delusional modality that was cooked up by the corporation at a global level. The time to rebuke this is now. Do we have a chance of surviving this relatively intact as a country, well we will soon see.
Dear Dr. Hanson,
I hope you are right in your assessment. However, a relatively recent opinion poll does not quite bear it out.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/americans-divided-whether-woke-compliment-or-insult
But then who knows? This may be one of those topics in which pollsters are often fooled by the public. Just recall the polls ahead of November 2016…
Sorry to disappoint you, Dr. Hanson, but America is quickly becoming a very woke nation. You are correct most of the time, but DEAD WRONG this time. Wokeness is literally EVERYTHERE; at our children’s schools, at our shopping centers, in the media we watch & listen to, as well as in our own families. In N. Korea, you are canceled for even THINKING independently. In the U.S., you get canceled if anyone suspects you are anti-woke. I have lost several friends, because they are afraid of being canceled {fired from their jobs} for associating with me. How can we reverse the woke paradigm shift? I don’t think we can. After all, we can’t even have free & fair elections anymore.
Seems so true. Noticed yesterday tooling along the freeway and looking through a glass darkly, not very far north of Nogales, multiple billboard advertisers displayed 13.6% as if it were 70% and 70% as if it were null. The quickness of woke was stunning. Only when they come face to face with the reality of a hungry, fierce enemy will they rethink, should there even be time by then.
I’ve been so lonely since 2000. Everyone I know is hypnotized and afraid of the left. All of this gooey emotional stuff is crippling. It’s so boring. I’m 66 and I think everyone is so ugly now. Some of the young people are so cruel. My own age too.
Like Mr. Tilty just above, I desperately wish this were true, I hope it is true, but I see far too many presumably smart, educated people who remain fully “woke,” and fly into a fury at any disagreement. Tell them that men simply can’t become pregnant, or that it is more oppressive to force a twelve-year-old girl to share a locker with an anatomically intact 17-year-old boy, and they call you a “hater” who will force “trans-women” to die. Try to explain, calmly, that banning internal combustion engines before there is electric generating capacity and an electric grid adequate to charge tens of millions of lithium batteries while running everyone’s air conditioning, or that manufacturing those batteries (in China, of course) will generate more pollution and more CO2 than simply burning gasoline, and they accuse you of ending life on earth and perhaps destroying the planet itself. And of course, mention that Joe Biden is senile, stupid, and owned by the CCP and they call you an ultra-MAGA fascist. They are apparently irretrievably irrational, and nothing gets through to them.
If we make it to November, 2024, we’ll have an accurate measure of how many are incapable of learning from their catastrophic mistakes and how many are capable of connecting cause and effect, but I’m increasingly pessimistic. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Wow . . . I just don’t know how you put all this together to make the point so powerfully . . . America is still dynamic . . . I’m writing this at 1:40 a.m., but I have to say, I’m inspired, uplifted . . . I do hope we are waking up to woke, that we will wake up in time.
VICTRIX LUDORUM
Or Victim ad nauseam
While the West Teaches gender bending
the East sticks with the 3 ‘R’s : “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic”
Go Figure
Oh, they are figuring, one may count on it. 24/7. And, at 8x the counters we graduate plus a double century old hunger for respect and more, and with the current afflictions plaguing the West, it’s only a matter of time before we are counted out.
With one exception, ‘they’ still pronounce it, “leading, liting, lithmetic.”
Sorry, 😉
Just imagine how educated our kids would be if we spent our allotted educational funds in a manner was actually for their educational benefit.
Oh, were it true. One only has to read of the highly respected (sarc) majority of faculty at ASU a few days ago that wrote and signed a letter condemning the invitation of three noted conservative and peaceful speakers at this institution of “higher learning”. Sadly, the “renowned” Admin approved the whine. This rot is nursed by the media to help it grow. Metro men accompanied by enlightened women of the Administration, contrary to what some believe of universities, are not critical thinkers, they present as low to midlevel government employees, aka, chair warmers.
You are not alone. It’s also happening in Australia.
Thanks for verifying Wokeism in Australia. A commentor from Israel reported the same the thing happening in Israel after another article or broadcast from Victor Hanson a few months ago.
I dread a global movement that is heading towards a global government.
God’s blessing to all in Australia.
It seems to me that the woke have begun to sow the seeds of their own destruction:
1. Pushing multi-million dollar reparations for blacks who were never enslaved
2. Defunding police and decriminalizing the justice system
3. Normalizing homelessness, drug use, and related depravity
4. Advocating for biological men to compete in women’s sports
5. Mocking traditional religions and religious values
6. Replacing the meritocracy with racist preferences
7. Allowing open borders
8. Promoting sex change surgery for minors
9. Indoctrinating children in woke ideology in public schools
10. Eliminating fossil fuels with infeasible, unreliable, expensive green energy
No one with common sense supports any of this.
I dream and pray you are right. I live with the terror you may be wrong. In your hopeful scenario it’s a case of nothing happens until it happens to you, and when it does ………..
That’s my fear. By the time woke reaches far enough, deeply enough…..too late. Spell coma. Permanent variety. Lambs to a slaughter already finito.