Recently, news outlets, including Vice News and The Atlantic, have purported that no one can define “woke.” I’m sympathetic to the argument that the word “woke” does little to persuade those who may not already be right of center or conservative. But, hand-wringing over woke’s definition, or lack thereof, doesn’t disprove that wokeism is alive and well and a societal problem.
Below are 20 examples of what woke is.
- Woke is Stanford Law students, slated to make $200,000 per year upon graduation, screaming at a federal judge and making comments like “He can’t find the cl*t.”
- Woke is BLM rioters burning cities and looting private businesses as a form of “peaceful protest.”
- Woke is repurposing Nazi rhetoric for left-wing antisemitism and calling it “activism.”
- Woke is a professor walking out of a lecture in a neck brace because students at a prestigious university can’t handle viewpoint diversity.
- Woke is GoFundMe arbitrarily shutting down a fundraiser by working-class Canadian truckers, many of whom are ethnic minorities.
- Woke is the American Federation of Teachers passing a BLM resolution while doing sorry little to address record-low reading and math scores.
- Woke is labeling successful people, who happen to be minorities, as “model minorities.”
- Woke is immigrating to the richest, most prosperous country in the free world, getting elected to U.S. Congress, and believing the U.S. inculcates a “system of oppression.”
- Woke is labeling “written language” and “math” as “white supremacy.”
- Woke is being from a leafy Connecticut suburb and screaming at your Yale faculty because you think you are oppressed.
- Woke is physically assaulting and stealing from an elderly bakery owner in a college town and then tarring him as a racist.
- Woke is calling 69 million Americans “racist” because you disagree with them.
- Woke is sending your kids to private schools but denying other, economically-disadvantaged kids, that same opportunity.
- Woke is conflating “all people are created equal” with everyone being the same and forcing upon people the same outcomes.
- Woke is labeling people based on fixed traits like sex or skin color.
- Woke is illegally giving minor children puberty blockers.
- Woke is mandatory corporate struggle sessions during which employees are castigated for being white, male, or worse yet, both.
- Woke is lowering standards in the United States military, one of our last meritocracies, in the name of “equity.”
- Woke is disdain for the American working class, most especially those in the Midwest and South.
- Woke is denying that these examples are woke because the truth will depose you from your self-appointed bully pulpit.