How woke died

In 34 days, Trump returns as president

On May 17, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.”

On the surface, it was a review of Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, a book by Nellie Bowles, an ex-NYT writer, who took on woke.

Goldberg wrote, “There is much about that febrile moment worth satirizing, including the white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable implosion of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles dissects both in the book’s best sections.”

DiAngelo wrote White Fragility, which is a pretty odd description of a race of people who boarded creaky, leaky wooden boats and conquered the world, discovering four continents along the way.

Bowles’s took a shot at NYT. She/her wrote, “At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.”

Indeed, Goldberg even reviewing the book was a shot at her fellow columnists, most of whom, like her, never covered a fire.

But she softened it and wrote, “Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that interstates were tools of racial segregation.”

Really? I get that interstates plowed through some black neighborhoods but they split white neighborhoods as well. The first gay transportation secretary’s destruction of sections of interstates came in the name of restoring a black neighborhood that disappeared six decades ago.

If we want to talk about destroying black neighborhoods, how about looking at HUD which demolished buildings that housed black businesses?

The mall in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, took black land and gave it to Forest City in Cleveland to build an edifice to relocate Sears, Penney’s and Montgomery Ward’s. The mall is now a heartbeat away from joining the Dead Malls list.

I mention this because Racist Interstates is such an absurd notion but then again all of woke is as weird as Tim Walz. South Park skewered Kathleen Kennedy, destroyer of Star Wars and other worlds owned by Disney, in its Put a Chick in It, Make Her Gay episode.

That’s the why. Let’s get to the how as in how woke died.

A is for Academia. Throughout my life, going to college was the aim of many a family. In the 1990s, colleges marketed themselves as rainmakers. Sure students paid steep tuition but in the long run they would make a million more bucks over time than those mere high school graduate peasants.

Along came the federal government. It was here to help. Student loans made it possible for middle class college students to live like trust fund babies in their college years. Then came graduation and reality hit. They would need that mythical million bucks to pay off that student debt.

The myth of the million dollars reminded me of the story of the man who complained to his plumber about the bill and said, “You make more than me and I’m a doctor.”

The plumber said, “I know. That’s why I gave up medicine.”

The tide having turned on college also turned on the terminology colleges used. People asked what the heck was cisgender? Intersectionality? College not only became synonymous with freeloader college grads but yucking up the language.

B is for boycott. Bud Light is now a verb. Conservatives have made Ford and other major corporations jettison DEI like the original tea party tossed crates into Boston Harbor.

C is for cinema. People stopped watching the propaganda. Most moviegoers are under 25. Kathleen Kennedy killed a generation of movie fans.

Money talks. Disney has written off for tax purposes entire movies. The premise of the upcoming Snow White holds that the homely Rachel Zegler is more beautiful than Gal Gadot of Wonder Woman fame. Zegler got the gig because she is as brown as snow in Maine.

D is for Democrats. “Never underestimate the ability of Joe Biden to fuck things up.”—Barack Obama.

The incompetence we witnessed under FJB undermined every Democrat policy including its wokeness.

E is for election. People started voting woke out. Trump has won the last three presidential elections. This last one has his adversaries bending at the knee and converted to making America great again, which includes abandoning wokeness.

The Independent reported, “GOP Senator Mitt Romney said on Sunday that MAGA Republicanism now wholly dominates the Republican Party, echoing the skepticism of those who have been waiting for some kind of post-Trump Republican Party to emerge.”

F is for fed up. The woke demanded people use strange pronouns. It backfired and is now mocked. Trump’s pronouns are Missed/Me. Well, at least according to the T-shirt.

No. 5 in the rules for radicals is, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

J is for J.K. Rowling. She objected to calling mothers people who give birth. Trannies came back and called her a TERF. Me. She inspired other women to publicly object.

L is for Luigi Mangione. This coward apparently shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Rallying behind the cold-blooded killer of a father of two children is the latest promotion of violence by the woke that is costing the left support.

M is for mothers. Their objections to men being in the girls’ locker room raised people’s awareness of woke. You might say they woke people up.

For years lefties promoted girls to play sports. Then Will Thomas and the rest of the bully boys took over. The resentment is real, deep and lasting.

P is for pendulum. The extremism of the woke Wookies swung the public back to sanity.

X is for Twitter. Elon Musk has made it OK to speak your mind without fear of censorship. Liberals have fled to Bluesky, a rival doomed to be the next Parler. Good riddance.

Goldberg was right when she said wokeness is dying, but she was wrong when she said we may miss it. Nope. I believe we swung and hit that one out of the park.