by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Given that Ron DeSantis plans on riding his crusade against “wokeness” to the White House — if Trump doesn’t stop him, of course — let’s really dig into what it means to be “woke.”
There is a lot to unpack. On one hand “woke” is an amalgam of abstract fears on the part of people who want a white Christian ethno state. It’s also a catchall for MAGA people to use to hand wave any policy disagreement they have with someone that they can’t wiggle their way out of.
So, in a sense, to be “woke” is whatever a conservative needs it to be to own the libs. But also, I would propose it’s a word meant to be imbued with the general sense of dread that a lot of conservative feel about the dramatic social changes that have occured in America since about the middle of Obama’s second term. From their point of view, everyone not MAGA is aggressively gay now and the “woke cancel culture mob” will ruin your life if you don’t support them “grooming” children to be transgender.
This is all bullshit, of course. But this abstract fear is very, very powerful when it comes to electoral politics — so much so that Ron DeSantis may become our first autocrat because of it. (Again, only if Trump gets out of the way — which isn’t going to.)
“Wokeness” is curious because there is no set definition. Which, I suppose, is what MAGA “thought leaders” want because, lulz, the better to own the libs with. If no one knows what “wokeness” is, then it can be anything as necessary to win an argument.
I guess, relative to people like Ron DeSantis, attacking “wokeness” is a way of Red Pilling the electorate without getting into what that really means. The sense that CIS white people are under attack by transgender POC who rant about “trigger warnings” and “pronouns” is an extremely alarming concept to your typical Christian white people.
Throw in Fox News and Right wing podcasts berating their audience with the boogie man of the “woke cancel culture mob” and, well, lulz, there you go. The gnashing of teeth over “wokeness” is actually a proxy debate over America becoming a majority minority country in the coming years and all the other changes to America society that scare the shit out of Christian white people.
So, I guess you could say that “woke” is everything and nothing. It is what a MAGA person with a podcast needs it to be at any particular moment to scare the shit out of his or her audience that their lives will be ruined by the “woke cancel culture mob” for this or that stray comment.
In my experience, “woke” people — at least one Twitter — are people who frame any discussion relative to if you follow some nebulous orthodoxy that only they seem to know the finer points of. They have all these rules about human behavior that make no sense relative to how people actually act. They come across as easily offended — triggered, if you will — and they attack me for being a ‘CIS white male” who should neither be seen nor heard. It’s always when people come at me from the Left — the woke Left — that I am most at the lost and get the most angry. It’s difficult for me to articulate what exactly these woke Twitter users believe without sounding, well, racist and misogynistic for not agreeing with them. Which, I suppose, makes me unwoke?
The bottomline is, as it has always been –we’re fucked. Get a passport and get out of the country while you still can. Autocratic fascism is very popular in the United States and in the end the only question will be if we have a civil war, become an autocracy or get taken over by a military junta.
