"Woke" is the New Code for Fascism

Back in the 1960’s in the Civil Rights Movement, those who opposed us were much more blatant about it. I remember one chant in particular (trigger warning – this is crudely racist):

N*****-lover

N*****-lover

N*****-lover, Jew!

We hate N*****s

And we hate you!

Clear, simple, and to the point, with the economy of combining two kinds of racism into one hate-filled chant.

Today, racists, sexists, homophobes, and other forms of life have become even more economical – they combine all their hates into one word – WOKE.

According to Wikipedia:

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.

The Right has expanded this meaning to signify a political agenda that is to blame for everything that they don’t like. It took about a day for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) to be blamed on “the Woke Agenda.” We don’t know what was behind the SVB failure, and it’s true that like most businesses today SVB paid attention to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but it seems unlikely that this commitment, or the minority of women, POC, and LGBTQ Board members significantly contributed to the failure. In fact, the vast majority ?bank failures since 1929 have come on the watch of Boards that were composed of white men.

But today’s Right is never stopped by facts or logic. They continue to practice the big lie technique – say it loud enough and long enough and people will start to believe it – whether it’s shouting “woke” about SVB, about Disney, about drag queen story hours, you name it. These supposed champions of small government and minimal government interference have no qualms about government interference when it comes to education, women’s health, even outlawing a drug that has been used safely and effectively for 20 years under FDA oversight.

It has become increasingly clear that, in fact, the Right has only one political agenda, which they cloak in various disguises including a distortion of Christianity that has little to do with Christ’s teachings, morality that is a cloak for homophobia, “pro-life” which does not extend beyond life in the womb, and protection of children that means protecting them from the truth about history and current social issues and feeding them a diet of fables instead.

The fight against lies and hypocrisy has never been fought on an even playing field. As the old saying goes, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” A lie like “woke” explains everything in one world, while the truth is more nuanced and may require thinking. As Mark Twain said, "If you make people feel like they're thinking, they'll love you. If you make people think, they'll hate you,” and liberalism has the unfortunate effect of making people think. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has declared that state “where woke goes to die.” He may as well have said “where thinking goes to die.”

So not much has changed on the Right since the 1960’s – they’ve just gotten more subtle in their approach – the chant I quoted to start this article was crude and explicit. It appealed to the people who turned out to throw rocks at Black schoolchildren, to beat and kill Freedom Riders, and to assassinate Civil Rights leaders, but the more genteel racists, the kind who hid their red necks under white collars and Gucci scarves, shied away. Not today – today they can all march under the Anti-Woke banner, and attack the non-existent “Woke Agenda” and “Wokism” as a cover for their white male supremacist views.