What Went Wrong With Wokeness, The Left's Authoritarianism

Wokeness is a collection of elitist, culturally relativist luxury beliefs for the class-privileged. Can it be rehabilitated? Or should we just 'burn it all down'?

Wokeness’s failures has turned morality upside down. Photo by DirkKo on Pexels

Wokeness: It used to be a good liberal ideal.

The term originates in the 1920s, when black separatist Marcus Garvey exhorted Ethiopia and Africa to “Wake up!”, calling on greater social and political consciousness among blacks globally. ‘Stay woke’, the call to action among activists and virtue-signallers today, was popularized in a 1938 blues song by Lead Belly about the nine Scottsboro Boys accused of raping two white women. At the end he encouraged others to ‘stay woke’.

Lead Belly meant it specifically as a caution to black Americans to be wary of racially motivated threats and danger. Other social and literary references later utilized the term, but it didn’t catch on with multicolored America until the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots.

‘Stay woke’ has a long and honorable history of genuine social justice on the left, popularized by Black Lives Matter after the police killing of Michael Brown.

Woke: The MAGAS of the left

Wokeness, once a marker of progressivism, isn’t recognizably progressive anymore. Progressivism is about genuine progress, and since 2014 those who primarily describe themselves as ‘woke’ have deteriorated into an ugly reactionary left-wing parody of the right’s counterpart extremism, Make America Great Again. Ironically, wokies are themselves also trying to Make America Great Again, as they attempt to mold or force America into their own image of what they think the country should be. And also ironically, they, like their MAGA parallels, believe the best thing to do to the country is to ‘burn it down’ and start over.

“Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,” an anonymous Trump official told Rolling Stone magazine recently. “Of course we aren’t fucking bluffing.”

Meanwhile, on t’other side, a New York Times/Sienna Research survey recently revealed that when asked about the need and extent of reforming the country, fourteen percent of American left-leaning self-described radicals agreed that “the system needs to be torn down entirely.” Surprisingly, the most radical came not from the traditional 18-29 age group, but from Millennials, those mostly unmarried codgers in the 30-44 group. Twenty-one percent claimed they were voting neither for Trump nor Biden (the findings, reported in the National Review, predated the Harris coup d’état).

As my ex-coworker in a Connecticut computer firm used to say, “FDISK and reboot!” referring to the process in the Olden Days to wipe a hard drive clean and reinstall everything when it’s beyond repair.

Literally burning or tearing down the entire country is pretty extreme no matter which side you’re on. Social and political movements inevitably devolve toward extremism if radicals are left unchecked and unchallenged, which happened on the right when Donald Trump began demanding to see Senator Obama’s birth certificate. It happened on the left when social justice’s zeal to fight injustice embraced the very systemic wrongs it claimed to fight.

What went wrong with wokeness?

No good idea or practice remains so without limits. Liberalism’s laudable commitment to inclusion and tolerance brought us civil rights for women, minorities, children and even animals, but instead of recognizing that all proper values can go overboard, it didn’t stop to ask, “Is it possible to be too tolerant? Too inclusive?”

An early example of how the faction that would one day be labeled the Regressive Left and today, the woke, had commenced down the extremism path, followed the response to radical Islam in the days, weeks and months after 9/11.

As soon as it became known that nineteen Muslims backed by Osama bin Laden pulled it off, the radical right happily launched a nationwide crusade against America’s Muslims. Like 9/11, it too wasn’t coordinated, but rather a series of Al Qaeda-style ‘lone wolf’ attacks. We liberals watched in horror as right-wing nutbags targeted anyone wearing a turban or a hijab for harassment or violence.

The Regressive Left responded in a manner not unlike their right-wing adversaries. Just as the right tarred all Muslims as evil, the Regressive Left turned them all into victims above reproach.

It became verboten to criticize Islam at all, to ask questions about why there was so much violence everywhere in the Middle East, and whether the Islamic world itself bore some responsibility for the murder of not just 3,000 Americans but the countless victims of terrorist violence, within as well as outside of Islam. Conservative ditz-bomb Anne Coulter quite rightly complained that the American left was blaming America first and withholding accountability from a demonstrably violent religion and part of the world.

We see that mindless support and deification of ‘victimhood’ in today’s college student protesters, who now mindlessly support Islamofascism exemplified by the filthy, genocidal Hamas cult.

Wokeness is no longer a proud label.

Woke is racist

The woke fancy themselves anti-racist, and at one time they were—until their hatred for ‘oppression’ metastasized into hatred against all white people just as the right’s hatred for Islam did after 9/11. Black Lives Matter began with the best of intentions, but found itself with egg on its face years later when research revealed only a few dozen black men were killed by police every year, at least some in the process of committing crimes, rather than the hundreds or thousands estimated by themselves and other Americans. Later, scandals erupted around how BLM was spending its money—not on social justice efforts like reforming a highly problematic national police force, but on the leaders themselves. The nadir of BLM’s personal admission that they stood as much for social justice as the American Nazi Party came within days of October 7.

Can Social Justice Be Rehabilitated?

On The Eternal Whiteness Of Being

‘Woke Racism’: John McWhorter’s Take On What’s Wrong With Antiracism

White People Who Hate White People Are Racist

Then there’s wokeness’s permeation of DEI initiatives as a way to ‘fix’ racism, but which has since become an outlet for grossly overpaid, mostly angry black women to vent their personal frustrations and lack of talent on white people and now, their new fave scapegoats, the Jews.

A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop

What If New Hires Had To Take A ‘Snowflake Test’ To Get The Job?

Liberals & Conservatives Are Making For Strange Bedfellows In Massachusetts

‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber

Woke is anti-feminist

‘Luxury feminism’ is a term first coined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to describe woke feminists who can afford to ignore the gross abuses of their sisters in less-privileged countries, because, Muslim. She and Yasmine Mohammed at the Free Press have got some harsh words for how tolerant Canada is of abuse against women and girls when they’re not Western, and their criticisms are every bit as applicable to privileged feminists outside the country too.

Unwoke feminists know women’s rights are for all women globally, especially those without voices, not just the ones like us who can afford to speak up without frightening retribution. Ali and Mohammed have lived under real Muslim oppression and demand to know why luxury feminists ignore so much gross Islamic misogyny and support the very worst of the worst Islamic terrorists.

We liberal feminists want to know, too.

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Feminists Against Women: When They Won’t Say No To Men, They Harm All Females

It’s Time To Reckon With The Left’s War On Women

What If Women Challenged Male Aggression Like The Bonobos?

False ‘False Rape’ Allegations: The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape

When Did Feminists Become Such Tools For The Patriarchy?

Feminism’s devolvement to pleasuring, rather than smashing the Patriarchy, leads us to our next exploration of how wokeness went so hideously wrong.

Woke gay conversion

Perhaps nothing illustrates how horribly wokeness has gone off the rails as its commitment to ‘curing’ gay kids of their homosexuality by pushing them into sex change operations just like Iran does to gay adults.

Woke extremists have become so addled by their own tolerance orgasms that they actually go along with science-free ‘gender-affirming care’ despite mounds of research showing that most ‘trans’ kids are gay kids who will outgrow their gender dysphoria. Clinging to ‘40s and ‘50s stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, any kid showing interest in something s/he shouldn’t gets them whisked away to the doctor, often first ‘identified’ by woke-indoctrinated teachers.

When you’re as ignorant, as the woke are, to the science showing there’s biological and psychological difference between men and women, and that the tension between the sexes is more evolutionarily than culturally explained, and willfully ignore the lack of science behind transitioning, woke activists fall prey to greedy medical professionals and blithely believe the tired, long-debunked canard that their kids will commit suicide if they’re not allowed to transition.

Don’t question. Just do as you’re told, good like wokies.

A Dude-y Transactivist Demonstrates How Dangerously Dudeist The Trans Nuts Are

Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces

Reality Is Not Transphobic

Lesbians, I Know That ‘Cotton Ceiling’ Guy Who Called You ‘Transphobic’

You Can’t Change Your Genes

The Horrifying WPATH Files Document Leak Details Appalling ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Malpractice

Woke anti-science

It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t

Has The Left Jumped The Shark With The Trans Biology Debate?

Complaining About One’s Birth Body Is A Ridiculous Sign Of Privilege

Here’s the final nail in the woke coffin of former liberalism: Their phobia of free speech and expression. Censorship: It’s not just a right-wing thing!

Woke censorship

One of wokeness’s most disgusting conceits is that ‘We don’t censor, right-wingers censor!’

Yes, they do, but so does the left, and both have a very long and ugly universal history of censorship, which is clearly a human defect rather than a partisan one.

Censorship, Tyranny, And Science Suppression On Medium

Which Online Platforms Don’t Censor Content Creators?

Canadian LGBTQ Groups Politely Protest Free Thought At Libraries

Banned! What The Left’s & Right’s Censors Don’t Want You To See

It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Trump is re-elected. Left-wing censorship may come to an end while right-wing censorship will undoubtedly rise. Again.

Should wokeness be abandoned, or can it be rehabilitated?

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who describes themselves as ‘woke’ has as much to be proud of as anyone in a MAGA cap. Wokeness has come to be identified, rightly or wrongly, with vicious, destructive extremism, and we real liberals are complicit in what went wrong: We failed to counteract, challenge, and put down our extremists.

We failed to curb our dogs.

Can wokeness be saved? Rehabilitated, even?

Not all who call themselves ‘woke’ are ideologically extreme. Some simply haven’t recognized, or perhaps they prefer to shield their eyes, from the extremism, anti-intellectualism, and refutation of traditional liberal Enlightenment values that has come to infuse wokeness. Perhaps, still engaging their own commitment to reason and rationalism, and capable of handling a challenge to their beliefs and values, they’ve simply missed how critically wrong ‘the woke’ have become. They certainly won’t find much woke criticism in the media, which has embraced a ‘social justice’ approach to journalism rather than the impartiality and facts presentation the profession once stood for and strove for.

Too many of the ‘woke’ embrace political violence, domestic terrorism, and a nearly identical Nazi-like dedication to old-fashioned, old-school antisemitism, which they learned in social justice-infected academia. Those who want to return to a healthier definition of ‘woke’ have an extremely difficult road ahead of them.

I make it clear to others that I’m liberal but not woke. There are plenty of liberals advocating a return to genuine social justice; intellectuals like Coleman Hughes arguing for a return to racial color-blindness that the ‘woke’ excoriate as ‘racist’. (Hughes’s TED talk was downranked and suppressed by TED when ‘woke’ employees complained about it.) Or feminists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed arguing that feminism is for everyone, not just privileged woke Western women. And the voices speaking up against the trans movement are growing as the WPATH Files, the UK’s damning Cass Review, and countless systematic evidence reviews of the ‘science’ behind ‘gender-affirming care’ (for anyone, not just the young) is near-non-existent.

Should we ‘burn wokeness down to the ground’ as they inevitably argue for society?

Or should we slowly ‘drain the swamp’, and try to draw these people back to traditional liberalism?

What are your thoughts? Comment below!

Image by Gretta Blankenship from Pixabay

When I’m not fantasizing about ‘deprogramming’ wokies the way parents did to kids in religious cults in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s (which didn’t much work anyway, to be honest), I help women and others think for themselves and take back their power here at Grow Some Labia.