“Woke” was coined by the left some years ago to describe a person who had become sensitive to the left’s pet issues, especially racial and “social justice” ones. It implied that a person disagreeing with the left about those issues was not just wrong, but unconscious. Becoming woke was unintentionally analogous to the Christian concept of being born again — which is appropriate since leftism is the left’s religion.
This catchy term was initially successful. But the left never succeeds at success. That’s because what’s important to them is not being successful in resolving grievances, but parading those grievances as evidence of their victimhood.
Victim status is more important to the left than winning – and easier too. If the left were a sports team, they’d be lazy and winless but they would always say, gleefully, that it’s because the referees robbed them.
And so, to the left, an outcome that succeeds in resolving their grievances is a failure because it deprives them of their celebrated victimhood. An outcome that fails to resolve their grievances is a success because it ensures perpetual victimhood.
By the way, the left’s loud and incessant complaining causes policy makers – from politicians to board rooms to college administrators – to mistakenly think they’re more numerous than they are. The silent majority of non-leftists don’t get heard because, well, they’re silent. Until election day anyway.
Think of the left as a nagging wife or husband. Because they enjoy the victimhood status it confers on them, nagging spouses nag loudly and frequently. If you have a nagging husband, Siri probably thinks you have three or four of them based on the amount of nagging she eavesdrops on.
“Woke” thus followed a predictable path, something like a nagging wife who starts every complaint with, “Why do you always….” Initially it was a useful slogan and so the left re-purposed it into their entire grab bag of victim-conferring complaints.
It started as a term for anti-racism (whatever happened to the left’s “science” that race doesn’t exist?) and taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those who want it (so long as the wanters are woke). But then it expanded into global warming, censorship of conservative views, abolishment of merit, cancelation of comedians, arrogant school boards, pro-abortion, political correctness, Orange Man Bad and everything else in the left’s monotonous catechism of litmus tests.
The left pretends to seek change but are actually just grievance-mongering by sloganeering. Even the French think they’ve gone overboard with wokeness.
Conservatives observed all this with bemusement turning to amusement. “Woke” had become a parody. It went from a clever brand to a cliché to the punch line of a joke that everyone has heard too many times.
Woke thus joined its ancestral words like “liberal.” The left rebranded itself “liberal” in the 20th century because “socialism” had become associated with, duh, socialism.
(It was a deliberate corruption of the word “liberal” which historically meant social tolerance, lean government, non-interference and libertarianism. The left believes in none of that and so in the hope of deceiving people, for a little while anyway, they of course had to say they did.)
“Liberal” then got a bad reputation, just as “socialism” had, because the people came to associate it not with classical liberalism but with socialists who had rebranded themselves liberals. So the left rebranded itself again as “Progressives.”
You see how this works. The left keeps a good brand only until people begin to associate it with the bad product they’re selling.
“Woke” is the latest runner in this semantical chase. But as with all the old leftist brands, “woke” is getting a bad name too. AOC complains (like the good leftist she is, she does love complaining) that conservatives are deliberately using the word “woke” to mock wokeness, just as they used “liberal” to mock liberals and used “socialist” to mock socialists.
To that, I plead guilty. The left never seems to get the point that their word games get turned against them. They always lose their race through the thesaurus because people naturally come to associate any word, regardless of its true meaning and regardless of its initial catchiness, with what it is actually used to describe. That’s how language works.
“Woke” now refers to the panoply of leftism to which the left themselves applied it. If conservatives find it politically useful to use “woke” as mockery, it’s because the left has applied it to mock-worthy notions. The left could rebrand themselves “superhero’s” but within three years people would associate “superhero’s” with overreaching socialists and so it would become a term of derision.
What the left needs is not a new brand to apply to their tired old theories. What they need are new theories. They need theories that are rooted in something other than celebrating their victimhood under the guise of bogus complaints. They need theories that work.
the Aspen beat 
Right on!!
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
As my little grandchild would ask if he’d read your post, ‘have you met each black person?’ I’ve taught my brood to judge individuals, no matter their colour or religion, on their character and actions. Shame we no longer quote Martin Luther King, You must be so angry to use such hateful language.
Having read both posts and having great respect for the perspicacity of your young grandson it seems to me that you missed the point. He probably wouldn’t have. Smart kid, you should learn from him.
John failed, intentionally no doubt, to identify the source of the quote he posted. I read through the comments hoping someone besides me and John would have known it was Booker T.. Washington.
Yesterday I was with some friends and one of them refered to AOC as ‘Woko Ono” and everyone in the room laughed.
That made my coffee come out my nose. Brilliant mockery of a very dense prog.
AOC and the ‘Squad’ what a group of losers. What a sorry way for their supporters to waste their votes. but they are getting what they voted for now- to their dismay.
Unfortunately, those aptly named LOSERS are never in danger of losing their seats, due to the fools in their districts. Those voters are NOT dismayed like the rest of us are. Were they on a national stage, they’d be gone after one election cycle. Our hope is that the moderates who still wish to keep their seats do not go along with the idiots.
Woko Ono wins the Interwebs today!!!
Isn’t it fitting that the ” woke” left would chose
” Somnambulent Joe ” as president ?
Perhaps revealing , yet further, that THEY are the true sleepwalkers of political and societal reality ?
“Somnambulent Joe” was chosen by the DNC because he was electable over the actual communists who populate the “woke” party. Once chosen, the swing states were manipulated via the courts to insure the communist victory. Read the book “Rigged” by Mollie Hemmingway. I knew a lot of court challenges by Trump’s team were tossed out, eventually by state supreme courts, but the initial challenges were upheld by lower courts. Will make your blood boil.
As well, nearly all the dozens sworn statements , stating election irregular, under penalty of perjury, were NEVER heard in a court of law. The cases were tossed on technicalities, before the verification of the statements were ever determined.
It’s so much easier to simply virtue signal than to actually live a life of virtue. Those who live lives devoid of actual, measurable achievement simply preen on social media as a measure of their worth. I’ve yet to figure out why AOC has generated so much attention. She’s like a darker version of Paris Hilton, famous for being famous. Her vapid, silly comments and ridiculous ideas would be cute if she were a ten year old child. But she’s not. She’s actually a member of Congress. People voted for her, as they voted for the rest of the Squad and they “vote” for the talking heads in media who are exhibit “sound and fury signifying nothing” to quote a famous dead white male. Maybe someday they will actually wake up and realize what fools they are.
Hey, take it easy on Paris.
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Problem is, regardless of whether their pet names – socialist, liberal, woke, progressive – go by the wayside and are mocked, their illiberal ideas somehow keep living on and severely damaging the actual liberal society that most people want to thrive in. Somehow their ideas never get truly defeated.
Yep, same old hatred of the bourgeoisie, with its Christian culture and small-town Babbitts, that goes back a couple of centuries. However, back when we called them hippies and red-diaper doper babies, they didn’t think of themselves as victims so much as triumphant harbingers of The Age of Aquarius, etc. A distinction without a difference, I suppose, especially when I put AOC and Jane Fonda together in my mind.
That’s because the desire to get free stuff is some human nature. Woke = “Hey, do you like free stuff?”
This analysis applies to the cannon fodder sent forth for pervert and anti-pervert activity. The command element uses no such language but certainly approves everyone else using it, including their marks, getting wrapped up in linguistic glue. The command element of pervert forces focus on creating chaos in institutions, families, communications, and governments so as to reduce the risk of having to live cleanly, lovingly by eliminating the majority of persons who might insist that they do. That would be no less than 80% of humanity. Fear is their principle weapon. They are skilled at conjuring it from a myriad of directions. Linguistics are an ineffective response to fear. Spiritual discipline, calming the mind, repeating a Name of God, is an effective response to fear.
You say perverse, or perverted, I say demonic — an older word in the lexicon of Jesus that I much prefer. But we’re speaking the same language, and I appreciate your comment, David.
Excellent analysis. It must help to have the clear air of Aspen, although it doesn’t seem to help the leftists who travel or live there. The Left thrives on short term sprints wherein they use words or phrases until they no longer work, so they find replacements. The Left is successful to the extent they control the language (via overwhelmingly leftist media); this seems to be their only consistent ploy throughout history. Central power by whatever ism it is called is their go-to mantra, but never allowing for the ultimate power, God. As you said, leftism is their religion, no need for any higher power. After all, both Siri and Alexi confirm it for them.
Let’s just call leftists what they are … the totalitarian Left.
The Left goes through all of sorts of branding and re-branding … Democrats, Dixiecrats, the Ku Klux Klan, Social Democrats, Democrat Socialists, Socialists, Liberals, Progressives, Woke, etc. This is because they suck … and deep down they know that they suck because of what they want to do to their fellow citizens. But the Left wants and craves power more than anything else so the constant re-branding.
Related note … notice how the radical environmental movement (also part of the Left) also constantly re-brands. In the 1970s it was global cooling, then in the 1990s and early 2000s it was global warming, and now it is climate change (as if the natural state of the climate is always in stasis.)
Yet the Left cannot change their ideas because all of their ideas are deeply rooted in Hegelian and Marxist ideologies. The Left shares the same political DNA with the social utopian collectivists and statists whose own brands deserve to forever be buried in the ash heap of history. Such past Marxist inspired social utopians include … Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, among others.
And yeah … fascism and communism share many similar roots and ideas. They are both collectivist, statist, anti-individual, anti-capitalism, anti-Semitic, anti-God, and they both have filled and continue to fill lots of mass graves. Communism and fascism are just two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
If you simply look at the so-called anti-fascist Antifa and BLM, notice how their dress and tactics creepily resemble Hitler’s brown-shirts and Mussolini’s fascisti black-shirts. These 21st century criminal agit-prop vandals seem to have a penchant for re-creating Kristallnacht in American cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
So yeah … this is what it means to be “woke.” Riot, loot, shoot, assault, kill, steal and burn neighborhood supermarkets, drug stores, Foot Lockers, gas stations and courthouses. These woketards have already ruined their own branding (and neighborhoods) by their outrageous and criminal behavior.
Maybe they’ll start calling themselves utopians, or neo-utopians, or even rainbow unicorn farts. But they’ll always remain unrepentant totalitarian Leftists, deeply saturated in Marxist social Utopianism trapped within their DNA.
Always call them out and expose them for what they are, no matter what new name or fashionable label they may go by.
Applause! You might have beaten Beaton!
I should also add Jacobins to the mix … the head choppers led by Robespierre during the French Revolution culminating in the Reign of Terror. Ironically Robespierre met a rather gory fate as the head head-chopper ended up getting his own head chopped off. Poetic justice …
The Jacobins … proto-fascist and proto-Bolshevik by nature, preceded Marx and Engels by several decades. I believe both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels looked at the Reign of Terror for lots of their inspiration.
We unfortunately have our own self-identified Jacobins here in America in which they describe themselves as “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”
They do their nasty little publishing operation at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/
A lot of us have seen this coming for a long long time. But, are we going to fight this? Or are we all just going to keep sitting in the water, which is getting very hot now? We know what’s happening, but we can’t get organized into one big group. The Tea Party did it, why can’t we?
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