Is the woke era over?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., removed her pronouns from her bio last week. It was a small shift but a perceptible one.
The Democrats have just suffered a thorough electoral defeat and are wondering what went wrong. The most impactful ad of the election season focused on the far-left trans madness and had the tagline "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you."
Democratic political strategist James Carville blames the loss on "wokeness," and there’s an impulse to optimistically proclaim "the era of woke over" because of President-elect Trump’s decisive victory.
The declarations are premature.
Yes, Vice President Kamala Harris’ pledge to give free sex change operations to illegal immigrant criminals was an eye-opener for a lot of people, but much had happened to get to the point where a candidate could actively support something like that and not be laughed off the stage.
For one thing, the far left wokesters have marched through our institutions for decades, filling roles with their comrades and reorganizing the systems to support their mission. As we laid out in our book "Stolen Youth," about the woke indoctrination of children, this woke element has captured teachers’ colleges, libraries, medical accreditation organizations, media companies and so on.
We’ve had years of pronoun madness. Teachers were fired from their jobs for refusing to use a child’s new chosen pronoun, even when the teacher had been respectful and tried to avoid pronouns altogether.
WOKE CULTURE HAS PUSHED THIS MOM TOO FAR
It wasn’t just pronouns either. Parents who didn’t want pornographic books in their child’s school library were called book banners. The Justice Department went after them as if they were terrorists. Librarians pushed inappropriate books into the hands of kids.
Disney snuck inappropriate content into their work to foster a woke message. The American Medical Association pushes "gender reaffirming care" for minor patients even though there is an avalanche of evidence that such "care" causes children harm.
All of this will not be easy to reverse. It’s easy to see all of these institutions and organizations doubling down on wokeness to oppose the Trump administration.
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The other problem was that the woke years had been advanced, hand in hand, alongside cancel culture. There are things you simply are not allowed to say, even today after Trump’s landslide win.
Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton made an obvious point recently when he said "I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that." The "I’m supposed to be afraid to say that" was the worst part. This isn’t a fringe issue.
In deep blue New York City, a survey in April found that 66% said "they support requiring high school athletes can only compete against others of the gender they were assigned at birth." That number is far higher in other places.
For his extremely uncontroversial point of view, Moulton is being threatened with a primary and daggers are out for him. A Tufts professor said he will no longer be sending students to intern in Moulton’s office. The guardrails around institutional wokeism remain up.
The fever has broken, yes, but the infection will be tough to cure.