Our little leftie friends have had a lot of fun with “Florida’s Don’t Say Gay” law. That’s a misnomer, of course—a more accurate title for Governor Ron DeSantis’s fascist initiative would be “Florida’s Don’t Gender Transition Third Graders Without Mom & Dad’s Permission” law. But truth in labeling, alas, has never been progressivism’s strong point: see reproductive justice, trans woman, assault rifle, et. al.
Just now the comrades have their frillies in a trucker’s hitch over a word once popular on the virtual barricades but now problematic: Woke.
When it first made its way into the ideological lexicon, Woke signified all things virtuous: To be numbered among the Woke was to be on the side of the angels, personally, publicly, and politically. All you had to do was subscribe to an ever-evolving list of orthodoxies.
But with the passage of time, people started noticing that the orthodoxies embraced by the Woke included the clandestine gender transitioning of third graders and other funny stuff. When you see Drew Barrymore sucking up to a horrible person like Dylan Mulvaney, a fake woman whose schtick is a serial insult to actual women, there are no angels in sight. When your kid comes home from school in tears over his “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity,” you’re unlikely to be pleased. If you voted for Donald Trump—or any Republican—you might fume at being called a Nazi. Reviewing all this and more, you might conclude that like Dylan Mulvaney, the Woke are horrible people.
In short, the Deplorables have seized hold of Woke and changed it from an accolade to a term of abuse.
After a brief flurry of outrage and angst, the Woke settled on a defense, and it’s pretty hilarious. They claim that nobody on the other side even knows what Woke means! I call this hilarious becomes it comes from people who scream Fascist! all the time but can’t define fascism.
But of course, fascists like Governor DeSantis and I know exactly what Woke means. It means gender ideology, and fantasies of systemic racism/white supremacy/white privilege, and b.s. about toxic masculinity, and Critical Race Theory, and equity via discrimination, and white-adjacent Asians, and the 1619 Project, and the urban dystopia that once was Portland, and quiet quitting, and cancel culture, and the Awokening of James Bond—but above all, it means being an insufferable twit.
I’m not being too polite here, am I? But it’s not my fault! Truth in labeling demands that Woke be accurately defined—and there’s no way of doing that without committing a string of microaggressions. Sorry, comrades…