In 2020 a copy of Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice could easily be spotted by anyone walking into the children’s section of a public library. By mid 2023, however, the 2020 publication had become a cultural artifact like the slinky and the hula hoop because ‘woke’ has gone from a hip term for leftism to a battered conservative punching bag in the culture war.

This from frontpagemag.com.

‘Woke’, the term, peaked in 2020. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and appeared as a category on Jeopardy. In 2018, Essence magazine announced its list of ‘Woke 100 Women’. In 2020, Disney’s Hulu aired Woke, a tedious series about a college activist. [And] by 2023, wokeness has come to mean leftist extremism.

Today the term is most often used by Republicans and hardly ever by the Left who act baffled at the idea that there was ever such a thing as wokeness. Much like ‘Defund the Police’, a set of sounds that once defined Leftist culture, “has been flushed down the memory hole and everyone is pretending they never heard of it.”

In Seattle, the home of wokeness, ‘race and equity experts’ say it’s ‘time to get rid of woke.’

Erin Jones, a DEI consultant who charges $1,000 an hour for her workshops, admitted:

That word has been taken. There’s no good way to use that term.

I think it’s been so weaponized at this point that there was not a positive way to use the word ‘woke.’

What happened to ‘Woke’ is the same thing that once happened to ‘Liberal’.

Conservatives seized on it and used it to sum up everything wrong with leftist extremism. Before long, no one wanted to identify as a liberal because it meant being seen as a lunatic fighting for sex ed for kids, free needles for addicts, political correctness in the office and surrendering to enemies.

Leftist support for these policies never went away, but leftism underwent a rebrand.

Unlike conservatives who have retained the same name over time, leftists are chameleons.

Leftists were first characterized by that name during the French Revolution because they tended to cluster to the left during legislative debates. More specific ideological terms like socialists and communists came and went and became tainted by association with leftist policies.

There is no name for the Left that doesn’t have negative associations even for leftists.

Senator Bernie Sanders has spent most of his otherwise useless career trying to redeem the term ‘socialist’ in the United States. And recent polls show a growing approval for socialism among younger people. But, as the example of ‘Woke’ shows, that appreciation may not last long once conservatives turn whatever term the Left uses now into a political scarlet letter.

The destruction of wokeness within a matter

of years shows why conservatives should

not underestimate their cultural power.

Barred by the media, censored by tech companies and shut out by the entertainment industry, conservatives were nevertheless able to take the hip new term that leftists had rebranded themselves as and make it as toxic as yesterday’s radioactive waste.

That is something that Conservatism

should take a moment to appreciate.

Wokes argue that ‘wokeness’ has a long pedigree and will be back. They’re probably right. History does repeat itself and few are able to learn from it.

Republicans went to war on wokeness and in doing so, they appropriated it, they took the word and made it their own. Destroying the brand value of wokeness is not the same thing as defeating woke policies, however, but marketing is fundamental to leftist recruitment and expansion.

And now, once again, the Left is between descriptors.

Some call themselves “progressives”—a longstanding and twice dated term that “sounds like an eyeglasses prescription.”

Social justice still hovers around the margins but its users still remember when SJW became the derisive acronym of choice.

The media, which rarely recognizes the existence of a separate leftist movement, describing its members only as ‘activists’, ‘experts’ or ‘concerned citizens’, likes the idea of an invisible ideology that, much like 1984, no one even has the words to describe.

Wokes still control most major cities and companies, the educational system and the government’s policymaking apparatus, but the backlash has inflicted some casualties.

America is still a long way from 1988 when Saturday Night Live aired ‘The Liberal’ depicting a hunted Matthew Modine on the run in a conservative nation. (Like most SNL cultural guesses, it was actually wrong and conservatism had peaked while liberalism was in ascendance).

The long-awaited backlash that would usher in a new ‘Reagan America’ has been promised many times in the last two decades but has never actually been able to survive and take root.

Until the ascendance of one Donald J. Trump

who with the acronym MAGA may have created

and entirely new political party—time will tell.

And yet conservatives, who operate in a counterculture, should remember that they have the power to hurt the Left. The decline and fall of wokeness is a demonstration of the fragility of leftist cultural power which commands budgets in the tens of billions of dollars, controls private and public institutions, yet is deeply resented and vulnerable to some pointed mockery.

Final thoughts: We ARE winning, fellow Patriots. Even the Left has acknowledged their aura has begun to wane. Middle Class America is sick and tired of the Left’s selfish, wrongheaded bullsh*t.

Wokeness, once a badge of pride—as a result of non-stop Conservative derision—has become a badge of shame, a popular pejorative.

Go Woke, Go Broke.