The End of Woke
The past couple of days have been a cornucopia of crazy news articles. From the relogoing of Cracker Barrel to the elbows down of Carney. There was a story about car dealers limiting the number of gas car sales so as to make their electric quota and one about Austrian judges saying the use of Sharia law was great in their country. I addressed much of this in yesterday’s post Stuck on Stupid.
The mornings initial perusal of the headlines is no less filled with articles that seem more like they are pulled from the folds of National Lampoon. An opinion piece calling for the end of the Ontario College of Teachers (actually this idea is not the crazy, it is what the OCT does that is) was first in the crazy file followed quickly by an article about a Michigan man risking life and limb crossing the Detroit River in a $25 kayak to claim asylum here in Canada. He did this because he was afraid.
My favourite news piece was from yesterday. It has been reported in a variety of news sources, all of which are credible mainstream organizations. Had this been a single sourced article I might have thought it a parody piece from the Bee, but no this is an actual article describing a true event.
What this article denotes certainly is no less than the end of woke. Which sounds ridiculous when you consider the previously mentioned stories all of which seem to come from the pages of the Psychology of Totalitarianism and its description of the processes of mass formation. But no friends, this latest pronouncement from no less than the Democratic Party certainly symbolizes the beginning of the end.
The what am I referring you may ask? The Democrats hired a consultancy to help them relate better to the voters they have continued to lose to the new Republican movement symbolized by MAGA. Is it a change in policy? Good guess but that would not be correct. Are they ridding themselves of loud, crazy sounding candidates? Nope, but that could be half right as they are going to ban the crazy terminally they love to use that separates them form the normal person.
That’s right gentle readers, the Democrats have banned the use of wokisms. The consultancy provided a list of 45 terms that make Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness” Below is the list of these words split into headings of humour.
Therapy-Speak
- Privilege
- Violence (as in “environmental violence”)
- Dialoguing
- Othering
- Triggering
- Microaggression/assault/invalidation
- Progressive stack
- Centering
- Safe space
- Holding space
- Body shaming
Seminar Room Language
- Systems of oppression
- Critical theory
- Cultural appropriation
- Postmodernism
- Overton Window
- Heuristic
- Existential threat to [climate, the planet, democracy, the economy]
Organizer Jargon
- Radical transparency
- Small ‘d’ democracy
- Barriers to participation
- Stakeholders
- The unhoused
- Food insecurity
- Housing insecurity
- Person who immigrated
Gender/Orientation Correctness
- Birthing person/inseminated person
- Pregnant people
- Chest feeding
- Cisgender
- Deadnaming
- Heteronormative
- Patriarchy
- LGBTQIA+
The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs
- Latinx
- BIPOC
- Allyship
- Intersectionality
- Minoritized communities
Explaining Away Crime
- Justice-involved
- Carceration
- Incarcerated people
- Involuntary confinement.
So if you look at the list you’ll notice a list of words that define and separate. @Which really is what being woke is all about. Further defining separations of people so they feel more and more alone. Very much like the wolves separating the weak from the herd so they can eat. Progressives need ever growing lists of identified differences to deeper install fear into people that they are different and only through their benevolence can these differences be overcome.
I have no illusions that the few of us who are actually woke to this ongoing progressive construct (lol big words) are beginning to win. That this is nothing more than a regroup of the progressive left in their drive to control the language and our identities as a result. But maybe it is a start. At least it seems a realization that all these terms sound phoney. That the average person has no desire to understand their usage. That they just sound crazy.
Hopefully this is the start of the end. Sadly, I doubt it.