AMAC Exclusive – By David P. Deavel
![Woke-Culture-Typewriter Woke culture typed out on paper by red typewriter](https://static-asset.amac.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/27101704/Woke-Culture-Typewriter.jpg)
CNN contributor John Blake is worried and I’m happy. You see, next year’s elections are coming up and polling does not portend the Brave New Democratic World coming through in a landslide. This in itself is a good sign. But Blake’s column attempting to explain why is useful in showing exactly what the Democrats’ communication strategy is and how Republicans can beat them.
For Blake, bad and mediocre polling numbers can’t mean that Americans are reacting to the Democrats’ gross politicization of our justice system, the economic damage coming from “Bidenomics,” their promotion of bodily mutilation under the rubric of “gender affirmation,” or racialized politics.
No, the danger Blake sees is that Republicans are experts at “verbal jiu-jitsu.” Instead of taking the Democrats’ arguments head-on, Blake claims, they use “a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns [it] into an unusable slur.” According to Blake, “diversity,” “woke,” “Critical Race Theory,” even “liberal” were all simply good terms that were winners for Democrats but were somehow turned negative by crafty Republican masters of spin.
Given the regime media trick of turning any story of Democratic blunders into a story about how those evil Republicans “pounced” or “seized” on them, it was unsurprising that many wags noted that this piece was merely a case of “Republicans Pounce on Words!”
And indeed that’s what it is. Given that Republicans don’t control the major media, entertainment, or academic worlds, one might wonder how they have such power over the public. Blake quotes various lefty academics talking about the conservative world’s “think tanks” with their “linguists” and “focus groups” who can figure out what terms “resonate” with the public. Then, through the power of their greater “discipline,” Republicans simply keep repeating negative meanings for these terms until a willing public goes along with their views of them.
Blake follows the well-worn path of explaining all these terms benignly (often using dictionary meanings or older usages), asking how one could object to them in that format, and then asserting that the negative meanings were added on by Republicans.
“Woke,” for instance, was simply a term in the black community meaning to be “actively aware of social injustice.” Who doesn’t want to be aware of injustice? Blake says “it has been transformed into a contemporary scourge, one that a politician compared to a ‘virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.’”
“Equity,” Blake insists, simply means “being fair or impartial,” but Republicans have turned it into a word that means “a mandate to discriminate.”
Blake gives many other examples and consistently follows the same dishonest procedure. He never acknowledges that Democrats are not using any societally agreed-upon understandings of what social injustice is or basic fairness or impartiality. Instead, they are using very ideologically narrowed views.
Wokeness, as the student of today’s progressive discourse James Lindsay says, is being aware of social injustice as defined by the various forms of Critical Theory. It is to have an “awakened consciousness…set particularly with regard to issues of identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and others.” The woke person has “been awakened (or ‘woke up’) to an awareness of the allegedly systematic nature of racism, sexism, and other oppressive power dynamics and the true nature of privilege, domination, and marginalization in society and understanding the role in dominant discourses in producing and maintaining these structural forces.”
In other words, it’s not just about being aware that a police officer might be racist. It’s about internalizing the entire leftist worldview of our society as being intrinsically tilted toward whites, males, heterosexuals—and tilted against all others. It’s about constant social activism against the perceived enemies who are found everywhere.
Equity, our other example, has to be understood in the same way. It’s not simply being “impartial” or “fair” to individuals. It’s not equal treatment under the law. As University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds likes to say, the left uses “equity” because it sounds like “equality” but means something completely different. Equity means the advancement of those groups against whom society is tilted until they are equal or, perhaps, even superior in order to atone for past injustices. And if there are disparities in outcomes, it does indeed mean “a mandate to discriminate” against individuals in order to procure the right group outcomes.
The left’s failure to establish a new lasting political coalition doesn’t have to do with Republican wordsmithing or jiu-jitsu. What it has to do with is the fact that despite the left still having control over the vast majority of communications and educational institutions, the internet—even with its censors and would-be censors at major social media sites—has made it possible for ordinary people to figure out what they mean by their terms and whether their claims are true.
When Blake retails the idea that Critical Race Theory is an “obscure academic theory,” ordinary Americans can find out through Christopher Rufo’s reports, laden with leaked materials from honest Americans, and Chaya Raichik’s Libs of Tik Tok feed on X (Twitter) that it may be a theory, but there is nothing obscure about the way it is applied at all levels of education, government, and corporate management.
The same goes with all the other terms. The left’s problem isn’t a slick, disciplined Republican public relations machine and institutional superiority that allows it to change the meaning of words. The left has all that. What they don’t have any longer is the ability to conceal what they really mean by the words to which they officially attach such simple meanings. Both their new, boutique terms and the old, traditional, truly good terms like “fairness” and “justice” and “democracy” are presented in public in one way, while in private they are used as code for leftist power.
I’m sure I’ll be accused of cultural appropriation, but the easiest way to explain what’s really happening is to say that the right has become more adept at helping Americans get “woke” to the radical and destructive ideology that brings injustice with it under the guise of words that sound like one thing and mean something radically different.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
Our Country is being destroyed. Our problems our not republican or democrat but RIGHT and Wrong. GOOD and Evil Media is destroying our Country with its destructive reporting practices. The average American is seeing everything they have worked for being destroyed by Evil practices, opinions, trying to convince our youth that Evil is right Never thought I would see this in America
If the republicans want to do the right thing quit calling the democrats my friends, my colleagues, or anything else but my enemies trying to destroy our nation. Then have the tenacity to fight every law, plan or appointment by democrats and show some grit. That’s the people’s problem now is there is not one nickels worth of difference between democrats and republicans. Sorry but if you try to tear down my country you are my enemy.
If you can’t speak to me using traditional standard English than please don’t bother talking to me. Not interested in wokeness. Try it sometime, it is a very effective tool.
Leftist and their followers are evil anti-Americans. They must, have to learn lessons the hard way. They will .
Great article. Just got through watching Victor Hovland win ,$13 million in the FedEx pga championship tournament. This is capitalism at it’s finest. The best thing about watching golf on Sunday with a rain delay is that it preempts the woke anti American 60 minutes garbage. Love it. Ps. Watch 60min if you want to know what woke is.
ROLLING STONE has turned LOSER WOKE pushing anti-Trump propaganda. Time to Boycott ROLLING STONE.
Go WOKE. Go BROKE.
Even Microsoft BING A.I. is Left Wing-Bias.
Don’t forget that in September that Microsoft is FORCING YOU to accept their updated policy for you to accept their Left-Wing Biased A.I. whether you want to or not. If you don’t accept their FASCIST policy you no longer can use the internet. NO BS people.
Its one thing to talk to like minded friends about this stuff and quite another to speak to indoctrinated dem robots. Perhaps it is futile to attempt to win over your gray pony tailed bro in law, but the thirty year olds have lifespan ahead. Something you say today might ferment in their socialist brains and erupt later as they really awaken. Its worth a try. Dont worry, they dont think you’re cool anyway. They’ll respect you for taking a stand but not for trying to be one of their homies.
Welcome to BIDENOMICS where “Good is Evil and Evil is Good!” . . . Jackass Joe is just the tool of Evil being weaponized against us, the People! Once he is charged and found GUILTY of TREASON these Communist wannabes will learn to go play elsewhere!
It’s all about money and power, and nothing else. The Democrate party and the unelected swamp are creating hate and distrust at every opportunity diverting attention from their power craving corruption. There are too many groups and organizations that survive from funding poured into them under cover through Swamp based government support. If the DNC was loosing power, the Swamp and many other groups would start loosing funding. So, they created diversions to move funding under cover of different bills like the $2.2 trillion CARS Act, enacted in March 2020 and then the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 202 which is a $2.3 trillion spending bill that combines $900 billion in stimulis releif for the COVID-19 pandemic in the US with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill for the 2021 federal fiscal year, combining 12 separate annual appropriations bills and to prevent a government shutdown caused by gross government overspending. The CAA bill is one of the largest spending measures ever enacted.These money buckets were easily corrupted and monies deverted onto vote buying programs allowing people to live or continue living on the government dole. In many cases these handout recipients receive more money than most of the people on social security, who worked and paid into the social security program their entire working lives. Monies are also being diverted into organizations that are not and should not be receiving funds from the federal government but the channels are so deluted and burried in account to account routing it will be years before these misappropriation will come to light. This is very much like the Biden family business accounts hat tricks. In one, out two, in three, out four and so on.So, create hate discomfort, confusion and lie, lie, lie, because corruption isn’t as effective as social injustice, inequality, racism, abortion and disdain of gender preference. All lies to create hate and cover the real purpose, power and money!
The left is full of sick mentally ill people. I believe it is way past time to take all licensing power away from the APA. The APA has completely abandoned their responsibility to manage the medical efforts in mental health in favor of their desire to be popular. the desire to be popular in its self being a mental illness.
Boy are the Dems good at ‘finger-pointing’ to put their negative/bad attempts to gain control, when it backfires, on their opponents – Republicans, conservatives, and Christians. They blame others for their faults but don’t hesitate to claim the fame if their plans/moves are accepted positively. Problem is their Marxist/Socialism moves for change are never accepted by true patriots of the USA.
Wow, changing the meaning of how words are used to reflect someone’s bias is a bias in itself. The interpretation of a specific word is inherently subjective based on what time period it is being used in any form. To limit the definition use is eliminating interpretation inference. What the left is mad about is that their specific interpretation definition is being used to show their misconceptions and ideologies and they have problems accepting responsibility to the consequences, so they naturally turn around and blame anyone else but themselves for not understanding their specific views at specific time period. All anyone is doing is reflecting their own statements and they don’t like what they see but expect everyone else to agree without any comment or thought.
I can’t wait for the Dims next new term to replace “woke” so we can bash their iron heads again with it
Thank God!
Nice article. Here’s a deeper dive for those who wish to better understand the CRT manipulation and tactics the radical left masks.
libertysentinel.org/critical-race-theory-lies-on-silly-lies-to-destroy-society/
Why was my comment taged, awaiting approval? I quoted from the Holy Bible, it that now an offence ?
This present condition we see ourselves in (with narrative, “woke”) was foreseen a long time ago, and the prophet Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 5:20 as follows;
20 What sorrow for those who say
that evil is good and good is evil,
that dark is light and light is dark,
that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.
21What sorrow for those who are wise in their own eyes
and think themselves so clever.
22What sorrow for those who are heroes at drinking wine
and boast about all the alcohol they can hold.
23They take bribes to let the wicked go free,
and they punish the innocent.
Bidenomics = $10.00+ for a box of crackers and can of Cheez Wiz. Bon appetite’!
You can’t even get a freakin’ job