Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed.
Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present.
The so-called white male heterosexual victimizing class was collectively to be held responsible for their sinful triad of white “rage,” “supremacy,” and “privilege.”
Class considerations became passé. The Duchess of Sussex, and the billionaires Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, shared grievances against all whites, whether they hailed from Martha’s Vineyard or impoverished East Palestine, Ohio.
A bicoastal elite would draft the woke agenda and the oppressed would follow as ordered.
That top-down blueprint would embrace massive multibillion-dollar reparations to blacks.
In lockstep, all victims would rally around a Green New Deal that mandated high energy costs to discourage consumption of fossil fuels.
The new transgender canon mandated three sexes. Sex is socially rather than biologically determined. And there is a large, oppressed, and transgender population: this presents the next great civil rights struggle for America.
Historical wokeism lodged a list of grievances against the supposedly flawed American past. Indicting the dead required statues to be toppled. Names had to be changed. Histories were to be rewritten. Even the foundational date of America was to be reconsidered and altered.
Yet, the rainbow fabric of woke is now fraying—and for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, woke took off after the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic, the devastating lockdown, the 120 days of violent rioting and looting following the death of George Floyd, and years of endemic Trump Derangement Syndrome. Most of those catalysts are waning. Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving. Millions of the comatose are waking up to normality—and don’t recognize their own country.
Two, woke is retrogressive, reactionary, and anti-civilizational. Decriminalizing the legal code, defunding the police, failing to apply norms to the homeless population, and destroying meritocracy have all hollowed out our major cities.
San Francisco was a far cleaner, safer, and kinder city 20, 40, or 80 years ago than it is today.
A woke FBI, Pentagon, or airline industry becomes a matter of life and death.
Three, in modern America, class is now a far more accurate metric of oppression than race or gender.
It is one thing to restrict fossil fuel development if you are in the upper one percent income bracket, quite another if you commute 50 miles a day in a used car. If there are to be reparations, why include Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, but not indigent Hispanics, Asians, and poor whites?

The multimillionaire, and prep-school and Ivy-League educated Barack Obama may castigate the unwoke Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) for his absence of victimhood. But from which of his three enclaves does Obama do so—the Kalorama mansion, the Martha’s Vineyard estate, or the restricted-access beachfront retreat in Hawaii?
Four, religions also trump race. Hispanic-American Catholics and Middle-Eastern-American Muslims have more in common with so-called white Christians than they do with an atheist, or agnostic woke elite who pushes the lie that the anti-religion Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a mere charity group.
Muslim-American communities in Michigan do not want children seeing drag queen shows or the pride flag flying with equal status to the American flag. The Catholic Hispanic community of Los Angeles has little tolerance for lurid anti-Christian motifs that preview a Los Angeles Dodgers game.
Five, wokeism is cannibalistic. Even the children of woke architects with perfect SAT scores and 4.0 grade point averages are being rejected on the basis of their race at their coveted Ivy League schools.
Neither the mansions of Beverly Hills nor estates of Presidio Heights qualify as sanctuaries from violent criminals, who are now exempted by the anointed from legal consequences.
The wokest of Hollywood celebs will soon lose movie roles and be disqualified for film awards on the basis of their race.
Even the most left-wing of movie directors do not want to be ordered by Soviet-style commissars to hire their crews, actors, and writers on the basis of race.
Six, wokeism is a dangerous diversion of American resources.
The United States may have sponsored gender studies programs, flown pride flags, and bragged of George Floyd murals in Kabul. But meanwhile its military suffered the most humiliating defeat in a half-century, as it skedaddled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars in deadly arms for terrorists.
Our elite work to ban plentiful natural gas, subsidize transgendered activism abroad, and lecture on sexual identities in the military. China’s elite builds dozens of coal and nuclear plants, and doubles the size of its navy, while preparing to absorb Taiwan.
Americans are rejecting wokeism because they finally are realizing that if they do not, they will not have a civilization left.
Although I suppose better late than never might be one response to Professor Hanson’s column, another might be, too little too late. Or, as Emerald Robinson wrote recently:
Imagine a country where people never have to worry about finding, not just food, but every imaginable type of food, condiment and dessert at any time they want to eat, as well as any beverage that they desire? Imagine that same country where most people can easily find apartments, houses and shelters with wonderful kitchens and several bathrooms and many bedrooms and closets that are filed with their personal clothing, shoes and sundry other items, and where they may not even have to pay to inhabit them? Imagine a country where any medical issue could be attended to by walking into a hospital emergency room and asking to be diagnosed and treated and anything deemed necessary to save their life, regardless of cost, will be made available? Imagine a country where most people grow fat because food is plentiful and always available and they have so much time on their hands that they can amuse themselves with gadgets and toys and never have to worry about not being able to support themselves but only need to complain and grieve that they deserve more and that someone else has to provide it for them lest they be subject to laws and penalties and derided as greedy, racist, bigoted and xenophobic?
Should such a country exist could it be because of an evil capitalistic society that competitively allowed it to create such abundance that all of its citizens, and even non citizens, invading though its unattended borders and arriving en masse, would have access to such abundance, based primarily on merit and a distain for satisfaction and plain mediocracy? For such a country to exist is it possible it became so wealthy from harming the environment by using carbon fuels that eventually could make the whole planet warmer, wetter and uninhabitable where some occupants currently live?
Imagine a country where it is possible for some to become who they would like to be by their own efforts, and with the help of the government, for others, without their own efforts? Imagine that same country that has now advanced so that anyone can pretend to be biologically and genetically who they prefer to be and no one can disagree and deny them their beliefs without risking legal punishment? Imagine a country where every individual can become pregnant and deliver or terminate their progeny? Imagine such a country that decides that the rules and laws of nature don’t count, that everything is relative, mutable and changeable and that human ideologies such as family, homeland, history, love between men and women, faith, service to higher ideals and everything that is human no longer matter and that what matters is what the few decide no matter how aberrant?
America has enjoyed success beyond the wildest imagination of its Founders. It became what it is because of something it’s current leaders no longer have a clue about. It is because of these Democrat leaders that sit on the shoulders of the giants who provided individuals with an opportunity to enjoy freedom from government that allowed the best and the brightest to bestow, on most, through competition, the abundance the rest of the world enviously admires and lusts to become part and enjoy.
It is liberty and free market capitalism that works and anything less can never compete. What it can do is destroy and that is what “woke” is about. It is a pathological and sick ideology that can only develop where wealth and prosperity have become so normal that the population can afford not to work and play with such an anti-human experiment. Ultimately it will fail like the Tower of Babel because of its own superabundance of worthless fat if it is not taken down by enemies who are watching, waiting and contemplating for the opportunity their bristling, muscular non woke military are enthusiastic to prove that they can do it.
Of course all of wokeness is based upon what is considered oppressed. In America the least fortunate live better than most inhabitants in other parts of the world and they don’t even have to expend effort in order to do so.
Perhaps the sleeping public has had enough and we are awakening to what is happening to our country and our culture. I have faith in the basic American citizen who provides for his family, cares for their needs, and works for the good of all. We do not all live in big cities but we are everywhere. We may be mostly silent on many subjects but we will eventually be heard.