If You're Anti-Woke, Vote Harris
The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 116 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast
Most of our listeners are against wokeness, or social justice fundamentalism, or successor ideology, or whatever people want to call the illiberal, racist, sexist worldview that’s become popularized on the Left in the past 10 years or so. We get annoyed by cancel culture. We think everyone is too obsessed with race and gender. We want our institutions not to discriminate against men and Asians. We don’t want our AI’s to create images of black & indigenous nazis.
My pitch to those of you who could broadly be described as “anti-woke” is: support Kamala Harris. This may seem counterintuitive because the Democrats are obviously the party of wokeness, and giving them more power seems like it will make things worse, but that misunderstands the issue. Wokeness is not, and never was, a political issue. It’s a cultural issue. So the relevant question is what effect the election will have on the culture. And my prediction is that electing Donald Trump will lead to an explosion of wokeness, because that’s what happened the last time we elected Donald Trump.
2016 was a long time ago, so many of us may have forgotten, but social justice craziness wasn’t really that big a deal back then. I spent the early 2010’s in the polyamory community, which was one of the most liberal spaces in the country. All of the worst social justice-related behaviors were there, but - and this is the important thing - we were on the fringes of normal society. Nobody listened to us or cared what we had to say. It wasn’t until Trump was elected that wokeness went mainstream.
Under Obama, it was really hard for people to argue that racism was an insurmountable barrier because the most powerful person in the world was a black man. Sure, there were tons of arguments out there about how that didn’t mean racism was over, but nobody really listened. It drove the hardcore racists insane, but most people just relaxed about it. Modern-style “antiracism” was largely contained to the most leftist spaces and institutions.
When Trump was elected, suddenly that validated all the worst fears of the race and gender obsessives. Donald Trump is an obvious racist! He was the leader of the Obama birtherism movement. He blamed Mexican immigrants for ruining the country. He promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. He lamented that our immigrants were all from “shithole countries.” He’s also an obvious misogynist! He bragged about sexually assaulting women! His main argument against any woman who criticized him was that she was ugly. He was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault. He objectifies his own daughter. The way he talks about women in general is disgusting. In the same way Obama’s election showed that the country wasn’t so racist that we wouldn’t elect a black man, electing Trump showed that we weren’t so tolerant that we wouldn’t elect an obvious racist and sexist.
After Trump’s election, wokeness went into overdrive. Suddenly, wokeness was in! It was popular!
In 2017, right after Trump’s inauguration, we had the “women’s march” - a substance-free protest that was just generally against misogyny. You might remember it as the origin of the “pussy hat,” though it wasn’t long before that sort of thing - once the symbol of progressivism - became completely disfavored as not inclusive enough.
2017 was when the whole #metoo thing happened, leading to the demonization and cancellation of anyone who dared to suggest that maybe a woman might lie or exaggerate about an accusation of sexual impropriety. Journalists were canceled based on an anonymous “shitty media men” list. Aziz Ansari was canceled for a story about how he was kind of awkward. Later in 2017, prominent blogger Wesley Fenza wrote his influential and insightful piece “Woke Is the New Cool,” describing how status in elite society was all about who could outdo everyone else in their hatred of whiteness, maleness, and anything that could be spun as “oppression.”
In 2018, Al Franken was pushed out of the Senate based on ridiculous, transparently exaggerated accusations. That was also when the book White Fragility came out and Robin DiAngelo became a household name. Also all the software companies changed their gun emojis to squirt guns. The Covington Catholic kid went viral for smirking at an Indian. In 2019, we got Race2Dinner, the ridiculous “service” whereby a white lady and a black lady would host a dinner where they yelled at white women for being racist. 2019 also gave us the 1619 Project, the big New York Times series arguing that America’s true founding was in 1619 when the first slave ships arrived.
Most agree that 2020 was “peak woke.” That was the summer where George Floyd was killed, leading to riots in almost every American city, where health officials went on tv to say that everyone needs to stay home to avoid covid, except for the rioters because racism is an even worse disease. Despite how violent and destructive they were, the riots were near-universally reported as “mostly peaceful.” Most major journalists changed their social media profile photos to black squares. Anyone who didn’t got harassed by woke mobs. Ibram X. Kendi - the guy whose main contribution to the discourse was the idea that anything that doesn’t create equal outcomes for black people is racist - was named in the Time 100 and given a multi-million dollar grant to found the Center for Antiracist Research. A bunch of top universities eliminated the requirement to take the SAT for “equity” reasons.
Then Biden got elected and things calmed down. Substack rose in prominence as a home for writers who wouldn’t be tolerated on other platforms. Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired all the wokescolds. He even put back the gun emoji! Louis C.K., previously canceled as part of the #metoo purge, won a grammy! The main Black Lives Matter organization was revealed as a grift. Kendi’s antiracist center was revealed as a grift. A bunch of Ivy League presidents got fired for being too tolerant of leftist anti-Israel protests. Most major schools reinstated the requirement for SAT scores. Several Universities have eliminated their DEI departments. The Cass Review came out and showed that a lot of youth gender medicine was unproven or harmful, leading to reforms. Affirmative action was declared unconstitutional, and there was very little backlash. Even the 1619 project was edited to delete the part about America’s “true founding.” You can even say “retard” again and nobody will do anything!
To see how stark the difference is, you can just compare the Kamala Harris campaign of 2020 to the 2024 one. In 2020, her campaign was entirely about her race and gender. I challenge you to find a single article from 2020 mentioning her without talking about the “historic” nature of her candidacy. Now look at her. She was just formally nominated last weekend, and she didn’t mention her race or gender at all. Almost nobody did. They sense that the political winds have shifted.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence. If we elect Trump again, we’ll get another resurgence of wokeness. It will be another existential struggle of oppressed vs. oppressor, with a new example every few days. Except this time it will be worse because now if Trump wins, people can say it was because of racism and sexism. You’ll start hearing the term “misogynoir” in regular conversation. Conversely, if we elect Harris, she’ll have a similar effect to Obama of marginalizing all the people who claim our society is irredeemably racist and sexist. The usual suspects will keep screaming about how everything is awful, but the trend will continue where fewer and fewer people listen to them.
So please. I really don’t want another four years like 2016 to 2020. Please do what you can to spare us another round of the President Donald Trump experience.