A Short History of Wokery

Wokery burst onto the scene much like covid or, more appropriately, the Black Death. Or World War II. Has so much stupidity been promulgated so quickly and so broadly at any time in human history? Maybe not. Previous stupid phenomena like the witchcraft scare and phrenology took longer to take root.

James Kunstler offers a short course in wokism that includes a happy ending:

What were the execs of these mighty companies thinking — these knights of the boardroom, these capitalist geniuses, these moral nonpareils — when they cancelled Atlanta’s turn to host the midsummer All-star Game to “protest” Georgia’s passage of a law that requires voter ID? Surely that they were striking a righteous blow against systemic racism. And then, the rest of the world realized — almost immediately — that Major League Baseball requires online ticket buyers to show ID when they pick up their tickets at any stadium…and that Delta Airlines requires passengers to show ID (duh) before being allowed to fly in one of their airplanes…and that various other corporations snookered into this latest hustle such as Nike, Coca-Cola, and Calvin Klein support forced labor in the Asian nations that manufacture their products.

But who expects moral consistency from virtue-signaling corporations? No one.

Wokeness emerged on the scene in 2014 when the feckless teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson upon arrest in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement. The moral panic BLM ignited proved to be a spectacularly effective device for repelling the truth of the situation, and many more like it, which was that Michael Brown resisted arrest, fought with, and menaced officer Wilson before getting shot.

And now, of course, we have George Floyd.

With the help of their allies in the news media and the coddled faculty ideologues on campus, the Democrats fed this moral panic until it grew into an historic mass hysteria every bit as insane as the witchcraft hysterias of the Middle Ages in Europe. Then Mr. Trump came along….

And the insanity was dialed up to 11, beginning with the Russia collusion hoax and continuing throughout Trump’s term in office.

They kept it up for four years, using every device in the bureaucracy to drive Mr. Trump from office while deliberately gaslighting, hoaxing, misdirecting, and bamboozling the public. In the process, the Democratic Party became hostage to the worst elements among its supporters and foot-soldiers: the race hustlers, the gender-deranged, the criminal sociopaths, the limousine Marxists, the Wall Street swindlers, the Silicon Valley megalomaniacs, and even America’s foreign adversaries — as evidenced by the Biden Family’s lucrative dealings with the party that runs China.

That is a fair summary, but I would question whether the Democratic Party includes any factions other than Kunstler’s catalog of its “worst elements.”

All social hysterias run their courses. They run out of new gags, and out of new recruits. Their tropes grow tiresome, even comical, such as the Woke mainstays of “racism,” “misogyny,” and “white supremacy.” Their promptings reveal themselves as obviously dishonest. The punishments they seek seem increasingly warped and sadistic. The behavior they induce begins to look patently insane. That’s where America stands now.

It is, of course. Kunstler’s is an optimistic interpretation, and I hope it is correct. My own guess is that we have quite a ways to go before wokery burns itself out and its exponents, like Robespierre, are sent to the guillotine. Figuratively speaking.

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