2024: The Year to Cancel ‘Wokeness’ in America

Glasses with the year "2024" are displayed ahead of New Year's Eve in Times Square in New York on Dec. 29, 2023. Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo

Commentary

When it comes to spending their money and supporting their values, many Americans are now wide awake, and most don’t like what they see. “Peak wokeness,” a term that may or may not be new (it is to me), is now pervasive in our lives and dominates our culture.

Undoubtedly, it would like to do the same with our private thoughts and our closely held traditional values and beliefs.

It just about does.

Wokeness Is Orwellian–and Everywhere

The woke crowd in the United States is loud, proud, and ... Stalinesque. It’s literally forcing communism down our collective throats.

Worse, these greatly misguided and extremely intolerant people are seemingly everywhere—from your coffee shop and your bank and your 401(k) investments to the shows that you pay to watch on your smart television. They’re in the boardrooms of corporate America; they run our schools, colleges, and universities that celebrate transgenderism and make indentured servants of their graduates­, and they’re in human resources departments to ensure that no independent thought or idea is expressed in the workplace.

A big part of the woke movement’s success lies in its Orwellian distortion of language so that commonly understood meanings of words are inverted to mean the opposite. For example, words such as “tolerance” really mean intolerance of competing ideas and values, and “inclusion,” found in the common woke phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), really means excluding traditional ideas, values, and beliefs.

DEI is a woke term that’s misleading and un-American but saturates our K-12 schools. The diversity component applies to every application and interpretation possible—race, ethnicity, sexual orientation—except for straight, white, Christian people, overrepresented Asian people, and the ideas that are the foundation of the United States and Western Civilization. No one in the woke DEI crowd wants to “include” politically or culturally conservative Americans in anything except reeducation camps.

To put a finer point on it, that reeducation camp population would likely include all Trump voters. That would include Bible-believing Christians, pro-Israel Jews, most veterans, stay-at-home moms, homeschooling families, folks who drive trucks and SUVs, those who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccination, those who think that there are only two genders, those who believe that climate change alarmism is a fraud, those who think that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election (election deniers, but not 2016 election deniers), and those who believe in the constitutional right to bear arms and self-defense.

If there were any white, conservative males left over from that list, they would be in the reeducation camps as well.

Changing the Meaning of Words

Other examples of woke terms are environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “stakeholder capitalism.” “Investing,” according to ESG guidelines, seeks to reward those companies that toe the leftist line of socialist policies with more investment money, no matter how inefficient or unprofitable that company might be. That strategy has cost U.S. investors and their retirement accounts millions of dollars in lost growth and earnings.

Like ESG, stakeholder capitalism has nothing to do with capitalism. Rather, it’s a cryptic term for nothing less than fascism, the blending of corporations and government. In stakeholder capitalism, a firm’s focus isn’t on earnings, profitability, or its responsibility to return value to shareholders but on the “societal stakeholders.” That ambiguous term means that private and public companies must answer to the government and follow socialist and woke hiring policies, such as government-approved and controlled supply chain policies, pricing, and, of course, woke cultural guidelines.

Fight the Wokeness With Alternatives

In the aggregate, woke ideology has nothing to do with the traditional meanings of the terms adherents use but has everything to do with destroying traditional U.S. society. That can happen only if Americans allow it to.

The key to stopping this vile movement is to take a page out of their own playbook and cancel the woke mob at every turn, in every aspect of life in which they seek to dominate.

Thankfully, that’s already happening.

Woke film companies such as Disney are losing billions of dollars on their subversive films because most people can’t stand the woke messaging that permeates their stories. Films that celebrate traditional American values and beliefs, such as “Top Gun Maverick” and “The Sound of Freedom,” have made enormous sums of money. Now there’s Loor, a movie studio committed to telling great stories, comedies, and more, through audience fundraising.

There are now alternatives to woke big tech firms that censor free speech and promote the woke agenda, such as the recently liberated and formerly named Twitter, now known as X. X is now a bastion of free speech but so are the X alternative Telegram and YouTube challenger Rumble, which allows much more free flow of content. There’s also a fantastic Amazon alternative called PublicSquare.com that connects consumers “with companies that share your values.” (Full disclosure: I have a product on Public Square.)

There are certainly other options and opportunities to counter and cancel the so-called woke “mind virus” that’s plaguing our country. Standing up to school boards that push the multi-gender and communist agenda is critical, as is voting out politicians who support anti-American and anti-traditional values and policies.

The resurgence of American ideals and values isn’t going to happen from the top layer but from each of us, as individuals and small groups determined to not let our country go down the drain without a fight.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.