Wokism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw4dUbbVxSc
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Elon Musk is sounding off on his 19-year-old transgender daughter, calling her a "communist" whose thoughts were altered by her "woke" education. On Aug. 31, the Wall Street Journal published excerpts from the Tesla founder's upcoming biography in which he touches on his rise to wealth and his career. And his most scathing comments were actually about his daughter.
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The Messenger
Bill Maher Compares ‘Woke’ Liberals to KKK in Joe Rogan Sit-Down, Earns Praise From Vivek
Story by Zachary Leeman •

Bill Maher Compares ‘Woke’ Liberals to KKK in Joe Rogan Sit-Down, Earns Praise From Vivek
The HBO host blasted some in his party for hyper-focusing on race
Published |Updated
Zachary Leeman
Bill Maher attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California Arturo Holmes/FilmMagic
Bill Maher attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California Arturo Holmes/FilmMagic
© Arturo Holmes/FilmMagic
Television host and comedian Bill Maher compared "woke" liberals to the Ku Klux Klan in a conversation that has gained praise from GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

Maher joined podcaster Joe Rogan in an episode that posted on Saturday to discuss a variety of topics, including the separation of a liberal like himself from what he called more "woke" progressive in the party now.

"Liberal is a different animal than woke," Maher told Rogan, adding that "woke" isn't even an "extension of liberalism."

The HBO host and comedian argued race is where he separates from many in his own party, even comparing the thinking of "woke" liberals and their focus on race to that of the KKK.

"The woke believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan, that we see race first and foremost everywhere" Maher said. So, again, you can have that position, but don’t say that’s a liberal position. You’re doing something very different."

The comedian said he believes in a "color-blind society."

The conversation got the attention of 2024 GOP hopeful Ramaswamy, who was previously a guest on Maher's podcast.

Though the comedian described the Republican as "both disarming and alarming" in his chat with Rogan, Ramaswamy thanked Maher for "saying the quiet part out loud" and said he's faced pushback for expressing similar sentiments.

"The reason they attacked me last week for saying something similar isn’t because it’s so outrageous but because it’s so obvious," he wrote on X. "Kudos to [Bill Maher] for saying the quiet part out loud."


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Related video: Bill Maher knocks Vivek Ramaswamy for rapping on the campaign trail (FOX News)

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Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Story by Zachary Rogers •
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Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Musk floats idea of holding a poll for paying X users to decide if the ADL can continue to operate on his social media platform
Published |Updated
Zachary Rogers
Elon Musk is considering booting the anti-Defamation League off X. Chesnot/Getty Images
Elon Musk is considering booting the anti-Defamation League off X. Chesnot/Getty Images
© Chesnot/Getty Images
Elon Musk is considering banning the Anti-Defamation League from X, formerly known as Twitter, because the organization has been infected by "woke mind virus," he tweeted Saturday

The ADL was launched in 1913 to battle antisemitism, which is skyrocketing in the nation and on X since Musk purchased it last year.

Musk conceded in a tweet that the ADL has “done a lot of good work in prior decades” but has since “been overzealous in recent years & hijacked by woke mind virus.”

He floated the idea of hosting a poll on his social media platform to determine if the ADL can stay on X or get jack-booted off.

That scheme popped up just as Musk announced that only X "verified users" who pay an $8 monthly fee from now on will be the sole users who can participate in polls on hie site.

Musk's attack on the ADL followed a discussion earlier this week by organization president Jonathan Greenblatt with Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino about hate speech on the platform.

Greenblatt said in a tweet that he appreciated Yaccarino "reaching out," adding: "I'm hopeful the service will improve."

He vowed that the ADL "will be vigilant" against hate speech and "reserves the right to call them [Musk and Yaccarino] out" if the platform fails to improve.

Following Greenblatt’s post, the hashtag #BanTheADL began to trend, with a boost from Musk, and picked up steam over the weekend.

Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
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After the banning hashtag exploded, an ADL spokesperson told the Daily Beast that the organization is “unsurprised yet undeterred that antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack."

Critics bombarded Musk on X over his comments about the ADL and his threat to ban the organization on a platform he claims champions free speech.

Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
© Provided by The Messenger
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
© Provided by The Messenger
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
© Provided by The Messenger
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
© Provided by The Messenger
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
Elon Musk Slams Anti-Defamation League As Infected With ‘Woke Mind Virus,’ Mulls Ban
© Provided by The Messenger
Musk told author Walter Isaacson for an upcoming biolgraphy that his takeover of the social media platform was spurred by his concerns about the “woke mind virus,” which he claims infected his child, who is transgender.

Related video: Elon Musk unveils X's video calling feature (Dailymotion)
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California Republican Scott Baugh: ‘Wokism’ More Threatening Than WWII, 9/11
Story by Daniel Marans •
54m

Scott Baugh is hoping to flip a Democratic-held House seat in Southern California. Rep. Katie Porter (D), who defeated Baugh in November, is running for the U.S. Senate, creating an open seat.
Scott Baugh is hoping to flip a Democratic-held House seat in Southern California. Rep. Katie Porter (D), who defeated Baugh in November, is running for the U.S. Senate, creating an open seat.
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Scott Baugh, a Republican attorney hoping to flip a Democratic-held U.S. House seat in Orange County, California, said that “wokism” is more threatening to the country than the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, both world wars and the Civil War.

Baugh, a former GOP leader in the California State Assembly, made the remarks while speaking in June to the International Christian Ambassadors Association, an ecumenical Christian nonprofit.

“What’s the greatest threat to religious freedom? We were born in the Revolutionary War. We survived civil wars, World War II, World War I, a lot of wars, 9/11,” Baugh said. “None of those were that threatening to our country compared to the war that we’re fighting now. That war is about wokism and the lack of common sense.”

“That wokism ; it’s communism, wokism, whatever you want to call it ; it’s infected our churches. I like to tell some of our pastors that Jesus came to offend. That was his purpose,” he added. “How would you know you needed a savior unless your sins were pointed out? And our churches aren’t doing that.”

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In contemporary culture, “wokeness” and “wokism” usually refers to a view on the left that racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are ubiquitous and intersecting sources of oppression in American society and that combating those forces requires vigilance and identity-conscious policies. Conservatives often use the term, however, to disparage a broader range of liberal ideas that they believe unfairly discriminate against historically privileged groups or undermine meritocracy and religious freedom.

House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, condemned Baugh’s remarks, calling him a “perennial loser” who would fail again in 2024. (Baugh ran unsuccessfully for the seat in 2022 and lost in the primary for a neighboring seat in 2018.)

“Scott Baugh’s disgusting culture war nonsense has gone too far,” DCCC spokesperson Dan Gottleib said in a statement. “Service members and veterans deserve better than this offensive propagandist, and so does California’s 47th District.”

The loss of life in any traditional war is tragic and should be honored and respected.Zach Freimark, a spokesperson for the Baugh campaign
Baugh’s campaign insists that he was referring exclusively to the threat that he believes “wokism” poses to religious freedom.

“When Scott said those words, he knew that a handful of liberal groups and media outlets would react when they saw it,” Baugh campaign spokesperson Zach Freimark said in a statement. “The loss of life in any traditional war is tragic and should be honored and respected.

“We also cannot allow liberal advocacy groups and their media allies to deflect the truth or take away the fact that woke politicians and the bureaucrats that work for them are destroying our education system, attacking faith-based institutions, de-funding law enforcement, and eroding our everyday freedoms. California needs someone willing to stand up to these attacks.”

With the backing of House Republican leadership, Baugh is the strong favorite for the Republican nomination in California’s 47th Congressional District. House Republicans see the seat, which includes the city of Irvine and surrounding suburbs, as one of their top pickup opportunities.

Since three-term Rep. Katie Porter is running for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat, Democrats will lack the advantage of an incumbent in the district race in 2024. California state Sen. Dave Min and Joanna Weiss, an attorney and Democratic activist, are the two most credible candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for the 47th District.

Related...

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Woke

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Woke (disambiguation).
"Stay woke" redirects here. For other uses, see Stay Woke (disambiguation).
Refer to caption
Then–United States Congresswoman Marcia Fudge holding a T-shirt reading "Stay Woke: Vote" in 2018
Part of a series on
Discrimination


Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.

The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in recordings from the mid-20th century by Lead Belly and, post-millennium, by Erykah Badu.

The term woke gained further popularity in the 2010s. Over time, it became increasingly connected to matters beyond race such as gender and other marginalized identities. During the 2014 Ferguson protests, the phrase was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After the term was used on Black Twitter, woke was increasingly used by white people, who often used it to signal their support for BLM; some commentators criticized this usage as cultural appropriation. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread internationally, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.

By 2020, many on the political right and some in the center in several Western countries began sarcastically using the term as a pejorative for various leftist and progressive movements and ideologies they perceived as overzealous, performative, or insincere. In turn, some commentators came to consider woke an offensive term that disparages persons who promote progressive ideas involving identity and race. Since then, derivative terms such as woke-washing and woke capitalism were coined to describe the conduct of persons or entities who signal support for progressive causes rather than working toward genuine change.

Origins and usage
"Wake Up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation." —Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions (1923)

In some varieties of African-American English, woke is used in place of woken, the usual past participle form of wake.[8] This has led to the use of woke as an adjective equivalent to awake, which has become mainstream in the United States.

While it is not known when being awake was first used as a metaphor for political engagement and activism, one early example in the United States was the paramilitary youth organization the Wide Awakes, which formed in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860 to support the Republican candidate in the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln. Local chapters of the group spread rapidly across northern cities in the ensuing months and "triggered massive popular enthusiasm" around the election. The political militancy of the group also alarmed many southerners, who saw in the Wide Awakes confirmation of their fears of northern, Republican political aggression. The support among the Wide Awakes for abolition, as well as the participation of a number of Black men in a Wide Awakes parade in Massachusetts, likely contributed to such anxiety.[10][11]

20th century

Folk singer-songwriter Lead Belly used the phrase "stay woke" on a recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys".
Among the earliest uses of the idea of wokeness as a concept for Black political consciousness came from Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey, who wrote in 1923, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!"

A 1923 collection of aphorisms, ideas, and other writing by Garvey also adopts this metaphor in the following epigram: "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations".

Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says he met with the defendant's lawyer and the young men themselves, and "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro) – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." Aja Romano writes at Vox that this usage reflects "Black Americans' need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America".

By the mid-20th century, woke had come to mean 'well-informed' or 'aware',[13] especially in a political or cultural sense. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest such usage to a 1962 New York Times Magazine article titled "If You're Woke You Dig It" by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, describing the appropriation of Black slang by white beatniks.[8]

Woke had gained more political connotations by 1971 when the play Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham included the line: "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk."

2008–2014: #Staywoke hashtag
Through the late 2000s and early 2010s, woke was used either as a term for literal wakefulness, or as slang for suspicions of infidelity. The latter meaning was used in singer Childish Gambino's 2016 song "Redbone".[16] In the 21st century's first decade, the use of woke encompassed the earlier meaning with an added sense of being "alert to social and/or racial discrimination and injustice".


"Master Teacher", a 2008 song by the American singer Erykah Badu (pictured in 2012) included the term stay woke.

This usage was popularized by soul singer Erykah Badu's 2008 song "Master Teacher",[9][13] via the song's refrain, "I stay woke". Merriam-Webster defines the expression stay woke in Badu's song as meaning, "self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better"; and, although within the context of the song, it did not yet have a specific connection to justice issues, Merriam-Webster credits the phrase's use in the song with its later connection to these issues.

Songwriter Georgia Anne Muldrow, who composed "Master Teacher" in 2005, told Okayplayer news and culture editor Elijah Watson that while she was studying jazz at New York University, she learned the invocation Stay woke from Harlem alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, who used the expression in the meaning of trying to "stay woke" because of tiredness or boredom, "talking about how she was trying to stay up – like literally not pass out". In homage, Muldrow wrote stay woke in marker on a T-shirt, which over time became suggestive of engaging in the process of the search for herself (as distinct from, for example, merely personal productivity).[18]


"#StayWoke" hashtag on a placard during a December 2015 protest in Minneapolis
According to The Economist, as the term woke and the #Staywoke hashtag began to spread online, the term "began to signify a progressive outlook on a host of issues as well as on race". In a tweet mentioning the Russian feminist rock group Pussy Riot, whose members had been imprisoned in 2012,[20][21] Badu wrote: "Truth requires no belief. Stay woke. Watch closely. #FreePussyRiot".[22][23][24] This has been cited by Know Your Meme as one of the first examples of the #Staywoke hashtag.

2014–2015: Black Lives Matter

A 2015 protest in St. Paul by Black Lives Matter supporters against police brutality
Following the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, the phrase stay woke was used by activists of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to urge awareness of police abuses. The BET documentary Stay Woke, which covered the movement, aired in May 2016. Within the decade of the 2010s, the word woke (the colloquial, passively voiced past participle of wake) obtained the meaning 'politically and socially aware'[28] among BLM activists.

2015–2019: Broadening usage
While the term woke initially pertained to issues of racial prejudice and discrimination impacting African Americans, it was appropriated by other activist groups with different causes. While there is no single agreed-upon definition of the term, it came to be primarily associated with ideas that involve identity and race and which are promoted by progressives, such as the notion of white privilege or slavery reparations for African Americans. Vox's Aja Romano writes that woke evolved into a "single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory". Columnist David Brooks wrote in 2017 that "to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures."[30] Sociologist Marcyliena Morgan contrasts woke with cool in the context of maintaining dignity in the face of social injustice: "While coolness is empty of meaning and interpretation and displays no particular consciousness, woke is explicit and direct regarding injustice, racism, sexism, etc."

The term woke became increasingly common on Black Twitter, the community of African American users of the social media platform Twitter. Andr; Brock, a professor of black digital studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggested that the term proved popular on Twitter because its brevity suited the platform's 140-character limit. According to Charles Pulliam-Moore, the term began crossing over into general internet usage as early as 2015. The phrase stay woke became an Internet meme, with searches for woke on Google surging in 2015.

Refer to caption

A woman holding a sign reading "I Love Naps But I Stay Woke" at a Women's March in Missoula, Montana, 2018
The term has gained popularity amid an increasing leftward turn on various issues among the American Left; this has partly been a reaction to the right-wing politics of U.S. President Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016, but also to a growing awareness regarding the extent of historical discrimination faced by African Americans. According to Perry Bacon Jr., ideas that have come to be associated with "wokeness" include a rejection of American exceptionalism; a belief that the United States has never been a true democracy; that people of color suffer from systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans experience white privilege; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups, for instance in certain professions or industries, are automatic evidence of discrimination; that U.S. law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of color and so should be defunded, disbanded, or heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that U.S. capitalism is deeply flawed; and that Trump's election to the presidency was not an aberration but a reflection of the prejudices about people of color held by large parts of the U.S. population. Although increasingly accepted across much of the American Left, many of these ideas were nevertheless unpopular among the U.S. population as a whole and among other, especially more centrist, parts of the Democratic Party.


"Stay Woke – Bin Off this Bloke", a placard criticising media mogul Rupert Murdoch at an environmentalist protest in Melbourne, Australia in 2020
The term increasingly came to be identified with members of millennials[16] and Generation Z. In May 2016, MTV News identified woke as being among ten words teenagers "should know in 2016". The American Dialect Society voted woke the slang word of the year in 2017. In the same year, the term was included as an entry in Oxford English Dictionary. By 2019, the term woke was increasingly being used in an ironic sense, as reflected in the books Woke by comedian Andrew Doyle (using the pen name Titania McGrath) and Anti-Woke by columnist Brendan O'Neill. By 2022, usage of the term had spread beyond the United States, attracting criticism by right-wing political figures in Europe.

2019–present: As a pejorative

By 2019, opponents of progressive social movements were often using the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that "wokeness" was an insincere form of performative activism. British journalist Steven Poole comments that the term is used to mock "overrighteous liberalism". In this pejorative sense, woke means "following an intolerant and moralising ideology".

United States
Among American conservatives and some centrists, woke has come to be used primarily as an insult. Members of the Republican Party have been increasingly using the term to criticize members of the Democratic Party, while more centrist Democrats use it against more left-leaning members of their own party; such critics accuse those on their left of using cancel culture to damage the employment prospects of those who are not considered sufficiently woke. Former President Barack Obama stated in 2019 that the idea of always being woke is something people should "get over" and that social media posts proclaiming to be woke are not activism. Perry Bacon Jr. suggests that this "anti-woke posture" is connected to a long-standing promotion of backlash politics by the Republican Party, wherein it promotes white and conservative fear in response to activism by African Americans as well as changing cultural norms. Such critics often believe that movements such as Black Lives Matter exaggerate the extent of social problems.

Among the uses by Republicans is the Stop WOKE Act, a law that limits discussion of racism in Florida schools. A program of eliminating books by LGBT and Black authors from schools was conducted by the Florida government and by vigilantes calling themselves "woke busters".

Linguist and social critic John McWhorter argues that the history of woke is similar to that of politically correct, another term once used self-descriptively by the left which was appropriated by the right as an insult, in a process similar to the euphemism treadmill. Romano compares woke to canceled as a term for "'political correctness' gone awry" among the American right wing. Attacking the idea of wokeness, along with other ideas such as cancel culture and critical race theory, became a large part of Republican Party electoral strategy. Former President Donald Trump stated in 2021 that the Biden administration was "destroying" the country "with woke", and Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley used the term to promote his upcoming book by saying the "woke mob" was trying to suppress it.
Asia
In Japan, the term has been used to describe Western progressive politics. It has most commonly been translated into Japanese as (lit.;'awakening culture'),[49] but also as (which is a Katakana form of the word "woke").

Canada
The term is widely used in Canada as in the United States to describe progressive politics. During a debate in 2023 on the Law Society of Alberta's 2020 adoption of a rule which made certain Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training courses on Indigenous Canadian history obligatory, a lawyer from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms wrote an op-ed arguing that the course was a form of "wokeness".

France
The phenomenon le wokisme (or wokeism) has also seen use in French politics, particularly since the 2022 French presidential election. Much of the opposition to le wokisme sees it as an American import, incompatible with French values. Then-education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer established an "anti-woke think tank" in opposition to what is perceived as an export from the English-speaking world. According to French sociologist and political scientist Alain Policar [fr], the term "woke" which originated from African American communities to describe awareness of social injustices, has been used pejoratively by French politicians from the former republican left, the right and the far right to label individuals engaged in anti-racist, feminist, LGBT, and environmental movements. This derogatory usage gave rise to the noun "wokisme", suggesting a homogeneous political movement propagating an alleged "woke ideology".

French philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot characterizes "wokeism" as a corpus of theories revolving around "identity, gender and race", with the core principle of "revealing and condemning concealed forms of domination", positing that all aspects of society can be reduced to a "dynamic of oppressor and oppressed", with those oblivious to this notion deemed "complicit", while the "awakened (woke)" advocate for the "abolition (cancel) of anything perceived to sustain such oppression", resulting in practical implementations such as adopting inclusive language, reconfiguring education or deconstructing gender norms.

Europe
In a survey by YouGov, 73% of Britons who used the term said they did so in a disapproving way and 11% in an approving way. In the United Kingdom, the term has also been used as a pejorative by conservative figures.

In Hungary, Hungarian politician Bal;zs Orb;n stated that "we [Hungary] will not give up fighting against woke ideology".

In Sweden, singer Zara Larsson's commitment to expressions of "gender power", amongst other things, has been described as "very woke".

In Switzerland, politicians from and supporters of the right-wing Swiss People's Party criticized Swiss bank UBS for "woke culture".

Oceania
During the 2022 Australian federal election campaign, both Scott Morrison, then-prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal-National Coalition, and Anthony Albanese, the current prime minister and leader of the centre-left Labor Party, insisted they were not "woke". Peter Dutton, current Opposition Leader and leader of the Coalition, has also used the term several times before. Members of minor right-wing parties, especially Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the United Australia Party, also frequently use the term.

In New Zealand, former deputy prime minister and leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters, referred to the government led by Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Party as a "woke guilt industry". Then–opposition leader Judith Collins also referred to Ardern as "woke".

Reception
Scholars Michael B. McCormack and Althea Legal-Miller argue that the phrase stay woke echoes Martin Luther King Jr.'s exhortation "to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change".

Linguist Ben Zimmer writes that with mainstream currency, the term's "original grounding in African-American political consciousness has been obscured". The Economist states that as the term came to be used more to describe white people active on social media, black activists "criticised the performatively woke for being more concerned with internet point-scoring than systemic change". Journalist Amanda Hess says social media accelerated the word's cultural appropriation, writing, "The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation." Hess describes woke as "the inverse of 'politically correct' [...] It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are".

Writer and activist Chlo; Valdary has stated that the concept of being woke is a "double-edged sword" that can "alert people to systemic injustice" while also being "an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse". Social-justice scholars Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, in their 2019 book Stay Woke: A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, argue against what they term as "Woker-than-Thou-itis: Striving to be educated around issues of social justice is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized by others as a woke individual is self-serving and misguided." Essayist Maya Binyam, writing in The Awl, ironized about a seeming contest among players who "name racism when it appears" or who disparage "folk who are lagging behind".

In March 2021, Les Echos listed woke among eight words adopted by Generation Z that indicate "un tournant soci;tal;" ["a societal turning point"] in France.[75]

The impact of "woke" sentiment on society has been criticised from various perspectives. In 2018, the British political commentator Andrew Sullivan described the "Great Awokening", describing it as a "cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical [Christian]" and who "punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame". In 2021, the British filmmaker and DJ Don Letts suggested that "in a world so woke you can't make a joke", it was difficult for young artists to make protest music without being accused of cultural appropriation.

Woke-washing and woke capitalism
Further information: Woke capitalism and Go woke go broke
By the mid-2010s, language associated with wokeness had entered the mainstream media and was being used for marketing. Abas Mirzaei, a senior lecturer in branding at Macquarie University, says that the term "has been cynically applied to everything from soft drink to razors". In 2018, African-American journalist Sam Sanders argued that the authentic meaning of woke was being lost to overuse by white liberals and co-option by businesses trying to appear progressive (woke-washing), which would ultimately create a backlash.

The term woke capitalism was coined by writer Ross Douthat for brands that used politically progressive messaging as a substitute for genuine reform. According to The Economist, examples of "woke capitalism" include advertising campaigns designed to appeal to millennials, who often hold more socially liberal views than earlier generations. These campaigns were often perceived by customers as insincere and inauthentic and provoked a backlash summarized by the phrase "get woke, go broke".

Cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill describe "woke capitalism" as the "dramatically intensifying" trend to include historically marginalized groups (currently primarily in terms of race, gender, and religion) as mascots in advertisement with a message of empowerment to signal progressive values. On the one hand, Kanai and Gill argue that this creates an individualized and depoliticized idea of social justice, reducing it to an increase in self-confidence; on the other hand, the omnipresent visibility in advertising can also amplify a backlash against the equality of precisely these minorities. These would become mascots not only of the companies using them, but of the unchallenged neoliberal economic system with its socially unjust order itself. For the economically weak, the equality of these minorities would thus become indispensable to the maintenance of this economic system; the minorities would be seen responsible for the losses of this system.

See also
flag United States portal
icon Politics portal
Culture war – Conflict between cultural values
Go woke go broke – Political slogan affiliated with the American political right
Feminazi – Pejorative term for feminists
Political hip hop – Music genre
Social justice warrior – Pejorative term for a progressive person
Straw feminism – Distortion or fabrication of feminist arguments
References