A primer on woke

History reflects a thumping of Democrats on November 5, 2024, as the Comeback Kid carried the Blue Wall – the popular vote – and both chambers of Congress. Amongst the damage, numerous Democrats promised a reformation, a thoughtful and thorough review of their platform with a renewed focus on the concerns of working-class voters.

But six months later, an alleged postmortem regarding “lessons learned” has been postponed – indeed, jettisoned – in favor of…a doubling down on a host of extreme positions rejected by 80% or more of Americans. (Witness the nomination of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis as but the latest example of this never-serious retrospective.)

One can observe this continuing obsession with specific social/economic issues (anything “green” on the environment – no abortion restrictions – bizarre and pointless pronoun nonsense – an insistence on 62 genders – resistance to work requirements within Medicaid reform), but nowhere is the enthusiasm for woke progressivism greater than when it comes to the forced inclusion of boys/men in female athletic contests and the care, feeding, and protection of criminal migrants.

This relentless infatuation with transmen (notice how it never goes the other way in athletics) and illegal migrant criminals got me thinking about how the woke mind “virus” (so counter-cultural in so many applications) works – and continues to attract adherents – in 2025 America. My conclusion: woke theory is unique in that it requires the willing suspension of real-world experience (objective belief), all the while guaranteeing the unmitigated freedom that accompanies no regrets…for anything…ever.

With regard to the former, woke suspends what your faculties (eyes, ears, brain) tell you is day-to-day reality. In this context, you are encouraged to disregard the science of athletically superior biological boys running, jumping, and throwing faster, higher, harder, and longer than biological girls. Hence, the wokester fondness for the catchphrase “live your own truth” – a nonsensical but nevertheless favorite piece of advice from the most recent Democrat nominee for president.

Note that some enthusiasts for this uneven playing field concede the unfairness of it all but still advise girls to simply train harder and longer in order to narrow nature’s chromosomal advantage. And if the extra work proves to be not good enough…then simply eat it and settle on second place as the ultimate goal. An illogical conclusion, devastating for female athletes for sure, but at least this school of thought recognizes the science (biology) of it all.

Parenthetically, this suspension of objective reality phenomenon is equally applicable to the three-year border denial campaign force-fed to the public by Biden/Harris and a willing legacy media, at the same time Fox (and other right-leaning platforms) were daily filming the mass chaos that followed from ten to twelve million uninvited “guests” crossing the border. Here, the American public was instructed to disbelieve their lying eyes.

The second and perhaps more explicable facet of wokeism is no regrets…or apologies.” In other words, adherents have full license to say or do anything – to exhaust the fake news toolbox if you will – because they arbitrarily perceive they own the moral high ground.

This notion of no consequences/it’s all good explains a great deal during the Trump era. And so, it was wholly acceptable to proffer (groundless) Trump-Putin conspiracy theories or pretend that Joe Biden was not cognitively impaired or fail to apologize for famously claiming Border Patrol agents on horseback whipped poor Haitian migrants at a border crossing. Indeed, all those lies and plenty more were carelessly thrown daily against the wall in the most noble and singular (for wokesters) of causes imaginable: Destroy Donald J. Trump.

In 2023, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas gave the GOP response to a Joe Biden State of the Union address. In that memorable response, she referred to the antics of the emerging woke left as… “crazy.”

After six months of Trump 2.0, I see no reason to move off that description.

Bob Ehrlich is a former governor of Maryland, member of Congress, and state legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”

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