Photo Credit | Gage Skidmore
There were many reasons that President-elect Donald Trump won in such a resounding victory this week: inflation, the bewildering open border policy, the Afghanistan withdrawal humiliation, the world on fire, etc. But let’s not forget one of the top ones: This was a resounding defeat of wokeism.
Voters have rejected wokeism—defined here as an unhealthy obsession with viewing all of life as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, or, as the woke would put it, being “awake” to the misfortunes of the marginalized.
This would still have been true even if Vice President Kamala Harris had won.
Throughout her long public career, the vice president has embraced all the woke nostrums. She was particularly adept at describing equity—the government and the private sector treating Americans differently depending on their race—and how it is different from equality.
“So, there’s a big difference between equality and equity,” she voices over in a 2020 animated video. “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”
President Joe Biden spoke the word “equity” constantly, but he struggled with it, at times starting to say “equality” before catching himself. And he never described or defined in any way the thinking behind it—probably because he lacked the knowledge.
Harris, however, completely abandoned her views during the three months she ran for president, and the media, of course, never held her accountable.
This was a tacit admission that she understood how much the country hated the use of race to justify dismantling society or the promotion of the idea that the United States is systemically racist. Voters also happen to disagree with allowing males to use women’s bathrooms and allowing minors to surgically or chemically castrate themselves or remove other healthy body parts.
It is, of course, an open question whether Harris’ sudden march to the center on these issues was a political ruse and whether she would have turned around and promoted these policies once elected.
But Trump was elected and will now be our 47th president. And we know from his time in office that he is anti-woke in word and in deed. He will take measures against this ideology—as he did in his first term with his ban of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings in the government workforce and government contractors.
And there is so much to do in his second term.
An anti-woke agenda would comprise clawing back the cultural institutions that the Left has penetrated and subverted for decades now.
This Left long ago abandoned doing things frontally, such as launching bloody revolutions, and has opted instead for infiltration and indoctrination.
Of course, as we saw with the 2020 riots instigated by the Marxist-trained founders of Black Lives Matter, this Left will also opportunistically launch street violence when it thinks it can deliver a knockout blow against society.
But violent action must be preceded by, and act in tandem with, capturing K-12 school systems, so “educators” can weave Marxist programming into standards and even curricula. It must accompany the complete takeover of the university, where many departments no longer have a single conservative, and the takeover of museums by curators and administrators who are busy “decolonizing” our cultural institutions.
So the anti-woke agenda must prioritize doing everything possible to ensure that universities can no longer compel speech, whether it is forcing students or faculty members to express or affirm the falsehood that America is “systemically racist” or to break the rules of grammar by referring to a male as “she” or “they.”
Of course, Trump must also reinstitute the ban on DEI in the government force and contractors.
Another measure that must be part of the package is taking back control of public museums and restoring them to their original mandate of increasing and diffusing knowledge and away from efforts to become a change agent that seeks to deconstruct society.
And because the lifeblood of identity politics, one of the central aspects of wokeism, are the racial categories that the Left has painstakingly created in the past five decades, the new administration would also do well to eliminate these groups from government paperwork.
Lastly, if this election has taught us anything, it’s that the Left has captured legacy media, whose bias in this election was unrelenting.
There is little the government can do about ABC News, CBS News, etc. as long as they don’t violate their license, but NPR and PBS have violated the public trust with their extreme and biased coverage of this election. They are subsidized by the taxpayer, conservatives and liberals, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
It’s high time to yank those subsidies. The defeat of wokeism requires it.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Mike Gonzalez
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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