The Patriot Post® · Wokeness Is Wearing Thin

“It does not take a majority to prevail,” said our favorite Founding Father, “but an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

And are those brushfires we see out there in Southlake, Texas? And in Tallahassee? And in Chicago? And in, of all places, Manhattan?

It appears so. It appears that little pockets of people are starting to speak out against woke supremacy. We’re nowhere near what columnist John Hinderaker calls “a preference cascade,” but folks are beginning to pull off the veil of silence. “One person turns to another and says, ‘I want this to end.’ Pretty soon — amazingly soon, once it starts to spread — it turns out that most people agree.”

We can dream, can’t we?

In Southlake, which is northwest of Dallas, Republicans organized, swept local elections, and threw woke Democrats off the school board as voters rebelled against a proposal to add Critical Race Theory to the curriculum. Elsewhere in the Great State of Texas, Lamar County Democratic Party chair Gary O'Connor announced his resignation Tuesday, just days after having called South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott an “oreo” in a since-deleted Facebook post. Don’t let the door hit ya, Gary.

In Tallahassee, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has given Republicans a blueprint for strong and principled pushback against the woke elite and a hostile press – from steady and effective COVID-19 leadership, to Big Tech pushback, to CRT pushback, to anti-riot legislation, to arming college students against leftist indoctrination, and more.

In Chicago, Jason Fried, the CEO of a software company called Basecamp, told his employees that political discussions will no longer be allowed on the company platform. “It can’t happen where the work happens anymore,” said a fed-up Fried.

And in Manhattan, parents began rebelling against the poisonous racist claptrap being fed to their children at some of the borough’s most elite schools. “The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob,” wrote one parent to some 600 fellow parents. “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.”

Bold, powerful stuff.

Steven Hayward, Hinderaker’s colleague at Power Line, thus wonders whether wokery is starting to wane. We don’t think so — at least not just yet. But he writes, “More and more the woke pandemic afflicting our elites … is reminding me of forced busing back in the late 1960s and early 1970s — a project to which liberals (and compliant federal judges) were fiercely dedicated … and which was hugely unpopular. Then, as now, many Republicans spoke in subdued tones about their opposition to busing for fear of being called ‘racist.’”

But eventually someone speaks out. And in this case, it was the Democrats’ Cue-Ball Cassandra, James Carville, who last week pointed out the 800-pound canary in the coal mine: “Wokeness is a problem, and everybody knows it It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud … because they’ll get clobbered or canceled.”

Cassandra, it should be noted, was not only gifted with prophecy, but also cursed: Her visions, however true, were never believed. The American people — the vast majority of them — seem to have a real problem with wokeness. But the Democrats haven’t given us any sense that they believe Carville, or that they’re willing or able to correct course.

It’s no wonder they’re behaving like they know their days in leadership are numbered.