Woke: It’s Not Just For Breakfast!  

By Kevin Howley, March 26, 2023

When I was a kid, the packaging on breakfast treats like Pop Tarts and Instant Oatmeal featured all manner of puzzles, jokes, and riddles. Over a double espresso and toast one recent morning, I had a Proustian flashback to my youth, when I ran across this item from the messianic right wing website, WND, featuring the image of Kellogg’s brand cereals for an “exclusive” headlined: “The Big List of U.S. Companies Going Crazy For Woke LGBT.”

Inspired by my early morning revelry, I crafted a breakfast query of my own: What do you get when you combine the daily drama of MAGA world with the conservative claptrap of antiwoke populism? Answer: The 2024 GOP campaign strategy.

Call it “Operation Gaslight”: a nefarious plan to make us question our individual and collective sanity; a devious plot to confuse and incapacitate people; a war of attrition over the nation’s fragile attention economy.

It’s absurd, of course. But the awful truth is, it seems to be working. Even “Sleepy Joe” has half a mind not to run for reelection.

Meanwhile, Republican extremists and their right wing media enablers have seized the moment to lull us into a perpetual state of disbelief and bewilderment. Case in point: late last week, House Republicans passed education reform legislationthey’ve dubbed the Parents Bill of Rights – what I refer to as the Dumb and Dumber Act – Exhibit A in the GOP’s antiwoke crusade.

It’s like something out of Hitchcock’s Suspicion, when gaslighting husband Cary Grant reassures his befuddled wife, Joan Fontaine, that all she really needs is a nice long rest.

Right Wing Media’s Blame Game

One of right wing media’s preferred techniques is affixing the politics of grievance to the daily news cycle. Pick a story, any story, and conservative pols and pundits will spin it to enrage, deceive and distract.

The antiwoke agenda that’s propelled Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to national prominence is simply the latest manifestation of this battle-tested, culture war tactic. Just this month, right wingers are blaming the “woke mob” for everything: from recent bank failures to this year’s Oscar winners.

Headlined “Silicon Valley Bank Went Woke Rather Than Focus on Its Shareholders Home Depot Co-Founder Says” The Blaze forgoes analysis from finance experts and regulators and instead repeats dog whistle talking points of corporate reactionaries like Bernie Marcus. “These banks are badly run,” claims the co-founder of the home improvement behemoth, “because everybody is focused on diversity and all the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is, shareholder returns.”

Perhaps Marcus missed the newsflash that shareholders and directors were on the receiving end of a record number of loans months before SVB imploded. Why fault corporate greed, lax oversight, and bipartisan deregulatory fervor for bank failures when you can pin the blame on Black Lives Matter and “woke” Clinton donors.

Anti-Woke’s Achilles Heel

Of course, it wouldn’t be conservative demagoguery without a few swipes at the liberal media. Not that they’re counting, but the newsies over at the Daily Wire recently posted this headline: “6 Woke Moments From the Academy Awards.” At least someone’s still watching on Oscar night.

My personal favorite is this item from The Federalist, “Legacy Media Fuels Corporate Wokeness But Will Always Choose Wokeness Over Corporations.” As if.

Media corporations are just that: profit-oriented enterprises that don’t put anything above the almighty dollar. And therein lies the antiwoke crusaders Achilles heel when it comes to castigating major corporations, like Disney and Hershey’s, for appealing to diverse consumers. From a profit-making perspective, appealing to historically marginalized and disenfranchised communities is sound business strategy.

Kinda makes you wonder: What would America’s best known, much beloved, and frequently fawned over free market fundamentalist, Ronald Reagan, have to say about the likes of Ron DeSantis and his growing legion of antiwoke crusaders, using the levers of government to strongarm corporations?

Woke Antichrist Agenda

The right wing indignation complex will try to score political points at the drop of a chatbot. Headlined, “They Forgot To Tell You That ChatGBT Is Woke,” American Thinker laments the fact that artificial intelligence isn’t buying corporate conservativism’s scandalous and willful ignorance of the dire findings of climate science.

And from the “Is Nothing Sacred?” file, WND rings the alarm over woke mission creep in America’s armed forces with this unhinged nugget: “U.S. Military Totally Woke: New Plan Devotes 1 Of Every 6 Pages To Diversity, Climate Change.” Small wonder that WND frequently polls readers with apocalyptic survey questions like this one, embedded in a flattering story about antiwoke sports figures: “Will You Inspire More Athletes To Stand Against The Woke Antichrist Agenda?”

Like any serviceable wingnut conspiracy, the antiwoke crusade neatly accounts for recent calamities, while presciently anticipating every eventuality. Consider this comprehensive rant from PJ Media headlined “The Woke Wrecking Machine.” Columnist Victor Davis Hanson tips his hand early: “Almost everything that has followed from the mass woke hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.”

Hanson goes on to blame “wokeism” for everything from the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio and flooding in California, to the COVID pandemic and the bloodbath in Ukraine. Along the way, he ticks every item on the conservative checklist: cash bail, racial animus, immigration, and education.

If all of this sounds like a MAGA reboot ahead of the 2024 election, you’re on to something. No wonder Hanson concludes his end times rant on an up note: “Someday wokeism will disappear because it is inherently nihilistic and cannibalistic. But in the meantime, Americans should end it now before it ends America first.”

This call to action, such as it is, reveals the true intentions behind the right’s war on woke: Despite all of its sound and fury, the right wing noise machine wants us all to go quietly into that good night.

Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.

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