Anyone who reads the blog on a regular basis knows that my credentials as an anti-wokeness warrior are impeccable; if you don’t believe it, check out my posts on wokeness from 2019 and 2023 and anything I wrote on “The 1619 Project.” I showed my disdain for woke mobs on the internet on a regular basis. That does not, however, mean I ever had any sympathy for the Trump/DeSantis right, which wants to whitewash American history, not illuminate it. I knew both then and now that MAGA’s purported concern about free speech was bogus, and that its ultimate objective was to use state power to silence the left. Events have proven me right.
Trump 1.0 was a wokeness accelerant. It is interesting that Trump 2.0, which has been far more extreme, has not had the same effect; in fact, even AOC has now conceded that wokeness at its peak was out of hand. We are actually starting to see a swing towards liberalism, not an even more vicious form of wokeness, partially because the original version was largely expressed on a platform which now belongs to Elon Musk, partially as a result of the lost 2024 election, and partially because Trump 2.0 has made the population more conscious of threats to free speech. It is a ray of sunshine in a dark time that is likely to get even darker in the near future.