But At Least Woke is Dead, Right?

On Wednesday they shot a poet.

 37 year old writer and mother of three Renee Nicole Good was sitting in her car observing an ICE raid in a Minneapolis neighborhood when a number of the goons rushed at her car, yelling at her to leave the area. Paradoxically, while issuing this command, they attempted to yank the door open. Panicked, she tried to leave as instructed, at which point, one of the officers pulled out a gun and shot her three times point blank in the face.

 According to the President and the Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, the officer who executed Good, Jonathan Ross, was fighting for his life in hospital after being fully run over by Good’s car.

 Here is footage of Ross immediately after the incident. As you can see, his crushed and mangled body is barely still recognizable as human.

I’m not going to post any of the half dozen videos of every conceivable angle of this incident because you can find them easily and even posting them for consideration gives undue credibility to the idea that there might be two sides to this. It is some of the cleanest video that you could possibly want of something like this. There’s no shaky cam or deceptive angles. Very, very clearly, at no point were any of the ICE officers directly in the path of where the vehicle was moving as it was moving. Certainly nobody got “run over,” even injured, even hurt.

 What happened was an ICE goon became infuriated that he wasn’t going to get to pull a woman out of a car and slam her face into the concrete and, let’s face it, probably molest her that day, so he decided to unload three rounds of substitute masculinity into her head instead.

 Once again, I assure you, this is not in any good faith way controversial. Nobody who saw the video disagrees that this is what happened, no matter what they say. I don’t know what kind of hallucinatory drug would even make that possible. And yet, in the most astonishing example of large scale gaslighting I think I’ve ever seen, pretty much every Trump voter I’ve been able to find has closed ranks, gallingly insisting to people with working eyes that this is an image of a man shooting in self defense as he is actively being run over by a car that is speeding directly toward him:

What chills me to the bone in fear for Good’s family is that, in the space of a few days, this innocent woman has become one of the most despised human beings among the American and international far right. The myth that she tried to run down an ICE agent isn’t even on the top of the list of the reasons she deserved to die. Consider, for instance, the fact that she listed pronouns in her social media profiles.

She was a poet, she was in a same sex marriage, and she had a kid with no male role model (they like to imply she abandoned her child’s father when in fact he died). Did I mention the pronouns?

They are projecting that she looks like a Karen, like their HR nightmare.

Every right-wing influencer from the gutter trash like Tim Pool right up to the Vice President of the United States is celebrating her death, not because she attacked a cop, which they know isn’t true, but because she represents something they have been champing at the bit about for a while now: Permission to expand scope. To move beyond immigrants and black people and start disposing of other undesirables.

 I know that we already crossed this Rubicon with George Floyd and probably earlier than that, but this is just another terrifying example of how the American right, and indeed Trump supporters in other countries around the world, have coalesced into something closer to a cult than a political movement.

 But hey, you know what?

 At least Woke is dead!

That’s right, boys and girls, rejoice! We did it!!

 No more interracial couples on TV, we did it!! Woke is dead!! You can say faggot again!! Woke is dead!!

Gigantic asses in videogames!! We’re bringing back plastic straws!! Woke is dead!! Blackface is back and we’re putting the radium back in cough medicine!!

At least, that’s the concern of a certain breed of enlightened centrist, people who don’t like fascism but also don’t like that they cast some black people in the Lord of the Rings TV series, and think that the latter explains and maybe even partially justifies the former.

 Ben Cohen of The Banter is certainly no fan of Donald Trump. He calls him fascistic and rails against the billionaire oligarchs and the dismantling of democracy. But as the New Year rolled in and Cohen reflected upon the eve of Trump’s second year as America’s first monarch, he chose to open it like this:

 I have a confession to make. A part of me has enjoyed watching the left’s radical identity politics movement crumble under assault from the Trump administration. DEI is gone. Gender pronouns are out. Biological men taking part in women’s sport is becoming a thing of the past.

 This kind of instinctual “I’m nervous about calling out brutal ethnic cleansing because it might make people think I respect queers” caveat is the kind of centrist technique I’ve decided to call a Silverism after this classic from the “black people can’t restrain their jungle instinct to eat cats” era of the 2024 campaign:

But only the brain of the kneejerk-anti-wokeist can come up with a mental Korbut flip like Cohen’s assertion that America willingly electing a white supremacist is a “cathartic reckoning” because it somehow debunks the idea that America has a white supremacy problem:

 More than that, the Democrats appear to finally understand that the vast majority of Americans think they are out of touch elitists. Outside of liberal enclaves, people don’t use terms like “Latinx”, “BIPOC”, and “intersectionality”. They don’t believe America is a white supremacist country and would desperately love to move beyond the stultifying tenets of Wokeism. The party refused to listen until it was too late, and the reckoning has felt cathartic.

 Now, I am of course also a white guy but I am nevertheless more hesitant to posit that the utility of the suffering of minorities is to teach other white guys a lesson. Certainly not about a complaint as insipid as “woke.” Like, there’s a paramilitary force rounding up anyone on the street who looks vaguely Latin and disappearing them to a swamp fortress where many of them just die of exposure or exotic disease and that’s the first news their family will hear about them after their disappearance and it feels good knowing that Anita Sarkeesian will learn her lesson from this and stop criticizing our video games. Native Americans might lose all rights to their own ancestral land and that’ll serve Barbara from HR right for making me sit through that fucking land acknowledgment, I hope she’s suffering.

 No, “cathartic” is not the word I would use for this. I don’t use the pain of fascism’s victims as a tasty snack to make me feel better thinking that someone might be sorry that they made me hear the word “BIPOC” all those times.

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One of the patron saints of this kind of smug told-ya-so-ism is of course Noah Smith, who dropped a piece on January 4 called “Where does a liberal go from here?” in which he makes a handy metaphor: His politic, Le Liberalism Classicale, is of the enlightened intelligentsia of the early French Revolution, “reading the works of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Diderot,” which certainly explains his impressive vocabulary.

The progressives, then—the “woke” people, the “Blueskyists”—are of course the French Terror that followed.

 Now, you might think the French Terror is a bit of a hyperbolic way to describe unisex bathrooms and the tabooification of the R-word, but it’s a regular thing for him to variously describe progressivism as the French Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Second Intifada. Might I suggest, for variety, the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Pacification of the Algiers?

 It's always this same lesson: Progressivism and Woke drove normal people so far up the wall that they frankly had no choice but to actively embrace and work toward the evil Biff Tannen Bad Future from Back to the Future II. But does that make sense? That people were just for the large part pretty liberal and cool with racial minorities until DEI programs started and white people started losing promotions to non-white people and the understandable reaction was to throw them all into a place called “Alligator Alcatraz?” That everyone was pretty cool with queer and transgender folk and even let them get married but then a cis woman came fifth behind a trans woman in a swimming race and now we need to literally kill everyone who uses pronouns?

Can I venture an alternative hypothesis:

 Do you think it’s possible that maybe Woke might not have been as bad as you remember?

Here’s the thing: I do have theories about how we got where we are under the global hegemony of the Trump-right phenomenon and constant readers are likely sick of me mentioning that I’m writing a book about that and it’s very complicated, a damn sight more complicated than Woke drove everyone nuts. Part of the problem is indeed that people who grew up having their brains eaten by 4chan are now entering government, but the architects of this movement are a lot older than that and they have been working toward this for a long time. They are masters of propaganda.

 There’s this odd thing that the enlightened centrist “I didn’t leave the left, it left me” types like Bill Maher like to go on about, and that’s the fact that a big part of the reason Kamala Harris lost the election was because she just wouldn’t shut the fuck up about trans people. People were so sick of hearing about trans rights that they would have voted for the San Francisco Giants Crazy Crab over Kamala by the end of it.

But actually… Kamala Harris never talked about that stuff, or very rarely. A lot of people actually have a false memory of Harris going on and on and on about trans rights, just as people apparently have a false memory of Renee Nicole Good plowing her car full force into Jonathan Ross as he bounced cartoonishly off her windshield.

 Yes, the dreaded Woke, or SJW as it was called in 2016, was a driver of the early Trump movement, and Gamergate had a lot to do with it, but few people are aware that the architect of Gamergate, largely, was Steve Bannon, the elder political operative and Cronus of Trumpism. He is not cool, he is not a geek or a gamer, and he is not driven to any large extent about the crybaby complaints of anti-Woke.

 But he knows that you are.

The whole woke thing was a big fat red herring and if you’re still whining about it then you fell for it. The Bill Maher types can go on and on, contorting their face with smugness until it turns inside out, abut how the Democratic party needed to talk less about the woke stuff and move, move, move to the right. But they can’t stop talking about something they weren’t talking about in the first place.

 In fact, they tried to take this advice in 2024. If you didn’t notice, that’s because it was shitty advice that didn’t work. Among the top complaints of progressives who were actually paying attention to all three of the presidential campaigns against Trump was that the Democratic party continually tries to shake its progressive wing off like fleas and court the center-right, to the point where Kamala Harris actually teamed up with the Bush-era neocons, snubbing the left in favor of winning the vote of all five remaining GWB loyalists.

 In their fumbling, they couldn’t out-propagandize the other side to avoid still being portrayed as the party whose top policies include white genocide and transing your children at gunpoint.

 You’ve never actually heard anyone use the term “Latinx” but you’ve heard stories that the progressives have been ramming it down people’s throats hand over fist, and you are by extension sick of it, but guess who you’ve been hearing those stories from?

 There is a story to tell about how a man like, for example, Matt Walsh went from dressing like this and complaining about ethics in games journalism and female hypergamy…

…to dressing like this and talking about killing or enslaving everybody in the Western hemisphere in the name of Donald J. Trump.

That story is endlessly more complex than the “progressives betrayed liberalism by going too woke” narrative.

 In fact, but for the endless fucking whining of the Noah Smith types, “anti-wokeness” plays less of a part in the second Trump administration than you might realize.

 The anti-woke thing was much more a project of Elon Musk, whose brain is destroyed. His idiotic Department of Funny Memes and 420 LOL or whatever the fuck it was called was advertised as a sophisticated operation but all they really did was run AI word search through government websites to remove references to black people and other woke bugbears, with the hilariously incompetent side effect of deleting information about the Enola Gay and defunding transport initiatives because of the prefix “trans.”

 What Donald Trump’s core base is more about is something much more frightening and has little to nothing to do with the childish culture war issues that the shallow explainers like the enlightened centrists still think pin it down.

 Not everyone has fallen for it (most haven’t, if his popularity polls are anything to go by) but Trump’s hardline supporters are completely enamored with the idea of Donald Trump using the presidency to enact his personal vengeance and nothing but that.

 Trump is able to tap into the general anti-immigrant attitudes of the right to bolster the deportation frenzy that emerges from his personal hatred of Hispanics, but most of the other stuff that energizes his base doesn’t benefit them at all. They are perfectly happy and even enthusiastic about opening the coffers and using taxpayer money to harass people like Letitia James, constantly and forever, for personally insulting him. Nobody gets anything out of that.

 In fact, Trump’s current war on the state of Minnesota, the very war that killed Renee Good in its crossfire, against a supposed Somalian immigrant threat in that state that seemed to come out of nowhere basically yesterday, is based almost entirely on two things: His racist hatred against Ilhan Omar, who particularly pissed him off recently, and his personal hatred of Governor Tim Walz, who ran against him as Harris’ running mate and who is widely credited with making that a much closer race than it otherwise would have been.

 Trump’s base is not animated by “anti-woke.” They are animated by erecting monuments to Trump, renaming landmarks after Trump, destroying personal enemies of Trump, now killing people who oppose Trump, and soon going to war and dying, not for America, but for Donald J. Trump. These are the hallmarks of a personality cult.

 I don’t know what winning this fight will involve, but I sure as hell know that it has almost nothing to do with “being less woke.” Aiming for that fake target is what got everyone into this mess in the first place.

I'm writing a book that goes into detail about how a single generation of online culture got us from the liberal democracy of the 90s to whatever the hell this is. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

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