MOREFIELD: The New Kind Of Woke Is Worse Than The Old

Remember how the left would use the word “racist” as an all-encompassing smear to malign anyone who dared express even the slightest deviation from the politically correct leftist ‘current-day’ take on race relations, and the person labeled a racist would grovel, recant, apologize, and beg for forgiveness, yet still suffer some or all of the consequences of deplatforming, job termination, financial ruination, or even finding angry blue-haired mobs at their home, workplace, or businesses?

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Even as a child growing up in 80’s Appalachia who didn’t see black people with any sort of consistency until college, I knew that “racist” was one of the worst things to be called, and in the ensuing decades I watched in horror as the left won victory after victory at least in part because of the Right’s desire to avoid it and unwillingness to fight back. The psyop worked, spectacularly, and it became easier to just keep your head down than to notice patterns and talk about it out loud.

So yeah, political correctness has existed for a long time, but it ramped up significantly from the middle of Barack Obama’s second term until 2024, a decade historians should consider the ‘Heyday of Woke.’ In addition to the race hysteria that began with Michael Brown and culminated with a drug-addled fentanyl addict who had once pointed a gun at a pregnant woman somehow becoming a martyr (and justification for the sacking of police stations and burning of cities) for managing to die in police custody, that decade also brought the attempted normalization of mentally ill people who think they’re the opposite gender, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and the COVID craziness that endured for years after 2020 and is in many ways just now dying down.

Crazy times indeed, crazy times that many of us thought largely ended with the election of President Donald Trump to a second term. After four long years, patriots were in charge again, and we wouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. DEI was dead, cancel culture was canceled, and people could finally speak what they believed to be the truth without fear of losing everything …

If you’re hearing the sound of a record scratch just before an abrupt stop, you’re picking up what I’m laying down. Because, while one kind of woke definitely declined, another, even uglier one reared its head right in its place, and this time the Trump administration and Republicans writ large are almost 100 percent on board.

I’m talking, of course, about how antisemitism has essentially eclipsed racism, sexism, and every other kind of -ism as not just the new worst possible thing someone can be accused of, but something virtually anyone can and will be labeled as for offenses as simple as daring to deviate from the establishment status quo on Israel.

And this new kind of woke is even more dangerous because it’s bolstered by the billionaire class, justified by entrenched religious theology, shared by most politicians on both sides of the political aisle, and, most tragically, supported by a Republican administration that is perfectly willing to stifle speech and persecute violators at the behest of a foreign country that wields entirely too much influence over our foreign and domestic policy.

By the way the Trump administration has gone about dealing with the largely imaginary threat of “aNtiSeMiTism,” one would think Nazi-style anti-Jewish pogroms were becoming a routine event on the streets of major U.S. cities. In addition to multiple Trump executive orders meant to combat “antisemitism” and give Jews extra legal protection, we now have a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, an Anti-Semitism Advisory Committee, and our Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights laser-focused on defunding colleges and universities that fail to crack down enough on speech they consider antisemitic (i.e., criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza). Not to mention the individuals who have been marked for deportation, not for being here illegally or doing anything illegal, but for supporting the ‘wrong’ side of the Israel/Palestinian conflict. I mean seriously, have we run out of gang-bangers to deport?

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The irony here is that none of the woke protections of the former woke era work against this new witch-hunt. In other words, being black, or trans, or female, or even Jewish won’t protect you. As Jewish author, academic, and activist Norman Finkelstein aptly pointed out in his recent conversation with Tucker Carlson on TCN, the “Jewish supremacist billionaire class” has essentially colluded with the Trump administration to aid and abet “the most audacious and stupendous assault on academic freedom” in history, driving out people in academia who dare to disagree with the establishment narrative on Israel and Gaza.

“Three Ivy League presidents were ousted,” he told Tucker. “They were all women. Two of the three were women of color. So they had all the so-called, you can call it, ideological protections of a woke culture. It didn’t protect them. They had all the protections. Do you know how the New York Times would have screamed to high heaven at three women, two women of color being ousted? Not a peep. And that reign of terror, it is a reign of terror, continues to this day.”

Yes, real racism and antisemitism exist. However, the threat is almost always overblown for political purposes. Just like the vast majority of those accused of racism don’t actually hate other races, most of those accused of antisemitism don’t really hate Jews. That’s a good thing for humanity, but it doesn’t say much about the establishment media & political hacks who kowtow to a foreign country and its powerful lobby at the expense of their own countrymen. The fact that the powers-that-be have managed to successfully use the ‘antisemite’ charge to silence dissent and slander critics of Israel’s actions for years says everything about their credibility. In that, they have zero.

James Lindsay and other wokesters on the right love to get on X and call right-wing Israel critics “woke,” as in “woke right,” but the irony is they are only doing that because they know full well they are defending their own kind of woke, and they want to distract from it.

It’s the same old wolf, just wearing different clothes.

Scott Morefield is a Senior Columnist for the Daily Caller. He spent three years as a media & politics reporter with the Daily Caller from 2018 to 2021, another two years with BizPac Review before that, and was a weekly columnist at Townhall from 2018 to 2026. His op-ed bylines can also be found on Newsweek, TheBlaze, The Hill, Breitbart, National Review, The Federalist, American Greatness, and many other sites. Follow him on Twitter @SKMorefield.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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