If being woke was your New Year’s resolution, last Sunday’s Oscars might have cured you (adults drowning their profession in politics). Back in 1998, when the last not-woke Democrat (Bill Clinton) lived in the White House, the awards show had over 57 million viewers. With only 9.8 million this year, HBO’s liberal iconoclast Bill Maher quipped stars were texting their kids to “go to bed” and nannies were texting back “they already did.” Meryl Streep in a pink pussy hat is not that funny.
What’s funny was Maher saying the Oscars “dared you to be entertained…no jokes, no songs, not even any clips of when we used to have fun.” He dissed best picture Nomadland: “move over, That Girl, Mary Tyler Moore and Alice, there’s a new girl in town. She drifts around in a van, but can she be 19 and hot? Maybe give her a different supporting cast; a handsome guy, a funny guy, a lesbian best friend, and a dog that can solve mysteries.”
I was a wild-eyed hipster in the Nixon years, when “woke” was questioning a war in Vietnam, having black friends, joining the Peace Corps, tutoring poor kids, supporting your girlfriend’s career ambitions, and wanting clean air and water. Back then, enlightened liberalism inspired professors to be open-minded and tolerant, millions to send checks to CARE, and black activists to welcome nuns, priests, and rabbis to PEACEFUL protests. Those were the days, my friend.
Open minds and tolerance are now anathema to woke academics, actors, anchors, anti-fascists, anti-racists, Big Tech elites, chief-executive cowards, mad-liberal journalists, and progressive politicians. To be “woke” today is to have a closed mind and intolerant behavior, driving veteran Democrat James Carville to say his party is threatened by a wokeness:
“Wokeness is a problem. It’s hard to talk to anybody who doesn’t [agree] but won’t say it out loud because they’ll get clobbered or cancelled. We’ve got to speak the way regular people speak. Who lives in a ‘community of color?’ White and black and brown people live in neighborhoods. In Louisiana, Carter Peterson had the backing of the progressive machine but lost by 10 percentage points. Woke got the crap beat out of it.”
Carville’s right, but “woke” progressives aren’t listening. Even as black Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) addressed the nation after President Biden’s State of the Union, woke tweeters got “Uncle Tim” trending on Twitter. It took Big Tech almost a day to delete racist tropes. Read what “woke” progressives said and wrote:
Texas Democrat Gary O’Connor: “I had hoped Scott would show some common sense, but it seems clear he is little more than an Oreo with no real principles.” Thank you, Gary, for judging Scott by the color of his cream filling, rather than the color of his cookie dough.
MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross: “Scott is thirsty for white approval…I could go into great detail refuting every one of his asinine points, but I don’t argue with people Harriet Tubman would have left behind.” Isn’t that nice? Ms. Cross wants a Way Back Machine so she can tell Ms. Tubman to turn Tim Scott over to white overseers (BTW, is “Tiffany” still a name?).
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel: “Every black Republican senator got together to let the American people know the Republican party isn’t racist…and then Tim promptly returned to the sensory deprivation egg he calls home.” I stopped listening to Kimmel on politics and race when he thought wearing blackface made him funny.
The View’s Joy Behar: “Now, Tim Scott, he does not seem to understand – a lot of them don’t seem to understand the difference between a racist country and systemic racism. The fact Tim Scott can’t acknowledge this is appalling.” I wouldn’t trust anything Behar said about “them” after she defended her blackface photo shoot as an homage to “them” beautiful black women (and who are they, Joy?).
The woke are pushing politics, which is just options about policy, into the private lives of US citizens, who have first amendment rights. The woke have grabbed a tiger by the tail, because nobody wants to be told their policy position is actually rooted in bigotry or evil.
Parents want schools to teach their kids how to think – not what to think. Award-show audiences want entertainment – not sermons. Republicans want to support Tim Scott’s conservatism – and oppose Kamala Harris’s progressivism – without race entering the conversation. Back to the 60s. Those were the days, my friend.
