Do you live in fear of the rabid “woke mob?” If we’re to believe those on the right, they’re coming not just for our cultural norms, but for our jobs, our families, our very lives. They want us, we’re told, to hate men, hate white people – hate the entire country, in fact.
We know this because all of the people who supported the Muslim Ban or compared Syrians to Skittles or refuse to sympathize with trans people today – all of them have told us how dangerous and hateful the “woke mob” is.
“Cancel culture,” they say, is limiting speech and bringing about the ruination of society. They ignore, of course, the idea that the individual right to pay someone no heed because they have distasteful views is itself a form of expression.
They also ignore the giant gaping hole in their argument: namely that it is the right, not the left, that tends to be closed-minded and refuse to entertain alternate viewpoints – about CRT, trans rights, abortion, guns, atheism – you name it. Good luck speaking with any right-winger about issues they disagree with you on or presenting to them facts that may diverge from their preconceived narrative.
So what evidence does the right have of this supposedly dangerous mob? Usually, they’ll point to some Twitter comments or an isolated example of a teacher in Bumbletuna who said something crazy, or maybe a Department of Transportation directive that looks to alter official memo language in an effort to be more inclusive. Or, as we’ve seen recently, a truly bad idea to alter an enormous amount of the language in Roald Dahl books. “Aha!” they’ll shout. “You see how the liberals are destroying the country with their ridiculous and unpredictable standards?”
But we’re a country of 340 million people – you can always find silly cases to illustrate any story you’re trying to sell.
Yet let’s think about this for a moment: the Republican Party is now trying to sell us on the idea that the “woke mob” is somehow more dangerous than the actual mob that Donald Trump dispatched to the Capitol to try to upend a legitimate election and reinstall him in the White House after he lost to Joe Biden – essentially attempting to overthrow our republic.
The “woke mob” is somehow more dangerous, we’re told, than those trying to suppress voters through voter ID laws, the closing of polling stations, voter caging, and more.
The other day Donald Trump retweeted someone on his “Truth” Social platform who said that 80 million Trump supporters are “locked and loaded” and ready to fight for him. Yet the “woke” crowd represents a greater threat to the country than these people? Why? Because they might not want to hear Ted Nugent or because they think maybe we shouldn’t just mindlessly praise Founding Fathers who owned and beat other human beings?
We’ve seen this before, and so we should understand how precarious a situation we’re truly in. Throughout history, whenever there is a group that wants to exert authoritarian power, they always begin by demonizing others and creating a fictitious threat. Enslavers claimed that abolition would create black mobs. During the first and second Red Scares, we heard how subversive communist and anarchist elements were intent on setting the country ablaze, and so immigrants had to be deported, they said, and Hollywood icons persecuted. We used the same type of excuse for Japanese-American internment camps and for the FBI’s COINTELPRO ops, which targeted civil rights leaders.
That’s why we cannot fall for the narrative that’s being preached to us by the GOP today – because while the “woke mob” is largely a fiction, the measures they’ll take in response to this supposed threat will be very, very real. And then we’re all in trouble.
I write about politics, history, and the arts, and try to expose Republican hypocrisy. You can find me on Twitter by clicking on @RossRosenfeld.