The Woke Turning Point

 Conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a seminal book which conservatives and thinking liberals alike gave rave reviews entitled “Live Not By Lies.”  The book is one of the anti-Woke cannon, along with The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad, Woke Capitalism by Vivek Ramiswami, Woke Racism by John McWhorter, and Race Marxism by James Lindsay.

In his January 23 piece in The American Conservatism, Dreher asks “What was the Woke Tipping Point?”  Dreher asks what one event over the past 20 years led to the mess America is in?  Dreher concludes that the single event that has led to the Woke-tastrophe was the failure to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the Obergefell decision,  which would have codified traditional marriage into the Constitution. 

What Was The Woke Tipping Point? - The American Conservative

Dreher is partially correct.  He asserts, “The loss of the one-male and one-female binary as the exclusive model for marriage was the turning point….Recognizing that wokeness is a broad phenomenon, if I had to pick a single event as the most causative of advancing wokeness, I would say the Obergefell decision Constitutionalizing same sex marriage.

 I think Dreher is partially correct, but only partially.  It is difficult to pin the Wokification of America on a single event or source,   He is correct that the erosion of marriage and the family unit is a significant aspect of Woke.   The Obergefell decision came soon thereafter, wiping out the tradition of state jurisdiction over the governance of marriage and eradicating any local democratic input over how people wish to construct the mores of their society.  The transgender movement quickly latched on the to gay rights movement (the fight over transgenders in bathrooms began days after the Obergefell decision came down), followed by the push to sexualize children through Drag Queen Story Hour and “gender education” schools.   Dreher is right to point all this out.

But Dreher frames Wokeism incorrectly.  He contends that The Great Awokening covers “sex, gender, and race”.  He is incorrect and by not framing it up correctly, he inadvertently cripples our ability to fight back.

Wokeness is comprised of three prongs.  Or as I call it, the Woke holy trinity.  They are taken as an article of faith and questioning them is an act of blasphemy in Woke society.  Dreher names only 2 of them and, as a result, gets the inflection point wrong.  The holy trinity of Wokeness is gender ideology, racial justice, climate change.  

The Woke Tipping Point was the election of Barack Obama.  Obama didn’t emphasize gender ideology.  In fact, early in his political career, he said that marriage was between a man and a woman- then pivoted. 

But his zeal was placed on “racial justice,” whatever that means, and in particular he is the individual that is singularly responsible for the violent crime that roils our big cities now.    He set the tone early, falsely smearing the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” for questioning Henry Louis Gates.   Trayvon Martin looked like the son he didn’t have, even though Zimmerman was found to have used justifiable force in repelling Trayvon.   His administration set the wheels in motion in Chicago with his consent decree that hamstrung police officers.  He demonized the police at every turn and, along with his sugar daddy, George Soros, got numerous pro-criminal DA’s elected.  Obama’s clever emphasis on “diversity” meant the lowering of standards everywhere== in academia,  in the workplace, in housing, and institutionalizing a de facto reverse apartheid in government and in large corporate life.  In Chicago, for instance, which is roughly divided among equal thirds among Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks, Whites and Hispanics are mostly frozen out of any city government jobs that matter. 

Obama fully embraced the third prong of Wokeness—climate change tyranny.  He limited oil and gas leases on federal lands and killed the Keystone pipeline the first time around.  Worse, he sent eco-tyrant John Kerry to sign on to the ill-advised Paris Accord, which, among other things, obligated the U.S. to adhere to caps on emissions, while letting China and India off the hook for years—all the while permitting China to frantically construct scores of coal plants.  Even more absurdly, Obama committed the U.S. to be a major financier of a “green fund” which was to fund “green projects” in third world countries- again, a fund to which India and China were not obligated to participate in.  And because we run persistent deficits, we’ll end up borrowing some of those funds from—you guessed it—China.

The Obergefell decision was certainly an important milestone that helped to anchor the Woke movement, but LGBT ideology and its effect on the family is only one of the three prongs of Woke.  Obama’s election provided the accelerant to the other two.  Radical environmentalism under the banner of climate change, which threatens to destroy American capitalism and “social justice” and “equity,” which threatens social cohesion were seeded by Barack Obama.   He is rightly the godfather of the Woke movement.