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Legal Insurrection Readers Weigh in With Their Definitions of ‘Woke’

Legal Insurrection Readers Weigh in With Their Definitions of ‘Woke’

“Having the ability to deny reality and to formulate a bizarre fantasy world that can never be achieved.” –Legal Insurrection follower R.C.

https://twitter.com/wajacobson/status/1636720179148095488

We wrote last week about how conservative commentator/author Bethany Mandel’s awkward answer to an interview question on how she defined “woke” set off a pile-on fest among the Very Online Left, who accused Mandel and other conservatives who frequently use the term of racism and of being clueless as to what it actually means.

As the case almost always is with the left, though, they get to define and redefine the terms when it suits their purposes. And then when their words end up backfiring on them (as has been the case with their calls to “Defund the Police”) they turn around and play word games by claiming that you can’t weigh in on a topic if you allegedly can’t define it.

The debate over defining “woke” has turned into a classic case of left-wingers trying to control the debate by creating this alternate reality where they make up their own “truths” and “facts” even in the face of information that runs contra to everything they claim. And because their political opposition supposedly “can’t define” those “truths” and “facts,” then in the left’s view they have no business injecting themselves into the debate.

In the aftermath of the Mandel firestorm, Professor Jacobson noted on Twitter that one didn’t need to be able to explicitly define “woke” in order to know what it was when they saw it:

[Video courtesy Andrew Marcus]

Legal Insurrection also posted that video clip to Twitter and asked Facebook followers what their defintion of “woke” was.

Here are some of the responses:

“People who DON’T want lower taxes, smaller government, freedom of speech. And DO want everyone to defer to their vision of society with no discussion of such vision.” – D.J.C.

“A primitive religion that must apply to all but them.Includes human sacrifice and defamation of those of any other belief.” – B.W.C.

“Let’s see- telling your employees to ‘be less white’ (Coke), getting rid of icons on Land o’ Lakes, Uncle Ben’s, Aunt Jemima. All products I won’t support.” – A.M.

“Woke means you’re so open minded your brains fell out. Your feels outweigh your lack of logic and reason.” – Conservatarians FB page.

“People who don’t have a clue about the real world and real science deniers . example, men [can] have babies …total nonsense.” – J.A.

“Having the ability to deny reality and to formulate a bizarre fantasy world that can never be achieved.” – R.C.

“Their rule is ‘no rules’ Except, of course, if you break the no rules rule then you are subject to abuse because there is no rule against abusing anyone or otherwise depriving them of a peaceful life.” – P.A.

“A group of people who are trying to force everyone in the world to be like them. Will not permit folks to live their life as they choose.” – W.B.

From “P.E” on the LI Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/legalinsurrection/posts/10160594243444486?comment_id=613082370201902

From “B.M.” on the LI Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/legalinsurrection/posts/10160594243444486?comment_id=911045720097104

What’s your definition of “woke”?

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

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Comments

“Woke” is political correctness run amok, but that then begs the question of what is political correctness. A more precise definition of woke is: viewing any given issue through the lens of “intersectionality” – i.e. that any issue can be reduced to an imbalance of power, and that people can be divided into two classifications of “oppressor” and “oppressed” (aka “victim”) based upon immutable characteristics such as race, gender and sexual identify, etc. That is Woke.

    Milhouse in reply to Brad. | March 21, 2023 at 5:43 pm

    Yep, that’s about it.

    Olinser in reply to Brad. | March 21, 2023 at 6:19 pm

    You forgot the most important part.

    Being able to change the ‘oppressor’ at the drop of a hat, and changing who is the ‘oppressor’ in the EXACT SAME SITUATION, simply because of the political views of the people involved.

    That’s how they can excuse rich white liberals attacking Clarence Thomas using all manner of racist terms.

      alaskabob in reply to Olinser. | March 21, 2023 at 9:44 pm

      Intersectionality should be self-limiting but it isn’t. Declare a certain group as top of the intersectionality pyramid. They get the goodies for being the most oppressed. But that in turn removes them from the top of the list. Down they go unless they can discover more oppression to regain the number one slot. Why after decades certain minorities fail even more? Obviously, there are “hidden” oppressions keeping them down. Hence, invisible “systemic” entrenched oppression that hasn’t been addressed. It is a job of the woke to discover, identify and correct these multitude of oppressive factors… that only they can see.

    venril in reply to Brad. | March 22, 2023 at 10:26 am

    Marxism, with a different flavor of frosting.

    CaptTee in reply to Brad. | March 22, 2023 at 3:41 pm

    The ‘woke’ are those who thought Hillary’s use of ‘deplorables’ was correct.

Dantzig93101 | March 21, 2023 at 5:39 pm

“Holding an un-falsifiable belief system, driven by rage and personal grievance, that denies obvious truths and seeks to destroy anything that supports human happiness and civilized life.”

“Woke” is a cultish idiocy based on trendyness and narcissism. Kind of like other silly spiritualism scams that come and go. But this time, the people behind it are not merely trying to buy Rolls Royces, but they are trying to destory our country.

    I agree — self-congratulatory sanctimony, malignant narcissism and a self-perceived (yet, fallacious) sense of moral/ideological superiority vis-a-vis conservatives are all part of the Leftist/Dumb-o-crat political ethos and attitude, whether that is characterized as “wokeness,” or, something else.

Shorter Brad: Woke is a doctrinaire belief in “systemic racism”.

    MattMusson in reply to Milhouse. | March 21, 2023 at 6:25 pm

    Woke people believe that all white created systems are inherently racist and the only cure is to give people of color unearned compensation to address the inequality.

    henrybowman in reply to Milhouse. | March 21, 2023 at 8:00 pm

    More exactly, “systemic oppression.” Not only races are oppressed, but also sexes, artificial gender constructs, faiths, and even nonsentients (“the environment”),

    Dimsdale in reply to Milhouse. | March 22, 2023 at 7:54 am

    While practicing the actual systemic racism.

Woke is whatever its adherents claim it’s not and you’re a racist if you say anything different.

Party control which in turn controls the population. The term PC started with Stalin,

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/12/the-historical-origin-of-political-correctness/

willful ignorance!!

Woke is being at the cutting edge of virtue signalling. It happens on the right as well.

WOKE = Delusion, wrapped in hysteria, inside insanity.

Woke is a virus. It escaped from Karl Marx’s lab. It has since evolved to turn the afflicted into bullies and virtue signalers, infused with progressive dogma, who coerce unvaccinated individuals, without a shred of humanity or compassion. to comply or else face retribution and cancellation.

Good luck summing or defining “woke” in a pithy sentence or two. I think it was the author Stanley G. Payne that said he can define “fascism” in a single paragraph – though one must first read his book about fascism for the paragraph to make sense.

Woke is many things […]

[…] being the latest iteration of the militant youth movements of Maoist-Leninist Marxism.

[…]

    Dimsdale in reply to Tiki. | March 22, 2023 at 7:52 am

    It’s like porn; you know it when you see it.

    Char Char Binks in reply to Tiki. | March 22, 2023 at 9:38 am

    The Woke are still fighting fascism nearly 80 years after Mussolini’s death. Their inability to define fascism is their strength; whatever they oppose is fascism

    bullhubbard in reply to Tiki. | March 22, 2023 at 9:41 am

    Woke (adj): a person or institution that adheres to the orthodoxy of neo-Marxist identitarianism and/or advocates the reform of institutions according to its principles of oppression hierarchies; connoting “awakening” from a state of ignorance to a state of enlightenment.

Wokeness is when people with no actual morality try and claim the moral high ground through nothing more than application of their hierarchy of grievances.

Their hierarchy makes absolutely no sense and can change at the drop of a hat.

That’s why a white male is at the absolute bottom, but slap on a wig and change your pronouns and magically you are now at the absolute PEAK of the hierarchy.

In 1919, P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian correspondent, fleeing the Bolsheviks while temporarily living in Southern Russia’s Ekaterinodar wrote to the English magazine the New Age.

On Bolsheviks…

“Of course, their success is only temporary, as, generally speaking, nobody can be a Bolshevik forever. It is a sickness from which people either recover or, if its germs have entered too deeply into the organism, they die.”

“Lately the comparison of Bolshevism with disease has become common. This is not sufficiently true.”

“Bolshevism is not only a disease; it is death, and a very quick death, or it is not real Bolshevism.”

“Bolshevism in general is a catastrophe, a shipwreck.”

“This is what you do not realize, and you will be able to realize it only when you learn our history of the last three years.”

It only text one word, woke is retarded.

“Woke” is the English translation of 毛澤東主席思想
(“Chairman Mao Zedong Thought”)
And wokesters are the US version of the Red Guard Youth.

    毛澤東主席思想 can go $%#%^ himself.

      Steven Brizel in reply to TheFineReport.com. | March 22, 2023 at 6:20 am

      Woke means that the institutions and establishment of mainstream America are hopelessly rigged and racist hostile to LGBT feminists and advocates of gender fluidity and ignoring climate. change and must be torn down by the. I tons who are hopeless and eternal victims with no way of advancement

thad_the_man | March 21, 2023 at 7:59 pm

If you need a definition for woke, then you are woke.

PS: The word was created by woke people to describe themselves.

    henrybowman in reply to thad_the_man. | March 21, 2023 at 8:03 pm

    Just like the term “fake news,” which was wielded so devastatingly by Trump, was coined by Obama in one of his farewell speeches. And now progressives try to claim that conservatives invented the term.

I couldn’t come up with one definition – but reminiscent of the Magic 8 ball and the wonderful web app programmers who came up with the ‘Band name generator’, I’d like to see a WOKE definition generator – that pulls the definition from a list of appropriate adjectives, adverbs, and nouns to define WOKE:

Witless / Weird / Wacky / Warped / Weak / Whiny / Wimpy / Worthless

Overbearing / Obsessive / Oppressive / Obnoxious / Oblivious / Obstinate / Obstructive / Opinionated

Kafkatrapping / Knobheaded / Knee-jerk / Knucklehead / Killjoy / Kooky / Knavish / Kiss-ass

Eliteism / Emotionalism / Egomania / Empty-headed / Errancy / Evasiveness / Equivocation / Exasperation

Any one each of the above seems an apt definition of WOKE.

    henrybowman in reply to MrE. | March 21, 2023 at 8:08 pm

    It would be easier to manufacture a Magic 8-Ball Woke Response generator.

    YOUR SPEECH THREATENS ME
    CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE
    MULTICULTURAL SPACE, YOU MUST LEAVE
    WHAT I HEAR IS SUPREMACY
    ABOLISH WHITENESS
    HATE SPEECH ISN’T FREE SPEECH
    NOT ALL LIVES MATTER
    THAT’S RACIST (must appear on at least two faces, preferably three)

    Dimsdale in reply to MrE. | March 22, 2023 at 7:47 am

    Maybe something like a slot machine… Pull the handle and wait for the offense of the day.

mentally insane criminals = woke

Subotai Bahadur | March 21, 2023 at 10:10 pm

Woke: Any thought, belief, concept, statement, action, or violence that has as its goal the destruction of American sovereignty, culture, society, heritage, beliefs, or people.

Subotai Bahadur

At this point, we aren’t even daring to try to have nice things. We’d just like to hold a few simple truths to be self-evident.

2+2 = 4 is a great example of people who’d like some peace vs people who’d like to stir things around and fuck shit up

Suburban Farm Guy | March 21, 2023 at 10:43 pm

Woke is anyone who demands you define woke but can’t say what a woman is. Woke is anyone claiming First Amendment rights to drown yours out with a bullhorn. Woke is anyone who calls you a book burner right after tearing down statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and King Jr.

Etc. We could go on all night

“Woke”: specific words and beliefs that are used as tribal delineators, to promote tribalism in general, to ensure conformity within the woke tribe, and to promote the power of the “woke” tribe. The definitional boundaries of “woke” continually change, and absolute purity of thought is vigorously enforced. The constantly-changing nature of “woke” keeps all members of the tribe constantly attentive to the latest evolutions and constantly in fear of being expelled from the tribe. If a member of the “woke” tribe steps over any line, no matter how trivially, the tribe uses all their power to destroy the errant member, socially and economically. No apology can be allowed to cleanse the offender of their non-woke sin. Woke tribal boundaries include: linguistic purity, ritual self-flagellation by historically dominate groups, complete refusal to listen to any non-woke viewpoint and to suppress such viewpoints so they can not be heard by anyone, and an adherence to the belief that all people outside the group must be fascist, misogynistic, racist, thieving-capitalist, and inherently and irrevocably evil. Tribal societies have never been able to coexist with democracy, and thus the promotion of the “woke” tribe is necessarily and intentionally anti-democratic.

Wokeness is a dogma which asserts that all members of society are assigned a locus on a continuum ranging from oppressed to oppressors. Thus there is a hierarchy of privilege which requires that the most privileged oppressors be perpetually beholden to the least privileged oppressed. Only by constant breast beating, cloak rending and mea culpa-ing can the privileged oppressors hope to be allowed to breathe the same air as the oppressed.

The woke dogma requires that all members of society, even the non woke, toe the line of its core tenets or face ostracization.

virtue signaling run amok. Just when an adherent or partial adherent decides to succumb to this ideology or parts of it – the rug is pulled out from that person, and newer more extreme, irrational, unsustainable, destructive forms of so called “superior moral belief systems’ are demanded.

Woke is the complete antithesis of logic, common sense, real history and science, as well as human nature.

It is the building of a Potemkin village in front of the ruins of the greatest country in the world.

It is a Marxist male dressed in an entitlement dress.

Woke is where the clowns and freak shows went after the circuses closed.

Wokesters find offense in the simplest statements of fact, equate meritocracy with discrimination, and demand protection against anything that offends their double secret code of sensitivity.

Woke is a toxic combination of several traits, and in this regard could be analogized (or considered to be) a clinical personality disorder.

The defining traits are: (1) a childlike acceptance of a fantasy version of communism, (2) a factual ignorance of history and political philosophy (3) a lack of religious or spiritual moral grounding, and (4) a mindset that one’s ideas must be imposed on all others by force, without limits or regard to other values.

‘Woke’ is any behavior or even immutable personal characteristic of which leftists disapprove. Some of these are transient, in that they can shift from time to time and place to place while other are constant and unchanging. Examples of those that are fixed, for all time, are ‘Whiteness’ and Maleness’. It matters not one whit that no individual has any control over either of those traits. They have been deemed by ‘Those In Charge of Definitions’ (consisting, primarily; almost exclusively, of White Lesbians) to be unforgivably and irredeemably evil. If you are a White Hetersexual Male with a point of view that is to the political right of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin then you are a hopeless reprobate and should abandon all hope. You are eternally damned and doomed.

WOKE = Calling Good evil, and Evil good.

Woke = 100% sanctimony over Left wing ideology and 0% self-awareness.

James Lindsay defines woke:
Woke = Having Critical Consciousness
Critical Consciousness = The cult belief that everything in society is designed to oppress you and the only way to see “the truth’ is to become a Marxist using Critical Theory

Dolce Far Niente | March 22, 2023 at 10:42 am

Wokism is a system under which there can be no consequences for anything to do with one’s genitalia, and no responsibility for personal life choices, all flavored with a frosting of race. Reality is of course anathema to this and will be shunned and shouted down if encountered.

Therefore, an entire urban demographic is freed from having to accept that their toxic culture is a direct product of their own choices, while others with significant mental illness or injury, and those who perceive themselves as “allies” can insist upon and receive total obeisance to their delusions.

“Woke”?? It doesn’t exist. Neither does Antifa. You don’t believe me? Just ask anyone in the media, press, education, corporate boardroom, the DOJ or WH.

Don’t know what you are talking about.

Woke is the air that everyone breathes in clown world.

Woke= insane cult that denies reality and operates in the world not as the world is but as they wish it were and as often with the insane they will react in a violent manner if their version of reality is challenged

Woke is simply the latest packaging of Trotskyite Bolshevism. It is nihilism run amok. It is a form of Communist Bolshevism that even caused Stalin to stamp it out. Unfortunately, he failed to completely eradicate it, and we are left. to complete the task.