Why I Am Not Woke

Even during the "Peak Woke" period, I never strayed from my core principles.

The word “woke” was originally used by some Black people to refer to Whites who were “awake” to issues of racial injustice in the United States. In those days, if a White person was woke, it was intended as a compliment and as a badge of honor. I understood what you and others like you were up against, and I had pledged solidarity with you.

In more recent times - especially since 2015 or so - the word “woke” has become a pejorative, referring to people who might otherwise be called “social justice warriors.” These people would jump on board with pretty much any left-wing cause, but only after it had become fashionable to do so. Most people said little or nothing about Palestine until left-wing thought leaders had started slamming Israel as a settler-colonial apartheid state (which it is not, and never has been). Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish woman who had become famous through her climate activism, suddenly jumped on board the Palestine bandwagon after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel. Had she said a single word about Palestine before those attacks? I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it.

Although I viewed Thunberg as a sympathetic and sincere figure when she was crying out for action on climate change, the fact that she so effortlessly shifted her attention to Palestine just when everyone else on the Far Left seemed to do so has changed my opinion of her, and not in a good way. It doesn’t cost much to follow other people. There is considerably more social cost to speaking your own truth - especially when it goes against what the “people in charge” seem to be saying.

Beginning in 2015 or so, the far-left flank in the US and elsewhere essentially took over the culture and started essentially punishing people who deviated from left-wing orthodoxy. If you said anything on social media opposing the trans movement, or suggesting that listing out the indigenous tribes who had lived on the land you were meeting on was a hollow and meaningless exercise, or questioning whether defunding the police was really such a good idea just after the murder of George Floyd, you would be kicked off of social media, fired from your job, and publicly shamed. I have to admit that I held my tongue (and my keyboard) in those days because I had a family to feed - and I expressed many of my opinions privately. But now that the woke tide seems to have receded a bit, I am going to say publicly why I never bought into much of the woke movement.

Can I Be Liberal But Not Woke?

The answer is of course. I believe strongly in immigration, including giving people a place to go to escape tyranny, oppression, war, and destruction. I believe that people should be able to marry whomever they love, regardless of that person’s gender. I believe that people should be able to express whatever religious beliefs they hold, but that religion should be kept out of government. I believe that people have the right to live as they wish, and that neither I nor anyone else has any say in how someone chooses to live. However, your rights end where mine begin, and as soon as your choices negatively affect others, your right to live as you choose may be constrained.

I was listening to Winston Marshall’s podcast yesterday, and he had on a guest who expressed some very interesting views. The guest, who identifies herself as left of center, was criticizing woke people for saying things they didn’t really believe just to sound virtuous and to curry favor with other woke people. The owners of Ben & Jerry’s, the famously left-wing ice cream company, stated in the summer of 2023 that “The United States is on stolen land … this July 4th, let’s commit to returning it.” That was all well and good until the chief of the local Native American tribe - the tribe whose ancestral land the Ben & Jerry’s factory was on - reached out publicly and expressed his interest in discussing ownership of the factory. The Ben & Jerry’s people never responded to him. That is woke virtue signaling - just like singer Billie Eilish saying “no one is illegal on stolen land” but then not responding to the local Native tribe who contacted her about the land her mansion sits on.

If you really support Native people, then you should put your money where your mouth is. Donate to your local tribe. Go visit them and make friends with tribal members. Ask how you can help them. Or better yet, do what Kevin Costner has done throughout his career - make films and series glorifying Native cultures. Dances with Wolves was an outstanding movie where Native actors got to play starring roles. Yellowstone was a hit TV series where Mo Brings Plenty, an Oglala Lakota actor, was invited not only to play a character but also to consult on Native cultural issues. What Costner has done is far more important than business meetings being started by listing off the names of Native tribes who lived in the area where you are gathering. Listing off the names of tribes does nothing to help or empower those tribes or their members.

If you really believe in classically liberal principles, then your actions will match your words. In most cases, “wokeness” involves empty virtue signaling that doesn’t cost the person anything, and that the person likely does not really believe in. Here I will cover four general types of woke virtue signaling - gender madness, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and Islam more broadly), COVID authoritarianism, and racial issues and law enforcement. Note that I am absolutely not saying that all opposition to these issues is woke virtue signaling. I am simply saying that these are some areas where people have made statements, participated in protests, and put slogans into their email signatures that were not accurate, or were essentially copied and pasted from left-wing organizations. There are many people who have made heartfelt and intelligent statements about these issues - but college students asking each other “Why are we protesting again?” is definitely not an example of intelligent and thoughtful statements.

Woke Issue #1: Gender Madness

Until 2010 or so, most people were pretty comfortable with the idea that humans can be broken down into two sexes - male and female. People with external genitalia could be assumed to be boys or men, and people with internal genitalia could be assumed to be girls or women. No one doubted the ability of doctors to ascertain a baby’s sex by looking between the baby’s legs, and no one thought it necessary to put “she/her” or “he/him” into their email signatures or social media handles to state the obvious. The idea that people could “opt out” of gender altogether was not seriously considered by the vast majority of us.

Then Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner, and all hell broke loose.

The Human Rights Watch, which had championed the push for same-sex marriage, emerged victorious when the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act - which had codified marriage as exclusively a heterosexual institution - in 2015. Rather than continuing to champion gay and lesbian rights, the Human Rights Watch decided to turn their attention to transgender issues. A group that represented 1 percent of the population quickly became a cause célèbre, and they suddenly could do nothing wrong. During and after the COVID pandemic, whole peer groups were coming out as trans, and no one seemed to bat an eyelash about it.

I have a PhD in psychology, and one of the first things that became obvious to me was that many of the young people who were coming out as trans in droves had experienced severe trauma as children or adolescents or were suffering from debilitating mental health problems. Some of these kids had been sexually victimized, some had been abused in other ways, some were socially awkward and unsure of themselves, and some were so despondent that they didn’t see a way out. The idea of transforming oneself into someone completely different was - quite naturally - appealing to these young people. If I were in their shoes, I likely would have felt the same way they did.

My issue is not with the kids who were coming out as trans. They genuinely saw it as an escape from the misery they were experiencing. My issue is with the mental health providers, scholars, and policymakers who encouraged all of this. The “trans lobby” - the hardcore activists who were pushing this agenda on children and families - didn’t want anyone questioning their ideology or their methods - and universities, social media companies, and the entertainment industry were more than happy to go along. I don’t know how therapists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and counselors could have - in good conscience - pushed teenagers and young adults toward dangerous surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones whose effects were unknown. Cutting a young girl’s breasts off often did not improve her mental health - more often it left her in pain. Cross-sex hormones wreak havoc on young people’s bones, hearts, and sex organs. The idea that puberty blockers somehow “pause” puberty - and that it can be restarted later if the person decides to stop taking the drugs - is completely illogical. No human biological process can be “paused.” Cells don’t stop dividing and transforming because someone told them to. Yet the medical and mental health professions seem to have gone woke - and only now are some of the affected youth beginning to file, and win, lawsuits against the providers who deceived them.

Why did no one stop and ask these young people what kinds of life experiences and mental health problems were leading them to contemplate taking such radical steps? What was the rush to affirm the person’s new identity, without addressing the underlying problems that led them to seek out a new identity in the first place?

I know people who identify as transgender, who went to gender clinics, and who were tricked into going on cross-sex hormones. The “providers” (if you want to call them that) told them - and their parents - that they would likely commit suicide if they did not go on these hormones. Yet the hormones didn’t help in the majority of cases. The same mental health problems that the person was facing were still there. That’s because the underlying problem had nothing to do with the person’s gender. The underlying problem had to do with the trauma they had endured and the psychological symptoms they were suffering with. Treating these underlying issues - not putting the person on cross-sex hormones - was what was needed.

But anyone who said any of this - including (and perhaps especially) doctors and other providers - risked having their lives destroyed. The trans lobby had taken control of medicine and mental health treatment, and the levers of power in our societies had gone along for the ride. Many people kept quiet instead of risking their livelihoods. The losers in all of this were the confused kids who just needed someone to care about them.

Here’s where the woke people came in - they insisted that the way forward was not to advocate for mental health treatment for people who felt that coming out as trans was the only way to save themselves. Rather, these woke people decided that we must affirm the new identity immediately. Any attempt to refer to the person’s prior incarnation was “deadnaming” and was essentially a crime against that person. It was almost as though the person had not even existed prior to their transition.

Worse yet, many non-trans (I refuse to use the word “cis”) people decided that declaring their pronouns in their email signatures and social media handles was the best way to support trans people. Never mind that many trans people have made clear that they do not want or need non-trans people to do this - and that some trans people actually find it aversive. Why would me declaring that I’m male do anything to help anyone else? Suddenly, after 10,000 years of humans being able to distinguish men from women, we were told that “you cannot assume anyone’s gender.” I see left-wing academics putting their pronouns into their email addresses - imagine getting an email from “David Smith (he/him/his)". Gee, you’d think that the name David might give away the fact that he’s a man - but nope, he’s got to tell us in case there might be some confusion.

My question is this - why were these woke people not declaring their pronouns 10, 15, 20, or 25 years ago? Was it somehow okay to assume their gender in 2006 but not in 2026? Look up any woke person’s emails from 2006, and you won’t find any pronouns in their address or signature. If “pronouns are a public health issue,” as the American Public Health Association declared a few years ago, why wasn’t it a public health issue before the Human Rights Watch decided to focus on trans issues?

Woke Issue #2: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

About 15 years ago, I conducted a Google search to find out where the American Left and Right stood on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The results I obtained were fairly inconclusive - many people didn’t know enough about the conflict to take a position one way or the other. The Israelis and the Palestinians had been fighting against each other since the late 1940s, and both sides had done some pretty nasty things to one another.

The first time I heard someone on the Left take a position against Israel and in favor of Palestine was at my daughter’s high school graduation in June 2021. The valedictorian from her graduating class said in her speech that the “apartheid” that was going on in Palestine had to be stopped. The Palestinians were the victims and the Israelis were the aggressors. There was no room for nuance, no “both sides have valid points” - none of that. The issue was settled, and the Israelis were the bad guys.

Let me be clear here that I am not an apologist for Israel. The Israelis have done plenty of bad things to the Palestinians. One of my closest friends, for 40 years, is a Palestinian American, and I have gotten to know his family - who are from the West Bank - very well during that time. The Israeli soldiers often harassed my friend and his family while they were en route to or from the West Bank. Some hard-line Israelis, like the tour guide who took me and my colleagues from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea several years ago, insist that Israel is blameless and has simply been defending itself against repeated attacks from the Palestinians (and other Arabic groups) since its founding.

Just as the valedictorian from my daughter’s graduating class was not being intellectually honest, neither was the Israeli tour guide. Israel has plenty of blood on its hands - even before the retaliatory war against Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Rarely in human history have there been scenarios where one group was solely responsible for a war. Life simply doesn’t work that way.

However, the Woke Brigade made very clear which side they were on almost immediately following the October 7th attacks. On October 8, 2023 - while Israel was still counting the casualties from the Hamas surprise attack and assessing how many hostages had been taken - the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a picture of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag - signaling their allegiance to Hamas. Elite universities through the United States, Western Europe, and Australia immediately blamed Israel for the attacks and framed the savage beheadings, sexual assaults, and burnings as a “heroic act of resistance.” Suddenly the Jews, who have been persecuted around the world for nearly 3,000 years, became the oppressors.

The reason for this is quite clear. As I will discuss later in this post, critical race theory (CRT) frames almost all human social interactions - especially those occurring between or among ethnic groups - in terms of oppression and victimization. CRT was developed in the United States as part of examining the massive disparities in criminal justice involvement and sentencing between Blacks and Whites. Derrick Bell, a law professor at several US universities, believed - with good reason - that the criminal justice system in the country was biased against Black defendants, and that this bias was rooted in systemic racism. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Bell was writing his first papers on critical race theory, it would have been difficult to argue against him.

However, when analyses of US ethnic and racial tensions are “exported” to other countries, misunderstandings and errors are almosyt certain to occur. Many woke people in the US, and in Europe, are under the impression that Israelis are White whereas Palestinians are brown. The idea that Israelis are White comes from a US-based understanding of Jews, where the vast majority of American Jews are Ashkenazi (of Eastern European origin). However, Israel is also home to many Sephardic Jews, who descend from Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and Iran. Israel is also home to many Ethiopian Jews, who are also people of color.

Further, many Palestinians are not brown! The leaders of Hamas are certainly not. So the idea that Israeli = White American and Palestinian = Black American is not accurate. And the idea that Gaza is an “open air prison” operated by Israel is also false. Prior to the October 7th attacks, many Gazans crossed the border into Israel to work or attend school. Israel provided food and supplies to Gaza. Yes, hard-line Israelis like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have long resented the Palestinians, but most Israelis did not. I know many Israelis, and most of them just want to coexist peacefully with the Palestinians.

Yet many woke Westerners insist on carrying water for Hamas, despite understanding little or nothing about the history of Israel, how and why it was founded, and what Hamas’s end goals have been since its founding nearly 40 years ago. Hamas’s founding charter states that its mission is not only to wipe Israel off the map, but also to kill every Jew on the planet. From an Israeli perspective, how can you coexist with a group whose primary goal is to destroy you?

So groups like “Queers for Palestine” do not have any idea what they are talking about. Anyone who is “queer” would not last a day in Gaza. Hamas terrorists would behead them, stone them to death, or throw them off the top of a tall building. The idea of drag queens in Australia teaching five-year-olds to say “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is absurd. Netanyahu and his commanders have gone way above and beyond what needed to be done to take out Hamas - they could have simply dispatched Mossad (the Israeli version of the CIA) to find and kill the Hamas commanders and eliminate the organization. If Mossad could find a way to insert explosive devices into Hezbollah fighters’ pagers, surely they could find a way to do likewise to Hamas. But notwithstanding all of that, the idea that woke Westerners have sided completely with Palestine seems more like virtue signaling than like a reasoned, thought-out position. Remember that “from the river to the sea” comes directly from Hamas’s founding documents, where their goal was to “push the Jews into the sea.”

My contention that the reflexive affiliation between woke Westerners and Palestine is - at least to some extent - an instance of virtue signaling is bolstered by the idea that many of the campus protesters don’t really know what they are protesting. I’ve seen videos asking protesters which river and which sea they are chanting about, and many of them cannot answer the question! One of the students I work with at my university was involved in one of the protests and was detained by the university leadership. I had to write a letter on her behalf to keep her from being expelled, even though she is an excellent student - and after the situation was resolved, I asked her whether she understood what she was protesting. “Not really,” she replied. “I just hate seeing anyone being mistreated.” So do I! But the first rule of protesting is - or should be - to understand the issues at stake before you join the protest. If you are not familiar enough with the situation to form an educated opinion, then you should probably refrain from expressing an opinion about it until you have gathered the necessary information.

Let me also say a few words about “Islamophobia.” Originally, that word was coined to refer to intense dislike - or hatred - of Islam and of Muslims. It was akin to anti-Semitism in many ways. But the term has been expanded such that any criticism of Islamic thought or doctrine is off limits. You cannot question the idea that men can murder their wives, sisters, or daughters for dishonoring their family. You cannot question the idea that women in some Muslim countries must completely hide their faces, with only small slits for their eyes so they don’t walk into something. Simply questioning any of this is evidence of Islamophobia in the eyes of some woke people. According to the European Academy on Religion and Society, the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization that pushes for the spread of Islamic sharia law around the world, observed how gay activists used the word “homophobia” to silence criticism of their movement. The Brotherhood then decided to appropriate this approach for themselves.

Any faith can be criticized. I’m Jewish and I have criticized Judaism many, many times. The idea that, in all but the most progressive sects of most world religions, only men can teach Scripture is reason enough - in my opinion - to criticize religion as a concept. And any religious faith that oppresses women - even threatening them with lashes (in the 21st century no less) for showing their faces in public is well deserving of criticism. It is not “phobic” to point out that the treatment of women in many Islamic countries is extremely cruel. I would say the same thing about other faiths that mandate such behavior - and indeed I have. (Orthodox Judaism also has its share of sexist and unfair laws and practices.)

Woke Issue 3: COVID Authoritarianism

Six years ago this month, the world essentially shut down. How long it stayed shut down depended on where you were. In the US, Florida and Texas reopened within two or three months, but New York and California stayed closed for more than a year. And even once cities and states (and countries) reopened, people were required to follow strict mitigation protocols. Masks had to be worn at all times while you were outside your home; you had to stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from people you didn’t know; and, in some cases, you were not allowed to leave your house at all! A friend of mine in Ontario, Canada, told me that she was outside briefly when the police stopped her and asked her what she was doing violating curfew. And this was in what was supposed to be a free country!

All of these rules were rigidly enforced until George Floyd was killed in late May. Then, large gatherings were encouraged - but only if the gatherings were organized for the correct reasons. If you were protesting for social justice, who cares about the virus? But if you were protesting against the mandates and arguing that they violated your basic rights, well … you were out of luck.

As sickened as I was by what happened to George Floyd - I still cannot bring myself to watch the full video - the hypocrisy our leaders were displaying was amazing in its scope. Racism was such a public health issue that the COVID virus, which had been forecast to kill 50 million people in the US alone, took a back seat. This makes absolutely no sense - unless you come to the conclusion that the public health officials overseeing the response to the virus didn’t take it as seriously as they were telling us to take it. (In my mind, the issue was not the fact that people were outraged by Floyd’s killing - the issue was the double standard that was applied to protesting against police brutality versus protesting against the draconian mandates themselves.)

The response to COVID became woke very quickly - people on the Far Left couldn’t get enough of the mandates. Wearing a mask became a symbol of extreme virtue signaling - even though a cloth mask will do almost nothing to stop a microscopic virus, let me show you just how woke I am! People were driving around by themselves with masks on - how much sense does that make? When the vaccines came out, many people got themselves vaccinated - though we quickly learned that the “vaccine” was not really a vaccine. It was akin to the flu shot, where it boosted your immunity for a short time, but you had to be “vaccinated” over and over again. (What kind of vaccine is that?) The statement, made by Dr. Anthony Fauci and later by Vice President Kamala Harris, that vaccinated people could neither contract nor spread the virus was patently false - yet many woke people continued to repeat it over and ovwer again.

Dr. Fauci became an extremely polarizing figure - he was clearly a Democrat based on a number of his public statements, and many of his predictions would up being comically wrong. Remember his statement that college football fans in the US South would become super-spreaders as they attended games in packed outdoor stadiums? Yeah, that didn’t happen. COVID infection rates actually went down in Southern US states that fall. Fauci’s admonitions about having Thanksgiving dinner on Zoom were downright offensive, and Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator under the Biden administration, famously stated that people have two arms - one for the flu shot and one for the COVID shot (you mean the one that doesn’t work, Dr. Jha?). Then there was the airline mask mandate, which infuriated travelers for almost 2 years before it was finally struck down by a federal judge in Florida. I can remember being on a flight and having the audacity to take off my mask while I was eating. A flight attendant stood there watching me, waiting to ensure that I put my mask back on when I was done. (When the airline mask mandate was lifted, passengers on one flight celebrated by throwing their masks up in the air.)

It’s now 2026, and you still see people wearing masks in public! Anxiety levels among young people have gone through the roof, likely as a result of being scared half to death by the COVID czars. Locking people in their houses for a year and a half is not a great way to promote people’s mental health, and “virtual school” was an abject failure. I’m not bragging when I say that I predicted all of this - it’s obvious that there would be severe downstream consequences of isolating people from each other for so long and of scaring the crap out of them with doomsday scenarios. But the woke people still insist that we got everything right during COVID - or else they say that “we didn’t know any better at the time.” As the British like to say, that’s bollox. Anyone who was paying attention could see that none of the mitigation measures made any sense.

Let’s see … you walk into a restaurant and you have to wear a mask, but once you sit down at your table, you can take it off! What sense does that make? Does the virus only spread when you’re standing up? And what of California governor Gavin Newsom ordering bars and clubs to close at 10 pm? Does the virus not spread before 10? John P. A. Ioaniddis, an statistical ethicist at Stanford University, has published several articles debunking all of the mitigation measures - and CNN’s medical expert Dr. Leana Wen stated on air a few years ago that cloth masks were virtually useless. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who was part of the original COVID task force in the spring of 2020, admitted under oath to Congress that the six-foot social distancing rule was essentially made up and had no scientific evidence behind it. My conclusion is that we were trapped inside our homes, forced to wear face coverings, told to stand six feet apart, and mandated to receive a vaccine with limited efficacy largely for little or no benefit. Most people wound up getting COVID anyway - that’s how viruses work! Worse yet, the isolation and despair brought about by the mitigation measures led to many unnecessary suicides and drug overdoses.

I am not saying that the virus wasn’t a serious threat. Of course it was. But the virus didn’t cause people to overdose on drugs or to kill themselves. Woke people are being very disingenuous when they claim that “the pandemic led to severe learning loss among children of color.” No it didn’t! The virus did not stop a single child from attending school. Our leaders did. My problem is with the public health response to COVID, and with the unwillingness of anyone involved to accept accountability for screwing it up. Dr. Fauci was wrong about almost everything, and he received honorary degrees from dozens of universities? All while ordinary people suffered the consequences of his poor decision making? In what world is that even remotely fair?

The teacher’s unions insisted on keeping schools closed and on keeping children on Zoom for the 2020-2021 school year, but now Randi Weingarten, president of one of the leading US teacher unions, is insisting that she fought to reopen schools? Does she think we’re idiots?!? The Chicago Public Schools teacher union threatened to go on strike in January 2022 unless virtual schooling was reinstated, but somehow these union leaders say they are representing the best interests of children and families? And which families do you think were least able to stay home with their kids and supervise their virtual schooling? That’s right - working class families, many of whom are Black or Hispanic. You want examples of racism? There’s one for you - White teacher’s union heads making decisions that compromised the well-being of children and families of color.

Ask a woke person about any of this, and you won’t get any admission that any of this was wrong. And therein lies the problem. We have failed an entire generation of young people, and no one is being held responsible for it.

Woke Issue 4: Race and Law Enforcement

Come with me on a brief trip back in time - to the late spring and early summer of 2020. George Floyd had been killed shortly before that, and the global public was rightly furious. The anger was all over the political spectrum. Liberals and conservatives were equally incensed. But the solutions that the two sides were offering were as different as they could possibly be.

Conservatives proposed improving police training, so that officers would be taught to interact more respectfully with citizens - especially citizens of color. Clearly the officer who killed George Floyd had been way out of line, and the other officers who were with him did nothing to stop him. Police officers needed to be retrained - everyone knows that cops are often arrogant and disrespectful to citizens, and there had been a series of incidents involving officers killing Black citizens. Something clearly needed to change.

Woke people on the extreme Left, however, had a very different message. The police should be abolished entirely! “Defund the police” and “Abolish the police” became commonly used slogans among the woke. You can just call a social worker if someone is breaking into your home at three in the morning, the logic went. The idea made no sense at all - does anyone really think that a career criminal who is trying to invade your home in the middle of the night is going to stop because a social worker showed up? No, I think that social worker is probably going to end up dead - and so are you.

Ironically, many of the woke politicians who were pushing to defund the police had armed security for their homes! In other words, we can have people with guns protecting us, but you can’t - and if you disagree, then you’re just plain racist. The logic strains credibility, but many people went along with it. If you disagreed too forcefully, you might get kicked off social media, lose your job, and get placed into Adult Time Out for a few years.

Interestingly enough, many of the people who were against defunding the police were the people who would have been directly affected by such a move. Inner-city Black people were overwhelmingly against getting rid of police, because the high crime rates in some of these communities meant that calling the police was often necessary. The people who were calling for police to be defunded were more likely to be middle-class Whites living in suburban areas with lower crime rates. You know, the people whose lives wouldn’t really be affected if the police were to lose their funding.

That’s the essence of being woke - advocating for viewpoints and policies that strain credibility but that don’t cost the woke person anything. And as for defunding the police, the verdict is in. Cities that defunded their police departments saw crime rates rise precipitously, and the people who paid the price were overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic victims of violent crime. Yes, the officer who killed George Floyd was out of line (to say the least), and he deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. I was calling for him to get the death penalty! But his despicable actions don’t mean that all police officers need to lose their jobs.

After Floyd’s murder, critical race theory went mainstream. Suddenly, everyone and everything was racist. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo published books accusing all White people of racism - akin to the Christian doctrine of original sin. If you were White, you were a racist, even if you never said or did anything hurtful to people of color. Your very existence is racist. Robin DiAngelo, in her book White Fragility, sets up a trap for Whites who insist they are not racist - if you resist the idea that you are a racist, then your resistance is just further evidence of how racist you are! White people who marry people of color are only doing so to escape charges of racism, and White parents who adopt Black children are just trying to hide their racism. Never mind that you might actually love the person you’re marrying or adopting. As Ashleigh Shackelford wrote on a chalkboard as part of her training session for White adults, All White People Are Racist. There’s no getting out of it - just admit what an awful person you are.

This madness went on for more than four years. Critical race theory was everywhere - it was in TV commercials, in corporate trainings, in sporting events, you name it. The National Basketball Association (NBA) probably gets the ultimate Critical Race Theory Award - during the 2020 playoffs, which were held in a “bubble” at Disney World in Central Florida, players’ names on the back of their jerseys were replaced with woke slogans. You had How Many More passing to Say Their Names, who then passed to I Can’t Breathe for the slam dunk. I understand the desire to raise awareness about the deaths of George Floyd and other Black victims at the hands of police officers, but was this not a bit over the top? Fans clearly thought so - they stayed away in droves. The 2020 NBA playoffs garnered the lowest ratings - by far - of any playoff campaign in the last 40 or 50 years.

The thing that really upset me was that the value of a Black life seemed to depend on who ended that life. If it was a White police officer, there would be demonstrations in the streets of major cities. But if it was another Black person, few people even seemed to notice. Imagine being that mother, grandmother, wife, or daughter who got the news that your loved one had been murdered - and that no one really cared because the murderer was Black. How would you feel? I know how I would feel - I would be incensed.

If Black lives really matter - and I wholeheartedly believe that they do - then every single Black life matters. If a Black person is killed, whether by a White police officer or by another Black person, it’s a tragedy. In 2022, Tyre Nichols, a Black husband and father in Memphis, was driving home from work when he was stopped for having a broken taillight. The incident ended with Nichols being killed by five police officers who beat him to death for no discernible reason.

Yet most woke people have no idea who Tyre Nichols was. You know why? Because all of the police officers who murdered him were Black. Had even one of those officers been White, there would have been protests all over the place.

So did Tyre Nichols’s life not matter because of the races of the officers who killed him? Did his wife and children lose their husband and father for no reason, and did no one seem to care, because there were no political points to be scored in protesting his murder? What does the lack of attention to Tyre Nichols’s death say about the woke movement as a whole? If you were his wife, or one of his children, how would you feel about all of this?

Summing Up

Wokeness is performative. It’s about saying and doing the Right Things so that one can feel, and be perceived as, virtuous. Yet most woke people don’t really care about the issues they are going on and on about. Many of the college students participating in the “river to the sea” protests have no idea where Palestine is or what river and sea they are referring to in their chants. The people chanting “globalize the intifada” in the streets of New York, London, or Sydney don’t know that “intifada” means violent uprising - or that the murder of Jews at Bondi Beach in Australia last December is part of “globalizing the intifada.” The celebrities who admonish the United States, Canada, or Australia for being on stolen land don’t seem too keen to give up their mansions - which, by the way, are also on stolen land. The people who are putting “she/her” and “he/him” in their email signatures (and even in their email addresses!!) often refer to “both genders” - which seems to undermine their claims of gender fluidity, no?

Returning back to the title of this post, why am I not woke? Because I am authentic. I believe that Tyre Nichols’s life mattered just as much as George Floyd’s life did. I believe that indigenous people and groups should be empowered and helped as much as possible. When my family and I lived in Florida, I took my kids to the Seminole reservation several times so we could learn more about their culture and history. When we were in New Mexico in 2023, my family and I talked with Native artisans about their cultural backgrounds, and we went out of our way to buy from them and support their businesses. I have friends who are Israeli and friends who are Palestinian, and I have asked both sets of friends to help me understand the conflict between the two sides. I see fault on both sides of that conflict, so I have said very little about it publicly. (Whatever goodwill Israel had after the October 7th attacks has been squandered as Bibi Netanyahu and his commanders have leveled Gaza, and their mission has not succeeded given that Hamas is still standing.)

By definition, woke people are insincere. They say and do what they think will keep them in good standing with the Good People. People who are obviously female putting “she/her/hers” into their email signature makes no sense - and many trans people have made it known that this kind of virtue signaling is a turnoff to them. I have never declared my pronouns simply because I don’t need to. They are obvious. And me declaring them does nothing to help or empower anyone. Just as saying that the US is on stolen land does nothing unless I’m willing to give up my home to a Native family. And calling everything racist is like the Boy Who Cried Wolf - it desensitizes people to charges of racism so that, when racist incidents do occur, they are less likely to be taken seriously.

Most of all, wokeness has undermined the Democratic Party and other left-leaning parties and movements around the world. The endless virtue signaling has turned people away from important issues, and I argue in many of my posts that wokeness is a major reason why Donald Trump won the 2024 election. The same people who cried racism at every turn also put their pronouns into their social media handles, posted Facebook pictures of themselves wearing masks, and incessantly chanted “From the river to the sea” after the October 7th terrorist attacks. When someone always takes the perfectly woke position on everything, I would question that person’s sincerity. (The same goes for people who always take the perfectly anti-woke position on everything!) You want to know why Stephen Miller, an admitted racist and White supremacist, is in charge of US immigration policy? Blame the Woke Brigade and their barrage of virtue signaling, which turned moderate voters off and pushed them toward Trump. As CNN commentator Van Jones said after the last presidential election, you can’t call everyone racist and then expect them to vote for you.

My views are sincerely held, and I express them respectfully and authentically. I think for myself, and I almost never agree with anyone on everything they say. I’m real and I say what I mean and mean what I say. The idea of going with the crowd on anything seems utterly foreign, and pointless, to me.

British commentator Piers Morgan recently published a book that he entitled Woke is Dead. For all our sakes, let’s hope he’s right.