Define Woke... Go ahead, I’ll wait.
The Trump Administration hates it when people are “woke.”
But what does woke even mean? Fox News certainly never defines it.
Woke means awake, conscious. Woke means you’re awake to injustice, aware of racial hierarchy, patriarchy. Woke means you are class conscious. Class consciousness is when you wake up to the fact that the rich run our society.
Being awake to that fact helps you see through manipulation by the rich to preserve a system that feeds all the money and power to them. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. The rich are parasites. Conservatives don’t want you waking up like Neo in his goopy little pod in The Matrix and seeing all of that. They want you to stay asleep.
Republicans are especially committed to preserving the existing hierarchies, rich people on top, men over women, white people over black and brown, Christians and Zionists over everyone else. And conservatives know that it is a lot harder to preserve these hierarchies when people are awake and can see through the manipulation. That’s because propaganda is like a magic trick. Once you know how a magic trick works it loses the ability to fool you. When people are awake and can see how propaganda is used to manipulate them, propaganda stops working.
This is why the Trump Administration hates wokeness. This is why the right, Fox News especially, tries to vilify wokeness. There has been a smear campaign raging for years to make people believe wokeness is a threat. The propaganda message is that wokeness somehow hurts the public. It is said that wokeness erodes our values. Conservatives are conditioned to have a negative reaction when they hear the word “woke.” Woke is how the right wing defines its enemies.
And they’re right. The enemies of the right, the enemies of hierarchy are woke - awake to class struggle.
The right, the rich, know that it is much easier to hurt a person, suppress their wages, take away their rights, when they are asleep. A sleeping person is vulnerable.
This is why we all need to wake up. Wake up to class war. If you’re a working person who lives off your paycheck, class war is already being waged against you. Wake up so you can fight back. It’s like the Negro Mine Workers said way back in 1940, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.”
Wake up friends. Stay woke.
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