Conservative Author Can't Define What Woke Means
She had a bit of a brain fart
In these strange and absurd times, partisans label their political opponents with plenty of vague and ill-defined terms. Many of these terms, dictated by spur-of-the-moment reactions, take on seemingly self-evident meanings without providing any real information about what is described, as is the goal with many of these labels. One such label is ‘woke,’ which has been used ad nauseum to smear anyone and everything as somehow dangerous to the public. This is especially common among conservatives, who took the term's original meaning and twisted it for their agenda. Despite that being their tactic, some of them can’t define what it means.
In a recent interview on Rising with Briahna Joy Gray, the conservative writer, and activist Bethany Mendell complained about supposed transgender indoctrination and promoted her book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation (2023). During that interview, she repeatedly used the term ‘woke’ to describe what she saw as the corruption of American youth. However, when asked what she meant by ‘woke,’ she couldn’t answer the question.
The fact that she couldn’t define the term itself should not surprise anyone. Woke has been an amorphous term among conservatives whose objectives are less about describing actual phenomena and more about putting people into boxes that they can discard. Leftist YouTuber Ian Danskin made this point well in his video The Alt-Right Playbook: Never Play Defense (2018).
By up putting labels that can be used as an attack instead of addressing the original meaning of a term or the idea it was supposed to represent, right-wingers can avoid the discussions they find difficult to address.
The fact that Mandell was unable to define what she meant is just another example of the hollow nature of right-wing rhetoric. Nobody should be surprised, and even more, people should come to expect this hollow approach to politics.