Tag: woke

Commentary: Unions’ Focus on Woke over Work Rankles Rank and File

RealClearWire

Los Angeles school teacher Glenn Laird has been a union stalwart for almost four decades. He served as a co-chair of his school’s delegation to United Teachers Los Angeles and proudly wore union purple on the picket line.

But Laird is now suing to leave UTLA and demanding a refund of the dues the union has collected since his resignation request. His turning point came in July 2020 when the union, the second largest teachers union in the country, joined liberal activists to demand that Los Angeles defund the police in response to Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

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Shrier: ‘Aw Shucks Conservatives’ Are Handing America Over to the Woke

Minnesota Sun Staff
Christopher Rufo

Both meek “aw shucks” conservatives and “chest thumpers” conservatives are handing America over to woke activists, author Abigail Shrier claimed in a Monday Substack.

The journalist and author highlighted the successful work of anti-Critical Race Theory writer Christopher Rufo, who Shrier praised for speaking not to elites, but to Americans, by “gathering evidence and pointing out the glaring harm in clear, unapologetic (but never crass or rude) language.”

“Rufo is out there identifying the problem, alerting the public, and sounding all available alarms,” Shrier wrote. “If he hasn’t yet slain the beast, he has at least awakened American parents from their coma, convinced them that they cannot trust the teachers and administrators and school boards who treat children, not as students, but as recruits for their revolution.”

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Commentary: Wokeness Has the Potential to Destroy the Military from Within

Minnesota Sun Staff

Wokeness might do to the American military what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls.

Wokeness—extreme ideological intolerance of opposing views and the imposition of life-destroying punishments for the insufficiently woke—is organized fratricide. 

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Over a Thousand Former Military Members Sign Letter Warning About ‘Wokeness’ in the Military

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Debra Heine   Over 1,000 former members of the military have signed a scathing public letter warning that the increased priority placed on “wokeness” in the military is a threat to the Constitution and the nation’s military readiness. The letter comes after Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley…

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Commentary: The ‘Woke’ Are Sleeping on China

Minnesota Sun Staff

Every day I read online about systemic racism, transgender issues, President Joe Biden’s latest faux pas, and other American social ills.

All well and good. I’ve written about some of these same issues as well. But are we elevating the trivial at the expense of the significant? Many of our citizens are focused on the ongoing cultural battle over subjects such as racism and transgender athletes.

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New Docuseries Takes Aim at the ‘Woke Reformation’

Minnesota Sun Staff
Dave Rubin

An upcoming docuseries hopes to burst the woke bubble billowing across Western culture.

“The Woke Reformation,” first teased on “The Rubin Report” May 14, tracks the rise of a woke culture that has infiltrated everything from academia to global corporations like Coke, Starbucks and Nike.

Dave Rubin, a self-described “classical liberal,” broke the news about the docuseries via his “Rubin Report” YouTube show and podcast.

“Woke Reformation” director Travis Brown also teamed with Rubin to share details about the project via Locals.com, Rubin’s social media platform. The author of 2020’s “Don’t Burn This Book” created the cyber network to allow artists to speak their minds without fear of cancellation.

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Commentary: The Strange Death of the British Labour Party

Minnesota Sun Staff
Labour Party

I must visit Twitter periodically to renew my sense of horror. For lurid anthropological enjoyment, Twitter offers a safari to those inclined. Twitter is most satisfying when reality intrudes upon those dedicated to unreality, the “my-truthers.” 

Last week’s elections in Great Britain were such an occasion. “Fascists live among us!” cried the Woke, who call for the professional death and canceling of anyone who disagrees with them. 

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Commentary: How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War

Minnesota Sun Staff
Riot in Minnesotta; BLM

The other day, I wrote that “woke” was the new conformism.

It is, of course, but I undersold it. It’s much more than that and more dangerous.

As Tal Bachman notes at Steynonline, it’s now our state religion, a state religion in a country that—constitutionally and for good reason—isn’t supposed to have one.

But “Wokism” is yet more than that, too. It’s a mass psychosis similar to many that have arisen throughout history when the masses followed leaders who, in their zeal or self-interest, took them to disastrous ends.

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Commentary: Tuning Out Wokeism

Minnesota Sun Staff
Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

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Commentary: The U.S. Military Is Just Another Woke Institution

Minnesota Sun Staff
The backsides of American soldiers in uniform

Tucker Carlson spurred a much-needed reexamination of the military in March. His monologue criticizing the military’s political correctness drew a more furious response from top brass than any foreign threat is likely to do. The generals’ response only affirmed Tucker’s points about the degraded state of our armed forces. Why do generals—both current and retired—feel the need to condemn civilians who question the wisdom of putting women in combat?

The answer is that the military, along with the entire national security establishment, is at one with the Democrat-Media complex. The image we have of generals and senior officers as defenders of tradition is wildly out of step with reality.

This fact is underscored by its contrast with a letter issued in France last week. The letter—signed by 20 retired generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers—was stridently right-wing. “The hour is late, France is in peril, threatened by several mortal dangers,” the letter states. Though retired, we remain soldiers of France, and cannot, under the present circumstances, remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful country.”

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Commentary: The Truth vs. Woke Fascism in Georgia

Minnesota Sun Staff

During World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower liked to remind his troops of the adage, “plans seldom survive initial contact with the enemy.” Today, the corollary is that the truth seldom survives initial contact with woke fascism.

Woke fascism—the unholy alliance between the Democratic-controlled national government, corporate leftist media, Big Tech, and globalist corporations loyal to profits over our republic—is now attacking the state of Georgia for wanting to ensure that elections in the Peach State are free, fair, and accurate.

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Commentary: The Joe Biden Who Never Was

Minnesota Sun Staff

These are the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive—and certainly the most dangerous. And its catalyst is the myth of ol’ Joe from Scranton who has unleashed furies and hatreds never quite seen in modern American history.

“Woke” Joe Biden

At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents.

Biden’s concocted working-man schtick meant praising former segregationists of the Senate like Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland. He would talk tough about inner-city predators, even as he pontificated about his support for tough drug sentencing. Kamala Harris, without any political traction other than her race and gender, once predicated her unimpressive and early aborted presidential campaign on the single strategy of knocking Joe out of the primaries for his purported innate racism that hurt victims of color, such as herself, the deprived child of two Ph.Ds.

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Commentary: Fully Woke Joe

Minnesota Sun Staff

On the identity politics that used to be known as “civil rights” Sleepy Joe is fully woke.

Just as he prioritized sex and race identity for his vice presidential pick, Joe Biden would racialize his monetary policy by remaking the Federal Reserve banking system. Biden is thereby the most identity-focused candidate in American history since the 19th century. And with the force of the Democratic Party behind him, he lacks any guard rails. 

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Commentary: The Worship of Power Over Truth

Minnesota Sun Staff

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about “purity spirals.” That’s what the journalist Gavin Haynes calls the familiar “moral feeding frenzy” that occurs whenever ideology triumphs over truth. The French Revolution provides vivid historical examples, as did Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s. Those caught in a purity spiral, I observed, invariably find themselves embarked on an endless search for enemies, “a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, ‘is always one of purer-than-thou.’”

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Commentary: When Enough is Enough, the ‘Woke’ Are ‘Awakening’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Recently, I read with great interest James Lindsay’s essay called “The Woke Breaking Point.” There, he invites his readers to ask friends and acquaintances “What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?” This, he suggests, is a way to help people keep themselves honest: if you consider in advance what state of affairs, specifically, would be “too far,” then you will be able to recognize better the excesses of the totalitarian Left and more ready to resist them at the point when it becomes absolutely necessary.

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Commentary: The Left and Their ‘Woke Racism’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism” – the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others – it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

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Commentary: Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Victor Davis Hanson   Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole – each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures:…

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