The campaign against ‘woke’ is no ordinary culture war skirmish – it is a project to restore the violence of slavery and white rule.

This is what the anti-woke state is — the plantation: white supremacist America under the occupation of more open white supremacists. There is no daylight between the campaign to end wokeness and the desire to see Black populations suffer, however much anti-wokeness is presented as the reasonable middle ground between the extremism of both sides — the Ku Klux Klan on one side and the bodies they hung from trees on the other.

The anti-woke in power immediately set about resurrecting their shrines to the sex traffickers of Black children and merchants of Black flesh. They immediately set out to curtail Black liberties and reverse performative efforts to reduce police shootings — however insincere. Being woke has always meant being attuned to anti-Blackness and resisting the society of white rule — which is why it is hated the world over. The colonist leaders who have shaken hands in agreement that anti-wokeness is the new paradigm, from the conservative former grand wizard to the progressive governor, have all meant the same thing: to see resistance ridiculed and dismantled.

The people who decry wokeness are no different from the people who decried Emancipation. What, indeed, was the abolition of slavery to a Confederate, other than woke government overreach? What was the integration of restaurants and schools to the segregationist other than woke corporations and DEI gone mad? What the 19th-century Redeemers sought, what the millions-strong 20th-century Ku Klux Klan sought, and what the 21st-century MAGA movement seeks is the restoration of the whipping post.

Really moving piece on the road that MAGA is leading us down.