We have now reached peak bullshit. When asked in a recent interview for El País if the reelection of Donald Trump meant “the woke is broke,” Judith Butler responded, “I don’t even know what the woke is. It’s just a slur that the right wing uses.” 

This is the bleeding edge of rhetorical acumen, folks, and it’s truly groundbreaking. Here’s the trick: you just lie. 

So one of the vanguard feminist intellectuals who drove forward the deconstructions of gender and who now uses “they/them” pronouns has no idea what “woke” means, claims it’s just a slur. If you can believe that, you can believe anything.

But Butler’s claim is by no means an unfamiliar fiction. If you happen to still use social media for anything more than watching reels, if you happen to descend into the comments (which hardly anyone does anymore and may itself indicate a degree of masochism or stupidity!) you will find that any discussion of wokeness is shot through with people who arrive to the discussion (using this term very generously here) believing that they are in possession of the rhetorical version of the scholar’s checkmate:

“Nobody can even explain to me what ‘woke’ means. It’s just a slur.” 

This is a level of cope that should not even be possible. Freddie deBoer has put it pretty well speaking about that same Judith Butler interview:  “[The] ongoing pretense that the word ‘woke’ has literally no denotative content is a bizarre and sad affect that a lot of progressive people are clinging to with white knuckles as a way to avoid the fact that their political movement has eaten shit as badly as a political movement can in the past few years.” Not a single person over the age of 14 believes this garbage for one second. 

Here’s the thing: the moment that you actually start trying to discover what “woke” really does mean–beyond the pretty low-res vibes-based instinct that most people rely on–the more you realize that this entire discourse is totally fake. The meaning of “woke” rests on a long history that is easily verifiable and undisputed by all parties involved. All you have to do is crack open some of these books and essays and provided that you’re possessed of a sufficient Lexile level, it’s all right there–admittedly, there are a few junctures that can be hard to sort out without help (have I recommended Joseph Heath yet?).

Of course, cracking open a book and reading a bunch of intentionally abstruse prose is probably a little less popular than anal bleaching currently. I guess that it’s fitting that the claim that “wokeness” is some kind of right-wing boogeyman would coincide with the general decline of literacy in the West. 

But the idea that Judith motherfuckin’ Butler cannot understand what woke means is the pinnacle of intellectual dishonesty. Butler has, for years, been my go-to for explaining how Marxism made the leap from being about economics to being about pronouns. That’s because she explained all of this herself in a 1997 paper called “Merely Cultural” in which she defended her brand of feminist, gender-critical cultural analysis against other “conservative” leftists that were inclined to think of her kinds of critique as being of lesser work. To counter this, she attempted to connect LGBT issues to economic critique by pointing out its importance to the production of people. All of this, to her, is necessary work towards the goal of “social justice,” but today people tend to just call it “intersectionality.” (Lefties will sometimes get very uppity about the “correct usage” of these terms but you can literally just ignore them. Ten times out of ten, their complaint is just some species of pedantry designed to derail the discussion.) 

How the Marxist vanguard become obsessed with the more nebulous social justice or “intersectionality” rather than bringing about the communist revolution is an interesting subject, but Joseph Heath, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, has written an excellent primer on it titled, “John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism.”

How the work of a bunch of egg-headed academics and awful writers came to dominate most of our institutions is another interesting subject, one that is covered in no small detail in Richard Hanania’s 2023 book, The Origins of Woke. 

But beyond all the dry theory and historical stuff, what people today call “wokeness” is the perceived (usually accurately) efforts at social-engineering that undermine or challenge certain socio-cultural ideals that were basically universal until very recently–things like gender or “heteronormativity.” When it comes to issues of race or sex, the name of the game is “inclusion” and “challenging stereotypes.” Sometimes this looks like the casting of canonically (or historically) ethnically European characters as black or really any other race. Sometimes it looks like girl-bosses triumphing over the evil white (he’s always white) patriarchal figure or his limp-necked son. Often it has involved white characters denigrating themselves and their race as “evil” or just “boring.” And what has generally bothered people about this is not so much that they hate any of the different groups involved, but rather than they recognize that certain demographic groups are being consciously elevated through these representations (not itself a bad thing) at the expense of other demographic groups (this is the part that gets most people angry). Such as when Google search results refuse to provide accurate images for requests for “happy white female” or “white American family.” 

Or when Google’s AI image generator, Gemini, was shown to be unable to create an image of a white pope or founding father. 

But that highlights one of the features of wokeness. For any single event or movie or show or game, there is a certain level of plausible deniability, which allows idiots online to make claims like– 

These racists just don’t like seeing black people and women.

Or…

These conservatards would hate Terminator or Alien if it was released today and call their heroines ‘girl bosses.’ 

First of all, I don’t actually think this is even true–the universal popularity of Vi from Arcane, a strong and independent lesbian, shows that audiences are still capable of navigating the distinctions between a strong female leads and a girl-bosses. Secondly, when those movies were originally released, they weren’t part of a very obvious propaganda campaign to change the way audiences see everything from race to the importance of muscle-mass. Woke isn’t a single film or comic or video game or TV series. It is the conscious inclusion of certain values on the part of the creators of those products, and the denigration of opposing values and the groups that hold them. It’s an effort to shift the Overton Window in a favorable direction for those causes, values, and ideologies, and to impose that vision onto passive observers who may lack the baseline understanding to comprehend the issue. 

Henceforth, “woke doesn’t mean anything” should be universally recognized as a simple declaration that the speaker is either 

1. willfully dishonest and incapable of or unwilling to seriously engage with their intellectual opposition (Butler fits in here) 

or…

2. so ignorant that they should only be treated as precocious children who need to be given reading assignments and then ignored until they’ve completed their homework. “Here’s some books. Get to work, fucker.” 

Nothing else need be said on the subject.