Wokeness is impossible to escape. Everywhere you turn, you see rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter signs, or calls for “diversity and inclusion.” Companies force DEI trainings on staff. FBI agents march in Pride parades. Teachers tell kids in school that they are oppressors or oppressed based on their skin color. Target stores sell transgender swimsuits and Bud Light teams up with a grown man who acts like a little girl. Even Buzz Lightyear and “Star Wars” have gone woke.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is falling all over itself to push transgender pronouns, to promote drag queens, and to celebrate Pride—even on Easter Sunday!

It’s enough to drive anyone with common sense up a wall. Yet when Americans dare to say, “Enough!” they find themselves branded “authoritarian” for wanting a moment’s peace.

If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.

 

Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.

That report reads like a dispatch from a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia, where evil white Christian jackbooted thugs have seized control of the government and are forcing everyone to adopt their propaganda. The report is so divorced from reality, it would be downright hilarious if so much of the legacy media, corporate America, the Democrats, and the Department of Justice didn’t take it deadly seriously.

In a classic case of projection, the SPLC report warns that the Right is trying to take control of the culture and erase the poor persecuted left-wing minority groups while the SPLC covers for the woke movement, which has already seized the commanding heights of American culture and is straining to silence dissent. It calls conservative efforts “ethnocide” (the erasure of an ethnic group’s culture, akin to genocide), and “Christian supremacy.”

Back at home in the real world, the woke elites have already taken control of the culture and worked to dismantle America’s heritage. Christians, Jews, and even atheists who hold beliefs about the world and America that used to be the norm find themselves living in what feels like a different country—nay, a different world.

Education

Woke ideology has seeped into the education system at an alarming pace.

Critical race theory, or CRT—a lens by which teachers tell white students they are oppressors and black students they are oppressed in a “systemically racist” America—amounts to a new form of “anti-racist” discrimination on the basis of race.

Transgender ideology teaches kids that males can become female and vice versa, encouraging experimental medical interventions while ignoring the horrific toll that “gender-affirming care” takes on young bodies.

Yet for the spin masters at the SPLC, efforts to weaken the suffocating grasp of woke ideology on America’s institutions amount to cultural tyranny. To them, commonsense Americans’ campaign against critical race theory and transgender ideology in schools is a form of oppression, while “drag queen story hour” is a symbol of “freedom” and is important for “democracy.”

The “Year in Hate and Extremism” includes a long section demonizing parental rights groups and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for “ethnocide through authoritarianism.” That section compares Florida’s efforts to prevent discrimination (what else do you call shaming students for the color of their skin?) to the “forced acculturation” of Native Americans in previous eras. It suggests parental rights groups and DeSantis are trying to “control a man’s thinking” to make minority groups more subservient.

Another section raises the alarm about school choice, suggesting that it is a secret “Dominionist Christian” plot to take over society.

The SPLC warns against “dominionism,” the idea that “only Christians … have the right to control government and all influential posts in society and culture.”

“The goal of much of this theology is to strip government of functions such as education and welfare and … reserve those for churches,” the SPLC warns. It claims “dominionists” want to “siphon off public funds and put them in the hands of a reactionary minority.”

The SPLC strains to connect its attack on school choice to racial segregation. It warns that dominionism aims “to fulfill a decades-old dream, begun when segregated schools were ruled unconstitutional, to keep education shackled to a narrow, authoritarian version of Christianity.”

So, parents who are fed up with the woke takeover of public education, who want to find schools that won’t indoctrinate their kids into CRT and transgender orthodoxy, and who want the education dollars they pay in taxes to follow their children when they leave this woke school system are pushing a form of segregationist “authoritarianism?”

If anyone is “authoritarian” in this situation, it’s the leftist activists who subverted the public school system in the first place, not the parents who want another option.

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