James Lindsay is asking folks on Twitter when exactly they broke with the woke. To me, that sounds like a good topic for a post, so:
Strictly speaking, I never had a woke breaking point because I was never woke. I grew up in a military family; consequently, I'm a cradle conservative. While I spent most of my young life focused on things outside of politics, I still absorbed a firm patriotism and a suspicion of changing things just for change's sake.
There is, however, that one moment at which I transformed from a basically-apolitical-but-instinctively-conservative young adult to an actively engaged conservative young adult: 9/11. The weeks immediately after that attack really opened my eyes to the depravity of the left. Ground Zero was still smoking, yet these people were already blaming us. I learned who the brainchildren were behind the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition - and who they were willing to defend (basically every vile dictator you could think of) - and quickly became hypervigilant when it came to defending basic American values. Consequently, for the next fifteen years, I worked for GOP campaigns, showed up at local conservative rallies, and eagerly jumped into the culture wars whenever they intersected with my fandoms (which they did in a big way after 2010; see my first post on that topic here).
And then there were the things that convinced me to board the Trump Train despite my initial reluctance. First, the unexamined contempt with which the media treated the Trump voter was already pulling me away from establishment conservatism by the early days of 2017. I may not have been a Trump voter myself, but I had friends who were, I knew their hearts -- and thus, I was certain they weren't unreconstructed bigots. There was something else going on -- and unlike many #NeverTrump conservatives, I was intellectually curious enough to seek out what it was.
Secondly, there were the obvious smear campaigns -- against Trump, against Justice Kavanaugh, and against the Covington kids. The latter, to me, was especially heinous. As I wrote at the time, what I saw there were a bunch of fellow nerds and rejects projecting all of their high school resentments onto a group of teens they didn't know and then acting out their darkest revenge fantasies to the applause of their peers. It was sick, it was abusive, and it only solidified my determination to prevent these people from gaining any more power than they already had.
And finally, there were the things I detailed in the thirteenth paragraph of my extensive open letter to several spineless members of the GOPe. The one thing I hate more than anything in the world is attempts to control me. But just below that is procedural inequality. I say it all the time: I just want the rules to be the same for everyone. Yet 2020 made it crystal clear that leftists, despite all their talk about "justice" and "equity," are merely interested in punishing people they perceive to be "privileged" and rewarding others they like. They have no genuine interest in making things fair -- and they certainly don't care about "the science" or truth.
So there you have it. I suspect this is not an especially original story; I think many people my age would say something vaguely similar. But this, in a nutshell, is why I'm not woke -- and why I never will be.
Bonus Links:
VIDEO: With Katie Herzog on the Expansion of LGBTQ Identity and How it is Wielded in Political Discourse, an interesting discussion of the ways in which people have appropriated the LGBT+ identity and weaponized it in political debates.
Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White, a years-old article that needs to make the rounds again because leftwing idiots still don't understand statistics.
Black Intellectuals Send Letter to Smith College President Demanding Apology for Workers Smeared as Racist, in which black moderates and conservatives laudably push back against an elite black student's claim to victimhood. More like this, please!
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