Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, the concept of “woke” is not a particularly new thing for you. Initially it came into somewhat common use as a term that described someone who was aware of what was going on in his/her community.
Of course, the dictionary describes woke as the past tense of wake. That is, being past the point of waking up. Today its common use is to refer to someone who sees the ‘infinite” ways in which racism, sexism and classism affect how we live our lives on a daily basis. And therein lies a problem.
Hard core leftists often use it as a pejorative, as in “not woke,” to smear people who do not agree with every progressive ideology put forth by the Democratic Party. It is also used in a knee jerk reaction against those who fail to keep up with and conform to Democratic talking points.
As with everything else ignorant politicians engage in, and being “woke” is certainly one of them, the Democrats will undoubtedly be shocked to learn that the habit of politicizing absolutely everything has led to unintended consequences.
Recently a New Hampshire woman, Karlyn Borysenko, became horrified at the hatred that had invaded her knitting world online. It got so bad that it actually made the New York Times and the BBC.
Borysenko noted,
“I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call.”
Now Borysenko was no centrist. She had been a Democrat for decades and had bought into the dogma the Democrats were good and the Republicans were evil. For example, anyone who supported PDJT must be a white supremacist. Borysenko lived inside the echo chamber of the Democratic Party. In particular, she got her news almost exclusively from MSNBC. Borysenko was convinced that PDJT hated anyone who was not a straight, white male.
What Borysenko did not realize was that the Democratic Left enjoys destroying those whose views they find unacceptable. She did not realize that cruelty and sadism had become the hallmarks of the Democratic Left. Wilhelm Stekel defined this in his 1929 book.
In short, the Left enjoys destroying people because it makes them feel morally superior. Of course the reality is that they are moral degenerates.
The hatred and vitriol coming from those on Borysenko’s side of the aisle over the most innocuous of things caused her to slow down and to begin to re-evaluate the positions she had bought into for a long time.
One of the favorite tactics of the Left when they are losing an ideological argument is to shout down, denigrate or try to smear people on the right who make good, logical arguments supporting their positions. The Left will call these people racists (most common), sexists, homophobes, islamophobes, etc.
Keeping in mind that, while such vitriol was not directed at her at that point, Borysenko still became uncomfortable with the tactics she was seeing that included so much hatred being directed at other human beings. She then stumbled onto the #WalkAway movement.
Borysenko had been told by her favorite news source, MSNBC, that the #WalkAway movement was fake and was just a bunch of Russian bots. She found out that was a lie. She met real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving. Borysenko was beginning to wriggle out of the straightjacket the Democratic Left and their media allies had put her in.
Then came the New Hampshire primary. She had attended the Democratic rally in Manchester. Despite trepidations she decided to attend the Trump rally days later.
PDJT believes in America. The Democrats believe only in themselves. Karlyn Borysenko has figured that out. While she may not like Trump the man, she sees Trump the President. And she likes what she sees.
As Andrea Widburg noted,
Borysenko is fed up with the vision that the Democrats are trying to sell, one of a hate-filled, dystopian country. She believes that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, but that it is Trump, of all people, who is trying to stitch the country together, while the Democrats are working to divide. She’s now an independent, not a Democrat, and rejects the Democrats’ divisiveness.
Karlyn Borysenko is another former Democrat who is now truly “woke.”
See Borysenko’s entire article here.