SLR: So Woke was a scam. Who knew?

US congresswoman AOC recently laughed off 'woke' as a thing of the past, quoting a colleague who called it crazy. In a Daily Friend opinion piece, columnist Simon Lincoln Reader argues the laughter is premature and self-serving, coming only after voters delivered heavy defeats to the politics AOC once championed. He contends the ideology's true legacy isn't a punchline but a trail of casualties: cancelled careers, fractured families and emboldened extremism, citing scenes from Seattle in 2020 to this year's Notting Hill Carnival. Declaring victory over 'woke', he writes, does nothing to undo the harm already done..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.I liked how US congresswoman and saucy LatinX Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) spoke about ‘woke’ recently on American television. Talking about yet another mentally deranged Democratic Socialists and a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly called Francesca Hong, AOC quoted a New York councilman who had remarked to her that ‘woke 1 was crazy’. AOC’s pretty mental herself: recently she’s started freezing her eggs, going to yoga and has sacked her ginger fiance. Mick Hucknall, leader of Simply Red, once claimed that racism against gingers was just as bad as normal racism. AOC’s ex may want to write to Mick, explore some possibilities there. The way she laughed about ‘woke’ – in a past tense – was akin to a woman telling her girlfriends about a blowout night out after too much cheap hooch. Maybe a camcorder was used. Dwarves perhaps. A lady vomiting in an ashtray. Sounds like fun. But there are a few problems here. Firstly, ‘woke’ still endures in parts of the world. Secondly and more importantly, if it ever ends – and there’s no guarantee of that – it will be remembered more for the casualties it claimed than a Dancing Bear™ bender with the girls, where the heavier ones got a bit handsy with the Jamaican hunk in a thong. What exactly was ‘woke 1’? At the risk of complicating the debilitating condition, I remember driving past a house in Los Angeles’ most prosperous suburb of Bel Air shortly after the 2020 elections and noticing a sign pitched into the lawn next to its gates. It was a horizontal pride flag; descending from the top in each shade of the flag’s colours, it said:‘IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTERWOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTSNO HUMAN IS ILLEGALSCIENCE IS REALLOVE IS LOVE’ Behind the gates, where a man was shouting at a woman exiting a Porsche wearing gym clothes (and a mask), the pile was worth – easily – $10m. I figured that the owner had a (very privately) dim view of that summer’s mostly peaceful chaos and carnage across his country, so decided to put his Lululemon-ed wife to work by purchasing crap from Temu (one of its best selling products in America that year), then spiking it as a peace offering to anticipated rampaging mobs – the coward’s version of how Colonel Kurtz displayed the skulls of his victims on posts near his hut as a ‘don’t-come-make-trouble-here-boy’. Basically, and in the interests of self preservation, the property’s shot caller was trying to outscam the scam.If you ask me, one of the worst things ‘woke 1’ did was to legitimize one of the most underrated groups of savages on the planet. Antifa. Perpetually lying about their agenda (‘we’re just antifacists’) and consisting of cheap sex workers, pederasts, tweakers and sodomites, ‘woke 1’ gave these inchoates licence – and the attention they craved. Law enforcement went soft on them, as did prosecutors and even city administrators. When antifa cannibal-adjacents stormed an area of Seattle in 2020, the mayor described the invasion as a ‘cooking festival’, but when rape and murder were included on the menu, not even progressive officials could stomach it. Americans who hate America – most of whom were actors, writers, academics and activists – then noted the country’s vacuum in exporting anything of substance anymore (‘the knowledge economy’), so promptly filled it with ‘woke 1’. Great Britain took its first deliveries – and was thrilled. Tell London that ‘woke 1’ is sleeping or on its way out and you’ll trigger another wave of statue topplings. There, it’s on amphetamines, like a Russian garage party. Last weekend saw the annual Notting Hill Carnival – ‘a celebration of West Indian culture’ – in which only 680 people were arrested. In a scene that resembled America’s cities on fire in 2020, the commentator for Sky News remarked that, despite the arrests and two related deaths, the number of zombie knives and flick knives and other weapons confiscated, it was overwhelmingly positive’. Now, try talking about ‘woke’ in the past tense to that guy. .Read more:.New York’s new mayor and the perils of progressive politics: Simon Lincoln Reader.Or parts of southern and south-western England occupied by retired boomers who incorporated ‘woke 1’ into the permanent classism of their country. Tell them: ‘sorry, Liberal Democrat voters Clive and Margo, AOC – once a poster girl for ‘woke’ – has admitted the whole thing was a joyride, a moral swindle, a virtue heist.’ How do you think they’ll take that? Not well I expect. Clive may even try to run over you with his caravan. It’s obvious why AOC is girly-laughing. She’s seen it for what it was / is. She’s witnessed someone who thinks as she does being comprehensively trounced during elections, so is making a sheepish retreat. But whatever her mood during the moment, the world is indisputably more hostile and less forgiving for ‘woke’. If we are to take Rowan Atkinson seriously – that the devil has plans for lawyers – it’s hard to see how he – or she – could ever match this era of torment. Filled with scammers and outscammers, cold-hearted cancelations, firings, ritual humiliation and social contagions relating to the gender identity dimension of the condition, ‘woke 1’s chief accomplishments lie in the ashes of families no longer speaking to one another, strangers encouraged to hate each other, parasitic politicians seizing expedience and even companies telling the public: ‘if you don’t believe what we believe, don’t buy our stuff’. The nauseating sight of adult men prostrating themselves before false idols. The greatest insult to our intelligence we’ll ever know. If we’re not soft and survive, one day we’ll remember ‘woke 1’ not as ‘crazy’ but as it deserves to be. A full-blown crime against humanity. .*Simon Lincoln Reader was born in Johannesburg. He spent a decade living in London, where he worked in financial services, eventually co-founding investment marketplace Lofotr Investors. He writes a Friday column for The Daily Friend, podcasts twice week and is a trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation, a charity awarding bursaries to young people in Cape Town..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

SLR: So Woke was a scam. Who knew?

Related Stories

The Economist on Woke II: Nepo-baby socialists - America's left trades race for class

BNC#9 | Dr Abedian Q&A: America's lost war, SA's "non-alignment", Israel-Palestine, oil's big moment

BNC#9 | Sasol CEO Simon Baloyi: Turning around an SA giant through Trump, tariffs and turmoil

Magnus Heystek: Why I didn’t bring one cent back from abroad