Could we be reaching peak woke?

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday the 7^th day of May in this the year of our Lord 2021. Today I will be looking at the question of whether we are approaching peak woke. Could the pendulum be swinging back the other direction or said another way? Could this be as bad as it gets? Or will we continue down the same road to our ultimate cultural and national destruction?

This is Mothers’ Day weekend and in the Castle Family I celebrate my wife Joan who is the mother of the family daughter. Both Joan and I lost our mothers many years ago, so we celebrate her and the family daughter whose husband returns from over a year’s exile at the bottom of the world due to the virus, so a glorious weekend of celebration for the Castle Family.

Definition of woke

What do I mean by the word woke? A good example of woke for Mothers’ Day is that the woke term for mother is birthing person. That’s right folks I wish I were kidding but I’m afraid not. Woke is an ideology of race and identity which holds basically that American white people are all racist because it is imbedded in their DNA. Often, they may not even be aware of it. But that racism is the reason for the lack of success of non-whites when and if there is lack of success.¹

I defer to Paul Craig Roberts:

The Democrats, the media, the woke intellectuals, the universities, and the public schools are hard at work preparing our doom. The United States are now the Disunited States. The blue states believe in white guilt, critical race theory, systemic racism, identity politics, and that all products of Western Civilization, even mathematics, are symbols and devices of white supremacy. The red states do not have an understanding of the ideological assault that has been mounted against them.

Have we turned the corner on woke?

Dr. Roberts has given us a very good definition of the problem that the word woke, and its proponents present to us. My theory today is that we may have turned the corner, or we are at least at the edge of the corner. I want to give you a couple of examples of how things were in a different time and how they have changed today. I recently read an article from a faculty member of one our finer universities and this professor said that it was common for university faculty to live in fear that they would say something that offended one of their students.

An instructive example from an earlier era

When I was in college and later graduate school in the mid 70’s debate was encouraged not feared. The graduate classes were small, and students worked in classes of 7 or 8 students with the professor, sometimes even smaller. There was no punishment for disagreeing with and debating a professor, and the professor did not get fired if he challenged our beliefs. The idea was to challenge us intellectually in order that we might consider other views and ideas.

I can remember one incident in a political science class that was more philosophy than politics the professor announced that he was a socialist. Today that would be normal and expected, but back then in East Tennessee, it was shocking. He told us that socialism was the best way and the only fair system. Since debate was encouraged, I said to him that since socialism was the best system, he could probably give us 8 or 10 places where it had been tried successfully. No, well then how about just 2 0r 3 places? OK then just give us one place, just one example of how it was tried successfully and where it made the lives of ordinary people better. Well, he said, the people who have tried it just didn’t do it correctly or else the CIA ruined their efforts.

Recent legislative and executive action

The point is that debate between professor and students was seen as a teaching method and a good thing rather than something to get a professor fired or a student banned from class. Maybe people are starting to rebel just a little against the domineering efforts of our woke leaders. Here in my state of Tennessee the House just passed a bill banning the teaching of critical race theory in the public schools. The bill doesn’t mention CRT directly, but it bans the key elements of the theory from being taught.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, lifted the state’s remaining COVID restrictions, freeing the Florida economy and the day-to-day activities of Florida citizens from government regulations that shut down most economies. Governor DeSantis has become a national spokesperson among conservatives who have seen the results of his policies. I remember a headline from the New York Post a couple of weeks ago, “New York is alive and doing well—in Palm Beach Florida.” People in New York grew tired of their Governor Andrew Cuomo and voted with their feet and their money.

State v. federal attitudes – guess which one is woke today

Governor Cuomo does not seem to grasp his own culpability in the nursing home deaths or the many accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against him, but he has heard the bankrupt business owners and the fleeing citizens. He has scheduled the 19^th of May for the state to begin complete reopening, with Broadway at full capacity by September 14. Here in Tennessee, the governor has lifted the authority of mayors to order lockdowns and mask mandates and ordered the state to begin complete reopening May 15th. The Memphis Commercial Appeal, our very woke newspaper, editorialized that the Governor’s order should not apply here.

The legislatures in certain red states sense both overreach and weakness from the Biden/Harris administration and are moving to get out in front of his wave of executive orders and regulations. Georgia is not the only state to put voter ID in place and now many other states have joined Georgia with the very simple principle of voter I.D. It makes logical sense to most people that if you need an I.D. to buy a drink or fly on an airplane, it is not egregious to require it for voting. The New York Times, and the Washington Post do not see it that way and still call voter ID a restriction on voting.

The Arizona audit – and popular revolt in Texas

The Arizona legislature is currently conducting an audit of the 2020 election with many states to follow. The “victors” seem alarmed at the challenge of an election audit, but it has been commonplace in the past. More than a dozen states currently have nullified federal gun laws, or they are in the process of doing so. Those states are telling the federal government that they will not allow the overturning of the constitution by executive order. Time will tell us what the response of the federal officials will be to all this resistance, but the point is that resistance exists and it is growing.

Where elections have been held people voted overwhelmingly to end woke socialist experiments in their communities. Even in Austin, the Berkeley of Texas, the measures were resoundingly defeated. Teaching of critical race theory was defeated 70% to 30% in Southlake Texas. The school officials referred to it as the school diversity plan, but voters saw it for what it really was. Southlake is an affluent suburb 30 miles from Dallas and voters from both sides referred to the vote as a fork in the road or a watershed moment for the divisions in Texas.

More examples of Texas revolting against woke

In Austin, on May 1^st, voters overruled the mayor and city council and approved proposition B which reinstates a public camping ban that was reversed by the council in July 2019. The vote was 57% to 43%. The lifting of the public camping ban resulted in homeless people camping in public parks, on sidewalks and in downtown areas. If you want to see the results of such policies just visit LA or San Francisco. The people of Austin decided that their city could still be saved from the violent crime, public drug abuse, public defecation etc. that have plagued California’s cities, and they revoked the permission to legally do those things.

The group sponsoring the reinstating of the camping ban was called Save Austin Now. That group refused to give up until they managed to get the matter on the ballot. So some dedicated people do still care about their communities. Texas seems to be a hotspot as a result of the impact woke Democrat policies have had on that state. A dozen counties in Texas have declared states of emergency because of the worsening border crises. Arizona has similar conditions, and the governor is taking similar actions. The border states are under invasion from foreign nationals from who knows what countries, all invited by the Biden Administration. People are becoming alarmed but what can the states do to protect them?

National Guard deployments to the border

The governors are the commanders of the state national guards and do not need federal permission to send them to the border. The real questions involve the rules of engagement for the guard and anyone else defending the border. If I were an officer in the Guard, I would want a written order including the rules of engagement for my unit. If the rules do not permit lethal force, then sending the guard is a meaningless gesture. The states could also form state militias as permitted by the constitution to defend their borders since the federal authorities will do nothing to defend them but then the same rules of engagement problem exist.

The administration has started to experience a little pushback on things that obviously do not make logical sense. For example, to tell people there is no crises at the border is too ridiculous even for Democrat politicians to accept and even they have started demanding answers. Unfortunately, there is apparently no one in the Administration with enough intelligence to even make up a believable lie about what they are doing. That leaves them in the role of Baghdad Bob who famously responded to the American tanks by saying on American TV, you are not seeing this.

About that virus…!

There is a feeling in the air that the virus and its problems are over and done with. I see it each day on the faces of people in the gym and people as they pass through my office. We are still required to wear masks to enter any place of business in Memphis, but that is supposed to be lifted a week from tomorrow. Will the virus be any less contagious then than now? When I raise questions about the virus and the response to it, no one can answer. Or at least no one will answer because the answers do not make logical sense.

In conclusion, we are a nation with a history of freedom where people are free to think whatever they want to think, but suddenly that concept is doubted. Virtually all the people I talk to say they want it that way but in some areas of the country many people believe that those who do not think as they do should be held accountable. That means you will comply, or you will not work, and you will be banished from the public eye. Perhaps that is why people are fleeing from those areas, but some people seem too distracted to notice.

Woke has reached its peak in Red States

Finally, folks. Are we at peak woke? Certainly not everywhere because the vision of the Biden Administration however sinister plays well in the highly populated cities of both coasts. But just step one foot into RedState America and you will see that people are starting to figure it out. And it has probably reached its peak with them.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

Editor’s Notes

This article first appeared on the author’s own site and appears here by permission.

1 And similarly, sexism explains why women fail when and if they do fail. Likewise, homophobia explains why homosexuals fail, and transphobia explains why transsexuals fail. Originally, critical theory meant that the factory-owner class practiced a classism that forbade any laborer to be better than that.