What is woke?

An intolerant and moralizing ideology.

On Sunday, Jill and I turned on Netflix to try to decompress after our long road trip. As usual, what I found was the usual “woke” TV shows - banal and not worth our time. Finally, we settled on a new Science fiction thriller series. After getting hooked by the first two episodes, with episode 3 -the Netflix producers spring the trap. That is, the rather violent but non-sexual series having to do with a time-travel plot pivots to include a gay lover and a subsequent gratuitous man-love scene which was inserted into the plot line. Jill and I almost in unison reach for the controller, turn off the TV and go to bed.

I vow to try to find a better solution to our issue of finding decent programming that is non-woke. But what the heck does that term mean anyway

-United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 describing obscenity.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

Yesterday, in my search for a television and movie aggregator that is non-woke, I came across an interesting website called “Not-Woke Shows: Your Show Tips, Our Reviews”. The site has a list and a search engine for non-woke shows and games. It also provides an aggregation of various news stories on the subject from around the web.

The site gives a great description of what the term woke means in the context of entertainment industry, and then goes on to define it’s criteria for “wokeness” in context to movies, television and gaming. Because the site is contextualized to the entertainment industry, I have taken the listed definitions and criteria for woke and modified for general usage (with permission of the website owner).

I hope you find the following helpful; it is an attempt to clarify the concept so that you will know it, when you see it - because sometimes that intuitive sense isn’t enough.

'Woke': an intolerant and moralizing ideology. It is often used to disparage a liberal progressive orthodoxy. Like its cousin 'canceled' the phrase bespeaks 'political correctness' gone awry. Though "woke" has its roots in anti-racism, it was mis-used so often that it lost any and all remnants of its original meaning.

Woke's constant mis-use has ultimately resulted in the word representing all the problematic attempts to redefine society to conform to a very small minority's understanding of how the world should operate.

Examples of Woke:

Anti-Religious Bias - Woke religious bias is typically presented in one of 4 ways:

1. Turning religion on its head to imply good is evil and evil is good

2. Religion is mere spirituality or mysticism

3. Religious people are all mean-spirited, hateful and/or hypocritical

4. Mocking religious people/God

Bad Masculinity - A gross mischaracterization of masculinity that implies that men's (or boy's) behavior is inherently toxic. This categorization would also include instances where males are portrayed as inherently oblivious or idiots while females are portrayed as enlightened.

Climate Chaos - This ideology believes that society has the power and duty to change the weather worldwide, back to temperatures found during the Little Ice Age, which was a period of wide-spread cooling from around 1300 to around 1850 CE. During this period, average global temperatures dropped by as much as 2°C (3.6°F), particularly in Europe and North America.

Communistic Love - An ideology the promotes socialism or communism in any capacity (but especially over capitalism).

COVID-19 Virtue Signaling - The health concerns during the COVID-19 outbreak were certainly real, but they brought along a widespread sense of misplaced virtue. People acted virtuously by wearing masks and receiving insufficiently tested shots, which were wrongly labeled as "vaccines." Access to and acceptance of sufficiently tested medical alternatives to shots were denied and mocked.

Distorted Racism - The implication that racism can only be exclusive to one group or suggests that there are systems (laws) in place that limit people based on their ethnicity then the woke moniker is applicable as no such laws exist (at least in the U.S.).

Flawed Feminism - Though it was first established as a goal to give equal rights, "feminism" has morphed into a political movement that is no longer a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions, it is about gaining unequal rights. The ideology is based on perceptions of inequality that don't exist and generally disregards femininity as a whole. The ideology promotes a concept wherein women are supposed to be superior to men.

Guns As Villain - The idea that a gun is responsible for a person's death rather than the person using it.

Inclusivity Pandering - Inclusivity pandering is when an organization hires employees based on obvious pandering to a marginalized (or more often perceived-to-be marginalized) group, yet the inclusion seems forced and an after-thought. When this happens, the woke label is aptly applied.

Infinity Gender - Normalizing an ideology suggesting that more than two genders exist and it is the duty of the state to enable and pay for treatments and surgeries to enable this ideology.

Normalized Killing - Normalizing an ideology that strategically has people sympathizing with or normalizing the abortion issue or an assisted suicide.

Pride and Trans Rights - The exaggeration of the marginalization of LGBTQ in society, which requires fixing by month long pride celebrations, parades, special hiring practices and the teaching of these issues in our public school systems.

Racist Expectations - The "racism of low and high expectations" is especially problematic as it is regarded as virtuous by some. This form of racism presumes that a group of people are either LESS or MORE capable to do something simply as a byproduct of their skin color. Examples include (but are not limited to): Getting an I.D. card, driving correctly, getting good grades etc. Shows that exhibit such racist overtures will be regarded as woke.

Sexualizing children - The woke label is applicable when children are presented in a sexual way. This includes in the classroom or in libraries.

The Great Reset - Using the flawed concept of climate change as well as the politics of the pandemic to drive societal change that promotes globalism, a global command economy and a loss of national sovereignty.

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