In a 1.23 piece titled “It’s Time to Destroy the Old Myth of the Sundance Breakout for a New One,” IndieWire’s Eric Kohn has posted the following: “Don’t get me started on the loaded, right-wing propagandistic implications of the word ‘woke.'”
Kohn is not given to put-on humor and is, I presume, in a dead-serious mode. He actually believes that a term which is universally understood to signify the most malicious social and political cancer since the domestic Red Scare terror of the late ’40s and ’50s…Kohn actually believes that the word smacks of “loaded, right-wing propagandistic implications,” and is therefore illegitimate and hysterical and has traction only within the rightwing media realm. He therefore believes that anyone who uses the term is some kind of Fox News wackazoid.
There’s obviously no talking to Eric on this topic, despite the fact that I’ve known him for years to be an obviously bright and genuinely decent and considerate fellow.
But good God, Eric…c’mon. To deny the legitimacy of the word “woke” is to be with the crazies. Do you actually not see the parallels between the career-destroying anti-Communist right of the ’50s and the career-cancelling woke left of today? Have you ever read about the French terror of 1793 and ’94? You’re simply too perceptive to look around and say, “Naah, there are no similarities between the current terror and what happened in this country 70 years ago…none whatsoever. And there are zero Maximilien Robespierres among the progressive left. Only nutjobs like Tucker Carlson think there are any comparisons worth making.”
I know firsthand what it is to grapple with woke terror, and I’m not a rightwing dude at all. I’m a sensible center-left moderate who voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who believes in Pete Buttigieg in ’24, who listens to excellent music while driving, who has driven rented scooters all over Rome and Paris, who wears fine Italian shoes and high-end Zara T-shirts, who dropped acid roughly 15 times in the old days and experienced satori on the third or fourth trip by way of the Bhagavad Gita, who drives a nice VW Passat (black) and owns an excellent Bluray library and loves his 14-month-old granddaughter Sutton.
The anti-woke world is full of decent fellows like myself…good God, Eric. Come up for air. Wokeism is a mental virus, a cult…a form of insanity a la China’s Great Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and early ’70s. And most of the citizens of this country despise it with every fibre of their being.
