The Top Ten Woke Lies

The first two in a series.

At the heart of wokeness is a lie – the Marxist lie that human society is reducible to power imbalances between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus wokeness depends on false narratives to sell itself and smear its opponents.

Below are the first two in a series of the Top Ten Woke Lies subverting American politics and culture.

10)      The Right Wants to Ban Black History and Culture

“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” Governor DeSantis said in December 2021 when announcing the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act. “We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”

The hate DeSantis was referring to is the race essentialism of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the false 1619 Project narrative which claims that America’s founding was rooted not in liberty but in slavery and racism. The Left has injected this debunked historiography, this anti-American subversion into every level of education from pre-K through graduate school – but not in Florida, thanks to its culture warrior governor.

“We believe in education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis said at a news conference a year ago at the signing of HB 7, the “Individual Freedom” measure, which officially banned the pernicious ideology of CRT from classrooms. "We believe an important component of freedom in the state of Florida is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies opposed upon you without your consent.”

Freedom and states’ rights don’t sit well with Democrats, who also resent having their racial indoctrination of children booted out of schools. Thus, back in February on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, the titular host and left-wing propagandist sought to smear DeSantis when she asked Vice President Kamala Harris, “What does Governor Ron DeSantis not know about black history and the black experience when he says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren?”

Hold it right there. DeSantis, who worries the Left so much that he is beginning to supplant former President Trump as the new Literally Hitler™, has never declared that the history of slavery and its aftermath should not be taught to children in his state. In fact, black history is actually required in Florida’s schools and has been since 1994. And DeSantis supports that.

According to the Florida Department of Education website, the state’s African American History classes must teach “the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery” as well as “the enslaved experience,” “abolition,” and “the history and contributions of Americans of the African diaspora to society.” “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum,” DeSantis has said.

The epically incompetent Kamala, unsurprisingly, not only didn’t call Andrea Mitchell out for her blatant lie in their interview, but ran with it, replying, “Any push to censor America’s teachers and tell them what they should be teaching in the best interest of our children in partnership with the parents of America, is I think, wrongheaded.” After some further blather, she concluded, “It should not be some politician saying what should not be taught in our classrooms.”

First, too many of America’s teachers do not have the best interests of our children at heart and are not working “in partnership with the parents of America,” but instead are actively concealing a woke agenda from them. The racist falsehoods of CRT and the 1619 Project are vital weapons in their brainwashing arsenal. Parents who discovered, thanks to the COVID lockdowns over the last three years, what those activist teachers have been up to were rightfully outraged about it.

Second, CRT is not black history – it is poisonous propaganda, indoctrination into a neo-Marxist worldview that does not open students’ minds but inculcates a “revolutionary consciousness” that closes minds. It does not promote racial healing and unity but intentionally provokes racial resentment and guilt. Rejecting CRT from the curriculum is not censorship; it is good governance that actually is in partnership with the parents of America, who don’t want their children subjected to any more of the radical Left’s relentless incitement of racial division.

But the lie that Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans want to censor the history of slavery in America – indeed, to outright ban black history and black culture in schools – has become the coordinated, rabble-rousing rallying cry of the leftwing media from MSNBC to The Atlantic to the moronic co-hostesses of The View. And they’re clinging to that lie – indeed, when castigated on social media and by the DeSantis team for her slanderous accusation, an unrepentant Andrea Mitchell offered up the lame non-apology that she had merely been “imprecise” in her language.

The lie that conservatives want to erase blacks and whitewash slavery from American history is just one of the many false, woke narratives the Left pushes continually in order to demonize their political opponents and stoke revolution. Another one is…

9)        The “Don’t Say Gay” Law

Gov. DeSantis has also been at the center of another leftist smear: that a bill he signed into law in March 2022 targeted the Alphabet Community, silencing them about freely expressing their gender identity. In fact, as FrontPage Mag’s Joseph Klein reported, what DeSantis signed was the common-sense Parental Rights in Education law which protects schoolchildren younger than 4^th grade from the predations of leftists pushing graphic sex education and gender ideology to kids as young as pre-kindergartners. The law also protected the right of parents to decide how their children are raised and educated, including being informed if their children are considering transitioning to the opposite sex.

“They support injecting woke gender ideology into second-grade classrooms,” DeSantis said of the radical educators. “They support enabling schools to ‘transition’ students to a ‘different gender’ without the knowledge of the parent.” It’s a sad state of affairs in our culture that such a law would even be necessary, but even before it was signed, the Left had already coordinated their opposition by falsely branding it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

The evening before the bill was signed, the actress/activist hostesses of the Academy Awards show in Hollywood – Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes – predictably politicized the ceremony by delivering a shout-out about the law: “And for you people in Florida, we’re going to have a gay night.” To the delighted approval of their fellow Hollywood elites, the three proceeded to chant the word “gay” over and over again in challenge to the Florida law – as if it literally banned anyone from saying the word.

The truth is that nothing in the Florida law prohibited the word “gay” or attacked the youth of the Alphabet Community in any way. The word “gay” itself doesn’t even appear in the text of the law. There is absolutely nothing in it that could be interpreted as anti-gay or – as President Biden himself falsely characterized it – “anti-transgender” or “hateful.”

But the Left never lets the truth get in the way of its politics of personal destruction. From NPR to The Washington Post to Time Magazine to the predictably propagandist The View, the media coordinated to attach that “Don’t Say Gay” label to every report on, and pundit discussion about, the law. The aim was to fashion a unified narrative to demonize Ron DeSantis and the Right generally, in the minds of millions of Americans, as homophobic, transphobic bigots – another ugly woke lie.

Stayed tuned for more of the Top Ten Woke Lies