The wind is in favour of the anti-woke and a proud reappropriation of “free speech” to speak hateful thoughts. Irish people delight in free speech – freedom at last, thumbs up Donald – until young Óisín on the J1 visa announces he needs a burner phone to get past US customs because of the anti-Trump/pro-Palestine stuff on his real phone. Or Gráinne gets detained on her return to Chicago because of an age-old brush with the law.
The message is to be careful what you wish for. Woke is a sly, mercurial word that has long outlived any meaning. Yet in elections around the world, it rises again and again like a zombie, because it’s code. Insistent users should take a long, hard look at their bedfellows.
They surely applauded the weekend news that the nailed-on front-runner for the Romanian presidency was George Simion. He is the full deck. The 38-year-old called Donald Trump’s election “a victory of the patriots over the globalists. I expect that all this neo-Marxist, woke, transhumanist ideology will stop there and we will be left alone ...”
Simion plans to set up an alliance of countries within the European Union “in the spirit of Maga” and – because anti-woke often goes hand-in-hand with ultranationalism – he is barred from entering neighbouring Ukraine or Moldova, because he wants Romania’s pre-second World War borders to be restored. He will also break EU laws he disagrees with, while stressing that Romania should remain part of the union, naturally. Like all wannabe renegades, he sits in a cleft stick: he needs EU money.
‘Woke’ keeps coming up in elections but it is a meaningless insult
I leaned over to the man beside me and asked him to put on headphones. Everyone looked away
In many ways, Francis reminded me of another senior Catholic figure who died recently in Ireland
Conor McGregor is the weirdest objection yet to plans for an elected Dublin mayor
Hungary’s Viktor Orban has also flailed for years against “the woke virus” and “gender madness”, while simultaneously staking territorial claims to other people’s countries. Revisiting the 1920 Treaty of Trianon to recreate Greater Hungary is a feature of Orban’s mainstream politics.
Deep in a cost-of-living crisis and in-your-face corruption, morally bankrupt leaders know what to do: stoke up the base with anti-woke rants accusing villainous EU leaders of trying to turn Hungarian children transgender or gay. Orban’s latest anti-woke effort has been to ban Pride parades.
Sadly for Hungarians (and everyone else eventually), punching down doesn’t pay the bills. Orban’s fawning displays of fealty to Putin and Trump have failed to fill the big hole in the budget. The EU – whose taxpayers’ money drove Orban’s giveaway first decade in power – is digging in. Billions earmarked for Hungary are being withheld.
So it looks like the anti-woke wind may be multidirectional. If, as has been suggested, part of Mark Carney’s remarkable Canadian election win was down to his rejection of the “woke agenda”, Canadian voters must have been mightily confused. It wasn’t Carney who repeatedly parroted Trump talking points such as ending “woke ideology”, attacking the media, vowing to crack down on academic institutions he disagreed with, or openly appealing to the poisonous manosphere. That was Carney’s Conservative political rival, Pierre Poilievre. Despite the Toronto Sun editorial citing a description of Carney by former chairman of Vote Leave, Jon Moynihan, as “the perfect epitome of homus wokus”, he is the ultimate proof that “woke” as a pejorative is utterly meaningless and obsolete.*
Further south, a little-noted feature of the weekend’s extraordinary Australian election was the fate of the Trumpet of Patriots party. A vehicle inspired by Trump, lavishly funded by mining billionaire Clive Palmer with a marketing budget that outstripped the big parties, it got 2 per cent of the vote and not a single seat. The Trumpish opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who lost the election and his seat (like Canada’s Poilievre) to Labor’s Anthony Albanese, thought he could rely on battleground suburbs to vote in line with their resentments against “wokeness”, but got it disastrously wrong. Labor’s president, Wayne Swan, concluded that Albanese won because “the economic imperative overrode the culture imperative”.
Meanwhile in England, where voters were once again begging for change, they chose the walking anti-woke virus that is Nigel Farage, who after a campaign spent “slamming” “woke” councils and “woke milk”, now controls 10 local councils. To be clear, Farage is the same man who spent 20 years driving Britain to Brexit, leading to a 15 per cent fall in trade and a 4 per cent cost to the economy (about £100 billion [€118 billion] a year), according to the British government watchdog.
Yet his first diktats have included banning “woke” flags from council buildings and telling diversity, equity and inclusion employees to get another job while his newly elected Reform mayor, Andrea Jenkyns (the education minister who gave the middle finger to protesters at Downing Street) vowed to sack diversity officers in Lincolnshire, only to discover there weren’t any. The good news is that Farage’s Reform/Brexit/Ukip/Trump-derivative party now has to run administrations like proper politicians and respond to people’s demands on the ground.
The time spent on anti-woke nonsense is bewildering. Think what might have happened if, instead of targeting Kamala Harris’s “woke agenda” (last heard of in 2019) while overlooking Trump’s idiotic claim that little “Jimmy” could be lovingly waved off to school and come back with “a brutal [transgender] operation”, people had listened to her plain exposé of Trump’s economic policies. It’s time to exhale, move on and note the words of Anthony Albanese, the quiet man who won in Australia: “Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values ... For the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need.”
- This article was amended at 8am on May 7th to amend an error that occurred in the editing process
