The Rise of 'Dark Woke'

You’ve heard of “woke,” “right wing woke,” and “woke reich,” but there’s yet another kind of woke in town, “dark woke.”

All of these labels share the same DNA. They're reactionary in nature. Each one is a backlash to a backlash.

The original “woke” was a reaction to social injustice, like racism, inequality, and discrimination. It was initially about alert to these things, but over time the meaning broadened to mean all sorts of different things—positive and negative, depending on who you ask and what mood they happen to be in.

The “Right Wing Woke” (which I had previously written about here) flipped things around. It took the grievances and victimhood that the right had spent years mocking on the left and rebuilt it in their own likeness: virtue signaling, moral absolutism, social enforcement mechanisms, cancel campaigns, and tribal loyalty tests—just aimed in the other direction.

“Woke reich” narrowed the target further, used mainly to describe a slice of the right accused of flirting …