“You know what woke means? It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to shit.”
Former President Donald J. Trump got his biggest applause line this past Saturday night at a rally in Cullman, Alabama by apparently remembering the gut-trusting magic formula that won him the presidency in 2016 and delivering his most hilarious (and true) bit in a hot minute, prompting the packed crowd to break into a full-throated “USA!” chant so awesome that you could practically feel the Americana in the air.
As Roderick P. Hart writes in Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen, an analysis of why Trump’s rhetoric connects with such a broad swath of the populace in our horrendous “Age of Identity” and “unforgiving globalization”, it was exactly the kind of sanity that most Americans crave hearing from a leader.
Trump’s populism says to his followers: ‘I know you’re there and you’re important to me.’ For individuals who [feel] ignored, [this is] a welcome message. Finally, acknowledgement.
It’s as if Trump recalled that as long as the people are on his side, he doesn’t need Globalist American Empire’s approval, and that giving an inch to these censorious, thought policing elites, the same ones always attempting to redefine the vague and meaningless term “presidential”, never results in victory for him or the American people.
Any honest person knows damn well that the compliance police in the Human Resources department have taken over our country, and that, as Trump correctly affirmed, everything they touch “turns to shit”. This was true six years ago when Trump responded to Megyn Kelly’s absurd statement that he was somehow part of the imaginary “war on women” because he called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” by proclaiming:
I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico, both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody. Frankly, what I say – and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding, we have a good time – what I say is what I say.
It’s even more true today. The vast majority of red-blooded Americans across the political spectrum hate the politically correct nonsense that overwhelms the country all day, every day, and they understand perfectly well that Trump speaks in a wink-wink vernacular that circumvents the preferred gibberish of our elites. There is a reason that the silent majority was ready for Trump in 2016 and not 2000, 2004, 2008, or 2012. The situation became truly unbearable. And when a culture or a society can’t talk about how to solve anything without losing their livelihood because of some kiss-ass snitch in the PC Stasi, they’re going to vote for someone who will, at the very least, acknowledge ‘the big problem this country has’. So if you want to know why the crowd went wild with laughter this past Saturday, you’ve got your answer. When Trump uses his bully pulpit to say obvious truths, it is cathartic.
Trump should do routines that invoke his magic formula like this more often. What is this magic formula you ask? Simple. It involves bringing up something not even remotely controversial (i.e. “Oh, Don, you’re a little controversial, you’re talking about illegal immigration. I said, ‘It’s illegal!’”), something anyone with one iota of intellectual honesty knows to be undeniably, demonstrably true, and saying it out loud in order to expose the hysteria of a shrill minority that he refuses to pander to.
Just how actually uncontroversial was what Trump said? Consider the fact that back in 2015, liberal Democrat Bill Maher essentially said the exact same thing during a Real Time rant in which he ripped fun-policing pc liberals a new one for ruining Halloween.
Banning a hobo costume doesn’t make the homeless feel better. It makes you feel better. This is the lazy liberalism in which scolding has become a substitute for actually doing something. And here’s the thing, reasonable people see self-righteous liberal busybodies trying to leech the fun out of everything and they say, ‘F*ck, I’m going to vote Republican, because I just can’t stand being on the same team as these humorless jackoffs.’
Notice, by the way, how Maher did not say that “conservatives” ‘see self-righteous liberal busybodies trying to leech the fun out of everything…’. He said ‘reasonable people’. That’s it. That’s who can’t stand this nonsense. Reasonable people. Reasonable Americans who don’t have their heads firmly lodged so far up their own asses that they can taste their own styling products of choice.
Flash forward to 2018 and political correctness, embraced by the woke, has gotten even worse. To his credit, Maher ripped the woke again (as he continues to do) since our fake-outrage obsessed elites and their imbecile fellow travelers never seem to catch the drift.
The majority of America…finds the woke people irritating as hell. In a new poll, 80% of Americans find political correctness to be a problem, including 75% of African-Americans, 74% of Americans under 30, 82% of Asian Americans, 87% of Hispanics, and 88% of Native Americans. If you’re not a statistician, let me break those numbers down for you. NOBODY LIKES YOU! Including the so-called ‘marginalized groups’ whose feelings you decide need protecting.
The significance of this woke hysteria, meanwhile, is no small thing. Woke, to put it in class terms, is not compatible with populism. Populism is anti-elitist, and woke is the dominant ideology and secular religion of our psychotic, elitist ruling class and their useful idiot bootlickers that run every major institution in the country.
As left-wing Populist and liberal Democrat Thomas Frank writes in “US Liberals’ Hysteria Outlives Trump” for Le Monde diplomatique (as if any woke publication in the U.S. would dare let him critique his own “side”):
The Trump era began with outrage at ‘populists’ who didn’t listen to the highly educated and were bringing authoritarianism to America. It has ended in a resounding professional-class triumph in which powerful corporations constantly tell the world what noble antiracists they are…in which the news media is not only post-objective but actively on a crusade to suppress the ideological Other… and in which tiny political missteps not only get people fired but sometimes bring them under a crushing hailstorm of public humiliation. In the supreme irony of our times, many of the same liberals who were so concerned about Trumpist authoritarianism four years ago have enthusiastically accepted a system of social media censorship in which ideas that contradict the findings of established authorities are in certain cases banished from the public sphere. And they are slowly but clearly coming round to the administration’s proposal to turn the government’s surveillance powers on what is called ‘domestic extremism’. It was fears of Trumpist authoritarianism that made this new, liberal authoritarianism possible.
Self-awareness? Yeah. Not exactly a strong suit of the woke. And if you think Frank is being hyperbolic, keep in mind that racist ‘antiracist’ Ibram X. Kendi, author of Antiracist Baby, just inked a huge development deal in Hollywood and launched his own production company.
Fellow Advanced Citizens. We couldn’t make this shit up if we wanted to.
In any case, The Donald’s bit delivered because in a society where humor has been all but outlawed (in an insanely short amount of time, no less), being hilarious is truly transgressive. Trump may have screwed the pooch bigly in terms of actually achieving his America First agenda during his presidency, but his greatest accomplishment was (and remains) his ability to operate as a one-man Rorschach test that can expose all of America’s actual enemies, foreign and domestic, at the flick of a quip.
It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that Trump is easily the most funny President we’ve ever had, and, like elite hysteria, this also is no small thing. Actual humor, after all, is a bulwark against authoritaraniasm. That’s why it was so refreshing to us at Advanced Citizenship to recently hear fellow Populist Tucker Carlson share this sentiment to a crowd of Hungarians in Budapest as he explained the ongoing war on humor in the United States.
This is a sign of ebbing freedom, of freedom going away. When they’ve banned humor, you know you’re moving towards something dark. And they have banned humor in the United States. You are not allowed to laugh at things. Nothing is funny. Everything is dead serious. This tells us two things. Why do they do that? The first two things authoritarian movements do. First, they try to control your language, and, second, they try to stop you from laughing. Why do they do that? Well, they control your language so they can control your mind…Words determine the way that you think. If you take the words away, as Orwell famously noted…you take away people’s ability to think about things. So that’s the first thing they do. They make it illegal to laugh. Particularly at them. Now why do they do that? There’s a deeper reason for that and it is that humor is perspective. How do you find something funny? By rising above it to a high altitude and looking down at its outline. By seeing things in their entirety. By looking up from the script and looking around and noticing where you are and finding it hilarious.
To this end, it cannot be overstated just how profoundly humorless our ruling class is. It’s why they’ve latched onto “woke” authoritarianism as a means of total control. As such, when Trump says that being ‘woke’ means ‘you’re a loser,’ he’s not just cracking a joke that tells our elites that no matter how much money and power they have, they still suck at life and that no one (really) likes them. He’s engaging in a revolutionary act. It’s why George Orwell proclaimed that “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” Every time Trump tells a joke that lands, he’s highlighting some universal truth. And, as Orwell also famously stated, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
When the country has incompetent, woke leaders that let millions of randos pour in across our non-existent border during a global pandemic that they never the fuck up about (insisting businesses that haven’t gone under yet initiate vaccine mandates and that perfectly healthy kids wear masks in schools because of “muh science”), rising inflation that is sending the economy right down the tubes, destructive corporatism that leaves most of our citizens unable to afford to start a family or buy a home, an education system that leaves you dumber and poorer the longer you stay in it, gasoline en route to cost more than gold, Americans (we’ll admit we have no idea why these Americans are in Afghanistan in the first place) being tossed to the side of the road in Kabul so our sadistic, self-loathing elites can bring people who hate us over here immediately, and a corporate media so pious and dumb that it tells us that the biggest issues facing our country are that Republican California Governor nominee Larry Elder is actually a white supremacist and that Matt Damon said the f-slur in a movie that literally nobody gives a shit about from eighteen years ago, you better believe a lot of people are going to agree that being ‘woke’ means you’re a friggin’ ‘loser’.
Our ruling class has already divided the country into two classes: the woke and the unwoke. All Trump did was state the obvious. This division was there before he made that joke and neither he, his supporters, or any and all ‘reasonable people’ who just care about the future of the country created it. So, with that being said, it would probably behoove us all to figure out next moves before our woke ruling class decides how they want to further inflict punishment.