Voting Against ‘Wokeness’ Is Not Single-Issue Voting—It’s Every-Issue Voting
Wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area is viewed and scrutinized.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
As the election approaches, American voters are compelled to introspect and decide who will earn their vote. Naturally, this decision-making process involves identifying which issues they hold most near and dear. For some voters, a single issue—such as immigration, abortion, or free speech—determines their choice. Increasingly, however, many Americans are also considering their stance on “wokeness”—a term often used to describe the perceived excesses of Critical Social Justice ideology, which encompasses Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Postcolonialism—as a potential deciding factor.
In 2021, at a rally in Cullman, Alabama, Donald Trump famously quipped that “everything woke turns to shit,” and that it’s “a shortcut to losing everything you have.” Similarly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed vehement opposition to wokeness—“Woke needs to die”—and has even signed the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited the teaching of certain activist concepts surrounding race and gender in schools and businesses. Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate, centered much of his campaign on opposing wokeness, even authoring a book in 2021 titled Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.
Critics often dismiss voters primarily motivated by a disdain for wokeness as narrow-minded or overly engaged in the culture wars. For instance, earlier this week, neuroscientist and noted Trump critic Sam Harris, during a debate with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, labeled these people as “low information voters.” He argued, “[T]here are many people for whom wokeness and far-left identity politics has become a single issue around which they’re going to react.” But is Harris’ characterization of these people as “single issue” voters accurate?
The answer is no, because the reality is that wokeness is multifaceted, and voting to oppose it does not equate to a “single issue” stance like voting based solely on abortion access or climate change policy. The adverse impacts of wokeness are neither peripheral nor trivial. Contrary to portrayals by some on the left, wokeness extends beyond mere debates over bathroom access or children’s library books. It poses a profound threat to a wide range of fundamental values cherished by many Americans. This is because wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area, from science and medicine to education and social issues, is viewed and scrutinized. Consequently, a voter primarily driven by opposition to wokeness is closer to an “every-issue” voter than a “single-issue” voter.
Woke concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are used to reshape policies at every level. This worldview challenges some of our most fundamental and valued beliefs, such as equality under the law and valuing individual merit over group identity. Instead of honoring individual achievement, “equity” demands that all disparities—whether in the workplace, the classroom, or the justice system—be eliminated to produce equal outcomes. This is routinely accomplished through preferential treatment based on race, sex, and other identities that comprise the intersectional stack. This represents a perfect reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless ethical guidance to judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Elevating group identity over the individual not only fuels racial tensions but also undermines both King’s Dream and the American Dream.
The negative impact of policies rooted in the woke concept of “equity” is profound and not always immediately obvious. Consider the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, in response to activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system. How is this statistically equal racial outcome achieved, you ask? By making it more challenging to remove black children from abusive and unsafe environments. Such actions have resulted in a rise in the proportion of black child maltreatment deaths. To echo the thoughts of Thomas Sowell, woke equity appears more focused on sounding good than on being effective.
The First Amendment—our fundamental right to free speech—is a primary target of woke ideology. Just weeks ago at the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, former secretary of state John Kerry described the First Amendment as “a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” Tim Walz also demonstrated a misunderstanding of free speech by stating on multiple occasions that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” despite the Supreme Court’s repeated affirmation that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Woke DEI policies have become synonymous with censorship, restricting ideas and individuals that don’t align with a narrow view of what constitutes “inclusion.” Therefore, voting against wokeness is not about opposing diversity but about defending open debate and merit-based achievement.
The catastrophic impact of Queer Theory on science and medicine cannot be overstated. Queer Theory contends that reality is merely a construct devised by the powerful to sustain their dominance, positioning itself in stark opposition to scientific principles. It insists that all natural categories, even fundamental biological distinctions such as male and female, must be “queered” out of existence to achieve liberation. This ideology has transformed reality into a farcical Monty Python sketch, where men claim to be women and demand to be treated as such in every conceivable context, including sports, prisons, and sex-segregated public spaces. The influence of Queer Theory on medicine has led to the widespread acceptance of pseudoscientific concepts like the “sex spectrum” and an innate “gender identity” or “brain sex” that purportedly can be misaligned with one’s physical body. These views are used to justify interventions like halting the puberty of confused and troubled children, followed by administering sterilizing cross-sex hormones and conducting extreme and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries.
As a scientist committed to the truth, addressing the spread of this harmful pseudoscience and protecting children from permanent bodily harm is a major concern.
Wokeness extends its reach further through Postcolonialism, which reduces all geopolitical events to a binary of oppressor versus oppressed, typically based on perceived colonial status. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, especially following Hamas’ October 7th massacre of over 1200 men, women, and children in Israel. The woke “decoloniality” framework labels all Israeli residents as “colonizers,” thereby casting innocent civilians as legitimate targets. Considering the pervasive history of human colonization over past millennia, it suggests that no group could claim legitimate ownership of any land without the possibility of being forcibly expelled or slaughtered. Because of this, I’ve previously described the ideology of decolonization as a woke parallel to jihad.
The examples of the detrimental effects of woke ideology on our society and globally are extensive, and I’m sure readers can identify many more. Importantly, woke ideology is not a marginal belief; its impacts are profound and widespread, representing a degradation at the core of numerous values that Americans hold dear.
Let’s be clear: Trump is the anti-woke candidate. While I’m not in the business of telling people how to vote, it stands to reason that if you agree with my premise that the problem with wokeness is not a single issue but closer an every-issue, then the choice becomes more clear. A vote for Trump is a gamble to purge our institutions of wokeness and its pervasive influence. A vote for Harris would guarantee its further entrenchment. Can they recover?
You may object—didn’t wokeness dramatically intensify during Trump’s first term? Indeed, it did. Even Sam Harris, during his aforementioned debate with Ben Shapiro, expressed concerns, stating, “it will be all woke all the time under Trump.” But wokeness gets more rabid during a Trump presidency for the same reason the possessed girl’s head in The Exorcist started spinning and spewing vomit when the priests began the exorcism process. The woke ideologues possessing our institutions will not relinquish their power voluntarily, and will go absolutely bonkers in the process of losing it. Nevertheless, this should not deter us from initiating the exorcism process.
Ultimately, opposing wokeness means upholding fundamental principles cherished by many Americans: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, scientific integrity, and women’s sex-based rights. To dismiss opposition to wokeness as a “single issue” trivializes the magnitude of the ideological shift at stake and its destructive nature on everything it touches. Voting against wokeness is not single-issue voting—it’s voting to protect nearly every issue that matters.
The choice is yours. And we can still be friends if we disagree.
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As always, think for yourself and vote for whoever you want. This is just my opinion, and I could very well be wrong!
Yup. I reached the same conclusion. I vote the closest to my values, not for perfection or any particular slate or blue no matter who nonsense. Even though I'm a Democrat, I'm not progressivist. It's a struggle to live in Seattle and suffer from one-party zealotry. If the fundamentalists from both parties could be tuned out and moderates from both parties surged, then real stable progress can be made. I know it's possible. To move in that direction requires a vote for Trump. I'm good with that.