Much of the Left has been debating “Woke 1” recently. Less discussed has been the Right’s own version of wokeness, characterized by censorship, attacks on free speech, and even jailing and deporting critics.
“Woke 1 was crazy.”
Those four words, spoken on ABC’s This Week earlier this month by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, unexpectedly blasted open the doors of political discourse. For nearly two weeks, debate has raged in columns and on social media about the concept of “Woke 1” — whether there was indeed such a discrete era, how bad it really was, whether the broader left is allowed to simply laugh off the “woke” excesses of the era. Or to take the opposite tack, whether trying to move on from those excesses is an appalling betrayal of activist movements.
Part of the problem is that for every five people talking about this, you’re likely to get six different explanations of what “Woke 1” actually means. Here’s mine: it’s the tut-tutting, puritanical style of progressive behavior, incubated in and spread from college campuses, that believed you could yell, condemn, finger-wag, and cancel your way to political change — and that reached its fever pitch in mid-to-late 2020, when we saw a spree of job losses and censorship on dubious grounds, because people were being yelled at, or because someone above them feared they eventually would be. This was a distinctly unproductive response to the mass outrage and protest over years of unaccountability for police murders, which demanded serious changes to American policing but ended up in part being diverted into censorship and policing of people’s behavior.
The “Woke 1” excesses people are complaining about now, the people hurt by them, and the absurdities involved, were very real: A business school professor removed from teaching his own course and investigated for using a Mandarin word that sounds like a slur in English. A data analyst accused of “anti-blackness” and fired for posting research about the impact of different protest tactics on the Democratic vote. A biracial makeup artist fired for singing along to a rap song that has a well-known racial epithet in the lyrics. A Mexican American worker fired after a white motorist hallucinated him doing a white supremacist hand signal.
This was on top of the wave of censorship that saw scenes, episodes, and entire shows and movies removed from streaming services for racial insensitivity, even when satirical. Online mobs condemned Paw Patrol for its positive depiction of police, and thousands of Twitter users angrily piled on the late Barbara Ehrenreich after they misconstrued one of her tweets as racist. Not to mention, there was an undeniable overall cultural vibe, effectively capitalized on by the Right, of censoriousness that the vast majority of people found repellant.
But all of this is a very long windup to say that it’s a bit silly we’re still debating the woke excesses of 2020 and earlier, when we are right now, as you read this, going through a period of objectively much worse and more dangerous woke excess, with none of the same scrutiny.
No, it’s not “Woke 2,” or some new version of left-leaning cancel culture that’s erupted again. This time, it’s the people who describe themselves as part of the pro-Trump, MAGA movement who are doing the canceling and taking far, far more radical steps to do it than we saw six years ago. Call it MAGA Woke.
The Sequel Is Always Worse
There are so many recent examples that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Remember when Trump and co. just searched a glossary of vaguely left-ish words — including “history,” “culture,” and “climate” — and then just mindlessly cancelled whichever grant or contract came up in the results, even if it screwed over their own voters? In the process of enforcing their own particular brand of political correctness, Donald Trump and the GOP defunded everything from research into diseases contracted by firefighters on September 11 and cancer studies, to Holocaust-related history projects and programs for disabled teens — all simply because they used words that made them uncomfortable.
This was on top of scores of government workers placed on creepy public watch lists run by right-wing groups linked to the White House for the crime of having political opinions that offend the MAGA movement. At least half of those workers were forced on leave or ended up leaving their jobs.
Nothing like any of this happened under what Trumpworld calls the “woke and weaponized” government run by Joe Biden. In fact, the big, bad, woke, cancel-culture scandal under that administration was that Twitter, both under government pressure but sometimes of its own accord, throttled the reach of some conservative accounts — a serious matter, but one that doesn’t nearly rise to the intensity and scale of the speech-related repression we’ve seen since Trump took office.
Speaking of which, that tech censorship of Bad Opinions hasn’t stopped under Trump, even though he won promising to end censorship and signed an executive order supposedly doing just that. The only difference between the old regime and the new one is the targets: instead of anti-vaccine posts, social media censors now target abortion-pill providers, pro-Palestinian advocacy, anti-CEO comments, pro-LGBTQ posts, and more. In fact, MAGA has expanded its woke weaponization of social media beyond the digital realm, revoking people’s visas, denying them entry into the United States, pulling their travel privileges, and more because of posts and memes critical of Trump, his allies, or US policy.
Worse by the Numbers
This is all anecdotal, you might retort. But MAGA cancel culture isn’t worse because it feels like it is. We know it is, by the numbers.
After the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk last year, Trump, his Vice President J. D. Vance, and their allies went on a cancel culture crusade, publicly demanding the heads of anyone daring to make utter a critical word about the late commentator — a speech stricture, by the way, that they themselves regularly violate.
The result? More than six hundred Americans were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their bosses for saying things that triggered the White House and MAGA world, according to a review by Reuters, the majority of them educators, including fifty academics and top administrators at universities.
Compare that to the twenty-two academics who lost their jobs in the “Woke 1” frenzy of 2020 and the 160 people fired for their pro-Palestinian advocacy over 2024 during the start of what we might call the “Watermelon Scare” — the ongoing and yearslong hysteria around, and resulting repression of, advocacy for Palestinian rights. Nor did those episodes see the threat of state power mobilized to try to get a comedian thrown off the air for personally offending a left-leaning politician, but this is exactly what happened after Kirk’s death, after Trump was angered by a joke late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made. That intimidation effort against broadcast news networks is still ongoing, by the way.
In other words, not only is “Woke 1” objectively not as bad as “MAGA woke,” it doesn’t even come close.
In a separate Reuters analysis, the outlet found that the Trump administration was slapped down by federal judges — ten of them appointed by Republicans — in a whopping seventy-five First Amendment cases in his term so far, out of a total of ninety-three. By contrast, over the “woke and weaponized” Biden administration’s entire four years, federal judges weighed in on twenty-seven First Amendment challenges to its policies — a fraction of what Trump’s already racked up — and ruled against it in thirteen of those, or less than half, compared to Trump’s rate of 81 percent.
Speaking of the Watermelon Scare, the crackdown on criticism of Israeli policy and defense of Palestinian justice is worse than ever under Trump. It turns out, somewhat bizarrely, that it’s criticism of the foreign country of Israel that is the most sensitive spot for the nominally America First movement.
Donald Trump’s forces have arrested, locked up, and tried to deport, often successfully, hundreds of students merely for saying things that the MAGA movement finds offensive — specifically, criticism of Israel. It revoked one pro-Palestinian activist’s green card explicitly for criticizing Israel and is still trying to deport him today. Another activist had her visa revoked for cowriting an op-ed in her college newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the genocide in Gaza. They are just two of many. This has been condemned as dangerous and un-American across the board, by both the typically more left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union and the more right-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Both Trump’s administration and the MAGA movement behind him regularly conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel — a conflation that is itself, by their own definition (“Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”), antisemitic. Using this dubious and offensive idea, Trump’s people have strong-armed universities into carrying out heavy-handed policing of what their students and faculty say, all in the name of protecting Jews on campus — by which they actually mean pro-Israel activists — from being offended.
We know this is what they really mean, because it is Jews themselves who have often been targeted in this crusade, a form of pro-Israel cancel culture masquerading as a campaign against antisemitism.
In fact, a whistleblower complaint just this week from within the Department of Justice laid out how much of this was driven not by actual concern about antisemitism but by MAGA world’s determination to cancel people for their pro-Palestinian speech. DOJ attorneys were, for instance, ordered to open an investigation into Columbia University based on a single New York Post article that detailed how protesters said and carried pro-Palestinian slogans and items. In another instance, investigators were ordered to do interviews with Middle East studies professors, Muslim ones in particular, at Brown University who had been accused of nothing, in order to trap them into saying something they could then call problematic.
All of this has led to an unusual situation where — in the words of the Forward, a pro-Israel, Jewish publication — the Trump administration has both “sought to ban diversity measures meant to benefit minority groups, while in several cases requiring universities to create new policies to benefit Jews.” This is at the same time that cheerleaders for Trump’s cancel culture policies speak in language indistinguishable from “woke” progressive college students — like billionaire Bill Ackman, who complained about “how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive [protests against the war in Gaza] could be to Jewish and Israeli students” and that “racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many.”
This form of MAGA wokeness hasn’t just negatively impacted the Left. It has also boomeranged on Trump’s own movement, as when figures serving or appointed to serve in his administration were thrown out for their criticism of Israel, which a rival political faction within Trump’s movement cynically mislabeled as antisemitism. Ironically, several out-and-out antisemites continue to serve in prominent positions under Trump with none of the same objection from this faction — because just like with “Woke 1,” the exponents of MAGA Woke often use cynical accusations of bigotry as a way to litigate completely separate political disagreements.
Let’s Have Some Perspective
The excesses of “Woke 1” were very real and unhelpful, which the Left has to acknowledge if it wants to be able to move on from that period.
But it doesn’t hold a candle to the frenzy of MAGA-driven wokeness that we are in the middle of right now, where it’s not just the private sector bringing the hammer down on workers who offend Trump and his movement but where the far-reaching use of state power is punishing and even criminalizing people for speech that MAGA figures regard as politically incorrect. Those efforts have seen people locked up, fired, doxed, exiled from the country, and even criminally prosecuted for their speech.
This is all objectively worse than anything that happened in 2020–21. It would be good if, in between obsessing over dumb, years-old tweets about Thanksgiving and whiteness, the media grilled Trump-backed candidates about some of it.