How I Escaped the Woke Plantation
Resisting leftists’ racial pandering
Leftists may claim to be the party of racial tolerance, but they sure love telling people how to vote based on skin color. These radicals feel entitled to Black people’s votes and seem genuinely confused that a “person of color” might actually have a mind of their own. We all remember the infamous moment that Joe Biden said “you ain’t black” if you consider voting for Trump. Well, I think it’s long past time politicians started talking to us as Americans, instead of using divisive race-baiting to drum up votes. I’m a former leftist who used to believe all Republicans wanted to target me because of my skin color. But, thank God, I broke through the propaganda and became a free thinker. Now, I want to advise fellow patriots on reaching out to persuadable minority voters to take our country back.
Many people are stunned when they hear that I no longer support the left. Discussing my own evolution has allowed me to initiate frank, nuanced dialogues with family and other members of my community. I want to draw on my own narrative, as well as lessons learned from these conversations, to offer my best advice for fighting the left’s pandering. We can’t allow them to steal the Black vote through fearmongering and identity politics, and I hope my perspective helps others make inroads in healing our racial divide.
My journey out of the left began in 2020. Until that point, I had completely bought into woke propaganda. I was raised in a blue state, attended an ultra-liberal college, and had no serious exposure to conservative viewpoints. I may have been trapped in that cult forever if the George Floyd riots hadn’t changed everything. I was horrified as I watched small businesses burn to the ground and saw police officers getting attacked for trying to do their job. Even leftist media couldn’t hide the destruction caused by these “mostly peaceful” protests. But the worst thing was all the liberals claiming they were committing this violence to help the Black community. I knew that many of the communities devastated by these riots would never recover. Privileged White liberals would move on with their lives, while working-class Black families would be left behind to deal with the aftermath.
I couldn’t believe how many mainstream media outlets refused to acknowledge the horror of the riots, and I began seeking out dissident thinkers who actually believed in law and order. I found the Free Press, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Megyn Kelly, among others. Listening to these voices, I felt shocked to learn about an intellectual community where people respected each other without all sharing the same beliefs. This was completely alien to everything I’d experienced on the left, where I had been taught to feel guilty for questioning any “lived experiences” of an oppressed group.
As I delved into the world of heterodoxy, I was stunned to realize that President Trump’s critique of “fake news” was actually real. There were so many news stories where I believed complete falsehoods because of the mainstream media. I went to protests and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot” after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, only to realize years later it was all a lie. I believed that Covington Catholic students harassed a Native American elder in Washington, D.C., until I read about how viciously they had been smeared and persecuted by the media. I naively wondered if journalists might recover from this hysteria after President Trump left office. But those hopes died when I saw them line up to demonize Kyle Rittenhouse for exercising his 2nd amendment rights during the Kenosha riots in 2021.
I also began noticing an underlying thread in all of these lies. All of them were designed to make me feel unsafe and alienated from my own country. Powerful journalists and politicians wanted me to believe that America was racist, that White Americans hated me, and that I had no hope of bettering my own life. That was when I truly understood the insidious evil of wokeness. In the guise of helping Black people, this ideology radicalizes and demoralizes African Americans, all while inflaming racial tensions to the worst point I’ve seen in decades.
Thankfully, I don’t think any of this is inevitable. President Trump shattered every norm for how Republicans are “supposed” to talk about race, yet made significant inroads with Black and Latino men. Minority voters are persuadable, and here’s my advice for helping even more escape the woke plantation.
The mainstream media inundates us with leftist propaganda, so I would start by talking about the real-life impact of radical left policies. No amount of fake news can stop people from noticing as their lives get worse in concrete, measurable ways. I’m talking about running errands and seeing food locked up with padlocks because of rampant shoplifting. Or being afraid to take the subway because of unchecked harassment by vagrants. And we’ve all heard Black Lives Matter’s radio silence on gun deaths in Chicago.
When I’ve discussed politics with loved ones, the conversations became much more meaningful after I brought up topics that couldn’t be explained away by propaganda. People would acknowledge that some leftist policies had been a failure, even if they didn’t agree with conservatives on everything. That gave me a foothold to start going deeper and discussing how radical leftism holds us all back.
I’ve also found it helpful to expose the culture of fear that silences opposing voices on the left. Many liberals take it for granted that they can’t question certain beliefs without being cast as bigots. But these norms are decided for us by White leftists and imposed by force on minority communities. I’ve been able to convert multiple friends by pointing out the inherent racism of this dynamic, including how brilliant Black thinkers and creators have been stifled by it. Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Kevin Hart have all been attacked by “enlightened” White liberals who think that they get to dictate our behavior. I can testify personally that Black people are getting increasingly tired of that high-handedness, and it provides an opening for dissident thinkers to make their case.
Finally, I would recommend emphasizing the importance of racial healing and overcoming our divides. The vast majority of African Americans still believe in Martin Luther King’s dream that all people might be judged by the content of our character. And it’s not lost on anyone that racial tensions have become far worse in recent years, even as the left claims to be more “anti-racist” than ever. I’ve been able to convert loved ones by explaining that the left’s obsession with race is a deflection tactic; if working-class Americans start resenting each other, we won’t see how the elites are taking us all for a ride.
Leftists believe Kamala Harris is entitled to my vote because of our shared racial identity. But I can’t think of anything more degrading than erasing someone’s agency by reducing them to their skin color. Exposing leftist racism is an urgent task for all patriots, and I hope my story provides some insight on how it can be done. I’m so grateful that I overcame the propaganda I grew up with to think for myself. I know from experience that far more minority voters are persuadable than political hacks would have you believe. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where their race is seen as the most important thing about them. Healing our divides is possible if we defeat the radical left—so, let’s go take our country back.