Slate.com finally admitted, “The base appears to be demonstrably more bloodthirsty than it ever was during Trump’s first term, almost like they’ve finally been granted an opportunity to satiate a long-unquenched rage, absent any platitudinal hedging,” but where have they been for the past several decades?
If you live outside the left’s intellectual bubble, it’s hard to miss the cognitive distance between their visions of themselves and their actions. Thus, those who believe their capacity for compassion makes them morally superior to their political opponents, regularly show precisely none for anyone harmed by their various plans and policies. When tens of thousands were forced from their jobs because of their refusal to take an unproven vaccine that was mandated unconstitutionally, progressives insisted it was for the best, reacting at times without outright glee that their inferiors had lost their livelihoods for the temerity not to comply. When a US citizen is killed by an illegal alien, a person who should never have been in the country in the first place according to our laws, many refuse to even speak their names, much less do anything to comfort the loved ones left behind, and yet they insist we remember the names of their various martyrs to the cause whether or not their actions may have helped precipitate their own deaths. When a healthcare executive, a husband and father of two, was killed in cold blood on a New York City street barely two years ago, many lionized the assassin as a modern day hero fighting against a corrupt system, but when a conservative influencer and organizer was assassinated in front of thousands at a college, many of the same people cheered the death, demanding more. Despite this obvious paradox, many of these same also seem to believe they conduct themselves according to former First Lady Michelle Obama’s famous maxim at the 2016 Democrat National Convention, “When they go low, we go high,” suggesting that they practice politics on an elevated plane, operating well above the gutter tactics of Republicans. Though the former First Lady continued insisting this was the case as late as 2022, it has never been close to true in my lifetime at least. On the contrary, every major Republican politician has routinely been described by Democrats as a racist, misogynist, authoritarian who wants to see the average person’s grandmother thrown off a cliff and black people back in chains. In case you had forgotten, the first was the subject of an actual 2011 advertisement that depicted then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan literally pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. The second was a real statement made by President Barack Obama’s second in command, future President Joe Biden to a mostly black audience, complete with a Southern drawl.
Needless to say, neither was anything close to taking the high road, nor were these isolated incidents. If anything, the situation has only gotten worse in recent years. Rather than directing their ire only at Republican politicians, Democrats and their progressive allies have expanded their attacks to include the voters themselves, targeting anyone who disagrees with them for any reason with truly horrific smears. Less than two months after First Lady Obama’s famous maxim, former Secretary of State and Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton referred to her opponent’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” beyond redemption during the 2016 campaign, then proceeded to call for them to be formally “deprogrammed” because they were “cult members.” President Biden labelled states that disagreed with his coronavirus policies victims of “Neanderthal thinking” shortly after taking office, compared those who disagreed with his plans to nationalize elections “confederates” who supported Jim Crow, what he termed even worse as “Jim Eagle,” only to close his term by deriding Republican supporters of President Donald Trump as extremists who threaten “the very foundations of the republic,” then ultimately refer to them as “garbage” after he’d ignominiously withdrawn from the reelection campaign. In the interim, he expanded on his previous remarks about black people being put back in chains to declare that any black person who didn’t support his campaign “ain’t black.” To be sure, I don’t mention these instances – or the many more I could cite if you had the time to read them all – to criticize the content or suggest that they are somehow beyond the political pale. In my view, they aren’t. Politics ain’t beanbag as they say, and especially for supporters of President Trump like me, Republicans have also embraced a bare knuckle, no holds barred, winner take all approach to political speech in recent years whether they want to admit it or not. Instead, I mention these instances and allude to the others only to point out the obvious reality that Democrats have not heeded their own advice and have embraced the same brawling political style rich with racial innuendo, openly, forcefully, and frequently, though they may protest otherwise.
Sometimes, however, the mask slips off and the truth slips out, or at least a part of it. So it was when Luke Winkie, writing for Slate.com declared that the “era of ‘Dark Woke’ is upon us,” chronicling what he perceives as the sudden decline of civility amongst progressives. According to Mr. Winkie, “we are in the midst of a marked pivot in the way the Democrat Party interfaces with its opposition. The shift in attitude hasn’t been firmly diagramed; instead, what’s going on here is mostly subconscious, like a collective unlocking of forbidden territory. There was a period of time in the late 2010s where liberal hostility to MAGAdom was screened for all potential vectors of transgression, and a seemingly infinite number of potential -ims or -phobias. The philosophy was well-intentioned, but also solidified the Democrats as the party of pedants (or narcs, or rule-fullowers). Now in the wreckage of the post-Biden era, some liberals have started to alter their approach. If sweeping appeals to our empathy have failed to resonate…maybe we are better off getting down in the muck. There is no perfect name for this dynamic, but some have begun to refer to it, somewhat facetiously, as ‘Dark Woke.’ In the most basic definition, Dark Woke is a social covenant that allows liberals to be extra mean to conservatives, by encouraging a style of animus that deliberately crosses the red lines previously established within progressive orthodoxy. The concept is difficult to articulate, but it’s easily felt. Dark Woke manifests when the liberal pundit Kyle Kulinksi tweets out an A.I. rendering of Erika Kirk and JD Vance standing side by side at a wedding altar, or when the Democratic Party’s X account accuses Stephen Miller of being cuckolded by Elon Musk, or Pete Hegseth is dressed down for being a drunk.” Somehow, Dark Woke also applies private, personal statements in Mr. Winkie’s view, such as “when Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones crushes the field after fantasizing about the death of MAGA-born children, or when Graham Platner–the guy with the Nazi tattoo–remains competitive for Maine’s Senate seat despite his generational baggage.”
Setting aside that’s more than a little odd to connect the political meme wars – where yes, conservatives have frequently taken their fair share of cheap, below the belt shots – with fantasies about killing actual children and actual Nazism, Mr. Lukie seems to believe this trend has “only been in the bloodstream for a short amount of time. It entered the lexicon in the early weeks of 2025, when both the Democratic Party and any sense of American consensus had been shattered by Donald Trump’s comeback victory. Nobody is exactly sure who originally coined the term, but ground zero, according to the internet historians at KnowYourMeme.com, might be a post made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a day before the inauguration. Ocasio-Cortez was replying to LibsofTikTok, a popular X account and one of the most prominent agitators in the MAGA propaganda ecosystem. LibsofTikTok took issue with AOC referring to Trump as a rapist; the Congresswoman responded by mimicking the brusque diction of the right: ‘Oh are you triggered? Cry more,’ she wrote, accumulating 17.6 million views in the process. The candor was so refreshing in those confusing times, so much so that one day later, another poster on X theorized that she might have inculcated a new social contract–a ‘proto Dark Woke’–that liberals could take with them going forward. The poster surmised the texture of the reinvention by positing an instruction question: ‘Who will the first Democrat to call Republicans retarded be?’” While Mr. Wilkie was honest enough to note that the impulse dates well before President Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, citing comedian Kathy Griffin’s controversy over a dummy with his severed head, he seemed blissfully unaware of the pre-Trump history or that Ms. Griffin was far from alone in her dark musings at the time, suggesting his thesis that this is something new in the blood stream is entirely false. After all, it was only a few days after President Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, when Madonna told an adoring crowd that she fantasized about “blowing up the White House” because he was in it. “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” she declared. “But I know that this won’t change anything. We cannot fall into despair.” “It took this horrific moment of darkness to wake us the f–k up. It seems as though we had all slipped into a false sense of comfort, that justice would prevail and that good would win in the end. Well, good did not win this election. But good will win in the end,” she added. Though it wasn’t technically speech, progressives also cheered when then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tore up President Trump’s State of the Union Speech – standing right behind him at the podium in the Capitol of all places – in 2020, a move that can only be described as dark, woke, and revered.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Wilkie ultimately identified the cause of this new approach as President Trump himself, because nothing can ever purely be progressive’s fault if the Orange Man is involved. First, he noted that a primary driver was the upcoming midterm elections, “it’s becoming clear that some forces within the Democratic apparatus are betting that Dark Woke can be wielded as an effective electoral strategy. One of the lessons of the current political environment is that Americans crave authenticity. Maybe the only way to consummate that desire is by hitting below the belt.” Then, he claimed progressives view this as a necessity as a result of President Trump’s 2024 victory, “this conclusion conceded the post election conclusion of a conservative cultural victory. If the arc of history is indeed tilting rightward, then Dark Woke acknowledges that the Democratic brand had grown too uptight, which must be rectified by a kind of reverse virtual signaling.” While he appeared surprised Dark Woke has taken off for some reason, that “certain Dark Woke principles diffuse[d] into the ranks and file Democratic voting population,” he finally arrived at the even darker truth: “The base appears to be demonstrably more bloodthirsty than it ever was during Trump’s first term, almost like they’ve finally been granted an opportunity to satiate a long-unquenched rage, absent any platitudinal hedging.” How this was a surprise when Axios reported that Democrats wanted actual blood as early as last July, demanding someone get shot for the cause remains a mystery and the progressive intelligentsia has been demanding outright war, but in addition to welcoming Mr. Wilkie’s admission as better late than ever, we can also consider it a case study about how tightly progressives cling to their virtue, even despite massive evidence it no longer exists. According to Slate.com the bloodthirstiness and the desire to simply be mean has to be something new, something brought on by a cataclysmic event, caused by an outside force, not generated from within. In reality, there has never been a non Dark Woke. From day one, the woke warriors have raged an unceasing battle on anyone who disagreed, branding them as retrograde hatemongers with no place in polite society. Some like me would argue that the entire project of intersectionality leads direction to this and not other place. Regardless, the violence was not so subtly bubbling beneath the surface the entire time complete with assassination fantasies followed by assassination conspiracy theories when some tried to blow President Trump’s head off in real life and succeeded in killing Charlie Kirk. To miss it, one must have not been looking too closely or seeing oneself in an inverted mirror, but sadly that is the nature of the modern progressive movement, where self-awareness and self reflection no longer apply, and when they’re wrong, even when they’re right.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 