‘Woke’ Is Not Dead

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

With President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, many cheered what they took for a cultural counter-swing, a meaningful movement away from radical progressive ideology and toward something resembling common sense.

 

Woke is dead! We’ve broken free from far-left ideological capture. We’re so back!

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news: “Woke” is not dead. It has merely evolved, as recent events attest.

 

If you’re the type of person who checks social media or the news only infrequently, you may have been shocked last week to learn that bombshell starlet Sydney Sweeney had personally attacked female athletes and set gender equality in sports back a thousand years.

 

She did nothing of the sort, obviously. She simply appeared — half naked with her unmentionables obscured by athletic gear — in a racy ad for a sports-prediction company. That’s the entire story. The “scandal,” if we must call it that, can be summed up in one sentence: a company put a hot, scantily clad blonde in a commercial. Except for the overreaction, there is nothing more to say about it.

 

But try telling that to the harridans and too-online weirdos who treat anything short of born-alive or late-term abortion as an assault on women: a cohort that, ironically enough, claims powerlessness as an identity even as it drives whole news cycles and endless debates about whatever has offended it that day.

 

There is no logic to it. Only raw emotion and bottomless grievance. In other words, “woke.”

 

Or, consider the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who killed her daughter and two sons. In this episode, activist jurors set out to correct perceived historical wrongs, rather than decide the matter directly before them.

 

Clancy has admitted to the murders. The question was never whether she did it; it was whether she was in her right mind when she did.

 

Yet, the jury did not return a verdict of “not guilty” by reason of insanity, nor did it convict her of murder or manslaughter. After days of deadlock, the judge declared a mistrial. Eleven of the twelve jurors — nine women and two men — were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible. The lone holdout was a black man.

 

The crazy thing is not necessarily that those eleven jurors, including every woman on the panel, believed Clancy was insane (and therefore not responsible for her actions) when she strangled her three children. It is that most of them — including nurses who leveraged their professional credentials to serve as unofficial expert witnesses in the jury room — seemed determined from the get-go to acquit her because they thought a not-guilty verdict would start a broader conversation about women’s mental health.

 

Juror Paula Devlin said as much after the mistrial. The jury, she told Fox News, “had a chance to get a conversation started that could change something.” She hoped “no other woman or husband has to go through this.”

 

Three majority jurors, including the forewoman, said after the mistrial that “they would be in court every single day supporting Lindsay Clancy” in a retrial, according to an NBC News affiliate.

 

Meanwhile, the real reason the jurors were there — to decide what justice for the murders of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months, should look like — went by the wayside.

 

For the modern radical progressive, the lives of children are always secondary to the almighty cause.

 

A brief review of the news last week might also leave you thinking there is an epidemic of racist lynchings in the United States.

 

There isn’t, but you try telling that to people such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, importantly, is at the forefront of the effort to recast “woke 1.0” as merely a series of passionate dialogues rather than a period of violent and destructive progressive excess.

 

On September 10, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) wrote: “Black folks are being found hanged in America. This is a national crisis and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country. We’re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings.”

 

Said Ocasio-Cortez on social media, “This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

 

In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, Pressley and nearly 60 colleagues wrote: “In 2026 alone, there have already been at least 10 reported hangings of Black people. They were as young as 18 years old and lived in different parts of the country, including Mississippi, Michigan, and New York.”

 

The letter cited an August 27 Washington Informer article that highlighted the hanging deaths of nine black people, four of which occurred between 2024 and 2025.

 

Of the nine, eight have been ruled suicides or cases where investigators have found no evidence of foul play, though some families dispute the findings. One exception produced a homicide charge, but nothing so far shows it as a racial lynching. The man charged in the murder is black.

 

The states where the deaths occurred include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina.

 

The Informer article did not mention every case from this year. There are at least two more: one ruled a suicide, and one still under investigation.

 

For context, nearly ten non-black people were also found hanged in public and outdoor places between 2024 and 2026. One of them, Cory Zukatis, a white homeless man in Mississippi, was even found hanging from a tree on the same day as one of the cases cited by the Informer.

 

Zukatis’s death, which went basically unnoticed by activists and national media, was ruled a suicide.

 

In 2024 alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 11,453 suicide deaths by hanging or suffocation. Roughly 8,500 to 9,500 of them were white.

 

Despair and depression make people do terrible things, regardless of the color of their skin.

 

Yet this truism did not stop Ocasio-Cortez from spreading a hate-crime panic, nor did it stop newsrooms from giving her the headline she wanted.

 

From the Associated Press last week: “Cases of Black people found hanged in the U.S. South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history.”

 

It is not much of a “ding-dong, the woke is dead” moment if we are still running with these hate-crime hoaxes.

 

There is more.

 

In Seattle last week, a coalition of business leaders begged Mayor Katie Wilson to reactivate the city’s surveillance camera network in high-event areas, an ask that came just weeks after a mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival. Wilson declined. She maintained her support for the city’s Office of Civil Rights, which argues that the cameras could threaten “disparate impacts on racially and socioeconomically marginalized communities.”

 

Then there is the New York Times, the most powerful news organization in the country, which last week questioned the average Israeli’s perception of the October 7, 2023, slaughter.

 

“[Israelis] still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” the report initially said of the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

 

An editor’s note later explained: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.”

 

The amended version still says, “Only a small minority of Israelis have protested against the military’s conduct in the war.”

 

Hate-crime hoaxes, bogus narratives in major media, exploiting murder as a “teachable moment,” the abuse of the English language, and hard-on-law-enforcement whackadoodle social experiments — this all sounds a lot like 2016–2024, if on a slightly smaller scale.

 

In Maryland this month, the University of Maryland Senate voted 108–22 to strip all instances of the term “DEI” from its bylaws and replace it with “belonging and community.” It also voted to rename its “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee” the “Belonging and Community Committee.”

 

But don’t get too excited: Only the labels changed. The services and policies remain the same.

 

No, woke is not dead. It’s not even on life support.