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We all remember how bad it got. Just a few short years ago, it felt like every major institution — from corporate America, to media, to universities, to Hollywood, to our own government — had decided that half the population was the enemy. Speech was policed, businesses were pressured, and ordinary Americans found themselves locked out of basic services for holding the wrong opinions.
A lot of people are now saying that chapter is closed. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said recently, laughing. Others have triumphantly declared that “woke” has been defeated. I understand the desire to move on. But those of us who lived through the mayhem shouldn’t be so quick to agree. Here’s what actually happened and why the danger hasn’t disappeared.
The woke ideology that pervaded nearly every aspect of public life did not conquer American institutions by force of argument alone. Rather, it spread so rapidly because corporate America, in particular, became a willing and enthusiastic partner.
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Technology companies censored ordinary citizens for what amounted to thought crimes, major financial institutions stopped doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, de-banked Donald Trump and refused to serve lawful gun manufacturers. “Green” initiatives became official policy, with nearly every major financial institution committing hundreds of billions to pursuing renewable energy and refusing to do business with coal companies and others that were on the “wrong side of history.”
Public displays of progressive orthodoxy became the price of admission across large swaths of the private sector. Companies understood that those then in political power were prepared to make life difficult for any entity that refused to fall in line, to say nothing of their own employees who could cause immeasurable headaches if executives strayed from the progressive worldview.
What we continued to call free enterprise was, in practice, something closer to totalitarian social control administered at the corporate level. A concentrated group of technology platforms, financial institutions and cultural gatekeepers enforced a political narrative against large portions of their own user base. And rather than face a market cost for alienating half their user base, the sheer scale of these companies, and the regulatory barriers that protected them from true competition, made the costs of ideological experiments nearly invisible to those imposing them. When a handful of firms control the infrastructure of speech, payment, and distribution, market power and narrative power become one and the same. Dissent does not have to be answered — it can simply be excluded.
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The only reason this apparatus was interrupted is that the American people changed the occupants of power.
President Trump’s 2024 victory put the technology companies on notice. Several of their leaders appeared at the inauguration, some even helping underwrite the event. One major platform executive later publicly conceded that his company had made serious mistakes. But we should not be lulled into thinking these companies have learned their lesson. What we are seeing isn’t repentance, but merely temporary accommodation. The true believers remain inside these institutions: corporate boards, human-resources departments and mid-level management structures are still populated by people deeply committed to racial quotas, oppression hierarchies, green fantasies and the denial of basic biological reality. Should political power shift again, the incentive to reimpose a more aggressive and better-organized version of the same project — Woke 2.0 — will be overwhelming.
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This is the deeper danger. When the guts of capitalism can be ideologically weaponized, the ordinary corrective mechanisms of competition stop working. Incumbents no longer have to persuade customers or improve their products; they can simply close the gates. A free market depends on the ability of new entrants to challenge established players on the merits. A free society depends on the open contest of ideas. Both are undermined when concentrated private power decides which competitors and which viewpoints are allowed to exist.
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What ultimately checked this power was not the market itself, but the marketplace of the ballot box. The policies that followed the change in administration — ending race-based preferences in federal contracting and employment, restoring the principle of equal protection under the law and ending the use of federal funds for irreversible medical procedures on minors — restored a measure of sanity and forced corporate America to adjust its public posture accordingly. Without that governing sanity, there is little to prevent the return of the previous regime on an even larger scale.
That is why the coming midterm elections matter so greatly, and voter identification is essential. Secure elections are the last reliable check ordinary citizens possess against concentrated power, whether public or private. Political leadership is not a luxury in a free society – it’s the thin line between a country in which the people still rule and one in which a handful of unaccountable institutions decide who may speak, who may bank and who may participate in public life.
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We have been given a reprieve in the current moment. The American people demonstrated that they still possess the power to correct course when they choose to use it. But, as the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Institutions that spent years enforcing ideological orthodoxy have not suddenly discovered the virtues of pluralism. They have simply calculated that the political climate has temporarily changed. The moment that calculation reverses, the pressure will return – more sophisticated, more coordinated and more confident that it can succeed where it previously overreached.
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The founding generation understood that freedom of thought and freedom of expression are not ornamental. They are the fundamental operating system of self-government. When those freedoms are systematically constrained by private institutions that face no meaningful competition and no democratic accountability, the fabric of society itself begins to fray. We cannot afford to treat the recent interruption of this process as a permanent victory when it is really just a pause. What we do with that pause will determine whether the next generation inherits a free country or a managed one.
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