This past Sunday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an appearance on ABC’s This Week, whereupon Jonathan Karl asked her to weigh in on some things now-former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong said a few years ago — about defunding the police, saying that the police exist to uphold white supremacy (factually true), and, perhaps worst of all, suggesting that we ought to do away with Thanksgiving, tweeting, “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.”
AOC responded to that by laughing and saying that “Woke One was crazy.”
I did not love that take, although I admit I’m also very sick of trying to explain what “defund the police” actually means to hysterical, ignorant people who are too excited to use it as a cudgel against the Left to understand what anyone is talking about. But Ryan Zickgraf of Unherd — yet another website for the kind of smug jerks who consider themselves brave, heterodox thinkers who don’t go along with the crowd despite having more or less the same takes on everything — did not love that take for far different reasons.
When I first saw Zickgraf’s headline “‘Woke One’ derailed my life: AOC can’t laugh off its excesses,” I had some ideas about what that might have entailed. But not one of those ideas came anywhere close to the magnitude of what this poor man has suffered.
He wrote:
In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word “Nicaragua.” No, I wasn’t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. When I repeated it slowly, a hush washed over half of the room, and management later informed me that people “didn’t feel safe” with me in the building, as if I were strapped with a bomb, not a guy with a sheet of questions trying to get through Central America.
When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.
Yes. He lost a gig hosting trivia at a bar. Can you imagine? I actually can, as I have also hosted trivia at a bar. So I closed my eyes and I imagined. I thought about how I would have felt if I had lost that gig, and then I realized that I couldn’t even remember why I even stopped doing it in the first place. Was my life derailed? Not that I recall! Can I imagine a scenario in which losing such a gig could possibly derail my life? Not so much. Though I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would pronounce Nicaragua in a way that would make anyone think I was saying a racial slur (I think we can assume that’s what happened) or that, were that to somehow happen I would not be deeply fucking horrified and apologetic … which I think we can assumebut our friend Ryan Zickgraf was not.
Actually, I can think of one way in which it might derail my life. I do sometimes have trouble sleeping because my brain won’t stop replaying hideously embarrassing moments from throughout my life, and something like that would certainly be at the top of the list. What I can’t fathom, however, is that whole scenario happening to me and having the thing I am most bothered by not be people thinking I used a racial slur, not people not feeling safe around me, but losing a gig hosting pub trivia.
I don’t know what is worse, though — the essay itself or the people taking it seriously.
I get it. He’s a white guy. It probably would have killed him to apologize and say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I really did not mean to pronounce it that way, I just tripped over my words.” He’d be dead now and thoroughly unable to write this nonsense.
The rest of the essay was largely seething anger over “woke” criticism of the police — and who can possibly imagine why? — and things people said that he found “ridiculous.”
But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn’t clear what “Woke One” includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?
Okay, so … the guy says “forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt,” and yet a very large portion of what makes him and others so furious about what they call “woke” is that people started expecting some contrition for the horrible things some other people had gotten away with doing over hundreds of years? That they were making people feel guilty? That probably people expected him to apologize, even if he only said a racial slur on accident?
Imagine thinking you deserve an “I’m sorry I read a book about anti-racism and that this hurt your feelings” or an “I’m sorry we did a land acknowledgement that you, personally, found ridiculous. I can’t imagine the pain you have suffered since.”
Imagine thinking that merely discussing police abolition and prison abolition came anywhere close to the fucking horrors these systems have been responsible for. You want to talk about “cruelties”? It is literally the law of the land here that “actual innocence” is not considered a good enough reason to let someone out of prison for a crime they didn’t commit. We have kept people in prison for years after someone else confessed to the crime for which they were convicted. Hell, Texas kept a man in jail for 35 years just awaiting trial. Our prison system violates practically every tenet of international law for the “standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners.” Oh, and on top of that, it doesn’t fucking work. People go to prison, get traumatized and end up doing worse things than they went there for the first time.
The police he’s so enamored of? Well, even just beyond the issues with corruption and police brutality (which, were he to personally experience it, he might consider even more upsetting than losing a gig hosting pub trivia), or spending the money we give them on tanks and other military-grade weaponry that they think makes them look “cool,” police officers are not even actually legally obligated to stop a crime in progress. The Supreme Court actually found that police who refused to enforce a woman’s restraining order against her abusive ex-husband and purposely ignored her 911 calls for eight hours after he had kidnapped their three daughters did nothing wrong and could not be sued by that woman, even though their inaction led to her said ex-husband killing the three daughters.
I would love to know, really, why any of that is so much less “extreme” and “shocking” than people discussing abolishing the entities responsible for it.
So yeah. Some people saw all of that going on and said “Hey! It seems like this isn’t working, maybe we should replace these systems with something else?” What a terrible thing for them to have done to you, personally, Mr. Ryan Zickgraf.
“Woke” essentially means “being aware” and “paying attention.” And while people like Zickgraf have tried to turn it into something else, something involving mean HR ladies “scolding them” and people losing jobs and other opportunities over things they didn’t even know would be seen as offensive (as I’ve said before — if these people want to ensure that people don’t lose their jobs without just cause, they are free to join me in calling to abolish at-will employment), ultimately, the thing they were mad at was being forced to hear about these things.
Many men didn’t want to know about all of the sexual assault and harassment the women they knew had experienced. They especially didn’t want to question if they themselves had ever pushed a woman’s boundaries and were the cause of her trauma. Many white people didn’t want to know that people of color were still affected by racism, didn’t want to know about police brutality, didn’t want to hear about things that made them “feel guilty for being white,” and resented being asked to consider the ways in which they have benefited from having white skin.
The fact is, they thought everything was nice, they found out it wasn’t and then got mad at the people who told them about it. That is, essentially, the thing they want an apology for.
To be fair, Zickgraf did admit that the anti-woke have not always been perfect themselves:
This, of course, doesn’t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.
By “dust[ing] off the calipers,” would he be referring to the zeal with which so many on the Right have become openly white supremacist over the last decade? (Yes.)
By “identitarian grotesqueries,” does he mean the now very-mainstream-on-the-Right view that women should lose the right to vote or, at the very least, go back to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Or the whole thing where they want to force everyone to be Christian, to the point of putting the Ten Commandments up in schools? Or the thing where they want to banish trans people from society?
Those grotesqueries? Because, you know, I just don’t hear a lot of people like Zickgraf talking about those things the way they talked about all of the bad, scary woke people. I don’t hear the free speech bros being outraged by all of the #Repealthe19th shit, or about Elon Musk taking one of the most important and influential social media networks and turning it into a site that no one normal wants to use anymore because it’s a cesspool filled with the most hateful human beings alive, and it’s cooking people’s brains.
I also don’t hear them warning of a “backlash,” which is interesting. Because if you all think we have so much power to “destroy lives,” you’d think you’d be afraid that all of this rampant sexism and racism on the Right might lead to retaliation from us … but no. It’s almost as if you weren’t afraid of us so much as you just wanted us to shut up so you didn’t have to feel bad.
I don’t hear anyone complaining about “free speech” when the Right tries to cancel people, or movies or television shows … or restaurants that change their logos. Because it’s just assumed that they have every right to support who they want to support and oppose who they want to oppose.
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Perhaps he can’t do that until he gets his apology:
But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from woke doesn’t exist — it’s just basic decency to: of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill? We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes.
But I thought being anti-woke meant never having to say you’re sorry? Isn’t that kind of the whole point? That it’s very bad to make people feel bad about making other people feel bad?
Maybe it just goes the one way.
I think what bothers me the most about the “excesses of woke” people is that they are clearly trying to impart that what they “went through” was not only comparable to suffering police brutality, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assault, homophobia, transphobia, but worse. So much worse, in fact, that people just need to shut up about all of those things forever, for fear that it could lead to some white guy, somewhere, losing a bar trivia gig.
So you know what? I am sorry, Ryan. I am so, so deeply sorry that you had your entire life derailed by losing a bar trivia gig because you couldn’t apologize for what I assume was saying something that sounded like a racial slur. I am so sorry that someone you didn’t know on the internet probably said something that made you feel bad about being a white guy. Or that someone was perhaps not interested in your take on a particular subject at a particular time. I am so sorry that people hurt you, personally, by doing land acknowledgements. I am sorry that people were mad about injustices in prisons and police departments, and that them talking about what to do about those things made you feel unsafe. Or annoyed. Or whatever.
I understand now that, while you deserve apologies from the world for the way you feel you were treated for a few years, it is incredibly oppressive to expect people like you to apologize for the way everyone else has been treated throughout the whole of human history. I get it! You should not have to apologize for sexism or racism or consider ways in which you may have been sexist or racist yourself — that would be cruel — but I definitely owe you an apology for that time you lost your bar trivia gig, whether I was at that bar or not.
More than anything, though, I apologize for the ridiculous double standards that exist in this world for men and women, for white people and people of color, for straight people and LGBTQ+, for the Left and the Right, that have caused you to have so little self-awareness that you thought it was a really good idea to write that essay.
My sunshine boy, hello from Harry!
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-313181601?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
"And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined."
Could have? So he wasn't actually ruined? He just wanted to complain.