Roll out the carpet, folks, for the Great American Circus has arrived. No more bearded ladies or fire-breathing clowns, no sir! Now, we’ve got ourselves an act more confounding than any old freak show—the spectacle of “wokeness”. It’s an unpredictable tide, washing over the nation, stirring up self-righteousness like silt at the bottom of a once placid river. A river that ran clear with what used to be good old-fashioned common sense.

There’s a fever in the air, can you smell it? It’s a fever for fairness, for justice, but it’s caught a strange wind and gone off-course. It’s running wild, bounding headlong into the chasm of the extreme, the absurd. We were once a nation of rebels, hell-bent on making our own paths, speaking our own minds. But this new culture – it’s about conforming, about fitting snug into boxes of righteousness, about policing every word, every thought, to be as inoffensive as possible.

American Flag
In this reinterpreted American flag, done in the style of Jackson Pollock, wokeism does cause the colors to run a bit. Original art by SOFREP

I’m all for knocking the power-hungry off their pedestals, shaking up the system and giving a voice to the little guy. God knows I’ve dedicated my life to that. But somewhere along the line, this ‘woke’ movement has twisted that noble pursuit into a freakish distortion of itself. We’ve moved from fighting for the silenced to silencing the fighters.

These new cultural luminaries, the self-appointed shepherds of the woke movement, they’re dealing in absolutes. It’s a strange and disturbing mirroring of the very tyrants they claim to oppose. Dissent is no longer a virtue, but a sin, a one-way ticket to ostracism.