On an election night that gave conservatives nearly more luminous moments than we could count, one shone with particular clarity. Around 1 a.m., before the networks called the presidential race but long after the result was obvious, CNN’s Van Jones faced the camera to deliver a characteristically weepy monologue. Black women and Hispanic people, Jones lamented, had “woke[n] up … with a dream and [were] going to bed with a nightmare.” Hardly missing a beat, fellow panelist David Urban asked how we could be sure such Americans hadn’t voted for Donald Trump.

Those wishing to mark the exact instant of wokeness’s demise as a going political concern could do worse than point to this television exchange. Here was Jones, captain of the Resistance, playing the race card with a shamelessness rarely seen since 2020’s Summer of George. Yet rather than shrink away, Urban, a white Republican, gave a smirking reply that exposed the ridiculousness of Jones’s assumptions. Needless to say, no bolt of lightning shot through the news channel’s studio to singe the GOP operative’s eyebrows. Conservatives could learn something from that. If wokeness really is behind us, isn’t it time we all start acting like it? 

One needn’t have looked far in the days following the election to find an emerging anti-woke consensus. Vice President Kamala Harris lost, the Atlantic opined on Nov. 9, because she “could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers.” Democratic strategist James Carville was even blunter: Democrats “could never wash off the stench” of “defund the police” and other bizarre identitarian obsessions. From the New York Times to Slate to Musa al Gharbi’s influential Substack, leftist organs seemingly everywhere embraced columnist Maureen Dowd’s pithy declaration that “woke is broke.” Summing up this reality last month, pundit Jonathan Chait observed that wokeness had “lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.” 

It is both healthy and inevitable that conservatives should greet the ebbing of wokeness’s tide with exhilaration. Yet instead of merely high-fiving in private, we must press our advantage, challenging false orthodoxies in public life, among friends, and in our workplaces and homes. 

Indeed, our very thoughts must change, to the extent that we have allowed alien notions to colonize them. If, as David Samuels recently wrote for Tablet, the Left’s project has meant “bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity,” our job is to punch some bullies’ noses. Having had right on our side all along, we now have the political winds. We mustn’t waste them. 

What this means in practice is less extreme than one might suppose. No, conservatives shouldn’t readopt the minor public racism and sexism that marked American life before the invention of political correctness. Vanishingly few of us want that. But yes, we should cease to self-censor where race, gender, and other sensitive cultural matters are concerned. Because this will require us to develop new intellectual muscle memory and forget old lessons, the going may be slow at first. My advice is to start modestly and build from there. Truth and courage are contagious, and small victories often lead to larger ones. 

For example, many of the current “rules” of public discourse arose from brazen muscle-flexing on the part of the Left. Even progressives must be amused by how easily apolitical white people were made to say first “African American,” then “person of color,” and then capital-B “Black” to describe 14% of their fellow countrymen. The point of this was never social justice, as everyone with a brain already knows. Rather, it was goalpost shifting designed to wrong-foot well-meaning normies, thus rendering them embarrassed, apologetic, and pliable. 

I do not contend that America’s problems would be solved if conservatives resumed using “black” instead of “Black,” “committed suicide” instead of “died by suicide,” and “homeless person” instead of “person experiencing homelessness.” But those changes are not nothing! Since at least former President Barack Obama’s second term, the nation has been chasing leftist shibboleths and playing leftist language games. If conservatives want to sap progressives’ power, we had better stop marching under progressive orders. 

Other language distortions will, of course, be trickier to oppose. I refer here to those having to do with transgenderism, which, election or not, will not readily give up its hold on America’s HR departments and employee manuals. It is a sad fact that some corporate workers risk discipline or termination if they use male pronouns for “Sally,” never mind that “Sally” has a penis, an Adam’s apple, and a men’s-league bowling trophy on his cubicle shelf. This doesn’t mean, however, that workplace conservatives are powerless to stop saying lies, to create new norms, and to push back against a de facto ideological barrier to white-collar employment. 

As ever, we should begin with the end in mind: a corporate ecosystem that no longer punishes conservatives for saying things that are obviously true. How we pursue that righteous state will depend on both our circumstances and our tolerance for risk. I personally will never, for any reason, use what I know to be an incorrect pronoun in the workplace and have spent the last several years insuring myself against that eventuality. Not everyone can go quite that far, but everyone can do something. 

For instance, one can stop honoring the pronoun requests of ridiculous transgender provocateurs such as Sam Brinton, the bald, goateed luggage thief briefly employed by the Biden Energy Department. Since no one on Earth believes men of Brinton’s ilk to be women (or “theys”), it is unlikely that referring to them correctly will ruffle many feathers. Having thus established a small zone of sanity, one can push it outward to include new “transitioners” in one’s orbit. If “Sally” has been “passing” for a decade, his pronouns may be a lower priority. If James is “June” after a long weekend, don’t comply. Mind you, some conservatives who force this issue will be fired. Others will lose friends or alienate family. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than freedom of thought and conscience as practicable American ideals. If transgenderism’s militant orthodoxies can survive this anti-woke moment, they will plague the nation forever. 

I am not convinced, though, that nearly as many pronoun refuseniks as we fear will lose their jobs. American corporations have, after all, been falling all over themselves to appease Trump and Trumpism in the weeks since Nov. 5. When, in mid-December, the president-elect opened the New York Stock Exchange, executives from Citadel, Charles Schwab, Visa, and other firms lined up to shake his hand. Meta and Amazon have donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inaugural fund. Across Silicon Valley, tech bros are pouring money into anti-woke venture funds, aware that the national mood has plainly shifted. This may be cynical catering to raw power, but so is the dismissal of pronoun traditionalists. Power has now changed hands. Different interests must now be catered to. I do not say that opposing Big Trans will be easy, but clear-eyed, value-driven, respectful dissent is more possible today than it has been in years. 

So, for that matter, is opposition to the casual anti-white racism present in any number of corporate, nonprofit, and public-sector workplaces. I confess with shame that I have sat through “implicit bias” training in the past, gritting my teeth but remaining silent. Never again. Nor will I keep my seat if instructed in “white fragility,” “structural racism,” or other evidence-free racial fantasies of the Left. Here, federal law and regulation are squarely on my side. Asked recently about DEI initiatives and civil rights law, current Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Commissioner Andrea Lucas expressed polite bemusement at the “critical gaps” in corporate employers’ knowledge. “There is no such thing as ‘reverse race- or sex-discrimination’ under civil rights laws,” Lucas avowed. “Different treatment based on race or sex is discrimination, no matter which group of employees” is affected. 

Will the Trump-era EEOC crack down on “hostile work environment” offenses against white people? It is entirely possible. Yet the mere prospect of fair civil rights enforcement may be enough to bring employers in line. Complaining in 2020 that a workplace “training” made them feel disrespected and targeted, many white professionals would have been told to suck it up. Today, I’m not so sure. Neither are managers. Furthermore, nobody wants to be the next Bud Light or Jaguar. Corporate wokeness, long a cost of doing business, has become an impediment to stability and profit. As with gender madness, the time to stand up against racial persecution in the office is now. 

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Finally, and perhaps counterintuitively, conservatives pushing a return to national sanity should remember to smile. Wokeness is a contagion, a habit of mind, a self-fulfilling prophecy. To oppose it with anger is inadvertently to give it strength. Ignoring wokeness’s precepts is better than arguing with them (when circumstances permit). Laughing in its face is better still. 

Conservatives stand now above a dying patient, pillow in hand. To smother wokeness in its bed would be a mercy, whatever price an unlucky few of us paid. Until we do so, we will continue to be bound by the worst set of ideas since Karl Marx put pen to paper in the British Museum. Let’s do otherwise: Kill wokeness, bury its body, and go on as if it had never existed. The future will thank us.

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.