The word woke didn’t start as a punchline. It wasn’t born in a cable news chyron or weaponized in a focus group. It came from a place of survival. To be woke meant to stay alert to injustice, to recognize patterns of abuse that polite society preferred to ignore. But today, centrists recoil at the word like it’s radioactive, lumping it together with slogans like “Defund the Police,” stripped of context, history, and meaning. In doing so, they erase the conditions that made it necessary. Because you can draw a straight, unbroken line from the rise of the smartphone camera to the explosion of Black Lives Matter protests. The difference between then and now isn’t that injustice suddenly appeared, it’s that it became undeniable. What once looked over by America is now captured in real time and shared globally within minutes. As Will Smith once said, racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed. And that filming shattered the illusion that incremental reform was enough. Yet centrists, t...
In the Inland Empire, patriotic progressives, combative centrists, and left-coded independents can sometime feel alone in Inland Empire. However, this blog serves as a counternarrative to the conservatives in this region. Please support this work by liking, subscribing, and sharing this content. Also feel free to reach out to be a guest writer on this platform. Like I always say a smarter Democrat is a better Democrat and better Democrats are what we all want to be.