All that’s true, but I would add another factor that makes “anti-wokeness” political catnip for today’s Republicans: It allows them and their supporters to pose as innocent victims of persecution rather than as aggressive culture warriors seeking to defend their privileges and reverse social change. It expands their marginalized opponents into phantasmagoric monsters with the power to terrorize the people that God (the God of the Church of the Day Before Yesterday, when life was purer and simpler) put in charge of earthly affairs. And it politicizes every perceived offense to traditional culture and religion in an unconscious parody of the very over-sensitivity it attributes to the “woke.”

There is great power in the ability to convince conservative evangelicals that having to co-exist with LGBTQ folk and with assorted unbelievers is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution and interferes with their ability to practice their faith; that very perspective gets them half-way to the polling places on Election Day, and ready to perceive conspiratorial fraud whenever their champions lose. It is, as Bacon indicates, a natural follow-on to the politics of the 45th president, whether he’s still in the middle of the fray himself.