The term “Dark Woke” is emerging as a harsher, more insidious evolution of its unmodified predecessor. Dark Woke is used to describe a combative, politically incorrect strain of the left, often seen as co-opting the right’s more vitriolic elements of online culture. One example might be Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare with Donald Trump.
Although Dark Woke was once limited to social media, it has unfortunately moved to the streets, this time led not by Antifa or West Coast students, but by millennial soccer moms in the Midwest. As these new tactics take root on the left, what begins as online outrage quickly spills over into real-world activism, sometimes with startling intensity and tragic consequences.
Take what happened in Minneapolis and Chicago, where increasingly militant confrontations, including protests and direct actions against federal agencies like ICE, erupted in the wake of high-profile deaths caused by federal agents. The fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis sparked a wave of white women joining the Dark Woke militia. With ICE active in the Midwest, anti-ICE protestors—many of them women—are leading street blockades and attempting to intervene in arrests, sometimes resulting in riots and arrests for federal conspiracy charges. In Chicago, 14 self-described “suburban moms” were detained outside the Broadview ICE facility. A week later, nine women were arrested blocking the same center.
A recent Cygnal poll found that 24 percent of Americans think it’s acceptable to break the law, even with violence, to stop federal immigration enforcement. Nearly 70 percent of Americans and about 80 percent of Republicans oppose such tactics, but support jumps to 61 percent among white liberal women aged 18 to 44—the most supportive demographic for these actions.
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