Dark Woke is what they're calling the left's new approach to PR. It's basically a combination of two ideas, wokeness and "Dark Brandon" memes about Joe Biden. In theory this is meant to balance the scales of public debate so that progressives can be just as offensive as they find the right to be. In practice it seems to boil down to Jasmine Crockett's style of argument, i.e. cursing and mocking disabled people for the cause. According to the NY Times, it's catching on.
“Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison,” said Bhavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters’ attention, where we’re stuck saying boring pablum. I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging — I’m a big fan of ‘dark woke.’”...
“All these new staffers, we grew up seeing extremely vile content overflowing from right-wing spaces into regular spaces,” said Caleb Brock, 23, the director of digital strategy for Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. “We’re ready to combat that by any means necessary.”...
In April, Ms. Crockett made headlines again when she referred to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels,” a remark that many in the disability community found offensive...
“I know I’m doing something right when the Fox News crowd is all just bitching at me like crazy,” Mr. Walz said at a town hall in Lorraine, Ohio, this month. “I’m loving it. Elon Musk was crying last week, ‘Tim is being mean to me!’”
None of this is really new. The Guardian was talking about "Dark Woke" back in January and said it seemed to flare up on Inauguration Day after an exchange between AOC and LibsofTikTok.
On the morning of inauguration day, #DarkWoke began trending on Twitter/X. The hashtag – ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Dark Brandon” – emerged in reaction to an exchange between the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-right influencer Chaya Raichik.
Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram Reel in which she explained her lack of interest in attending any inaugural festivities. “I don’t celebrate rapists,” she says bluntly. Raichik, whose social media account @LibsofTikTok is widely recognized for proliferating the anti-LGBTQ+ “groomer” moral panic, shared the video, declaring “another person Trump should sue”.
The congresswoman then retweeted Raichik, stating: “Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.” The post accrued more than 17m views, and in the process it birthed both a meme and a debate about Democrats’ approach to messaging for the next four years.
From 10,000ft, #DarkWoke appears to be little more than an internet exercise of dirtbag left gallows humor. The most viral tweet associated with the hashtag reads: “my Grandma voted for Trump so i made sure she fell down the stairs.” Attached to the post is a – presumably – staged photo of an elderly white woman recoiling in pain.
So maybe "Dark Woke" got traction from Trump's election but the "dirtbag left" is nothing new. They've been doing this for a while now. If anything, the new moniker seems like an effort to make an old approach to attacking the right edgy and new. It's really not some kind of breakthrough though. It's just a new justification for the same old hate.
Not everyone is convinced "Dark Woke" is a good idea. GQ published a column last month suggesting it was a dead end for the party which needed a lot more than a new messaging strategy.
Without a critical mass of current Democrat politicians practicing “dark woke-ism,” the whole thing just feels like a LARP, a pathetic consolation prize for losing the election. It’s fan-fic—fun but not real.
If the Democrats do with “dark woke” what they did with Dark Brandon and BRAT—adopt it as a marketing exercise, a tactic to signal edginess without real follow-through—it won’t help them win elections...“Dark woke” is a rebrand. We need a new idea.
My own take on this is that this is all part of the same old argument the left has after every election loss. The far left blames it on the boring center-left and the center-left blames it on the extremism of the far left. As I've written several times, I think the evidence is pretty clear that the center-left is correct on the facts. The far left really did hurt them in the 2024 election. But the far left never accepts that. It just keeps pushing for its agenda. Real leftism has never been tried and all that.
And so just a few months after that big loss, you have AOC and Bernie Sanders barnstorming the country to big crowds while Chuck Schumer is persona non grata. This is the wrong lesson for Democrats to take from the last election but the far left (as always) doesn't care about incremental politics or winning over the unconvinced.
Dark Woke is another attempt to make the same old leftist politics look edgy and sharp. But it's not a coincidence that "Dark Woke" is connected to the same Squad of leftists who lost seats in the last election. It creates feel-good moments in the short run and for some that's good enough even if its probably a loser in the long run. Ask Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman about that.
