THE RACK: the story behind one VOICWAR design, with sources. The newsletter, TEETH, arrives every other week. Subscribe.
While everybody argued about a word, the money moved. One side's cut was permanent. Yours came with an expiration date.
First, what the word actually was.
1938. Lead Belly records "Scottsboro Boys," about nine Black teenagers falsely accused in Alabama. On the recording he warns Black travelers heading through that county: "best stay woke, keep their eyes open." Survival instructions.
1962. Novelist William Melvin Kelley writes "If You're Woke You Dig It" for the New York Times Magazine. Even then, the subject is white people taking the word and wearing it wrong.
Then it stops being a description and becomes a weapon. A word you deploy to make caring about anyone other than yourself sound like an expensive hobby.
Now watch what happened while that argument was running.
December 2017. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The corporate rate drops from 35% to 21%, and that cut is permanent. The cuts on your paycheck were written to expire at the end of 2025.
Read it again. Their cut has no end date. Yours shipped with one.
Extending those cuts. Roughly 45% of the money goes to households making about $450,000 or more.
2022. Florida passes the Stop WOKE Act. A federal judge blocks it, writing that it turns the First Amendment upside down. A federal appeals court agrees: the state was trying to control what people say by calling it conduct instead of speech.
So the anti-woke project loses in court, and the tax code wins permanently.
One of those was the show. The other was the transaction.
"Woke" got turned into a slur so that objecting to any of this would read as a personality defect instead of a budget position.
It is not a culture war. It is a transfer of money, and you are on the paying end.
Wear it and make them argue about the tax code instead.
Sources: How did the TCJA change business taxes? — Tax Policy Center · Those Making $450,000 And Up Would Get Nearly Half The Benefit Of Extending the TCJA — Tax Policy Center · Expiring Provisions of P.L. 115-97 — Congressional Research Service · Stop W.O.K.E. Act (Florida) — First Amendment Encyclopedia, MTSU · Woke — Wikipedia