Stories About ‘Waking Up from Woke’

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Seneca Scott with goats in West Oakland, CA, September 16, 2023. (Jason Henry for *The Free Press*)

A political realignment in three acts.

By Oliver Wiseman

10.31.23

225

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A black activist fights the progressivism he says is destroying his city. Left-wing Jews say “screw the allyship” after seeing fellow progressives cheer Hamas’s pogrom. Immigrant New Yorkers oppose the new migrants coming to New York “with the expectation they’re going to be taken care of.”

Today in The Free Press, three stories paint a picture of a larger political shift happening in America.

It is sometimes said of the pandemic that it accelerated preexisting trends: we were already living online more and more, reinventing the traditional 9 to 5, automating ever larger parts of the economy, and abandoning shopping malls. And the lockdowns simply turbocharged it all.

Might recent weeks be having a similar effect on our politics? Could outrage at the horrifying events in Israel, the global explosion of antisemitism, and the Hamas apologism on campuses and in newsrooms, crystallize into a big political upheaval?

Yesterday, Elon Musk, responding to a Free Press story on X, said that “people are waking up from woke.” Last week, a similar argument was made by Konstantin Kisin in our pages with his essay “The Day the Delusions Died.” He wrote that “many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.”

One person who has felt disenfranchised from the left for years is Seneca Scott, a black Oakland activist fighting for the future of his city. Scott is a former progressive who used to support defunding the police. But then he changed his mind. In 2020, “I realized how deep the damage was,” Scott tells David Josef Volodzko in a profile for The Free Press. Oakland’s leaders, “the people we had put in place . . . were just complete frauds.” Now Scott says he’s aiming to start a revolution in his city that will spread across the country.

Read the full story of his political conversion here:

The Black Activist Trying to Save Oakland from ‘Phony’ Woke Progressives

David Josef Volodzko

October 30, 2023

The Black Activist Trying to Save Oakland from ‘Phony’ Woke Progressives

Cardboard boxes of fresh yellow squash sit on a table outside the Bottoms Up Community Garden in Oakland.

Seneca Scott said “meet me at my office,” and this lush spot at the corner of 8th Street and Peralta—home to songbirds and clucking chickens—is it.

A few minutes later, Scott, 44, drives up in his Jeep and hops out wearing pajamas, a down vest, and a wide grin. We sit at the picnic table in the morning light of the garden, Scott stroking his beard, his shoulder-length locks tied up, as he describes how crime is ruining his adopted hometown.

He says it’s ridiculous how criminals are taking advantage of the police force’s notoriously slow response times.

“You know in the movies when they go to rob a bank and set their watches, like ‘all right bro, we got 30 seconds aaaand synchronize,’ ” Scott says. “Now it’s like 45, 50 minutes. It’s insane. I can sit down and make a sandwich and shit. Smoke a cigarette, take selfies, walk home. Because the police aren’t coming. They’re not even picking up.”

Read full story

Next up, Free Press writers Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block speak to progressive Jews shocked by people who, until a few weeks ago, they considered ideological teammates. One says he is now “politically homeless.” Another expresses his dismay at the “cloaked antisemitism” he sees whenever he opens social media.

Read the full story here:

The Great Betrayal

Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block

October 30, 2023

After Donald Trump was elected, Emily Rose, 51, flew to New York with her daughters to walk in the Women’s March. She demonstrated on the streets of Minneapolis, where she lives, in the days after George Floyd’s murder. She donated money to small, black-led movements and social justice organizations that she believed in. She unlearned and then re-educated herself, as white Americans were instructed to, and read the teachings of anti-racist scholars like Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But then, after the massacre in Israel on October 7, when some 1,400 Jews were brutally murdered, not to mention the rapes, beheadings, and instances of torture, Rose began to notice something odd from the cohort of fellow progressives she admired: they were cheering for the other side.

“I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,” Rose said. “I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship. I will not stop fighting, because I believe in the causes themselves. But as for going out of my way to support, to post, to give money? I’m done.”

Read full story

Finally, Free Press writer Olivia Reingold meets Hispanics in New York exasperated by the city’s handling of the migrant crisis—to the point that some in this traditionally deep-blue metropolis are considering voting Republican.

Here’s what Marcos Marte, a 62-year-old who arrived in America from the Dominican Republic 30 years ago, told Olivia he thinks of the city giving shelter and expensive services to the migrants: “It’s the mindset of the piñata—somebody’s going to hit it, and everybody’s going to pick from it. And before, it was like, work, save, and enjoy your retirement with dignity. Not anymore. . . . It’s not fair.”

Read Olivia’s rich report in full:

‘This Is Not the America I Knew’

Olivia Reingold

October 30, 2023

NEW YORK CITY — When Marcos Marte arrived in America thirty years ago, he took the first job he could get. Even though he’d graduated with an engineering degree back home in the Dominican Republic, where inflation was reaching double digits, he found himself in a factory line in Long Island, New York. For 16 hours a day, he raced to pull defective steering wheels out of an oven, scraping off the rubber casing so that they could be redone.

“I got burned up all the time,” says Marte, now 62. “I still have the marks on my wrists.”

His coworkers gave him a nickname—“Mr. Overtime”—since he not only picked up extra shifts but even bought a van to make more cash transporting other employees to the factory. No one ever offered him “a giveaway,” but he says he wouldn’t have taken one anyway.

“I never knew any place where I could apply for food stamps because I refused to,” he says. “That creates a habit of not working.”

But now, he hears that migrants, who are currently pouring into New York City by the thousands, are given hotel rooms, laundry, and daycare. Mayor Eric Adams says that every night a migrant family is in the city’s care, the local government spends an average of $394 for food, shelter, and medical care. And that makes Marte, who now sells construction supplies, “angry.”

Read full story

In other news. . .

→ Haley on the up, Pence out: A poll published Monday showed Haley tied for second place with Ron DeSantis in Iowa, with 16 percent. Haley is the only Trump challenger to have shown any sign of momentum in recent months. She is steadily gaining on DeSantis in the polling averages—even if Trump remains the comfortable front-runner.

If anyone is to catch Trump, then surely the field needs to consolidate soon. Mike Pence seems to recognize that truth—and the fact that he has run out of cash. He suspended his campaign on Saturday.

→ Netanyahu says cease-fire would be ‘surrender’: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a rebuttal to calls for a cease-fire in an address to the international press yesterday. “Just as the United States would not agree to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or after the terrorist attack of 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas,” he said.

→ Jewish students targeted at Cornell: Jewish students at Cornell are living under the threat of violence on campus. In a statement Sunday, college president Martha E. Pollack reported “a series of horrendous, antisemitic messages threatening violence to our Jewish community.” She said that the messages named the building that houses the school’s kosher dining hall. Antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed—in the U.S. and around the world—in the days and weeks since the October 7 attack.

→ Biden fumes about NYT Gaza coverage: Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Max Tani report that Joe Biden “raged against The New York Times in a private White House meeting early last week, after the Times amplified a Hamas claim that an Israeli air strike was behind the Oct. 17 bombing of a Gaza hospital.” Maybe he is a Free Press reader.

→ Star-mangled banner: Don’t listen to the declinists. America is still capable of greatness—like getting Flavor Flav to sing the national anthem at an NBA game. Okay, maybe things have gone downhill a little.

ICYMI: “Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.”

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