Washington Examiner Reports: What is “ woke ”? The question is suddenly relevant because the activists of MSNBC and the “1619 Project” say conservatives can’t define what it is. Big mistake. Confident that woke was just a phrase, even a dog whistle, they have opened Pandora’s box.

Conservatives will relish keeping that Pandora’s box open a little longer because they now have an excuse to expose a central strategy of leftists — how they manufacture grievances and then plan to use resulting anger to provoke systemic transformation. Overwrought confidence will get you in trouble.

How all this came about is also instructive. On March 14, a leftist commentator named Briahna Joy Gray interviewed one of the most delightful people working on the conservative side, Bethany Mandel, and asked her at one point to define the term woke. As all of us whose living includes broadcast interviews have done, Mandel at first froze for about 10 seconds. That was it! Like Inspector Clouseau often did, the Left thought it had its smoking gun!

A tweet by the Vanguard that said, “LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define ‘wokeness,’” garnered 34.3 million views, and a hate fest erupted in the Twitterverse.

“This is perfect. See how easy this was, journalists?” Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” gushed in a tweet . She can’t tell history from fiction, but she’s more than glad to pile on someone who was simply caught off-guard on camera.

MSNBC, the house organ of the woke end of progressivism, went into overdrive. “As I mentioned in the Instagram post below, Mandel’s flop shows conservatives have so perverted the term ‘woke’ that they can't even define it on their own terms,” a very cross Ja’han Jones intoned on MSNBC.

Republicans, he added, have appropriated “the black slang term … to denote things they don't like, from truthful, inclusive education to Disney, the FBI and beyond.”



Not quite, Ja’han. Let’s parse this a little further.