The 'Woke' Lie That Broke America
It wasn’t the professors who rewired the culture. It was the editors.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock—or on a distant, signal-starved planet—you already know the Trump administration is at war with Harvard, a conflict that is being billed far and wide as a war on “woke.” But that framing misses something deeper. The roots of this conflict aren’t just ideological—they’re informational.
For years, we’ve been told that wokeism is a byproduct of radical academia. That it spilled from gender studies departments and grievance-filled lecture halls into the wider culture. That it marched straight from gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s syllabus into HR trainings, protest chants and TikTok rants. But what if that narrative is all wrong?
Not entirely wrong—but wrong in a way that doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s because the real origin of woke’s cultural power wasn’t the classroom—it was the newsroom.
For the best part of a decade, the word “woke” has been a battering ram for the right, a badge of honor for the fringe left, and a migraine for anyone caught in between. It’s the word that launched a thousand think pieces and broke dinner tables in half. And we’ve been told, again and again, that this all began in universities—petri dishes of privilege and grievance, where naïve students are molded by radical professors and released into the world chanting about pronouns and systemic oppression.
Yes, the ideological roots of wokeness—Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, the Frankfurt School’s war on Western civilization, Michel Foucault’s obsession with power dynamics—have been haunting campuses for decades. These weren’t sudden infections but slow-acting poisons, seeping into humanities departments while most of the public was too busy working, raising families or trying to pay off their mortgages to care what some campus theorist thought about performative gender.
But for years, these ideas remained largely academic, trapped in the amber of scholarly journals, panel discussions and lecture halls, devoid of sanity. They were intentionally cryptic, laced with jargon and unintelligible to anyone outside the ivory tower. A cult with footnotes and questionable citations.
Then something shifted. It wasn’t a change in what was being taught; it was a change in who was telling the story.
The shift didn’t happen overnight. But sometime around the early 2000s—post-9/11, pre-social media—the old scaffolding of journalism started to buckle. Even in that era, the media had a leftward lean—but the print-first, shoe-leather ethos that defined 20th-century reporting still carried a kind of rough-edged integrity. Then it began to fade. And over the next two decades the collapse accelerated. In its place rose a new breed of journalist—not hardened by beat reporting or late-night copy edits, but shaped by campus politics and digital echo chambers. These were ideology-forward digital natives, products of elite universities where activism blurred into identity and feelings outranked facts. They didn’t enter the newsroom to inform—they came to transform.
This wasn’t accidental. BuzzFeed didn’t want Walter Cronkite. The Huffington Post wasn’t looking for objectivity. They wanted click-hungry crusaders armed with Twitter threads and graduate theses on the absurdity of whiteness. And so they handed the megaphone to the newly indoctrinated—and they used it not to report reality, but to rearrange it.
George Floyd’s death was a tipping point not because it revealed something new, but because it validated a preexisting ideological script that had been waiting for its big break. Within hours, legacy media outlets sounded indistinguishable from activist organizations. Editors, most notably James Bennet at The New York Times, were ousted for publishing contrary opinions. Headlines became manifestos. Language was surgically rewritten—“pregnant people,” “Latinx,” “anti-racism,” “safe spaces”—not because the audience demanded it, but because the newsroom staff insisted on it.
This wasn't the university bleeding into culture. It was the university bleeding into the newsroom and the newsroom leaking into everything else.
The #MeToo movement, too, became less about holding abusers accountable and more about policing interpersonal dynamics with all the subtlety of a religious inquisition. “Believe all women” wasn’t a legal principle—it was a commandment. And those who questioned it, even gently, were treated not as skeptics, but as heretics.
And what makes this even more sinister is the illusion of neutrality. Universities wear their politics on their sleeve. You know what you’re getting. But media institutions draped themselves in the old language of truth, objectivity, fairness. This façade was maintained while the news media quietly pushed an entirely new religion, one with saints and boatloads of sinners, original sins and public confessions, and a ruthless appetite for ideological purity. This was the religion of the Old Testament—minus the mercy. Wokeness became its liturgy. Its high priests were Twitter users with blue checkmarks and pitchforks.
To sin was to misstep, to question, to hesitate. And there was no redemption—only exile. Wokeness has come to mean many things, but above all, it stands for zero forgiveness. No atonement. No second chance. Even Dante believed there was a way out of hell, but for the woke, sin meant eternal damnation in the form of headlines, hashtags and HR memos.
It wasn’t news anymore. It was scripture—rewritten daily, enforced hourly and always under threat of revision by the most devout. So yes, colleges birthed this emotionally charged madness. But blaming the universities only takes you so far. These ideas sat dormant for decades—quirky, cryptic and confined to the faculty lounge. What changed was their delivery system. The cultural combustion happened only when these theories were picked up, rebranded and broadcast by the media.
The university may have lit the match, but it was the press that set the country on fire. That’s why this isn’t just a matter of academia run amok. The real power lies not in who writes the textbooks, but in who writes the headlines.
If you want to understand why local libraries started having drag queen story hours, why brands began issuing apologies for things no one even remotely thought they were responsible for, and why children started being taught that math is racist—look not to the syllabus but to the subeditor at The Washington Post, not to the classroom but to the Slack channel at NPR.
This wasn’t a student revolution. It was a communications coup.
And now, with every newsroom reading from the same script, the illusion is nearly complete. To dissent is to “spread misinformation.” To ask questions is “harmful.” To suggest we’ve lost our minds is to be branded as part of a “backlash”—as if sanity itself were a regressive impulse.
The media didn’t just export this ideology. It monetized it. Rage clicks, shareable outrage, dopamine-laced doomscrolling—woke became profitable. And once the algorithm figured out that moral panic sells better than truth, the descent was locked in.
A few outlets, most notably the Times, discovered that selling progressive orthodoxy could be a lucrative model, but most haven’t been so lucky. Quite the opposite, in fact. Newspapers are shuttering. Subscriptions and advertising revenue are collapsing. Legacy titles are gasping for relevance in a market they helped poison. With trust in the media at an all-time low (only 7% of Americans have a "great deal" of trust in the mainstream media), the price of this ideological gamble has become painfully clear.
Wokeness may have bought a few years of traffic, but it ultimately cost the media its credibility, something that it will find hard to regain. The audience left, not because they couldn’t handle the truth, but because they knew they weren’t getting it. Ironically, woke once meant awake—aware, alert, eyes wide open. But now it’s the press that’s sleepwalking, lost in its own shallow, sanctimonious sermon.
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