Peak Woke?

The left's propensity for virtue-signaling has them dying upon some very odd hills. I'm for helping them get there.

President Joe Biden and his entourage have a 2024 problem: they are massively unpopular. Biden’s approval ratings have sunk throughout his term in office, like a lead balloon on Jupiter. Current polling suggests that if the 2024 presidential election ends up being a Biden-Trump redux, enough voters will hold their noses to re-elect Trump. It might not even be particularly close.

“What fresh hell is this?”

There are, in my opinion, a number of reasons for Biden’s growing unpopularity. First and foremost is his abandonment of multiple commitments during his 2020 campaign against Trump to govern from the middle. Biden has, at almost every fork in the road, chosen to appease those on the far left of the Democratic Party. The people he’s alienated over this—those who held their noses and voted for “not Trump"—are not going to easily forget.

Crime, immigration, green energy, Title IX—you name it, Scranton Joe throws junk pitches from the left side of the plate. Anyone who has the temerity to disagree, regardless on what grounds, is labeled with the epithet MAGA Republican. Further, Biden is no man of his word. No wonder centrist Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Krysten Sinema (I-Az.) are torpedoing large parts of Biden’s agenda in the Senate.

Then there’s the growing evidence of corruption in the Biden family. At the very least, the Biden family has been involved in business dealings that push the boundaries of legal and ethical decorum. Hunter Biden, in particular, has an “eww” factor that’s off the charts.

I’m going to withhold judgment on how bad all of the alleged legal improprieties are until the multiple ongoing investigations are completed. But it’s hard to imagine that with as much smoke as there is around the Biden family, there’s not some fire.

Then there is Biden himself. Right up until Biden became president, I actually kind of liked him. I bought the middle-class sensibility, “Scranton Joe,” schtick. He’d always seemed to be mostly just a goofy, gaff-prone politician with a good heart who was sincere in his desire to work across the aisle in the Senate. Persistent rumors during Obama and Biden’s two terms in office to the effect that President Obama disliked Vice President Biden made me question Obama more than Biden.

Now, unfortunately, I get it. Biden may be one of the most plainly arrogant politicians to ever spend a lot of time in and around the White House. His word isn’t any good (ask Joe Machin about this), and he’ll throw anyone under the bus to appease his left flank and further his sorry existence. When it comes to dishonesty and brazen influence peddling in the service of political power, he makes LBJ look like a piker.

Biden is, however, in my view, merely a symptom of a greater problem on the left side of the political spectrum. In a time where Republicans, who are saddled with Trump, ought to be easy to defeat in elections, they are not. It’s because of the stain of Trump that many Republicans lost close races in the last cycle. But that’s changing. Much of the country is at least equally disaffected with the progressive democratic movement, whose titular leader just happens to be Joe Biden.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Biden is actually a leader in the progressive movement; I think that he’s just latched onto that particularly meaty plank in today’s political flotsam. I’d actually respect Biden more if I thought that he actually believed some of the silly stuff that he pushes. But hardly anyone who’s been around is actually that much of a chucklehead. It’s all about preaching to the choir.

Morally, I see little difference between Biden and Trump. They are both for themselves first and last, and to hell with everyone else. My stomach churns whenever I hear either speak. These two are far from the best that our country has to offer and are all the evidence anyone needs in favor of the proposition that our political system needs a new set of overhead cams.

If it ends up being these two again in 2024, just shoot me.

Fortunately, I don’t see Trump emerging as the 2024 Republican candidate. Though he may be very popular with a segment of the right, his behavior has alienated a lot of Republicans who actually liked and supported Trump’s policies. I see Florida governor Ron DeSantis emerging as the ‘24 Republican candidate. DeSantis has pretty good conservative bona fides without any of Trump’s baggage. He’s got to figure out a way to get around Trump in the primaries, but I think that he’s up to that task. Especially with Trump’s mounting legal difficulties.

If it comes down to DeSantis-Biden in 2024, I think that DeSantis wins in a landslide. The left will have, once again, done it to themselves. I think that the two principal reasons for this rebuke will be Biden’s handling of the economy and his promotion of woke, virtue-signaling, leftist priorities to the detriment of everyone beyond his progressive base.

What most of the country sees that those whose provenance is progressive bubbles do not see is that the far left and their representatives in the White House and Congress don’t much care about most of us as fellow citizens or human beings; they care about us as symbols that may be used to either promote or oppose their priorities.

Progressives in NYC, for instance, had over forty opportunities to demonstrate their compassion and willingness to help Jordan Neely, a mentally ill man who recently died after he threatened people on a subway train in NYC and was put into restraint by a passenger, Daniel Perry, and others.

Neely, a habitual criminal and drug abuser, had very recently assaulted a 67-year-old woman, leaving her with serious injuries. He’d pleaded guilty to child endangerment for dragging a 7-year-old girl down the street. He was on a top 50 list of homeless people in NYC who needed help. Yet to progressives, his usefulness is not as a human being who needed help; it is as a Michael Jackson impersonator who needlessly died at the hands of a former U.S. Marine who acted out of racism rather than just trying to thwart an assault from an obviously crazy person.

Illegal immigration is another example of progressives caring more about people as symbols than human beings. No one can possibly look at the mess at our southern border (except Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas) and conclude that we are doing things in any right, reasonable, or humane manner. Both sides of the political spectrum have contributed to this, but the left prefers gasoline to water in trying to put the fire out.

I am on record as being pro-immigration. Almost anyone who wants to walk across one or more countries to get here is welcome, at least as far as I’m concerned. They share my values. But the “almost” in that sentence is an important qualifier. There’s ample evidence that not everyone crossing our borders illegally needs or deserves to be here. But not to virtue-signaling progressives, who see reasonable caution in this regard as tantamount to insensitivity and cruelty.

I’d love to hear progressives explain to the many victims of cartel-based smugglers who attempt this dangerous journey how their platitudes helped prevent cartels from using them as drug mules, from selling young women into prostitution, and from taking all of the money that they have.

Wait, why are the progressives all running away?

If the cartels can’t make enough money smuggling fentanyl through regular border crossings, they can always up the ante at numerous illegal crossings. I’d also love to hear Secretary Mayorkas explain face-to-face to the parents of young people killed by fentanyl poisoning what he did to try and prevent it, other than producing self-serving falsehoods about border security.

One area in which I’m quite sure that we’ve reached peak woke, and are watching the odds shift toward team red is in the whole gender identity brouhaha. Allowing males to compete in women’s sports under the guise of “gender identity” is an idea popular with absolutely no one outside of those in a few far-left bubbles. Allowing males who’ve been accused of sex crimes to be placed in women’s prisons with plenty of new victims (who can’t escape) is insane.

I’ve written for a local newspaper here in Eastern Idaho, The Idaho State Journal, for several decades. Recently, Idaho, along with a number of other states, has passed laws restricting or banning gender transition treatments for minors. The Journal has covered this, and many of our regular op-ed contributors have written about the issue both ways.

For the record, I am mostly against these laws. Families should have the right to determine what’s best for their children. It’s the medical profession, rather than the government, that should be establishing best practices. It’s on account of the fact that the medical profession has largely punted on the gender transition issue that it’s being taken up in state legislatures. Someone has to address it. If it’s not going to be those who should, you’re probably going to get the “B” team.

Being against government intervention in the process is not the same as approving of the gender transition procedures for minors, which I do not. Even at that, it’s none of my business unless you insist on making it so. You start feeding my kids malarkey about gender identity trumping biology (an exceedingly small probability) without my approval, and you’re going to have a problem that you can’t handle. I’m quite sure I'm far from alone in holding this point of view.

One of the things that intrigues me about the local columns from those condemning these laws, specifically a pair of local doctors who specialize in gender transition and a liberal former Idaho Supreme Court justice, is their willful ignorance concerning the paucity of scientific data supporting the sudden surge in gender identity crises in children—something that was virtually unknown a decade ago.

I don’t know that there is enough ignorance among professionals to explain any of this. I think that it’s almost entirely virtue-signaling. According to the pair of doctors and the good judge, those who have concerns about irreversible gender transitions for minors, including many scientists and physicians, are bigoted, uneducated, and unenlightened fanatics. I suspect that this is more about feeling superior to those they are predisposed to dislike than an abundance of well-considered care for mentally fragile kids.

The judge is entitled to his ill-informed opinion. The doctors are less so. Just give this madness about five more years. At that time, we can probably all sit back and watch physicians who used off-label drugs and surgery to address what are most likely mental health issues in children be sued for malpractice when their victims figure out that the adults in the room were actually not. I’ll bring the popcorn.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth