RIP wokeness, the narrative went. An unwelcome phenomenon that peaked in 2020 and 2021 finally died in November of 2024. Trump killed it.

But beware, voters. The great many people who are quite pleased and relieved to have rid themselves of myriad woke excesses must be warned that the Professional Left has never turned the particular page. It remains firmly and defiantly planted in a 2020 stasis. The fever has not broken. If anything, it appears to be radicalizing further while out of power.

It currently lacks the coercive tools to reimpose woke enforcement and cancel culture writ large, including with various governmental levers. It expects that to change. It has engaged in little to no self-reflection while in the wilderness. Its movement hasn’t endured a corrective gut check, let alone one that has precipitated any tangible shift in approach next time it has the authority it craves.

To the contrary, it has doubled and tripled down on policy extremism, ugly recriminations, obsessive identity grievance, and even COVID-19 culture itself. If the Left regains power, voters ought to know that its would-be overlords are champing at the bit to turn back the clock to the surreal bad old days of systemically weaponized outrage and mob rule. It is its fundamental ethos. It’s who it is, and what many of its people live for.

One of the top policy-related reasons Trump prevailed two years ago was immigration. The Biden-Harris border crisis offended and outraged many people, who bristled at the chaos, the undermining of national sovereignty, and the resulting public safety disaster. Since losing, the Left’s partisan vehicle, the Democratic Party, has not moderated one iota on the issue.  Indeed, Democrats have lurched further leftward, increasingly becoming overtly and reflexively anti-enforcement.

Some elected Democrats have begged forgiveness from their ravenous, radical base for supporting the bipartisan Laken Riley Act, named after an illegal immigrant’s murder victim, which made it easier to deport illegal immigrants with criminal records. The party’s 2024 vice presidential nominee recently intervened, ultimately unsuccessfully, to thwart the deportation of an illegal immigrant, despite a felony child sex abuse conviction and a standing final removal order lodged against him.

The phony “centrist” Democratic governors of Virginia and New Jersey, both elected last year, prioritized pro-“sanctuary” edicts upon assuming office. Elected officials have intensely demonized federal immigration agents, even amid an explosion of threats, violent attacks, and murder attempts directed at said agents, and forced a monthslong government shutdown designed to withhold additional funding from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

Former President Joe Biden’s reckless policies on this front helped pave the way for a bruising electoral loss in our most recent political cycle. This isn’t ancient history. But Democrats have evidently decided that, if anything, they’ve been insufficiently extreme and crazy on illegal immigration. Brace for worse, somehow, if and when they hold the reins of power again.

Likewise, leftists have absolutely not reconsidered their nasty, radical worship and exploitation of identity politics. Their top influencer and campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker, who seethed that “America deserved 9/11” and has openly praised the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, lit into the nearly half of Michigan Democratic voters who voted against his left-wing candidate in the state’s Senate primary.

In response to calls for Abdul el Sayed to mend internal fences after a bitter and divisive primary, which he won by the skin of his teeth, representing a major polling miss, Piker called the skeptics and critics within the party “unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of s***.”

That’s quite a message for black voters in Michigan, who broke overwhelmingly for el Sayed’s opponent. But wielding identity as a blunt force instrument is how the Left “debates” and operates. It’s systemized, outcomes-focused bullying.

For further evidence on this point, look no further than the current furor around WNBA star Sophie Cunningham’s decision to speak out in defense of the integrity and safety of girls’ and women’s sports. Cunningham is simply affirming the very premise of the league’s existence, and has done so with tact and malice toward none. She’s articulating a common-sense, fairness-driven stance shared by approximately 80% of the public, according to a raft of polling.

The response inside the hyperpoliticized and woke WNBA, and among many sports journalists, of course, has been volcanic and instructive. Cunningham has been attacked by various preening figures within the league and lustily booed by fans in opposing teams’ arenas. Her supporters were subjected to abuse in Seattle, where a co-owner of that city’s franchise berated teenage girls for outwardly and proudly supporting the integrity of women’s sports. The young fans were apparently guilty of holding a controversial-to-bigoted position, according to many of the leading lights in this women’s basketball league, which often comes across as more of a self-destructive grievance factory than a competition-minded business.

The WNBA’s core fan base overlaps heavily with hardcore left-wing political constituencies, thus curating a warped ideological echo chamber, lined by weird intellectual funhouse mirrors. By simply standing against encroachments on female-only sports and embracing one of the most consensus views in the country, Cunningham has turned herself into Public Enemy No. 1 among this identity-fixated crowd. It has not “evolved” one iota. It is positively giddy to ruthlessly enforce its bizarre dogma wherever possible.

In the various pockets of our society where this mentality has never waned, very much including the WNBA, it remains in full force. Its angry practitioners will eagerly force it back upon any and every institution and facet of society they control, as soon as possible. Not only has it declined to reevaluate its approach, but it sees itself as just getting started, with lots of ground to reclaim and scores to settle.

Then there’s COVID-19. Many people, probably most people, candidly, prefer to relegate everything about the pandemic to the past. It was a terrible time for many reasons, so people just want it to be gone. Over. Not to be spoken of again. This often precludes, unfortunately, meaningful debates and action over the grotesque governmental overreach we witnessed, as well as the devastating, ongoing consequences wrought by poor decisions, especially those that disproportionately harmed children.

The specter of COVID-19 reemerged in recent days following the publication of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s journal entries. These documents reveal a vainglorious man who was positively enthralled with the prominence and corresponding power he enjoyed. More importantly, the documents demonstrated, rather damningly, that what Fauci was telling an anxious public sometimes conflicted in very serious and disturbing ways with his true private thoughts. The portrait that emerged, as painted by Fauci’s own words, was profoundly unflattering in some respects and outright scandalous in others.

Rather than taking in this new information and recalibrating their thinking, many on the Left slid immediately into familiar and full-blown Fauci worship. They ignored new evidence. They assailed Fauci’s critics for noticing and calling attention to the various outrageous discrepancies between Fauci’s public pronouncements and privately conceded views. They remain blindingly and reflexively invested in the Fauci-as-science-itself narrative, infamously and pompously promoted by Fauci, as a means of discrediting detractors. Leftists unflinchingly rushed to their pro-Fauci battle stations without a moment’s hesitation, utterly unmoved by, or refusing to grapple with, updated information.

It is not remotely unreasonable to conclude that these people, including many influential Democrats, would have us do all of it, all over again — catastrophic missteps and abuses very much included. They’ve learned nothing, and they’re indignant about it.

Indeed, the weird COVID-19 vestige of surgical masks as quasi-religious totems and virtue-signaling accessories continues to thrive among wokeness’s most committed shock troops. A photograph taken at a very recent, as in this summer, meeting of the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America in Denver went viral online, thanks to the conspicuous prevalence of masks among attendees. They haven’t moved on from any of it. And they’re clawing their way back into power.

HIGHLY CREDENTIALED, UNDEREMPLOYED, AND FURIOUS: MEET THE DSA

Voters may have fair cause for disillusionment and disappointment with the GOP’s stewardship of Washington since early 2025. The president’s approval rating is languishing badly for reasons fair and unfair.  But like life, politics isn’t fair. And also like life, politics boils down to a series of choices. The public may not be enamored with the choices it made in 2024, but unless it is enthusiastic for a return to the last administration’s policies, but on steroids, coupled with the empowerment of committed and unrepentant woke crusaders, it should weigh its future electoral decisions very carefully.

What many normal people may perceive as a belated but necessary anti-woke cultural reset is considered to be an unfortunate but temporary setback by those who have never loosened their adherence to that agenda. Rumors of wokeness’s demise, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated. Beware.