This poem is a reaction to Jonathan Rauch’s Essay The Woke Right Stands at the Door.

It also includes a sizable extract from that essay (towards the end, you’ll know it when you see it).

Is woke an assault on logic and truth?
Did post modernism replace all facts
with power structures not connected to
a Real? And woke’s built upon that broken back?

Is woke the further confusion that claims
non-dominant perspectives are realer?
I’d thought it was more fair and less inane.
I’d thought it more a general feeling:

We should let other voices have a say.
And even fudge the rules a bit to let
new faces gather on the field of play.
An affirmative action mind-heart-set

I did however notice some strange storm clouds:
If a white man wins success, he stole it;
and anything he says about race must howl
off key—he has no right to unfold it.

I didn’t read the essays that stormed
academia. I cannot attest to sandy soil.
I thought perhaps we’d been too loud, had bored
our audience, and so had tainted our toil.
Or something like that.

But micro-aggressions always felt crazy.
When every phrase that someone can find a way
to wound themself upon is evil, how hazy
does discourse grow, how easily mislaid!

And enter MAGA, agreeing we lack
a public reality and that voices
long silenced may use any means to attack
the oppressors to reverse the flow of the foisted.

From JR’s essay:

Notably similar, for example, is the postmodern right’s opportunistically cynical attitude toward truth. What people call true (in the postmodern paradigm) is really whatever narrative, or metanarrative, achieves social dominance. Thus the way to establish what is true is not by reason, evidence, and objectivity, but by winning the narrative. In many cases, the postmodern right, like the left, is quite candid about this. Consider this exchange between Steve Bannon (the MAGA movement’s preeminent ideologist) and two reporters for The Atlantic:

Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.

But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.

“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”

One sees here the same subjectivism that became a hallmark of left-postmodernism: because objectivity is a fiction, there is no single reality but rather my reality or our reality contending against your reality—and, with no objective basis to choose, narratives must struggle to dominate. How to win this contest of narratives? The postmodern formula holds that language constructs discourse, discourse constructs power, and power constructs reality. Manipulating what people say thus manipulates reality itself. This explains the postmodern left’s obsession with language, from neopronouns and terms like “pregnant person” to the idea that words are violence.

Returning to our poem:

The year is twenty-twenty-six
And the race is on
Can Trump and Friends deep six
fair elections and declaw
checks on their absolute control
before the many catch
the stench of rotting thought, and hold
the line against this grab?

Three hundred Washington Post
Reporters with nothing to do*
Why not make the very most
of this assult on shared truth?

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

* Actually, the Washington Post Layoffs Were a Bigger Bloodbath Than You Thought
“Nearly half of the paper’s newsroom was eliminated during last week’s cuts—possibly the largest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation.”
Paul Farh
2/9/2026

Actually, the Washington Post Layoffs Were a Bigger Bloodbath Than You Thought