Welcome To Anti-Woke Hell. By Zaid Jilani

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Welcome To Anti-Woke Hell

Zaid Jilani

8 - 9 minutes

Elon Musk on April 13, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images.)

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I grew up in Georgia, surrounded by some of the most conservative communities in the United States. But while those conservatives held right-wing views on a wide range of topics, they weren’t for the most part fixated on provoking racial conflict or belittling LGBT people (even when they disagreed with their proclivities). To them, conservatism meant raising an educated and accomplished family, going to church, contributing to your community through charity and volunteering, and promoting good manners. These values were emblematic of the words in our state motto: “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.”

These qualities can be problematic if taken to an extreme—not everyone can live a cookie-cutter traditional lifestyle—but they add so much to the social fabric of the United States. When paired with a liberalism that urges change and reform, this decent conservatism helps keep the balance.

For the sake of the country, I can only hope that this type of conservatism isn’t overtaken by what I see daily on social media, because it is anything but wise, just, or moderate.

Twitter was once known as the de facto editor of left-leaning newspapers like the New York Times, with editors and reporters fearful of upsetting the commentariat. But after its purchase by Elon Musk, the service is increasingly distorting the politics and priorities of the right just as it once did the left.

The owner of X, Elon Musk, has explained on many occasions that one of the things he fears most is the “woke mind virus,” even going as far as to tell podcaster Joe Rogan that this was one of his motivations for buying the service in the first place. And it certainly seems like X is now the place on the internet to find the anti-woke hive mind. There are dozens of high-profile accounts dedicated to pushing back on the social and cultural trends popular among the left over the past decade, which can collectively be called “wokeness.”

But many of these accounts that got their popularity through highlighting excesses on the left seem to be blind to their own excesses—or at least willing to excuse them in return for retweets, likes, and racking up real money with X’s “Creator Monetization” scheme. 

Take, for example, the account LibsofTikTok (which was unceremoniously exposed in 2022 to be former real estate agent Chaya Raichik). The account once was true to its namesake, dedicated to posting progressive content from TikTok to criticize—much of it focused on teachers promoting LGBTQ content. Raichik, a social conservative, was no fan of these teachers and felt that exposing them to a wider audience would serve as a critique of their ideologies.  

But the account today rarely features liberals on TikTok. Instead, LibsofTikTok has turned into your garden variety far-right account, hardly going a day without promoting some kind of fear or resentment of liberals and minority groups more broadly. 

In one recent post, she argues that the majority of LGBTQ people had adverse childhood experiences, ominously warning that “this isn’t a coincidence. The media will never talk about this important topic though.” Forget criticizing the edges of wokeness and the cultural left, Raichik seems more content simply bringing back decades-old myths about homosexuality being the consequence of child abuse or mental illness. 

That’s also evident in her recent suggestion that a transgender Colorado state lawmaker is mentally ill because she’s “literally a man who thinks he’s a woman.” And Raichik has started to branch out a bit in terms of who she picks on. Recently, she posted a story about a man murdering his girlfriend, noting that he was a Somali Muslim immigrant in Sweden.

While this was a shocking act of domestic violence, what did it have to do with wokeness? Why did she have to emphasize that he was a “Somalian [sic] immigrant in Sweden,” implying that there is a cultural or religious inferiority that makes people of this background unable to integrate into Western society? 

If she posted about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her white husband, would she offer this as evidence that Somali Muslim immigrants are well-integrated and accepting? Of course not. Raichik, like so many of these anti-woke accounts who’ve become complete reactionaries, is feeding the beast of rage bait that is today’s X.

Fellow rage baiters include Ian Miles Cheong, an influencer who lives in Malaysia, posting videos of random black men mocking them as “cultural enrichers” and the very popular End Wokeness account posting videos of black men attacking white women and saying this is a “daily occurrence” kept out of the mainstream media narrative. (Ironically, the account only knew about the event because it was featured in a TV news segment.) 

These accounts are far from fringe, partly because the three I mentioned along with many other big-name bigots are constantly boosted by Musk. Despite having billions of dollars at his fingertips and being in charge of manufacturing cutting-edge electric cars and launching rockets into outer space, Musk frequently shares conspiratorial and prejudiced content without asking anyone to fact-check it for him. For instance, he wrote that an End Wokeness conspiracy about undocumented immigrants voting was “extremely concerning,” prompting the intervention of the County Recorder in Arizona’s Maricopa County (who is a Republican) to clarify the record. Elon also frequently pops up in the mentions of accounts that are obsessed with race war and all kinds of retrograde ideas.

What does all this mean? Am I just complaining about something that’s completely irrelevant to life? I’m always wary of writing too much about social media. It’s usually a hivemind of unrepresentative people and truly bizarre political subcultures. But we know that for years Twitter had a huge impact on mainstream media, and the service’s—and the owner’s—lurch to the hard right means that it is building a new ecosystem of influencers who may end up similarly distorting media and politics. 

Why is a Georgia Republican Congressman tweeting about throwing people out of airplanes, Pinochet-style? Why did the state of Oklahoma appoint Raichik to a government position supervising library media? Probably because these officials spend too much time on a website where their insanity passes for ordinary political conversation.

Musk and his favored anti-woke accounts have no interest in balance, maybe because the site rewards conflict and extremism, not comity and self-control. Any time I’ve raised issues with any of these posts while using the service, I’m awarded an avalanche of complaints that I’m some kind of woke liberal or at least doing their work. The argument is basically that you agree with this kind of content, or you’re the enemy—ironically mirroring much of the woke language these accounts were protesting in the first place.

Zaid Jilani is a journalist and previously worked as a digital reporter for NewsNation.

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