Leftist media was beside itself with glee last week after conservative writer and author Bethany Mandel appeared on The Hill’s online program “Rising.” She was asked to define the term “woke” after she dropped it into a couple of her responses. Mandel fumbled the question and didn’t have a ready, coherent answer. It seemed as though “woke” was just a general term of abuse that the Right throws around to disparage any opinion it doesn’t like.

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire’s recent documentary “What is a Woman?” offered everyday people a simple tool to trip up leftists who insist that the premises of the transgender movement—that gender and sex are a matter of opinion—must be accepted by society, immediately. Walsh asked advocates the simple question, “What is a woman?” and captured on camera their discomfort as they struggled to formulate a response which their ideology forbids them from answering coherently.

During the 2022 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Jackson to define the word “woman.” Jackson said, “I can’t.” Since Jackson is a woman, has been one all her life, and is a very smart person, she would have been more credible in her response if she had said, “I won’t.”

The simple question championed by Walsh and Blackburn is the gift that keeps on giving for conservatives. Against this backdrop, you can imagine the excitement the Left now has since it thinks it has discovered a question that in their minds conservatives can’t readily answer. They would be mistaken.

Two Words: Leftist Hypocrisy

The difference is that the Left is constrained from defining “woman” for political reasons, whereas some conservatives use the word “woke” without thinking about what they are saying. Unlike the Left, conservatives don’t get their talking points and marching orders from centralized sources. When conservatives adopt a term, the specific definition may vary as articulated. There’s an element of “You know it when you see it” to a lot of conservative language. This is the case with “woke.”

Now that leftist media will start to ask this question more often, they will want conservative interviewees to freeze just as they do when asked to define “woman.” But conservatives can answer the question in two words. Wokeness, or more accurately, “wokeism” is leftist hypocrisy. Faced with that answer, leftist interviewers will soon learn they’ve walked into a trap of their own making. If the conservative interviewee is asked to explain what that means, it won’t be long before the leftist interviewer quickly wants to change the subject.

“Wokeism” represents a systemic pattern, a flaw at the ideological level. Leftists are systemically hypocrites because that hypocrisy serves a purpose. Leftist ideologies are not readily accepted by most people. Everyday people would reject leftism if it had to succeed on merit. Leftist strategists have known this for decades.

As a result, they have honed the ability to tilt the political battlefield in their favor by leveraging their hypocrisy. Leftist hypocrisy is a strategic advantage used to confuse the populace and win power.

Transgenderism is perhaps the best example of wokeism. A man is not a woman, but thanks to transgenderism he is. Wokeism is leftist hypocrisy in action. A man says he is a woman, but he can’t even define woman. The circular logic is by design.

Answer and Then Explain

So, what is wokeism?

• When a man tries to convince you he’s a woman. When he wants to compete in sports as a woman and demands that you divorce yourself from reality and see him as a woman.
• When the Left describes the killing of babies as “reproductive care.”
• When the Left packages gender confusion as “gender affirmation.”
• When leftists ignore the massive numbers of shootings committed with illegal guns by criminals in Chicago while seeking to take away legally obtained guns from law-abiding citizens.
• When leftist politicians build million-dollar mansions on the coasts, or fly in private jets, while playing Chicken Little on the issue of climate change.
• When leftists push to defund the police while trying to use the same police to enforce vaccine mandates at restaurants and public venues.

It’s all wokeism, and it’s on a mission: to seize power by changing the terms of the debate, a strategic hypocrisy where the seeds of confusion are planted in the populace to frame the good guys as the bad guys and the bad guys as the good guys.

This will come to a head the next time a leftist asks, “Can you define woke?”

Just answer, “It’s leftist hypocrisy,” and then explain why.