According to the left, “woke” is a right-wing myth—you know, like the current recession, the crisis at the southern U.S. border and skyrocketing violent crime rates. Nothing to see here—move along.

But we mustn’t move along; the Overton Window (the ideas considered “acceptable” for public discourse) has been dragged so far left that common-sense ideas and policy prescriptions once considered mainstream are now silenced, and their advocates canceled.

Here’s an example. Do you, like a clear majority of Americans, believe that children are too young to decide to have double mastectomies or even more risky “bottom surgeries,” or receive dangerous puberty blockers before they’re 18 (a standard that applies to tattoos in Texas)?

Then according to woke ideology, you’re perpetuating trans teen suicide. The truth, of course, is that these are serious medical procedures with lifelong side effects and consequences, with no evidence of lasting improvement in mental health outcomes or suicide rates.

One more: Do you believe that humans who have babies are more properly called “women” and “mothers”? You’re behind the times; the new woke term is “birthing people,” according to the Biden administration, Democrats and other progressive groups.

What is wokeism? It is a soft fascism that looks to control us and suppress any opposition to its worldview. It is meant to control what you think. It is meant to control what you say. It is meant to control what you do. And it is meant to control who you are.

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has studied the phenomenon of wokeism, which began as Black vernacular. He compares the fervor—and the self-assuredness—of the woke to a religion.

“…If a person doesn’t agree with a certain agenda that’s centered on that, to the expense of everything else, then those people deserve to be shamed, possibly even dismissed from their positions,” he says. “And so it’s an evangelical and even prosecutorial way of being an anti-racist.”

Yet your compliance with wokeism—even out of a sense of politeness—leads unavoidably to the erasure of everything you are. And this is the point. A person who can be made to affirm anything, no matter how preposterous—that a man can become pregnant, or that the Pilgrims came to America to eliminate “trans” culture—is a subject, not a citizen. And subjects are fit only to be ruled.

We see this disease in all walks of life—finance, science, the media, and of course in business. It’s being mandated in boardrooms worldwide via the ESG (environmental, social and governance) movement.

But there’s good news. Americans are waking up to the manipulation they’ve been subjected to by wokeism.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar, for example, is taking a bold stand against the ESG movement, which is attempting to cripple the oil and gas industry. Backed by legislation passed in 2021, he’s calling out investment firms that “are telling us and other energy-producing states one thing, and then turning around and telling their liberal clients in other states another thing.”

Comptroller Hegar spoke on wokeism at a recent TPPF livestreamed event. He was joined on stage by author Vivek Ramaswamy, whose new book, “Woke, Inc.,” points out that “The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both.”

There’s further reason for optimism. We are seeing people like Bill Maher, Bari Weis, and even Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz—who I might add is generally no friend to reason and common sense—is bemoaning “woke leaders for abdicating their responsibility” to fight crime, resulting in Starbucks closing more than a dozen profitable stores just this month.

Like Schultz, our nation is waking up and smelling the coffee. Here’s hoping that wokeism goes the way of the left’s other bad ideas—onto the ash heap of history.