Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential race wasn’t just a prelude to mass deportations and geopolitical chaos. The MAGA faithful also saw it as the final, definitive rebuke of “woke” ideology. By that point, the term had been fully wrested from its origins. As it emerged from African-American vernacular English in the context of civil rights movements, “woke” described a state of active engagement with these social issues. Then, during the Black Lives Matter protests against racialized police brutality that began in the 2010s, the idiom came to denote an awareness of systemic injustice—and was more broadly adopted by liberal groups. Eventually, right-wingers perceived anything “woke” as insidious propaganda against their own constricted norms around race, gender, and sexuality—and weaponized the word in ways that robbed it of specificity. These culture warriors likely couldn’t define “woke” to save their lives, but they knew with utter conviction that the term could be applied to whatever they didn’t like, as fuel for cycles of exaggerated outrage that centered their reactionary politics. What exactly did society look …