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DALLAS, TX If being "woke" is such a good thing, why do people hate it so much?

As loosely defined, woke refers to a state of conscious awareness about injustice, particularly of the racial variety.

Revolving around that, though, is a constellation of ideas about how to conduct oneself in public discourse and signifiers to let those nearby know that you've reached a state of enlightenment.

For example, say the woke, the term "slaves" is considered antiquated when referring to those people deprived of their freedom before Juneteenth. "Enslaved people" is now the operative term.

When someone pointed out that former First Lady Michelle Obama has recently used the term "slaves," woke people will tell you that such things are permissible if you're the part of the minority who such a word might "trigger."

People who don't conform to heterosexual norms may therefore describe themselves as "queer." But calling someone queer, or "a queer" is absolutely triggering.

The only way for a person to know even if they're trying to stay abreast of current jargon is to apologize immediately if you've triggered someone, and hope that you can always remember that non-binary people prefer the pronouns "them" and "they," even though historically those words were only used in the plural.

And that's as it should be. Everyone deserves the right to be referred to in terms that they believe afford them basic dignity. But everyday language hasn't seen such upheaval since African-Americans let it be known at the end of the '60s that they'd rather be known as Black than those terms in use before the civil rights movement got underway.

In Texas today, Gov. Greg Abbott seeks to punish social media for censoring completely unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories online while at the same time making sure no traces of Critical Race Theory (which, although never actually taught, only highlights verifiable historical events) creep into the school curriculum. Both are targets in his current special session agenda.

And here's the real problem: Policing people's speech does not change their beliefs, and we've been through this before when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement sprang up in the wake of the communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

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In that moment, liberals decided that silencing opposing viewpoints was antithetical to rigorous debate, and after multiple protests and arrests pressing for free speech, the faculty at Berkeley voted overwhelmingly to support their students.

The working theory was that it was anyone's right as an American to say whatever they wanted, and someone else could challenge those opinions while receiving the same amount of respect and time to do so.

Now, with QAnon and hives of conspiracy theorists breeding in online isolation, there's freedom to claim that Democrats are pedophiles and a secret cabal of liberals are conspiring to take over the country. But, because membership in these online groups is tightly controlled, there's no public square to challenge such absurdities before they take hold, and these sites become hothouses that allow malignant extremism to flourish unchecked by facts.

Woke liberals have come to believe that if you shame people for using the wrong terminology, that will somehow change a bigot's thought patterns. They don't. They simply drive people underground into the company of those who welcome such nonsense, and their hothouse gets just that much hotter.

During the Free Speech era, you could be a rabid segregationist like Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a militant Muslim minister like Malcolm X, a radical Yippie like Abbie Hoffman or an American Nazi like George Lincoln Rockwell, and you got a chance to run your mouth in public without being muzzled or told you'd "triggered" someone.

Ideas could stood or fell on their own merits. Now, thanks to the internet, we only talk to people we already agree with, or people who hide what they think in fear of being called out for their biases. And as the saying goes, "If two people are in a room, and they share the same ideas, one of them is unnecessary."

The great blues guitarist Buddy Guy put it very well when he talked about having moved from Mississippi to Chicago in search of fame and fortune at the dawn of the civil rights era. In describing how urban racism differed from the rural variety he grew up with, Guy said, "I look at it like rattlesnakes."

He explained, "there's poisonous snakes everywhere, but a rattlesnake will make a noise to let you know to get the hell out of the way. Other poisonous snakes show up in other places where you don't expect to find them, and they don't warn you. They show you."

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Liberals Began The 60s Pushing Free Speech. Now Theyre Woke - Patch.com