The Left is allegedly trying out a new attitude as it grapples with losing a huge percentage of American voters in the last presidential election. The New York Times reports on this new trend, writing, “some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump’s no-holds-barred version of politics.” Online, it has a name: “Dark woke.”
“Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison,” said Bhavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters’ attention, where we’re stuck saying boring pablum. I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging — I’m a big fan of ‘dark woke.’”
The Times reports on an email, in which a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said the party’s main account on X had gained one million followers since the beginning of the year, pointing to several examples of viral moments — some embodying the principles of “dark woke” — that had garnered some 800 million impressions across platforms in the same time period.
The hostility, they claim, is just a response to the Right: “All these new staffers, we grew up seeing extremely vile content overflowing from right-wing spaces into regular spaces,” said Caleb Brock, 23, the director of digital strategy for Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. “We’re ready to combat that by any means necessary.”
Democrats have looked within their own ranks.
And just what is this ‘Dark Woke’ that has some Democrats so excited to be rebranded? The Times gives examples from the likes of the horrid human, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas.
Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, found herself in a spat with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, after Ms. Greene made a jibe about “fake eyelashes” that the chair, Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, declined to prosecute under the committee’s rules on decorum.
“Mr. Chair, a point of order,” Ms. Crockett said.
“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
Ms. Crockett’s moment became a meme. It was printed on T-shirts. It got her an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel. And now, Democratic strategists say, it has become a perfect example of “dark woke.”
The Times also points to Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn councilman “whose meme-fluent, sometimes confrontational presence on X has put him on the radar of national Democratic organizers, says he was recently asked to help the Senate Democratic Caucus with their social media strategy.”
“Being able to use this strategy of being raw and unapologetic and unabashed about our beliefs is something our base really wants,” Mr. Ossé said. He referred to a quote by one of Mayor Eric Adams’s advisers, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who said, “When they go low, you gotta dig for oil.”
“I know I’m doing something right when the Fox News crowd is all just bitching at me like crazy,” Former Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz said at a town hall in Lorraine, Ohio, this month. “I’m loving it. Elon Musk was crying last week, ‘Tim is being mean to me!’”
