Politics
Column: What happened to the Republican war on 'woke' — and what we should have learned from it
This isn’t going to be more musing about whether America has reached “peak woke.” But that is part of the story. So let’s start there.
About a decade ago, many on the left embraced the word “woke,” a term with roots in African American culture and activism. It originally meant staying awake — that is, “woke” — to the dangers facing the Black community. But in the hands of the broader, and whiter, academic and journalistic left, it soon became a kind of cool catchall for progressive politics, alongside other buzzwords like “intersectionality.”
The combined effects of the Trump presidency, the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed wokeness into overdrive. This was the era of “defund the police” and other radical inanities.
The right soon took up the word, using “woke” as a catchall for everything — woke or not, real or not — it hated about the left. The novelty of wokeness as a concept lent an equal edginess, for a time, to anti-wokeness. It’s a familiar tale, really: The same thing happened with “political correctness” in the early ’90s.
Republican politicians declared war on wokeness. Erstwhile presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was at the anti-woke vanguard, even pushing the Stop WOKE Act through the state Legislature. It didn’t work out too well for DeSantis or his imitators.
And that’s the point: Both wokeness and anti-wokeness have lost their transgressive edge. Now they’re both kind of “cringe,” as the kids say.
And that is a sign of healing.
One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way the fringes symbiotically feed off each other. Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen for Republican House fundraising efforts would be for the “Squad” of far-left members of Congress to be replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be primaried by an intelligent Republican who doesn’t talk about Jewish space lasers.
So is woke over? Probably not. The term might be in terminal decline as anything other than an epithet, but the ideas are going to be around for a while — as will anti-wokeness — because both are just stand-ins for the culture war’s left and right.
But it does seem as if many on the left are starting to realize they went too far. Most Democrats don’t talk about “defunding the police” anymore because it is a wildly unpopular idea, including among Black people. Nor do they use the term “Latinx” as much now that they have learned that it repelled more Latinos than it pleased.
It was recently reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants for faculty jobs to submit “diversity statements” confirming their support for “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” University President Sally Kornbuth told UnHerd, “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
A slew of elite schools have reversed course by requiring standardized tests again. Big corporations are paring back their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments, which surged under Trump.
And, of course, the explosion of lawlessness and antisemitic rhetoric on elite campuses has been a lesson for academia, the left and Democrats. The country isn’t that into disorder and bigotry. Polls suggest that the public is siding with police more than protesters.
There’s a lesson here for the right too. For a decade, the populist right has been whining about losing every battle in the culture war to rationalize its embrace of radical and authoritarian politics. But the premise is wrong. The right doesn’t always lose — or win — any more than the left does.
Trump and his supporters insist that America can’t survive without him in the White House. William Barr, who was attorney general under Trump, says his former boss is utterly unfit to be president but that he will still vote for him because a second Biden term would amount to “national suicide” because of wokeness or something. Never mind that wokeness surged under Trump and has been receding under Biden.
Obviously, the right and left still have plenty to complain and worry about. The point is that there’s always plenty to complain and worry about. Tides come and go. And people learn, eventually, from their mistakes.
Navy Secretary John Phelan was fired on Wednesday after months of infighting with senior Pentagon leaders and disagreements over how to revive the Navy’s struggling shipbuilding program.
Mr. Phelan is leaving the Pentagon and the Trump administration effective immediately, wrote Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, in a terse statement.
In his role leading the Navy, Mr. Phelan had championed the “Golden Fleet,” a major investment in new ships including a “Trump-class” battleship. But Mr. Phelan’s leadership was marred by feuds with senior leaders in the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Pentagon and congressional officials said.
Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to leave the administration, though he is the second one to clash with the defense secretary. Mr. Hegseth also has butted heads with Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll over promotions and a host of other issues. Mr. Hegseth fired the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month.
The Navy secretary has no role overseeing deployed forces, and Mr. Phelan’s firing is not likely to have significant implications for the conduct of the Iran war or U.S. Navy operations to blockade Iranian ports or open the Strait of Hormuz. As the Navy’s top civilian leader, his main responsibility is to oversee the building of the future naval and Marine Corps force.
But the tumult could make it harder for the Navy to replenish its stock of Tomahawk missiles and high-end air defense systems, which have been in heavy use in Iran.
Tensions had been simmering for months between Mr. Phelan and his two bosses — Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg — over management style, personnel issues and other matters.
Mr. Feinberg, in particular, had grown increasingly dissatisfied with Mr. Phelan’s handling of the Navy’s major new shipbuilding initiative, and had been siphoning off responsibility for the project from him, said the congressional official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Mr. Phelan, a White House appointee, also had a contentious relationship with his deputy, Under Secretary Hung Cao, who is more aligned with Mr. Hegseth, especially on some of the social and cultural battles that have defined the defense secretary’s tenure, the officials said.
A senior administration official said that Mr. Hegseth informed Mr. Phelan before the Pentagon’s official announcement that he and President Trump had decided that the Navy needed new leadership.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Phelan referred all questions on Wednesday evening to the Defense Department.
Last fall, Mr. Hegseth fired Mr. Phelan’s chief of staff, Jon Harrison, who had clashed with senior officials throughout the Pentagon. The unusual move highlighted the broader tensions between Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Phelan.
Still, the timing of Mr. Phelan’s firing caught some Pentagon and congressional officials off guard. On Wednesday, Mr. Phelan was making the rounds on Capitol Hill, talking to senators about his upcoming annual hearing with lawmakers to discuss the Navy’s budget request and other priorities.
“Secretary Phelan’s abrupt dismissal is troubling,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Wednesday night. “In the midst of President Trump’s war of choice in Iran, at a moment when our naval forces are stretched thin across multiple theaters, this kind of disruption at the top sends the wrong signal to our sailors and Marines, to our allies, and to our adversaries.”
Mr. Phelan also had a close relationship with Mr. Trump. In December, Mr. Phelan appeared alongside Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to announce the “Golden Fleet” and the new class of battleships bearing Mr. Trump’s name.
“John Phelan is one of the most successful businessmen in the country — in our country,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s been a tremendous success.”
Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Phelan ran a private investment fund based in Florida.
“He’s taken probably the largest salary cut in history, but he wanted to do it,” Mr. Trump said at the December press conference. “He wants to rebuild our Navy. And you needed that kind of a brain to do it properly.”
But Mr. Trump’s effusive praise masked deeper tensions with Mr. Phelan’s Pentagon bosses.
Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Hudson Institute, said that Mr. Phelan was “driving the Navy in a different direction” than what Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg wanted.
“He was championing initiatives like the battleship and frigate that don’t align with where the D.O.W. leadership is taking the military, which is toward submarines, stealth aircraft, unmanned systems and software-driven capabilities like electronic warfare and cyber,” Mr. Clark said in an email, using the abbreviation for Department of War, as the administration calls the Defense Department.
Mr. Phelan also clashed with Mr. Hegseth over personnel issues in the Navy and Marine Corps, a former senior military official said. Mr. Hegseth has directed service secretaries to scrub the social media accounts of general- and admiral-level promotion candidates to ensure they are not deemed too “woke” by Mr. Hegseth’s standards, the official said.
Maggie Haberman and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Politics
Manhattan DA’s office employee charged with sexual abuse after alleged incident on Queens subway
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An analyst with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was arrested Tuesday on allegations that he sexually abused a woman while off duty, police told Fox News Digital Wednesday.
Tauhid Dewan, 28, is accused of inappropriately touching a 40-year-old woman’s private area during a late-afternoon rush-hour subway ride in Queens, according to local outlet PIX11.
The victim was reportedly a random woman, the outlet added, citing sources who said she and the suspect were strangers.
A spokeswoman for the office told Fox News Digital that the staffer has since been suspended.
MAN ARRESTED IN NYC STRANGULATION DEATH OF WOMAN FOUND OUTSIDE TIMES SQUARE HOTEL
Tauhid Dewan, 28, was arrested in New York City Tuesday following allegations that the Manhattan DA staffer innapropriately touched a woman during a subway ride (LinkedIn)
According to the New York Police Department, Dewan was arrested around 5 p.m., possibly after returning from work.
PIX11 added that the arrest occurred minutes after the incident, which allegedly took place on a No. 7 train near the Junction Boulevard station.
He was subsequently arrested by the NYPD Transit Bureau and is facing multiple charges, including forcible touching on a bus or train, third-degree sexual abuse, and second-degree harassment involving physical contact.
He was also charged with acting in a manner injurious to a child under the age of 17, suggesting a minor may have been nearby and either witnessed the alleged conduct or was placed at risk by it.
ERIC SWALWELL FACES MANHATTAN SEX ASSAULT PROBE AFTER ENDING CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR CAMPAIGN AMID ALLEGATIONS
Tauhid Dewan is an employee of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is led by DA Alvin Bragg. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Law enforcement sources said Dewan has no prior arrests, local outlets reported.
According to city records, Dewan has worked at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a senior investigative analyst for nearly four years, since July 10, 2022.
People board a train at a subway station in New York City on Aug. 1, 2025. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
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His arraignment in Queens Criminal Court was scheduled for Wednesday, according to state records.
SAN FRANCISCO — With the California governor’s race quickly approaching, six candidates will face off Wednesday evening in the first debate since former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race in the aftermath of sexual assault and misconduct allegations.
The debate takes place at a critical moment in the turbulent contest to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. Ballots will start landing in Californians’ mailboxes in less than two weeks, and voters are split by a crowded field of eight prominent candidates. The debate also takes place after former state Controller Betty Yee ended her campaign because of a lack of resources and support in the polls.
Two Republicans — Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton — and four Democrats — billionaire Tom Steyer, former Biden administration Secretary Xavier Becerra, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan — will take the stage at Nexstar’s KRON4 studios in San Francisco. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, both Democrats, were not invited to participate because of their low polling numbers.
As the candidates strive to distinguish themselves in a crowded field, the debate could include fiery exchanges about the role of money in politics and potential heightened attacks on Becerra, who has surged in the polls since Swalwell dropped out. With the debate taking place on Earth Day, environmental issues are also likely to be raised.
The Wednesday night gathering is the first televised debate in the gubernatorial contest since early February. Last month, USC canceled a debate hours before it was set to begin over mounting criticism that its criteria excluded all major candidates of color.
The 7 p.m. debate is hosted by Nexstar and will be moderated by KTXL FOX40 anchor Nikki Laurenzo and KTLA anchor Frank Buckley. It can be viewed on KRON4 (San Francisco), KTLA5 (Los Angeles), KSWB/KUSI (San Diego), KTXL (Sacramento), KGET (Bakersfield) and KSEE (Fresno). NewsNation will also air the debate.
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