The “Anti-Woke” Crowd Has Always Been Among Us

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted and Published on October 3, 2025

An Editorial Opinion

Today’s “Anti-Woke” crowd has always been among us. This crowd has had many names throughout America's history.

They started out as enslavers, particularly in southern states.  They subjugated, exploited, and degraded blacks from the "cradle to the grave." They called Native Americans "merciless Indian savages" and proudly labeled them as such in the Declaration of Independence.

Then, they became Civil War rebels who seceded from the Union and declared themselves a confederation of slaveholding states.  They waged a four-year war against the United States of America over their right to enslave human beings. They even had their own President (Jefferson Davis), their own currency, and a First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama.

First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama.

After they lost the Civil War and the post-war Reconstruction era ended, the "Anti-Woke"crowd became the “Redeemers" of southern society and culture.  They also became the enforcers of strict Jim Crow racial segregation laws and customs.

For many decades, they used organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, John Bircher Society, American Nazi Party, Dixiecrats, White Citizens Councils, Sovereignty Commissions, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (via COINTELPRO) to impose a hardcore white supremacy agenda on black Americans.

In the late 1968, the "Anti-Woke" crowd was known as President Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”  By the early 1980, they had joined President Ronald Reagan in his “reserve discrimination” crusade against black Americans.

President Richard Nixon discusses his "silence majority."

By 2016, they found a political savior in Donald Trump and enlisted in his “Anti-DEI” and “Anti-Woke” MAGA Movement in record numbers. Trump successfully exploited a condition suffered by many modern-day Republicans and other MAGA supporters called Negrophobia.

While selling his MAGA base Trump Bibles for $59.99 each, President Trump also peddled a glorified white supremacy version of America that many of his MAGA followers have longed for since the "Redeemer" period ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

President Donald Trump peddling his Trump Bible to MAGA followers.

Throughout American history, the threads that bind this hardcore group of regressive whites (and their modern-day Negro jackanapes) are their obdurate obstinance and their massive resistance to equal rights for Americans of color.