There are cultural moments that get named and there are cultural moments that get named by Vanity Fair, which is the magazine that exists at the intersection of luxury advertising and progressive cultural commentary and which has declared that “Woke 2” has arrived, describing a new phase of activist energy that is less focused on social media posts and more focused on real-world action, in an article that Fox News covered today under the headline “Vanity Fair declares ‘woke 2’ is back,” which is the headline that produces both agreement and disagreement before anyone has read the article.
Vanity Fair writer Erin Vanderhoof argued that progressives are experiencing a resurgence of activist energy in response to the Trump administration, according to Fox News’s confirmed coverage. “If Woke 1 was the 2010s-era urge to fight racism, sexism, homophobia, and more with social media anger,” Vanderhoof wrote, “Woke 2 is something different.” The piece pointed to renewed street protests in Minneapolis and Portland, comparing the response to immigration enforcement in Minneapolis to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020, which is a comparison whose implications Vanderhoof presumably considered before making.
The timing of the Vanity Fair declaration is worth noting. Voters rejected the first wave of progressive activism at the 2024 ballot box, producing a result that Democratic strategists have spent eighteen months analyzing and that party moderates have described as evidence that the cultural positions associated with woke politics cost the party elections in swing states. Vanity Fair has responded to this analysis by declaring a second, more physical version is now underway, which is either a correctly timed cultural observation or the specific kind of cultural positioning that produces the 2028 version of the 2024 analysis.
The day before Vanity Fair’s Woke 2 declaration was published by Fox News, a man with a documented history of anti-ICE activity detonated an incendiary device outside 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, injuring three people, while pushing a shopping cart with “ICE off our streets” attached to it. Fox News covered both stories today. Vanity Fair covered neither.
Woke 1 lost the 2024 election. Woke 2 is more physical. Both are being covered in the same news cycle as an incendiary device and a $100,000 reward for information about a Black teenager who didn’t make it home from July 4.
When Vanity Fair declares a new phase of activism more physical than the last, the day after an incendiary device goes off outside a federal building, what exactly is the magazine declaring?
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