You want Woke 2? Here's Woke 2.
1. The goal of Woke 2 is to establish social equality, achieve material and spiritual progress, and construct a vibrant civic life for the people.
2. Defund the fire department
3. Abolish needle exchanges, and encourage smoking fentanyl instead (it’s much safer)
4. Art museum board members should prostrate themselves and apologize for their collections weekly; the rest of us are allowed to not think about it.
5. Implement Police 2. every year the citizens vote on how to divide the policing budget between Police 1 and 2 depending on who's been doing their job and not violating people's rights.
6. We need a Serrano-style dissolution of binaries more than a Woke 1-style intensification of them.
7. Access to methadone should be massively expanded.
8. Access to ozempic should be massively expanded.
9. Access to tylenol should be massively curtailed.
10. People should be able to do what they want to their bodies, including injecting hormones that change their gender. Even if they don’t feel like they’ve always been, epiphenomenally, of a different gender. Even like, just because.
11. Comic book people and adults who read young adult literature have shown over the last decade that they are not capable of being responsible members of a coalition. They have baby-brain; they are not welcome in Woke 2.
12. The greatest public health intervention possible is static car tire dust collectors.
13. If the left is said to have any core beliefs, a good candidate is that property is something which should be democratically contestable. The act of contesting some of the more spurious modes of property is a way towards both material and spiritual progress. It is a fact rarely acknowledged but factually true that a world where fossil fuels remain in the ground is in fact *richer*, because the negative externalities are greater than the value provided to those who burn it. The left should be willing to say: “If you want a world that is wealthy, you will destroy the fossil fuel infrastructure.”
14. In this reading, the left is a kind of vigilante short-fund destroying the net-welfare-negative business models around coal plants, Turbotax, land title insurers, and so forth, and redistributing the surplus to the people of the world.
15. Woke 2 acknowledges that Uber did the world a favor by destroying the exploitative taxi medallion monopoly, in which absentee medallionlords extracted rent from immigrant taxi drivers forced to do 17 hour shifts, often taking on themselves the risk of a bad day with the possibility of ending up net-negative at the end of the shift. While Uber is also exploitative, their cut is smaller, the market is bigger, and at least some share of the proceeds go towards improving the efficiency of the system.
16. Free public transit, but only for the rich
17. We need direct auto sales, specifically to destroy the "dealership owner class," the furthest right social block in the country
18. Mandatory labelling for nepo babies. This includes disclosure requirements for legacy admissions
19. Elementary schools should have classes on comparative phonology, so people can pronounce names and loanwords from other cultures
20. Abolish single family zoning, but also abolish commercial zoning. Home businesses and living in an office are both radical praxis.
21. We need new universities. One of them should have a mandate to accept all valedictorians, from everywhere.
22. Legalize korean sunscreen
23. There was a deviant Woke 1 tendency to be suspicious of interracial marriage. We should flip this and be suspicious of people married to people of the same race.
24. National payment processing network run by USPS
25. Voting age to 16 but only for local elections
26. A CDL should be required to drive a large pickup truck or SUV
27. Individuals liable for environmental crimes can be sentenced to exposure to the materials they polluted with
28. Having at any point in the past made a land acknowledgement is retroactively considered to have deeded the land to local native groups
29. We need public access to surveillance cameras
30. There must be a defense of abortion rights that is ready for artificial wombs—IE, it must not rest on “viability of the fetus.”
31. Woke 2 acknowledges that some of the worst parts of Woke 1 were the ways that it was weaponized—sometimes in the defense of worthwhile ends, sometimes not. However, if you don’t live in a vegan food coop or work for a nonprofit, Woke 1 is over. It is no longer possible to be cancelled without having committed at least two felonies. If you still feel victimized by Woke 1 we recommend, unfortunately, that you go to therapy about it.
32. In other words—Woke 1 is our generation’s Vietnam, in that some of the population was traumatized by it and will spend the rest of their lives acting like they’re still there.
33. Public access tv funding quadrupled, dedicated mostly to "day in the life" tiktoks of midlevel bureaucrats
34. Tax benefits of marriage should decrease with age gap
35. “Unconscious bias” is out, promoting intergroup contact is in
36. We’re performatively undoing the wine/whine merger. We’re now referring to “hwhite people”
37. Collecting statistics in order to do diversity and inclusion in a statistically defensible way should generally fall under safe harbor provisions and not increase liability
38. High quality, rapid-turnover air filtration in schools and cafeterias will improve educational outcomes and prevent conflict over the smell of food
39. Don’t get it twisted: the goal of Woke 2 is to establish social equality, achieve material and spiritual progress, and construct a vibrant civic life for the people.
