“Woke” is usually treated as a synonym for “progressive,” but that is not what the word is actually doing in practice. What it really names is anything that weakens hierarchy.
Once you look at it that way, a lot of otherwise strange cultural battles start to make sense. Fonts become political. Accessibility features become controversial. Plain language is mocked. Empathy is treated with suspicion. Accurate history is framed as dangerous revisionism. None of these things should be threatening on their own. Yet they are attacked consistently, not because they fail, but because they work.
Helping people is rarely treated as neutral. It is framed as indulgent, corrupting, or destabilizing. That framing only makes sense if the systems being protected depend on people remaining confused, dependent, or excluded.
The structures most often defended in these moments are not isolated. They are stacked and mutually reinforcing. Religion asserts moral authority without consent. Patriarchy governs bodies and care labor. Race is used to naturalize inequality. Capitalism reduces human value to productivity. Each system stabilizes the others. When one is questioned, the entire structure feels threatened.
Accessibility becomes a flashpoint because it undermines all of them at once. It makes systems legible to people who were never meant to understand them. It lowers barriers to entry. It reduces the need for gatekeepers and intermediaries. Most importantly, it reduces dependence on authority. Accessibility quietly says, “You do not need permission to understand.” That idea is deeply anti-authoritarian.
So instead of debating accessibility on its merits, help itself gets relabeled. It becomes “woke,” “degenerate,” “communist,” “lazy,” “feminine,” or “gay.” The labels are not random. They are tools for marking certain kinds of care, ease, or dignity as illegitimate.
When people are actually helped, a few things happen that are dangerous from the perspective of power. People become less reliant on authority. Systems that once felt impenetrable start to make sense. Survival requires fewer permissions. People begin asking why things are structured the way they are, and who benefits from that structure remaining unchanged.
Hierarchies built on dependency, confusion, shame, and artificial scarcity cannot survive that shift. So help is reframed as weakness. Accessibility becomes indulgence. Empathy is treated as corruption. Understanding itself is recast as indoctrination.
If helping people were framed honestly, the obvious question would be: why did we not do this sooner? That question cannot be allowed to surface. Instead, the conversation is redirected toward who is being helped. The issue is never that help fails, but that it helps the “wrong” people.
This is why help gets gendered, sexualized, racialized, and politicized. It is not about outcomes. It is about control—about who is allowed ease, dignity, and understanding, and who is expected to struggle as proof of worth.
Calling help “woke” is a way of saying that suffering is not a bug in the system, but a feature. It is a warning not to interfere.
Fascism rarely announces itself directly. It does not arrive in uniforms. It arrives speaking the language of common sense. It says it is protecting order, tradition, or neutrality. It accuses others of overreacting. It modernizes itself and denies its own name.
One reliable signal cuts through the noise. If a system fears plain language, accessibility, accurate history, or reduced suffering, then the “problem” is not “wokeness.”
The “problem” is power losing its grip.