When we saw the full schedule for this week’s Road to Majority conference, the annual religious-right activist event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, we were surprised that there were no breakout sessions focused on fighting “wokeness,” the catch-all term that right-wing politicians slap on everything MAGA activists dislike, from LGBTQ equality to programs acknowledging the existence of racism or promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) took care of that seeming oversight in his remarks at a Faith and Freedom “town hall” in the U.S. Capitol Thursday afternoon.
Banks, who was elected to the House in 2016, is now running for the Senate. In his introduction of Banks, Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed said that Banks would make a “qualitative difference” in the Senate because he would immediately move the Republican caucus to the right.
Banks has served as chair of the Republican Study Committee, a group of right-wing lawmakers, but that apparently wasn’t good enough for him, as he told activists packed into an auditorium in the Capitol Visitors Center that he had created an “Anti-Woke Caucus” and named himself chairman.
Banks told activists that his top priority has been “taking on wokeism in the military,” and he bragged that in marking up the National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee “took a hatchet to wokeism in the military.”
Banks was proud that the NDAA as marked up by the committee moves to reinstate servicemembers who were discharged for refusing vaccinations, “slashes DEI bureaucrats’ pay,” “defunds critical race theory at West Point,” and thanks to Rep. Matt Gaetz, bans drag shows on military bases, certainly one of the burning issues facing our national security establishment. (Are Banks and Gaetz not aware of the long history of U.S. troops being entertained by cross-dressing performers?)
At times Banks seemed to be competing with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the number of “wokes” he can squeeze into a single speech:
Republicans are talking about wokeism because that’s what all of you expect us to talk about. That’s what you, our constituents, expect us to fight against on Capitol Hill. Americans are sick of anti-Americans…In closing, the Anti-Woke Caucus’ goal is that every single bill that we pass out of this Congress…goes a long way to defunding and eliminating wokeness in the federal government.
While the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is apparently all-in for the “war on wokeness,” most Americans aren’t signing up. In fact, a majority of Americans believe that being woke—which they understand to mean “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices”—is a positive thing, and they are wary of politicians using it as a “distraction” from more important issues.
