In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.A piece of political conventional wisdom that emerged from President Donald Trump’s convincing 2024 electoral victory was that the country had decisively moved on from “wokeness.” The scolding, joyless, pseudo-religious fervor that had gripped much of our discourse, having been forcibly inflicted on our culture and institutions by leftist elites and activists, was over. Reinstating Trump as president was, in no small measure, an act of revolt against this stifling regime.There was much truth to this analysis. The Trump campaign said its most effective ad featured Kamala Harris pledging her support for taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for prisoners, which cut through the noise and intuitively laid bare her niche, out-of-step priorities. Voters rejected her, and in the process, seemed to announce a collective departure from a strange and unpleasant era.
RIP wokeness, the narrative went. An unwelcome phenomenon that peaked in 2020 and 2021 finally died in November of 2024. Trump killed it.But beware, voters. The great many people who are quite pleased and relieved to have rid themselves of myriad woke excesses must be warned that the Professional Left has never turned the particular page. It remains firmly and defiantly planted in a 2020 stasis. The fever has not broken. If anything, it appears to be radicalizing further while out of power.It currently lacks the coercive tools to reimpose woke enforcement and cancel culture writ large, including with various governmental levers. It expects that to change. It has engaged in little to no self-reflection while in the wilderness. Its movement hasn’t endured a corrective gut check, let alone one that has precipitated any tangible shift in approach next time it has the authority it craves.To the contrary, it has doubled and tripled down on policy extremism, ugly recriminations, obsessive identity grievance, and even COVID-19 culture itself. If the Left regains power, voters ought to know that its would-be overlords are champing at the bit to turn back the clock to the surreal bad old days of systemically weaponized outrage and mob rule. It is its fundamental ethos. It’s who it is, and what many of its people live for.One of the top policy-related reasons Trump prevailed two years ago was immigration. The Biden-Harris border crisis offended and outraged many people, who bristled at the chaos, the undermining of national sovereignty, and the resulting public safety disaster. Since losing, the Left’s partisan vehicle, the Democratic Party, has not moderated one iota on the issue. Indeed, Democrats have lurched further leftward, increasingly becoming overtly and reflexively anti-enforcement.Some elected Democrats have begged forgiveness from their ravenous, radical base for supporting the bipartisan Laken Riley Act, named after an illegal immigrant’s murder victim, which made it easier to deport illegal immigrants with criminal records. The party’s 2024 vice presidential nominee recently intervened, ultimately unsuccessfully, to thwart the deportation of an illegal immigrant, despite a felony child sex abuse conviction and a standing final removal order lodged against him.The phony “centrist” Democratic governors of Virginia and New Jersey, both elected last year, prioritized pro-“sanctuary” edicts upon assuming office. Elected officials have intensely demonized federal immigration agents, even amid an explosion of threats, violent attacks, and murder attempts directed at said agents, and forced a monthslong government shutdown designed to withhold additional funding from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.Former President Joe Biden’s reckless policies on this front helped pave the way for a bruising electoral loss in our most recent political cycle. This isn’t ancient history. But Democrats have evidently decided that, if anything, they’ve been insufficiently extreme and crazy on illegal immigration. Brace for worse, somehow, if and when they hold the reins of power again.Likewise, leftists have absolutely not reconsidered their nasty, radical worship and exploitation of identity politics. Their top influencer and campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker, who seethed that “America deserved 9/11” and has openly praised the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, lit into the nearly half of Michigan Democratic voters who voted against his left-wing candidate in the state’s Senate primary.In response to calls for Abdul el Sayed to mend internal fences after a bitter and divisive primary, which he won by the skin of his teeth, representing a major polling miss, Piker called the skeptics and critics within the party “unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of s***.”That’s quite a message for black voters in Michigan, who broke overwhelmingly for el Sayed’s opponent. But wielding identity as a blunt force instrument is how the Left “debates” and operates. It’s systemized, outcomes-focused bullying.Abdul el Sayed arrives for a news conference at the Spirit of Detroit shortly after winning the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan on Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
