Anti-woke activists are winning the culture war in America

Two years ago it seemed that a conservative movement against “wokeness” was taking over America’s schools. Seen by many on the right as an insidious liberal outlook emphasising race, gender and sexuality, wokeness has many guises: among them critical race theory (CRT), gender theory and queer theory. According to its opponents, it all amounts to the same thing, it is thriving in schools and it has to go.

Activists set out to uproot it, and quickly made their mark. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group founded in 2021 that opposes CRT and other supposedly progressive policies in schools, says that in 2022 over half its candidates won their school-board elections. Other anti-woke groups claimed success, too. But is their momentum waning? Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, says that its candidates won 43% of its elections this year. News outlets reported that the movement was losing steam.