Not even a thorough drubbing in the 2024 election can convince woke liberals to change their absurd behavior.
Thus, we must conclude that the behavior itself serves some deep psychological need.
For instance, on Monday, the Democratic National Committee opened its summer meeting in Minneapolis, MN, with a cringe-inducing land acknowledgment, one of the emptiest and most self-serving of all woke spectacles.
“The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota … people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis,” a speaker from the Saginaw Ojibwe Nation said in a clip posted to the social media platform X.
“The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and … the great river, the Mississippi River, for thousands of years before colonization,” the speaker continued. “This land was not claimed or traded; it’s a part of a history of broken treaties and promises. And, in many ways, we still live in a system built to suppress indigenous peoples’ cultural and spiritual history.”
The DNC Summer Meeting begins with a land acknowledgment that claims Minneapolis, Minnesota is on stolen land. pic.twitter.com/zayYRl5w4r
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 25, 2025
Conservatives, of course, need not bristle at the speaker’s argument. After all, no serious student of Indian relations doubts the federal government’s “history of broken treaties and promises.”
Indeed, since its inception, but especially from 1830 onward, the federal government committed crimes against the Indians.
Are “land acknowledgements” nonsense?
If anyone thinks for a moment, however, that woke liberals open meetings with land acknowledgements to draw attention to the Trail of Tears, then those poor, credulous souls have learned nothing about woke liberals.
First of all, when it comes to virtue-signaling about the American past, woke liberals detest nuance.
“[I]n truth the ultimate point of rest & happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix and become one people, incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the US,” Thomas Jefferson wrote of the Indians in 1803.
Here we have a sitting president wrestling with a complex contemporary issue. What if some Indians wanted to “blend” and “intermix” with their American neighbors, while others did not? What if European colonization and later American expansion actually divided Indian communities? Those things, of course, actually happened. But they do not fit the tidy woke narrative that depicts light-skinned people as oppressors and dark-skinned people as victims.
Secondly, every land acknowledgement contains an internal contradiction.
“You wish to prevent the Indians doing as we wish them — to unite, and let them consider their lands as the common property of the whole,” the Shawnee leader Tecumseh reportedly said to William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory and future U.S. president, in 1810.
Tecumseh’s words tell us, first, that Indians had not united, and second, that they had no shared view of landownership.
Moreover, if Tecumseh’s view represented that of Indians in general — land as “the common property of the whole” — then land acknowledgements make no sense, because the land never “belonged” to anyone, including, by their own reckoning, the Indians.
None of this, of course, diminishes the catastrophe that befell Indians over a period of centuries. Nor does it exonerate the post-1830 federal government for its hideous policy of Indian removal.
The point is that woke liberals’ behavior, including their silly land acknowledgements, stems from something other than history.
Indeed, the source of that behavior has deep roots that precede what we now recognize as the era of wokeness.
For instance, nearly a quarter-century ago, historian Alan Taylor published “American Colonies: The Settling of North America.” That book, which depicted colonists as oppressors and Indians as victims, contained one of the most jarring sentences I have ever read.
“Indian women also took pleasure in their practice of working the fields cooperatively in festive groups,” Taylor wrote.
Younger me nearly fell out of my chair. Apparently, it never occurred to Taylor that neither he nor anyone so removed from the phenomenon in question could have the slightest idea what Indian women thought and felt about their agricultural labor.
Of course, Indian women might or might not have taken such pleasure. But for present purposes, that matters less than the casual confidence with which Taylor proclaimed it.
It is precisely that casualness that defines all woke statements about the American past. When the entire woke narrative insists that people belong in “oppressor” or “victim” categories based solely on their identities, then that dichotomous view will infect every aspect of woke thought, often without the individual knowing it.
In that way, liberal writers can make claims about Indian women’s attitudes toward agricultural work. And those claims will sound true, not because of any supporting evidence, but because they conform to the narrative.
Ironically, a left-leaning think tank recently published a list of 45 words and phrases woke Democrats should stop using. The list included words such as “privilege” and “microaggression” — the kinds of things people say when they want to sound like academic ninnies. Land acknowledgements fall under the same heading. None of it appeals to voters, the think tank argued.
In sum, liberals do not engage in woke behavior from fealty to truth or for electoral advantage. Therefore, they must do it for another reason, such as looking good in the eyes of fellow liberals.
Meanwhile, they look ridiculous to everyone else.
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