(This is a guest piece by J.C. Whiteman, author of the book Home of the Saved.

For years I’ve dedicated my life to fighting the scourge of wokeness. I’ve written angry Facebook posts, yelled at teenagers on TikTok, and even boycotted Bud Light (though I still secretly drink it when nobody’s looking). I thought I was on the frontlines of the anti-woke revolution. But then, the unthinkable happened: I realized the only reason I know so much about wokeness… is because I’ve been awake to it all along.

That’s right. I’m confessing that I am woke.

Think about it. Who else stays up at night scrolling through Disney+ releases to make sure they didn’t slip in another gay character? Who else digs through college syllabi to find critical race theory where no sane person could ever find it? Who else, besides me, pays such close attention to rainbow-colored store displays during Pride Month? You think people who are “asleep” do that? No. Only the truly woke could be this hyper-aware.

I mean, when you dedicate your whole existence to pointing out how woke everyone else is, aren’t you, by definition, the most woke person in the room?

It hit me like a Chick-fil-A sandwich to the face: my life’s work of exposing the wokeness of others was actually the wokest thing a person could possibly do. I stayed vigilant. I stayed alert. I stayed… woke.

And then the panic set in. If I’m woke, what does that make the libs? Asleep? Dreaming? In a coma? Suddenly, I realized I’ve been living in some kind of inverted reality where the more I denounce wokeness, the more woke I become. It’s like Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, except one of the Spider-Men is wearing a American flag shirt.

So what now? Do I embrace my newfound wokeness? Do I start using preferred pronouns and recycling? Or do I double down and become even more woke by exposing my own wokeness as the ultimate act of anti-wokeness?