'Woke One' derailed my life

In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word “Nicaragua.” No, I wasn’t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. When I repeated it slowly, a hush washed over half of the room, and management later informed me that people “didn’t feel safe” with me in the building, as if I were strapped with a bomb, not a guy with a sheet of questions trying to get through Central America. When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t o