The Playwright Tony Kushner is important to me; his extraordinary play “Angels In America” was a landmark cultural event; I think about it often and have seen it three times.

Inspired by the AIDS epidemic raging tragically across America, the play was an act of genius that struck my heart and brilliantly captured the soul of our schizophrenic nation, which is both cruel and hateful and generous and warm and bigoted and open-minded at the same time.

The war against gay and Trans-America now ongoing in half of America is nothing new to Kusher. It’s AIDS all over again, packaged differently.  The country’s leaders and most of its people were content to hold their noses and look the other way as tens of thousands of gay men and women died lonely and horrible deaths.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even use the word “Aids” until it was way too late.

Our troubles, Kushner argues, go on a straight line from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump to the Frankenstein creation that is now the Republican Party.

The country is under siege from the newly extremist and Christian fundamentalist Republican party, which wants to make sure that black people, gay people, and transgender people are never written about in books,  spoken of again in our schools or statehouses. or represented in our politics.

In fact, for the first time in American history, Republican legislators are making it a crime to even talk about gay people in schools. Powerful corporations – historically friends to the Republican Party – are being threatened with special taxes and financial and legal punishment if they care to even speak about them or, God forbid, defend them, or help their workers get abortions.

In media terms, this is becoming the War On The Woke. 

But very few Americans know what the term really means.

In the Republican vernacular, the term “woke” is synonymous with elitism and the “radical left,” and with anyone who wishes to speak about racism, sexism, or anything the Republican Party opposes. It’s a code really, it’s a license to hate.

Wikipedia defines “woke” in this way:

Woke is an English adjective meaning to be “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” The term originated in African American Vernacular English. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social awareness such as sexism and has increasingly been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for black Americans.

Fox News describes being “woke” in this way:

But the meaning of woke evolved again with the rise of “cancel culture” — as the two terms saw increased use, they became intertwined in the public consciousness. Often, someone gets canceled after they say something insensitive – something not woke.

(Or is accused of being “woke.”)

Governors like Gov. Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida use the word as a noun.

To be “woke” is to be opposed to them and their policies, it is a code word for their followers to disregard any person or company using it as a mindless knee-jerk tool of the left. DeSantis even uses the term “woke” in his legislation threatening teachers with talking about gay people and to attack corporations who criticize him.”

But the conservative media has perfected this distortion of words into an art form and media missile, and also as a devastatingly effective political weapon.

I keep thinking that the party’s true hero is no longer Donald Trump but his best dictator pal, Vladimir Putin, who has mastered the horrible art of silencing free speech.

To care about them or support people is to be “woke,” thus ignored, dismissed, and bullied into silence.

It is the moral obligation of good people to not be silenced. If we make enough noise, they lose. That’s why I’m writing this.

Kushner is the rarest of cultural figures, a truly original thinker, a prophet, and a mystic. He understands that our divided country makes defeat inevitable for both sides.

We can’t do it alone, but the Republicans are trying their best to pull it off, they have gone rogue and are working to dismantle our system of working together for the common good.

When we figure out that the only way through this is to talk to one another, then we may begin to heal.

This week Kushner gave an interview to Reuters that caught my attention and my imagination. His remarks struck deep social and political nerves, and his interview was quoted worldwide. He got my mind racing.

Kushner’s premise is something that made sense to me, in part (full disclosure) because I feel much the same way he does about what is happening in America. His ideas help us to see what is right under our noses, but which we are often too close to grasp.

Republican ideology, he says, is based on the fantasy that White and Straight Christian Men can gain exclusive control over our culture, our teaching, our courts, our books and libraries,  and our political system. And our minds and bodies and identity.

By “fantasy,” Kushner suggests that this social coup cannot succeed, we are just too big and diverse, and yes, smart to be taken in by accepted party thinkers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz.

You can dress up a hog, but you can’t make it smell good.

The Republican assaults on the “woke” world, the banning all abortions, even those that occur due to rape and incest, accusing the Walt Disney Corp. of all things, of “grooming” and supporting pedophiles, and forbidding teachers to speak or talk about gay or transgender people may be offensive, but they are also stupid and short-sighted. Americans always have nosed up the extremes in politics, then backed off when it gets too close.

They may not like Joe Biden, but he probably isn’t running for re-election, and they may well like the alternative even worse, as they did last time.

Behind all of these tensions and lies are White, Straight, Christian men constructing an authoritarian culture that would keep people like them in power and hold back the African-Americans, women, gay and transgender people who are knocking on their gates. They also hope to silence the “woke” voters whose right to vote is being chipped away, state by state.

These are the people who are “woke” to being disenfranchised.

The once-proud GOP has become as adept as its Mar-A-Largo golf player ruler hiding out every day in the Florida sun while the country burns and freezes. Trump has become a powerful wizard pushing levers behind the curtain and pretending to be all-powerful.

The Republicans have staked out their vision of governance: it is mostly phony culture wars that pit Americans against one another.

More than 23 states have now passed hundreds of laws that all have one thing in common – it will be more difficult for blacks and people of color to vote.  It will be almost impossible for half of the women in the country to find an abortion.

The White Straight Christian Men were aroused by President Trump and are drunk with power and hope. They are building firewalls to stop the tide. They will fail.

“Change is happening,” said Kushner in the interview. “People are progressing. You can’t reverse the flow of history. The White, straight, theocratic right is determined to return the country to some fantasy of exclusive control by White straight men.”

Kushner is someone the Republicans would call a “radical leftist,” he is pretty far to the left of me, but he is also a genius and a visionary, and I take what he says seriously. I’m not yet so damaged that I can only listen to people who think exactly the way I do. That is the way to not think at all.

I would hate to live in a world where everyone agreed with me and thought the way I did.

The Republican vision is effective at arousing voters with mostly imagined and invented threats and demons, from Hunter Biden to critical race theory, taught in almost no public school in America.

To cast Disney, that sappy icon of Main Street family values, as a groomer of sexual perverts because the opposing brazen bigotry tells us that the people pushing this cultural iron wall are doomed to lose.

They’ve now kissed the feet of the Devil himself, welcoming to their party Nazis, Neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, traitors, wombats, fools, and bigots. That is not the formula for political success in America; I don’t care how many Republicans control congress.

Way too many Americans are beyond the control of the Christian Straight White Men. “They can’t kill all of us,” one black activist told an interviewer. Nor, as Putin is learning, can you control tens of millions of people by taking their freedom away.

You lie down with the devil and wake up with him in the morning, out in the kitchen brewing some coffee.

Governor DeSantis’s war against the LGBT community in Florida is disgusting. Anyone who knows him knows that he is not an ideologue and doesn’t even believe in what he is doing; he is a parasite and a mimic, feeding off his original mentor, Donald Trump.

Today, the two would-be dictators are circling one another in the ring, they are soon to be at one another’s throats, competing to see who hates democracy the most.  You can take that to the bank.

God willing, they will devour and betray one another. It’s their nature.

Like it or not, the absolute domination and control of the White Christian Straight Men is doomed, it must inevitably come to an end. I may not live to see it, or may not wish to, but I have no doubt this is one movement that has lost touch with reality.

Soon, most of the country will be black, yellow, and brown. Women are rising as doctors, lawyers, and legislators. There are a hundred ways for women who want an abortion to get one; the idea that they can all be silenced, denied control of their bodies, or blocked is another fantasy.

Our great cities and diverse populations are beyond their reach and control.

Blacks and gay people and women and transgender people can no longer be silenced and forced into hiding; they are loud, organized, and angry. And they are speaking out and being heard all over the place.

That is a new reality for America and the White, Straight Christian Men who have dominated the country. They are angry and frightened. It’s not an easy thing to give up.

But it’s not all bleak either.

I sense a new reality emerging out of all this. Change brings fear and resistance, this is not new. Change always wins in the long run.

The forces of status are overreaching. I can feel it. That is how authoritarians always lose – they never know when to stop.

I can’t imagine how any person of heart or conscience would wish to force women who were raped by a stranger or her father to have a child they don’t want to have.

It’s a matter of elemental decency that was once accepted even by anti-abortion advocates and the Republican Party. They never know when to stop, and in their fever and arrogance, they can’t imagine the resistance they will face to their cruelty.

If that makes me a “woke” man, I’ll take the label; it’s a lot better than “left” or “right” or “red” or “blue.”

Even now, feminist groups have flooded the Internet with free and easy ways to self-abort babies, from bell jars with pumps to pills from Canada and Mexico.

We are not yet China or Russia; we can’t be sealed off how they can seal off their people. The truth is seeping into Russia; China can’t control Covid by itself with Draconian and cruel regulations. The truth is important, it always finds a way.

Governers like DeSantis in Florida and Abbott in Texas are awakening us to the severe dangers they pose to our democratic structure, choices, and way of life. Their hateful messages will not resonate in most or all of our country. History and numbers and a free and vibrant culture stand against them.

Remember the Moms in Portland? I won’t forget them.

Governor DeSantis is even creating his own secret police to arrest fraudulent voters who do not exist. If he can’t find any evidence of voting fraud, he can at least try to frighten honest voters from voting.

While Manatees die by the thousands because of pollution and pythons have taken over the Everglades and the red tides are spreading all over Florida’s coastline,  he’s at war with the “woke,” fighting with Mickey Mouse.

I don’t want to live in Florida, and I bet a lot of other people don’t want to either.

Remember the moms. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This is the last stand of the white men in a battle that had to come. It’s a battle they cannot possibly win.

Half of America cannot be silenced or ignored, or intimidated. Black Lives Matter is not afraid of Ron DeSantis. Neither are the gay men and women marching all over Florida.

Rather than celebrating the diversity that is at the heart of the American Experience, the White Straight Christian Men have taken over a political party and are making their last stand. They are a humorless and graceless bunch.

Every day, I hear and see the evolution of states like Texas and Florida into “hate” states where the governors wage revolutionary culture wars rather than take care of roads and school funding, harass migrants and the poor, and ignore environmental challenges.

In Texas, employers are paying to fly their employees out of state so they can have the abortions they want. The state legislature is planning to make that illegal.

Step by step, the Republican governors are learning the lessons of Trump and Putin – lie and lie some more,  never apologize, never back off, never stop pushing for absolute control, distract everyone from reality.

This will not work in America, not over the long haul; things have progressed too rapidly, too many people have come here looking to be free, and too many people have only known freedom.

It is helpful for me to understand the context in which all of this is happening. Tony Kushner is right once again, the White, Straight Christian Men want to take over to keep themselves in power.

We are in for some difficult times, for sure.

But this is not a war the White Straight Christian Men of America can win any more than Trump could overturn a legal election or Putin can subjugate 43 million people who would rather die free than live as enslaved people.

More than 150 million Americans feel the same way.