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Notes -
It has largely worked for the woke. A large portion of the population has gone from fervently supporting color blindness to fervently supporting affirmative action, and so on for every other social issue. It doesn’t convert everyone. It doesn’t have to.
This seems to be saying that beating anti-wokes with a newspaper convinced those who were already members of the progressive coalition to get with the program and update to a different sub-ideology in their camp, not that it had any effect to dissuade those who were targeted by it. You could argue that there was a similar pool of proto-allies that merely needed to be scared into backing a promising new strategy when Trumpism first came around and had to fight against older schools of conservatism in the Republican coalition, but by now that pool seems to have been largely exhausted.
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