WASHINGTON — The narrative of a "post-woke America" that emerged from President Donald Trump's 2024 electoral victory has not held up. Proponents argued that the country had decisively moved on from identity politics and what they called "wokeness." That claim was central to political conversation at the start of the year.
Eleven months later, cultural and identity debates remain firmly entrenched in the national political landscape.
The premise, as widely argued at the start of 2026, was that Trump's victory signaled a cultural shift — that identity politics was a losing battle and that "woke" ideology had lost its grip on public discourse.
Texas politician James Talarico offers a recent example of the ongoing friction. In April 2021, Talarico said publicly, "God is nonbinary." The comment resurfaced during a heated political period last month.
After a primary election in April 2026, Talarico defended his position, telling those who disagreed to "take it up with the Apostle Paul," according to social media posts. Days later, he retreated, saying, "I may have 'missed the mark.'" The sequence — an assertion, a public defense, then a retraction — illustrated the immediate political pressure surrounding such cultural declarations.
Guy Benson, a contributor to HotAir, commented on Talarico's reversals and drew attention to a broader media dynamic. Conservative outlets like the Free Beacon had exposed a political figure's fabricated working-class image long ago, Benson said, but legacy media largely ignored those findings at the time. That changed, he said, once the figure became a threat to what Benson called their "partisan tribe's power quest."
Benson also criticized what he described as an "obsessive focus on the trials of non-white people" in media coverage, contrasting it with "indifference to those of us considered 'oppressors,' no matter our station in life or troubles we have."
Talarico's experience and Benson's commentary together reflect how cultural disputes continue to shape campaigns and policy debates — not recede from them.
