In the latest of constant gaffes, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden apparently doesn’t understand his party’s new watchword: woke.
“Everybody’s been woked,” Biden said on ABC News on Wednesday. He seemed to equivocate the term with the word “awakened,” adding, “Well, guess what? The rest of the working-class people in America have been awakened.” Biden then went on to discuss how Americans had been awakened to, apparently, the injustices of non-compete agreements at fast-food restaurants.
In its presently popular usage, woke is not a verb but an adjective, describing someone who rabidly pursues the use of race, sex, sexuality, and ideology to assign social benefits. Used by a leftist, it’s a compliment. Conservatives more often use it to describe corporations or armchair activists who do things like cover for mass-murdering communist China while accusing the freest country in the world of systemic racism.
Listen to Biden try, and fail, to use the term here:
The Democratic nominee’s latest gaffe is far from his worst. The Federalist has compiled his slip-ups into a long list.
There was the time he confused his wife and his sister onstage, the time he forgot what the Declaration of Independence was, the time during his presidential campaign that he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate, and the time he thought Bolivia and Venezuela share a border instead of being on opposite sides of South America.
He’s also forgotten what state he was in (confusing Iowa for Ohio), claimed to have attended a historically black college (he didn’t), forgotten the name of a man his administration nominated to the Supreme Court (Merrick Garland), and confused Iraq and Afghanistan while discussing the Obama administration’s policy in the Middle East.
Biden’s slip-ups aren’t always simple gaffes, either. He infamously said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” to the Asian and Latino Caucus, and called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” More recently, he told black voters that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re voting for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
