No Jane Fonda, 'Woke' Does Not Just Mean You "Give a Damn About Other People"

After visiting North Vietnam in 1972 and posing atop an anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam that was used to shoot down American planes to protest the Vietnam War, Fonda was derogatorily branded “Hanoi Jane.” 

The shortsighted photo-op drew ire among the American public, who saw her as a traitor to her nation and felt betrayed by the disrespect shown to the American troops. While Fonda has maintained her anti-war resolve, she’s repeatedly apologized over the years for posing with an anti-aircraft gun that claimed the lives of American soldiers, insisting she’ll take that regret to her grave. Though it was a huge blight on her career that inspired conservative boycotts of her films and significant public backlash that continues to follow her to this day, she evidently remained a bankable star who continued to secure roles and Academy Awards. 

Five decades later, Hanoi Jane is largely a thing of the past for Fonda, who’s found considerable career longevity, as demonstrated by her acceptance the other night of the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. A career spanning decades, the 87-year old actress has been working since the ‘60s and continues to land modern hits like the seven season Netflix sitcom, “Gracie & Frankie.” The public perception of Fonda has softened, likely in large part due to newer generations’ appreciation for her progressive political activism and philanthropy. 

Jane Fonda Defends Wokeness in Hollywood

During her SAG acceptance speech, she defended wokeness as Fonda used her support of the SAG-AFTRA union to segue into the importance of unions in protecting workers power and community. Seemingly referencing the current presidential administration, she warned, "workers' power is being attacked and community is being weakened." SAG-Aftra is different than most other unions, however, Fonda claims, because the workers (actors) don't manufacture anything 'tangible,' "what we create is empathy." 

Fonda elaborates on the painstaking process actors go through to inhabit the minds of characters who may be deeply flawed, even outright evil, emphasizing that empathy is the key to understanding them, even when their actions are detestable. She points to Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of Donald Trump in “The Apprentice” as an example. You can probably guess where this is going. "Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or ‘woke’—and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people," Fonda declared to a crowd that met her with thunderous applause, before delivering ominous warnings about what is "coming our way," alluding to widespread suffering at the hands of Trump’s administration on the horizon. 

While Fonda's sanctimonious ramblings paid lip service to the notion that Hollywood elites should welcome people of different political persuasions into their tent to successfully resist Trump together, her understanding of the dangers of wokeism, unsurprisingly, is way off base, and her dismissal of substantive criticisms of woke ideology as something especially toxic, regressive, and unproductive, is all the more out of touch when put in context of her speech which goes on to reference the harms caused by McCarthyism, when mere rumors of association with communists destroyed careers. Fonda proudly recalls how Hollywood resisted when brave producers hired blacklisted writers, while others founded the Committee for the First Amendment. 

The great irony, of course, is that if what's happening now is a parallel to McCarthyism, the red scare that used blacklisting, public shaming tactics, and ideological purity tests to establish a socially enforced political orthodoxy, she's on the wrong side of it. Maybe Fonda is too insulated from the devastating effects wokeness has had on regular people to see the flaw in her reasoning. Wokeness hasn't become a "dirty word" as Whoopie Goldberg says, for no reason. Wokeness is a subset of ideas based on flawed reasoning, that perpetuates social injustice by insisting it can never be fully dismantled.

To be "woke" is to be aware of social injustice, particularly systematic discrimination but also in the subtleties of everyday life. This philosophy has resulted in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies that prioritize diversity and representation over merit, an unforgiving culture that cancels upon the first perceived transgression and offers no repentance, forgiveness, or charitability, and has reverse engineered discrimination, such as judging people based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character, as a good thing. 

“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like Apartheid, or our Civil Rights Movement, or Stonewall, and asked yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” Fonda asked. “Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs?” “We don't have to wonder anymore because we are in our documentary moment. This is it and it's not a rehearsal.” That’s right. Standing before a crowd of wealthy celebrities dressed to the nines in custom Armani, and receiving a reward for Professional Virtue Signaler despite constantly getting it wrong is for sure like walking the bridge of Selma.

Perhaps even more ironic, Fonda has historically thrown the full weight of her support behind regimes that literally carried out human rights abuses like extreme persecution of political and religious dissenters via reeducation camps, executions, and other war crimes. Fonda refused to condemn the brutal human rights violations committed by the government she openly supported, despite other Vietnam War protestors managing to denounce them. This is who lectures us about being on the right side of history.

Fonda’s Long History of Misguided Activism

Fonda’s well meaning activist heart is no stranger to vague bleeding heart liberal marches on Washington or climate activist stunts that have landed her in a jail cell not once, not twice, but on six different occasions. Fonda has championed many a movement, including environmental and climate activism, the women’s liberation movement, Native American and racial justice, anti-war resistance, LGBT rights, and the list goes on. In the process, though, she’s made some curious friends, like the Black Panthers, who reportedly took advantage of her naive generosity by losing her car and credit card that she’d given them.

Despite raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from her acting career and aerobic fitness video empire, she’s long been a champion for socialism. In a 1970 interview with a group of students at the University of Michigan, she said, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist. I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism." Her criticisms of capitalism fall on deaf ears, given the fortune she's made in Hollywood and her previous marriage to billionaire media mogul Ted Turner.

Woke ideologues love to condescend to conservatives, independents, and other woke skeptics by insisting we can't even define what woke is or what its problems are. Wokeism is just another extension of progressive thought, largely built on the foundation of intersectionality, the idea that all forms of oppression are intersecting so one form of injustice cannot be addressed in isolation. This profundity of thought leads you down such epiphanies as Fonda's musings that "there'd be no climate crisis if it wasn't for racism."