Texas Democrat candidate Matthew Dowd says Jesus today ‘would be accused of being woke’

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A former Bush campaign adviser who is running as a Democrat in Texas’ lieutenant governor race said Sunday that Jesus Christ today would be declared "woke" by conservatives.

Matthew Dowd, who is seeking his party’s nomination to take on Republican Dan Patrick, said he came to the realization in church that today’s "wokeness" is just another term for human decency.

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(Dowd for Texas)

"As I sat in church today I was thinking that if Jesus were here today he would be accused of being woke," he tweeted. "How about we just say it is human decency to treat all with respect and dignity and that it is constitutional to say all men and women are equal."

"Lovely service at church today at Chapel in the Hills in Wimberley," he wrote in an earlier tweet. "'Let your joy be in your journey, not in some distant goal.’ Let us each find joy in meaning and service with compassion and respect of others. It is there that happiness resides."

Dowd, a former ABC News political analyst, was an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and the chief strategist for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. 

Dowd's comments came after Democratic strategist James Carville sparked the ire of progressives for blaming Democrat Terry McAuliffe's loss in Virginia on "stupid wokeness" and the progressive agenda.

"What went wrong is stupid wokeness," Carville said. "Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, people see that. And it really has a suppressive effect on all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something."

(MSNBC)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., fired back at Carville, saying "wokeness" is a term "almost exclusively used by older people these days."

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"And before people disingenuously complain ‘woke’ is denigrating to older people, it’s actually pundits like Carville using terms like ‘woke’ to insult voters under 45 that’s denigrating," she tweeted. "Don’t wonder why youth turnout falls when Dems talk about them like this. We need everyone."

(Getty Images)

Merriam-Webster added the word woke to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The Oxford dictionary adopted it the same year, defining it as "originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice."

Many Americans regard wokeness as connected to cancel culture, censorship, and Critical Race Theory, which may have played a major role in the Democrats' recent election defeats in Virginia. Liberal commentator Bill Maher has repeatedly criticized wokeness and cancel culture on his show over the past few months.