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“I think it’s crazy I’m the one who they labeled as controversial and Cardi B is the role model for twelve-year-old girls,” sings Tom MacDonald, a Canadian rapper from Vancouver. His song Fake Woke has reached #1 on the iTunes all-genre song sales chart in the USA. It remains at the #1 position. On YouTube it currently has over two and a half million views.
The song has caused controversy because of its deeply political content and the analysis that Tom MacDonald provides to listeners. With a jaded voice, he launches his lyrics against the progressive consensus that wants to rule the lives and visions of people under the optics of the woke culture.
In the opening verses, MacDonald criticizes the hypocrisy of the woke establishment that claims to want the best for the world, but puts rappers who promote drug culture in young people at the top of their music charts:
“There’s rappers pushing Xanax at the top of the Billboard, but if I mention race in a song I’m scared I’ll get killed for it.”
But the hypocrisy is not just blamed on the critics, but on big rappers like Eminem, who has previously faced criticism for songs like “Kill You” where he talks about killing and raping his own mother (a song he sang at his concerts until before the pandemic) but who now promote the progressive consensus:
“Eminem used to gay bash and murder his mom and now he doesn’t want fans if they voted for Trump.”
MacDonald fires back at the end against the cancel culture and the progressive narrative of white privilege.
“Cancel culture runs the world now, the planet went crazy; label everything we say as homophobic or racist. If you’re white then you’re privileged, guilty by association.”
MacDonald also drops a bombshell that takes everyone, left and right, by surprise, by exposing the technology that is today used by the tech titans to control people’s lives:
“They never freed the slaves, they realized that they don’t need the chains. They gave us tiny screens, we think we free ’cause we can’t see the cage.” Mixing it up with Ben Shapiro’s motto he sings in the chorus, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
A few lines into his second verse, MacDonald drops a lesson on free speech and how Big Tech censors facts to write reality: “Censorship’s an issue ’cause they choose what they erase. There’s a difference between hate speech and speech that you hate.”
Exposing the ridiculousness of Black Lives Matter identity politics, MacDonald calls the movement’s name the stupidest because “the system is screwing everyone exactly the same.” For the third verse, the rapper again touches on censorship by big companies, expressing his concern for the future of children who will grow up “idiots” without information and that, despite claiming it’s for our own good, what they are looking for with censorship is to prevent empowered citizens.
By the end of the verse, Tom MacDonald questions the ridiculousness of progressivism when it comes to manipulating language and changing it to apply gender ideology: “They’re tryna change amen to amen and awomen. How’d we let them make praying a microaggression?”, ending with a brutal reflection on the spiritual state of this age: “Instead of asking God for the strength to keep winning, we cheat to get ahead and then we ask Him for forgiveness.”
MacDonald’s rhymes are upfront and don’t play much between the verses to over-musicalize the message. However, the reflections that the rapper exposes in his song leave in sight the hypocrisy with which the system wants to dominate people and how progressivism wants to impose a ridiculous and totalitarian way of life.
Rafael Valera, Venezuelan, student of Political Science, political exile in São Paulo, Brazil since 2017 // Rafael Valera, venezolano, es estudiante de Ciencias Políticas y exiliado político en São Paulo, Brasil desde 2017