How “Anti-Woke” Curdled Into a Demand for Protection

It started as a real critique of campus speech codes. It ended with grown men chanting at schoolgirls and a New Hampshire statute telling teachers what they were forbidden to say. A look through the one-way mirror.

In the days after the 2024 election, a phrase went up across social media like a flare: your body, my choice. It was minted for the moment by the far-right streamer Nick Fuentes (a deliberate inversion of the abortion-rights slogan), and it spread fast, into a viral TikTok sound and a trending post on X. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks extremism, measured a roughly 4,600 percent surge in that family of rhetoric in the week after the vote, alongside a 663 percent jump on X in posts about repealing the 19th Amendment, the one that gave women the right to vote. Within days, researchers were tracking it offline: the phrase reportedly turning up in schools, chanted by boys at girls in class.

The genre gives the game away. This is not the language of people indifferent to feelings. This is the language of people who are obsessed with feelings — specifically, with manufacturing fear and humiliation in someone weaker and savoring the result. And it issued from the same broad political tendency that spent the previous decade lecturing the rest of the country to grow up, toughen up, and quit being so easily wounded.

That is the contradiction worth taking seriously — because, looked at squarely, it is not a contradiction at all. The anti-woke project began as a genuine critique of campus speech codes and has curdled, step by step, into its own mirror image: a demand for protection from criticism. And unlike the campus activists it built a career mocking, this movement now holds real power, and has started writing that demand into law.

First, the Part That Was Real

Around the middle of the last decade, a real argument broke out on American campuses over trigger warnings, “safe spaces,” microaggression-reporting systems, and the shouting-down or disinvitation of controversial speakers. In 2015, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt published “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic, later a 2018 book, arguing that shielding the young from offense was teaching them fragility, a kind of “safetyism” that left them less able to withstand disagreement. In August 2016, the University of Chicago sent incoming freshmen a now-famous letter announcing that the school did not support “trigger warnings,” would not cancel speakers over controversial topics, and would not create intellectual “safe spaces” where students could retreat from ideas they disliked. Conservatives hailed it as a manifesto.

And credit where it is owed: parts of that critique were correct. You do not, in fact, possess a right to move through the world unoffended. A university that walls students off from uncomfortable ideas is not protecting them; it is failing at the only job it has. Resilience really does beat fragility, and exposure to arguments you hate is most of what an education is. On the narrow merits, the anti-coddling crowd frequently had the better of it.

Hold onto that principle. It is about to be betrayed by the very people who sold it to you.

Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings (Now Available on a Mug)

Nobody packaged the principle more profitably than Ben Shapiro. The line that became his brand, facts don’t care about your feelings, first surfaced on camera in 2015, when he used it on a talk show in a fight about Caitlyn Jenner, then detonated across his 2016–2017 college tour, where the format never varied: a student would make an emotional argument, Shapiro would fire back the catchphrase, the clip would rack up millions of views. (He has acknowledged he did not coin it.) It became, as these things do, merchandise — printed on mugs, shirts, and, yes, tattoos.

But notice what else was for sale. Shapiro’s Daily Wire hawked a “Leftist Tears” tumbler — a travel mug branded around drinking the tears of your political enemies, available hot or cold. Pause on that object. A “Leftist Tears” tumbler is not the product of a movement that finds feelings irrelevant. It is the product of a movement that finds feelings delicious — one that keeps a careful ledger of who is crying and wants very badly for it to be the other side. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” was never a philosophy of stoic indifference. It was a permission slip: my feelings are facts, yours are weakness, and your tears come in a souvenir cup.

That is the hinge of the whole story. Once “owning the libs” hardened from a tactic into a personality, the advertised indifference to feeling stood revealed as its exact opposite: an intense, score-keeping investment in feeling — pointed in one direction only.

Then They Won, and Discovered Their Feelings

Then the movement started winning, culturally and then electorally, and the mask slipped. The crowd that mocked safe spaces began, quietly, to demand them. Hand their rhetoric back — the same contempt, the same register, the same energy they had dished out for ten years — and watch the toughest guys in the room suddenly discover decorum, civility, and a deep and abiding hurt. The “your body, my choice” wave is that same instinct at full volume: maximal cruelty deployed by people who, the moment it is named as cruelty, reach for the fainting couch and accuse you of being divisive.

Then there are the books. The movement that spent years branding itself the sworn enemy of censorship — champions of the marketplace of ideas, who would defend to the death your right to hear an uncomfortable speaker — got busy pulling books off school library shelves. In New Hampshire’s own classrooms, educators testified that they had begun stripping titles from their curricula rather than risk running afoul of a new state law. Which brings us to the cleanest evidence that “anti-woke” had become a demand for protection. It is not a meme or a merch line. It is a statute — and New Hampshire wrote one of the clearest in the country.

New Hampshire Put It in the Law

In 2021, New Hampshire Republicans took a concept lifted almost verbatim from a Trump executive order (a 2020 order targeting “divisive concepts” in federal diversity training, which President Biden later revoked) and resurrected it at the state level. Rather than pass it as a standalone bill that would have to survive open debate, they folded it into the state budget (HB 2). The resulting law, championed by then–Senate President Chuck Morse and signed by Governor Chris Sununu, made it a punishable offense for a public-school teacher to advocate a short list of forbidden ideas about race, sex, and identity.

Read what that actually is. The same political tendency that told University of Chicago freshmen to toughen up and confront ideas at odds with their own turned around and passed a law forbidding New Hampshire teachers from advocating certain ideas — on pain of their careers. The free-speech warriors became the speech regulators. The crowd that sneered at “intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas” built a legally enforceable one, and aimed the exits at history.

It was also, the court found, incoherent. In May 2024, U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro struck the law down as unconstitutionally vague, ruling that it left teachers to guess which lessons were permitted while “gambling with their careers.” According to the ACLU of New Hampshire, it was the first such classroom-censorship law in the country to be struck down. The law was so badly built that the people bound by it could not tell what it banned — which is what tends to happen when you try to legislate a feeling.

The One-Way Mirror

The through-line dissolves the apparent hypocrisy into something more honest: a consistent position. Mocking trigger warnings, selling “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and banning concepts by statute are not three contradictions. They are one stance seen from three angles. The content of the principle was always the direction in which it pointed.

The claim was never “no one deserves protection from offensive ideas.” It was “our targets don’t deserve protection from offensive ideas.” Resilience for thee; a safe space for me. The right to give offense, plus immunity from receiving it, plus, and this is the new and dangerous part, the power to turn your own discomfort into a punishable offense for somebody else. That is not a free-speech movement. It is a permission structure: a one-way mirror through which contempt flows out freely and is never once allowed to flow back.

• 2015

  Lukianoff and Haidt warn in The Atlantic that “coddled” students are being trained into fragility. Ben Shapiro debuts “facts don’t care about your feelings” on national television.

• 2016

  The University of Chicago tells freshmen it will not provide trigger warnings or intellectual safe spaces. Conservatives celebrate it as a free-speech manifesto.

• 2016–2017

  Shapiro’s campus tour turns the catchphrase into a merchandise empire — mugs, shirts, a “Leftist Tears” tumbler. “Owning the libs” sets into an identity.

• 2021

  New Hampshire slips Trump’s “divisive concepts” framework into its state budget, restricting what teachers may advocate about race, sex, and identity.

• May 2024

  A federal judge strikes the banned-concepts law as too vague to obey — the first such law in the nation to fall. The state appeals.

• Nov 2024

  After the election, “your body, my choice” surges across platforms and into schoolyards. The toughen-up movement produces the most fragile, aggressive grievance-speech imaginable.

And note the upgrade in firepower. The campus activists this movement loved to mock were, for all their excesses, mostly kids with limited reach — a sit-in, a petition, a lecture shouted down. This movement got the statehouse. It got the budget rider, the licensing board, the parental-notification mandate, the book-review committee. The safe space it built is not a designated room in a student union. It is the machinery of the state, repurposed to guarantee that certain people never have to encounter certain ideas — and that any teacher who might raise them thinks twice about the mortgage first.

The Premise Was Always True

So the next time someone hands you facts don’t care about your feelings, go ahead and accept the premise. It was always true. It simply turned out to be a description of the speaker rather than the audience — a movement that built an entire identity around being unbothered, and revealed, the instant it had power, that it was the single most bothered faction in the country. Bothered enough to chant at children. Bothered enough to legislate.

The feelings were always the point. They just had to be the right people’s feelings. Everyone else was told to grow thicker skin.

Dexter Dow is the founder and editor of Granite State Report, an independent New Hampshire civic journalism outlet based in Northfield.