In a more literal sense than you may expect, Elon Musk has discovered a “woke” goldmine inside Twitter’s offices.
Tuesday night, the new owner of the firm posted a video of a storage room filled with #StayWoke t-shirts.
“Found in closet at Twitter HQ fr,” Musk tweeted.
Found in closet at Twitter HQ fr 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/3xSI3KvvHk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
“Here we are, at the merch,” Musk explained in his own video.
“And there’s an entire closet full of hashtag ‘Woke’ t-shirts.”
A person off-screen in the video referred to the woke merch closet as a “hidden closet,” implying that the hoard was discovered in a remote portion of Twitter’s San Francisco offices.
Musk published a Justice Department report detailing the facts behind the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in a subsequent tweet.
Found in closet at Twitter HQ fr 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/3xSI3KvvHk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
The incident, which was later considered a lawful act of self-defense by prosecutors, sparked Black Lives Matter demonstrations that popularized the word “woke.”
Since then, the term “woke” has been used to designate politically correct, race-obsessed leftists. Today, it is often regarded an insult.
However, this was not always the case.
Originally, the phrase had a good connotation, at least in the perspective of liberals who employed it.
According to Fox News, the slogan dates back to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Its initial term relates to awareness of the alleged pervasive racism in American culture.
Around 2020, the phrase was repurposed as a critique of pompous liberals. In 2022, it is extremely uncommon to hear the word “woke” in its original usage, since liberals have accepted the word’s repurposing as a condemnation of their worst excesses.
Musk has dismissed the bulk of Twitter’s staff since acquiring the firm, stating his intention to alter the platform’s business processes and introduce more free speech rights to the site.
He has reinstated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but Trump has not yet returned to his old digital haunts as of Wednesday.