By Shannon Adock, Guest Opinion Contributor
We didn’t start the fire.
It was always burning since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t start the fire.
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
—Billy Joel
The 2026 midterms were a clear loss for Republicans. Democrats took both the House and Senate, flipping seats deep in red territory—Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and others. Democrats not only held their ground; they flipped seats in states Trump won by double digits in 2024.
This was not primarily a victory for critical race theory or gender ideology. Exit polling and post-election analysis point to cost-of-living anger, tariffs, the Iran war, and a classic midterm penalty on the president’s party. Still, the deeper problem remains. Congress changed hands. The institutions that raise the next generation did not.
Woke ideology continues to own the pipelines that shape what is thinkable: schools, universities, HR departments, prestige media, and the professional class that staffs them. 2024 was treated like a funeral for “Woke 1.” It was not. The virus adapted, sanded its language, and waited. Winning or losing Congress does not automatically reclaim the institutions that form the next generation. That is how an occupation works. It does not leave when you win one election. It leaves when you take back the host—and when parents stop delivering the next generation to it.
I learned that in 2021, not as an activist or politico—but as a mom. I ran for school board in Indian Prairie District 204 as a parent who knew classrooms should be for reading, math, and childhood—not political catechism, not racial guilt lessons, not wokeness. They called me a racist. A Change.org petition demanded I withdraw; fellow candidates and activists branded my objections to culturally responsive teaching as racist rhetoric. I called it the most combative experience of my life. Two days after I lost, I launched Awake Illinois. Then they called us Nazis. The Southern Poverty Law Center put us on its hate map alongside the KKK. Volunteers got harassed and doxxed. Livelihoods were threatened. Local conservative politicians even ran scared. That was the point. The smear is the enforcement mechanism. If you can make ordinary parents radioactive, you keep the propagandized narrative while the woke mic stays hot.
Our first slogan was simple: “They can’t cancel us.” It was a dare. We showed up at board meetings. We filed records requests. We trained candidates. We filed civil-rights complaints when districts erased sex in bathrooms, locker rooms, and girls’ sports, or ran race-sorted programming with public money. We did it in a deep-blue state, not a safe red district. The motto that survived this ideological battle is now personal: Be uncancellable. This is a competitor’s mindset. It is not about being liked. Rather, it is to grow a following that is empowered and refuses to be intimidated. That means you keep speaking after they name you. You keep documenting after they isolate you. You do not perform the ritual apology (struggle session) that turns a parent into a cautionary tale.
That is the part national commentators still miss. Wokeness is not mainly a congressional majority. It is what happens when a teacher cannot say a boy is not a girl without risking her job. It is a district that hides a “gender support plan” from parents. It is a journal that treats dissent as violence and a newsroom that treats a school-board mom as an extremist. Scientific institutions, Hollywood, and legacy media did not suddenly become brave after 2024. They sanded the language and waited. “Go woke, go broke” is true for brands that lecture customers. It is not a strategy for the places that still raise other people’s children.
The results are already being explained as inflation, tariffs, the Iran war, turnout, and the normal midterm penalty on the president’s party. Those factors are real. They are also incomplete. The professional class that lives inside DEI language, affinity programming, and institutional speech codes still has a vested interest in preserving the systems that employ it. Parents who only look at November elections and check out the rest of the year get more of the same institutional capture. We have watched this in Illinois for five years. Forced masking became racial sorting became secret social transition became males in girls’ spaces. The names change. The demand does not: submit to wokeness, or be named.
Gen Z, this is the closing message, and it is for you.
You were born from 1997 to 2012. In 2026 that makes the oldest of you 29 and the youngest 14. The oldest are already having children. Most of you will become parents in the 2030s and early 2040s, right as you become the largest parenting cohort in the country. You will become the largest parenting cohort in the country in the next 15 years. That is the real election.
That looks like homeschooling/parochial schooling when the district will not tell the truth about sex, race, or parental authority. (When Boomers ask me what they can do if their children attend woke schools, I suggest they offer to pay private school tuition rather than wait to pass it on via their estate.) It looks like moving to red states that still treat girls’ sports as girls’ sports and childhood as childhood. It looks like Christianity that forms a child’s conscience before a bureaucracy does—church, family, and a moral order that does not need a DEI office to explain right and wrong. I am not asking you to perform a culture-war identity. I am asking you not to outsource your sons and daughters to the same machine that called parents racists and Nazis.
A lot of you already know the machine is a lie. You watched girls lose races. You watched friends get socially transitioned and then regret it. You sat in classrooms where the rainbow flag and “safe space” sticker carried more moral weight than the American flag or the Constitution. You watched competent people get passed over so a bureaucracy could hit a demographic target. You watched adults call parents Nazis for speaking up. And you watched the same machine tape masks to your faces as if Governor Pritzker’s order was scripture. You watched teachers treat disagreement as harm and biological reality as optional. You do not have to raise your own kids in that environment.
Never forget, kids—that mandate was unlawful. We, the parents, sued, and I was one of the plaintiffs on behalf of my 3 kids. In Illinois, when we won the injunction against the unlawfulness, Sangamon County Judge Raylene Grischow wrote that statutory rights had been bypassed through executive orders and emergency rules, and that “this type of evil is exactly what the law was intended to constrain.” It was not the politicians who freed you. It was the parents who refused to be cancelled. Do not wait for the status quo to give you permission to protect your child.
“Be uncancellable.” That does not mean be cruel. It means refuse the struggle sessions. Demand ethical policy. Ask the question and make the comment in the open forum. Run for the board instead of waiting for it. Study the leaders who paved the American path for Liberty. Then, when you have children, do not default to the nearest government school because it is convenient. Build the home, the church, and the community that can actually raise them. Defend the girl who still wants a fair race and a sex-separated bathroom. Defend the coworker who refuses to lie.
Speech is not violence; it is free.
Sex is not assigned; it is born.
Merit is not hate; it is earned.
Those are not “political” slogans. They are the minimum conditions for a country that can still build things and tell the truth. They called me a racist for running. They called us parents Nazis for organizing. We are still here. The midterms were a loss, but the next twenty years of childhood are not settled.
If Gen Z becomes the largest cohort of parents who can actually protect their kids—through homeschooling/parochial schooling, through freer states, through faith that outlasts any election—then the woke virus loses the only host that matters.
To the kids who have watched enough insanity to not want to duplicate it: You didn’t start the fire. But you’re going to have to fight it. They cannot cancel a generation that will not flinch, and they cannot capture children whose parents will not surrender them.
Be uncancellable. Onward.
Shannon Adcock is the founder and president of Awake Illinois, a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to parental rights, educational transparency, and protecting children from ideological agendas in public schools. A Naperville resident, wife, and mother of three, her activism began in 2020 when she fought for in-person learning and against divisive programs like critical race theory and gender ideology. As one of the lead plaintiffs in a major 2021 lawsuit involving over 700 parents against Governor J.B. Pritzker, the Illinois State Board of Education, and numerous school districts challenging unconstitutional mask and quarantine mandates—which secured a key injunction—she has also been profiled and featured in national media outlets, including discussions on parental rights and school policy battles. Now a bold voice for Illinois families, she has testified before state boards, filed numerous federal civil rights complaints, submitted to the Congressional record, and earned awards including the Titanium Backbone Award from Illinois Family Institute and the Never Surrender award from Defending Education. Her motto is “Be Uncancellable.”
