The house style
Institutions that were supposed to be sound have gone off. We name the idea being flipped, show the source, and point to one lawful way to push back.
Woke Rot is a U.S.-first digest of institutional overreach — the rules, trainings, syllabi, and official definitions that quietly replace common sense. The typical reader is a parent, a worker, or a taxpayer who already sees the pattern and wants something they can forward without looking unserious, and something they can do that is not a pile-on.
We are not a wire service, a meme account, or a law firm. Headlines can be punchy. The facts have to sit inside a source we opened.
We do not invent stories, quotes, or URLs. Every edition headline links to the original report or official document. We prefer a primary record: a complaint, a board resolution, agency guidance, a syllabus, a records release, an official calendar. Allegations, investigations, pending cases, upcoming votes, and undercover methods are flagged as such.
The job is not to recap cable news. Regular items should have little or no major national pickup. Local papers, campus outlets, watchdogs, court filings, and official gazettes are the usual beat. Each story carries a short, honest “Buried” label after a good-faith check of major outlets. We will not dress a well-covered story as a scoop.
The audience is American. International items appear only when the conduct is completely flagrant — a government speech code, a formal prosecution for speech, or the equivalent — and then at most one or two per edition, labeled International.
We organize around the norm being flipped: parents’ rights into state secrecy, merit into equity, biology into identity, free speech into “harm.” Colleges are in scope, but they do not get to dominate an edition.
Each story includes one concrete, lawful Fight Back action, verified from a real source: a board or council meeting, a public-comment deadline, an official office or public body (official public pages only), a pending bill, a records request, or an organization already litigating or organizing. We never publish personal emails, phones, or home addresses of individuals. We never encourage harassment. If the only “action” on offer is yelling at a person, it does not run.
We critique policies, institutions, and officials. We do not generalize about people as a group, and we use no religious slurs. Coverage of official “Islamophobia” definitions is about speech codes and double standards, not about Muslims.
The 1–5 Rot Meter is an editorial opinion about institutional absurdity, not a factual rating of importance. It is labeled as such on the page.
If we get a fact wrong, we will correct it on the page and note the change. Send a correction through the tip line and mark it “Correction.” Include the URL of the story, the error, and the source for the fix. We cannot promise a personal reply until a form service is connected, but a substantiated error will be fixed.
Story tips, documents, and corrections: the tip line. This is a static site. The newsletter signup and the tip form are placeholders until they are connected to third-party services.