The ‘Death of Woke’ Has Ruined Cartman’s Life

In the Season 27 premiere of South Park, Eric Cartman declared that “woke is dead,” and he doesn’t think that he can live without it.

Last night’s South Park episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” is dominating entertainment headlines for how it satirized the realities of living in President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump’s America in 2025 while skewering its parent company Paramount for cozying up to America’s own Middle Eastern dictator. But for all the attention paid to South Park’s deepfaked version of Trump bumbling around the desert and exposing his tiny penis in the closing PSA, not enough chatter has addressed how Trump’s efforts to turn America into a fascist, far-right wasteland have literally made Eric Cartman politically correct. It’s enough to make Cartman lock himself in the garage with an electric car running.

Thanks to Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Cartman’s constant stream of racism, sexism, homophobia and general bigotry is no longer shocking or controversial – it’s the new norm as slurs that start with letters like “R” and “F” re-enter America’s collective lexicon like Jesus Christ coming back to South Park Elementary. Hell, thanks to Trump’s vindictive budget cuts, Cartman can’t even grieve the death of woke by listening to his “favorite show,” National Public Radio.

“Sermon on the ‘Mount” opens with Cartman in his morning routine as he instructs his treasured Alexa to tune the radio to his favorite station, only to hear static through the speaker. Cartman asks his mom about the issue, and she hits him with the devastating news that President Trump canceled NPR, thus ending Cartman’s limitless free access to hearing liberals whine about current events. Cartmen laments, “That was like the funniest shit ever.”

Cartman takes his complaints to his friends, raging that, in Trump’s second term, “woke shit is off limits” and “now everyone rips on the Jews, huh Kyle?” Already crushed that his unique brand of bigoted misanthropy has become the norm, Cartman hits rock bottom when P.C. Principal (who rebranded to Power Christian Principal following the results of the 2024 general election) calls an all-school assembly where he introduces the students to Jesus Christ, who will now become a daily presence at the public school thanks to Trump’s executive orders (and, hilariously, Paramount's presidential payoff).

“Woke is dead,” declares Cartman, who has become inconsolable upon the realization that his racism and anti-Semitism has been rendered unremarkable by the actions of President Trump. Cartman resolves to kill himself — and Butters — by turning on the engine to the Stotch family’s electric vehicle in their closed garage. 

Considering that, in just 2023, South Park rallied the anti-woke comedy crowd with the Paramount+ streaming special Joining the Panderverse, this dramatic shift in targets is bound to be unpopular with the show’s sizable right-wing popular if it continues throughout Season 27. However, Cartman’s assessment of the cultural climate is undoubtedly correct — when the executive branch of our government is systematically scrubbing the achievements of people of color from our history books and firing them en masse from government positions, it’s hard to pretend that punching down on marginalized people like Cartman loves to do is exactly boundary-pushing.

Unfortunately for Cartman, being an unrepentant neo-Nazi is the new norm in the American government — and electric vehicles don’t emit lethal fumes.