Modern day woke leftists are just oversocialized. They are so heavily invested in social status and governed by peer pressure they could never think for themselves and go against the grain, and the grain is set by a hostile media and academic elite backed by a lot of money. It is mob mentality on an epic scale. Everyone is afraid of the mob, and the closer to the mob you are personally, say a twenty something living in Portland, a member of the media, or a ladder climbing professional active on social media, the more likely you are to join the mob to avoid being a target of it. It really is the Salem witch trial mentality. A mass hysteria that has overcome huge segments of the population in the same way charges of witchcraft overtook Salem, only in this case it is being fueled deliberately by a group of people with an agenda.

BLM and antifa are primarily weapons of terror wielded by a hostile elite in order to keep the population from outwardly opposing their agenda and push the overton window on their brand of identity politics. It's a dubious strategy by a group of risk taking sociopaths from a culture that has always been about high risk and high reward behavior.