DeSantis was using “woke” extensively in recent speeches, Boebert was talking woke in committee. She had an oh so clever zinger: “when you go woke, you go broke”. I’m not sure if the orange idiot has used it much. Have any of them been able to give more than a stammering 5 second explanation of wtf woke is? They want to write it into law, whatever it is!
You can’t define succinctly something that is inherently elusive. It’s like being asked to define what “rude” is, it would be a hundred pages long.
They don’t want to define “woke,” that’s why. “Woke” is anything and everything that riles up their base, and that’s an awful lot.
When Boebert said the Woke/broke thing in committee the other day, it would have been the prefect opportunity to put her on the spot, but it wasn’t taken. After her being so pleased with herself, it would have been nice to have her humiliate herself once more.
Yes, until a few months ago, no one would have called a higher top tax rate “woke” but now I hear that as well from my MAGAt siblings.
Hell, my sister in law referred to a church run food pantry as “woke”. Literally said it was the first step toward communism!
A good question for Christian nationalist Greene would be: how was Jesus not woke? Seriously.
Because their audience knows what they mean. Rhetorical attacks about their imprecision aren’t changing anyone’s minds. It’s like right wingers asking people to define “woman.” The actual answer to how you define the term isn’t the point.
They want it to mean something it doesn’t, and by not defining it they can keep on using it incorrectly, and thus further trying to cement the meaning of it they want.
This is the way. They can use it any way they want, and you can’t call them on it, because it’s never been adequately defined. They, and all their supporters know that “woke” isn’t a real enemy, but it lets them pretend they’re fighting “The Evil Woke”, when they’re really fighting the things they really hate; you know, gays, women, leftists, racial minorities, and the like.
Why the GOP is obsessed with “woke” — but can’t define it | Salon.com
The inability to define “woke” is a feature, not a bug. “Woke” is very much meant to be a word that cannot be pinned to a definition. Its emptiness is what gives it so much power as a propaganda term. “Woke” is both everything and nothing. It can mean whatever you need it to mean, and you can deny that it means what it obviously means. The ephemerality of “woke” is what makes it so valuable. “Woke” morphs into being when a right-winger needs to feel outrage and evaporates into thin air should anyone try to ask a rational question about it.
If you have to ask, you are clearly not part of the “in” group. All of the “right” kind of people know what it means.
cue secret handshake
There’s a photo of white protestors on the steps of the Arkansas state capitol around 1957 railing against desegregation. One of the protestors has a sign that reads “Race Mixing is Communism.” There is a tendancy for people to make a connection between the ideas they don’t like to other ideas or ideology they also don’t like even when such a connection is tenuous at best. My friends who were heavily involved in the Occupy movement in 2011/2012, would often refer to ideas they didn’t like as 1% ideas. i.e. We had a discussion about what to do about a runaway goose population problem at a local park and when I suggested allowing hunters to take a few someone else told me, “That’s a one percenter solution!”
It didn’t matter that race mixing had nothing to do with communism, that hunting is hardly something relegated to the 1% exclusively, or that nobody can pin down what exactly woke means when they’re using it as a criticism. Quite frankly, I hear the right use the word woke more than I hear it from anyone else.
“Woke” will never have a definition because it’s not a descriptor, it’s an alarm call, and a call to action. It means “their tribe is taking power from our tribe.”
This is why every attempt to define “woke” devolves into an effort to conceal the fact that it’s about defining tribal boundaries and the type of power being taken. Anti-wokies know that their in-group language reflects poorly on them, but since they understand the out-group so poorly, they struggle to come up with acceptable code.
MAGA definition of woke: Anything I don’t like.
Communism, as the Soviets did it, included gender equality, racial integration of various Asian, tribal peoples, and atheism.
The last is probably what lead to the US putting “In God we trust” on everything, during the Cold War.
Whenever you hear “woke,” think “n----r” and it will all make sense.
“In God we trust, everyone else pays cash”
I really wish we could get that or of our currency"
“Woke” isn’t something you define, it’s a label you put on things. And from that perspective I think it’s pretty easy to discern the kinds of things that will get slapped with the “woke” label.
There is also the element of the right wing including (how inclusive! /s ) into the definition one of the latest dog whistles. Many on the right naively or on purpose, ignore that there are several racist elements who already define woke as a code to say out loud what they can not, it is a more “civilized” way to say to others (specially groups that they see as mostly made with white people that dare to help minorities) “stop being “N*****” lovers” or “Minority lovers”.