It’s Never What You Think
By Mitch Berg
Silly peasants. There’s no such thing as “Woke!”:
[Ipsos] latest poll confirms that no one really knows what “woke” means, particularly when respondents aren’t provided with any accurate definitions. “Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on ‘woke,’” USA Today’s write-up of its survey began, “but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.”
Or if it does exist, it’s an unalloyed good thing!
Hear that, Republicans? Everyone loves “woke”! Well, at least 56 percent of those surveyed endorse the word when they’re told it describes someone who is “informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” By contrast, just 39 percent of respondents express a negative view of the word insofar as it describes someone who is “overly politically correct” and is inclined to “police others’ words.” Having deemed the Right’s obsession with “wokeness” a quixotic endeavor, USA Today bellyflops into a solipsistic reflection on how the public’s perceptions “raise questions” about the Right’s self-defeating myopia.
Of course, this is an example of two institutions that should be distrusted and veriied – media:
This is a prime example of journalism that works backward from a conclusion in pursuit of evidence to support it.
and the polling industry:
A quick perusal of the polling on the issue exposes the flaw in USA Today/Ipsos’s methods.
When respondents are not primed with erroneous definitions and are instead asked only if they would vote for a self-described “woke” candidate, as CBS/YouGov did last October, they found that 58 percent of likely voters would be less likely to pull the lever for that candidate. That same month, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 64 percent of respondents, including a majority of Democrats, blame “the increase in crime” on “woke politicians” as opposed to “other factors.” That’s, at the very least, odd if most Americans don’t understand the word or believe it only describes a heightened social consciousness.
…that should be distrusted but verified, and then almost to a mathematical certainty distrusted some more.
For those who need a primer:
Wokeness in practice is not something so quaint as speech-policing and “political correctness.” It encapsulates an alternative theory of social organization that often enters into conflict with the Constitution. It prescribes not just otherworldly speech codes but programs of reeducation for those who decline to subscribe to them. It necessitates the redistribution of economic and social goods in the pursuit of “restorative justice” for wrongs committed by generations long passed. It redefines cosmic constants like the laws of mathematics, operating on the bigoted assumption that those laws are incomprehensible to those who were born into certain identities. “Woke” does not describe a persnickety busybody who cannot abide your verbal miscues. It describes a revolutionary.
But, like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that isnt, the “Republican War on Women” that never was, the “Threat to Abortion” that never existed in Minnesota, the “De Santis Book Ban” that isn’t and the “Blogger Registration” law that never will be, the new attempt to gaslight the right on the existence of “woke” (and critical race theory), the intended audience isn’t people who can reason or think critically.
It’s aimed at Democrat voters.
March 9th, 2023 at 11:05 am
oh good now we’ve got to put up with Emery cutting and pasting this “there is no such thing as wokecrap for the next 3 months
March 9th, 2023 at 11:21 am
Mitch, you forgot to mention non-existant Antifa.
March 9th, 2023 at 11:39 am
Ignore polling. Watch how politicians in close races ID themselves as woke.
March 9th, 2023 at 11:58 am
Might be good to learn to “name our enemies personally” instead of just calling them “woke”. I’m guessing that if we named the guys saying that the laws of mathematics are subject to interpretation, we’d get them the requisite mockery they so richly deserve. (among other examples) There is a very real danger of using general terms that describe a lot of people who don’t subscribe to the very specific offenses.
March 9th, 2023 at 12:59 pm
Bikebubba, try to find a democrat politician or pundit, or any public school teacher, who will publicly confirm that men cannot become pregnant.
You don’t need names, you can easily identify them as categories of people. They aren’t trying to hide it what they believe.
March 9th, 2023 at 1:01 pm
there is no such thing as woke
and its awesome!
you hater
March 9th, 2023 at 4:57 pm
Ladies and gentlemen, I present . . . Democrat Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, representing Texas’ 29th District!
God this is funny. Dumb as a stump Garcia, no preparation, no actual understanding of the issues involved. Love the looks Shellenberger and Taibbi give her.
https://twitter.com/TheFP/status/1633959894654107648?s=20
March 9th, 2023 at 6:24 pm
UMMP, is she the one that demanded Tabibi name his sources, opening them up to retaliation at Twitter?
March 10th, 2023 at 6:48 am
No, that was rep. Plaskett.
Interesting how fast Taibbi went from respected left wing journalist to right wing propagandist without changing his opinions.
Here is Taibbi considering a possible 2nd Trump presidency back in 2019:
Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid
America is the first country to ever elect a Mad King, and the way things are going, we may be dumb enough to do it twice
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-trump-2020-be-very-afraid-872299/
March 10th, 2023 at 10:07 am
It’s being used as a cudgel on people who don’t follow your line of thinking. Time to question its worth.
Sometimes a color is just a color, not evidence of white supremacy.
One wrong step in the minefield of language, one misplaced pronoun, one hint of insufficient fervor in ostentatious self-flagellation and one is presumed to be an ignorant racist troglodyte who deserves the loss of community, loss of reputation, and even loss of livelihood that too often follow.
This is what many of us are reacting against. At best, it is merely absurd; at worst, it undermines the possibility of deliberation about issues that really matter.
March 10th, 2023 at 3:35 pm
Wokeness is not separable from the Democrat Party. That is why so few (if any) Dem politicians are willing to state obvious truths. There are only two sexes that are set by nature’s god on conception, crime is not caused by overpolicing, the pathologies of the black community are not the result of white supremacy.
March 11th, 2023 at 11:43 am
LMAO…fucking rAT.
Whenever rAT plops down something he’s plagiarized, it stands out like a black mustache on a blond woman.