this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Hate influencer Chaya Raichik – who goes by “Libs of TikTok” online – is trying to take her show on the road, and it doesn’t appear to be going well.

Raichik gave a speech yesterday at the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).

During her speech, she ranted about “pornographic” books in schools and moved on to her hatred of everything “woke.”

Some students started laughing.

“Um, do you have a question? Is something funny?” she asked, apparently not expecting people to find her over-the-top concerns funny.

“How do you define wokeness?” someone in the back asked. 

Raichik tried to respond: “Wokeness is the destruction of normalicy [sic] and… And… Um… Uh…” More students started laughing. 

“… of our lives,” she said, apparently thinking she was finishing a sentence.

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[–] Mostly_Gristle 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven't come up with a shared definition.

That's actually kind of the point. It's like how they use the words "communism" and "socialism." It's a word they've made wholly synonymous with "unquestionably bad," and it's defined by what it isn't rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, "I don't know... That sounds kinda woke." And everyone knows that anything "woke" is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.

Even when we're talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can't be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they're dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define "woke," they can't answer, "You know... N*gger stuff." That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn't be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.

Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don't like.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

it's defined by what it isn't rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it

Omg, your so right about that.

Cause then all you have to do is find something that you don’t believe that is obviously wrong. You can call that socialism, and then do guilty by association from there.