politics

Whenever I see some moronic term like “Stop Woke” it just translates in my mind to “Stop Education”.

Not so fun fact:

It is popularly known in Nigerian and Western media as “Boko Haram,” which means “Western education is forbidden” (the word boko is a holdover from the colonial English word for book).

Too many similarities between these guys and republicans these days.

Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

That's the fun part: stifling education is the racist bullshit.

They've been anti-education since desegregation. Back in the '60s the Religious Right, particularly Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and the people in that orbit, tried really hard to go through the courts and use their freedom of religion under the First Amendment to keep black people out of their church-based schools. Obviously they lost, but they have never forgotten how the mean ol' federal government defiled their perfect little angels by forcing them sit next to some filthy negro while they learn their multiplication tables or whatever. Ever since then they've made it their mission to destroy public education.

By the 1980s that Evangelical movement had become fully ingrained into the Republican party, and that drive to destroy public education came with it. It's what's behind the push for charter schools. It's what's behind the push for private school vouchers. It's what's behind Evangelicals astroturfing school board meetings, and sometimes taking over the school board itself. It's a big part of why public schools (inner city public schools in particular) have been chronically underfunded for longer than I've been alive. It was racism the whole time.

But yeah, whenever I hear a conservative use the word "woke," I've found you can pretty much always mentally transpose "woke" with "ni--er stuff" (or "fa--ot stuff," depending on the context) and whatever they're trying to say suddenly makes a lot more sense.

It definitely, directly benefits them to choke out education for American citizens. They do not want critical thought. That is bad for bottom lines.

It isn't just affecting education, unfortunately. There's a number of topics (e.g. human rights, equality, etc) that society has become more enlightened about and that they'd like to revert.

Attacks on "woke" are attacks on civil rights. It's a way to undermine anyone who might stand up for "others."

I used to hear this joke "the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers." Like, haha, lawyers suck. But it's really a playbook for fascism: get rid of the people who might defend the othrrs. Not funny at all.

Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

Could be a bit of both.

I know these guys are trying to morph “woke” into some negative term, usually with some racially charged undertones, but it will always be synonymous with “englightened” to me.

Because that's pretty much what it means, social enlightenment. They hate enlightenment.

They’ve been giving funding intended to go to public schools to charter schools for a while now. The intent is to make public schools so bad that parents will be forced to either pay for expensive (religious) private schools, or to send their kids to charter schools which aren’t openly religious, but allow for “some religion” when it’s reflective of the population of the school community itself.

It religiously indoctrinates, and segregates communities at the same time. It’s by design. They don’t want a class war if they can perpetuate culture wars. Religious people are less likely to question authority. Dumb people are less likely to question authority. Uninformed people that have never met a person from “X” background are more likely to perpetuate culture war nonsense.

Yes, they know that educated people don't respect them. Their power depends on ignorance, which includes discrimination.

Some of them probably also believe many of the horrible or obviously false things they say. If you're narcissistic enough, it's not exactly lying. Everything you say is wishful thinking, and you can't tell the difference between that and reality.

It’s literally what he did with Covid statistics. In order to make it look like Covid disappeared in Florida, he simply stopped reporting test results, and then stopped testing altogether.

What he's alleging is literally what the Trump administration did with things like the weather.

Don't like what the weather is doing? Just lie about it! If the weather scientists call you out on that, fire them!

We’ve been living in bizarro world for almost a decade...

Republicans have been in bizzaro land as long as I can remember, which is back to Regan in the 80s.

DeSantis does know an awful lot about suppressing statistics - https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2419

And it's an idiotic statement. The one thing that is not under-reported in our shit media are crimes.

Didn't one of these goons post a picture of themself with a bunch of trans porn tabs open?

The bottom line is that these DeSantis/Trumper types are extremely weird people who are unable to manage their own emotions. I don't know how the fuck they grew up but everything with them is about what everyone else is doing, never about what they are doing.

Let's be real, this isn't grounded in logic at all. Soros is just a useful bogeyman in order to rile up the voter base.

I think they'd annoy the fuck out of each other.

So fucking weird.