2 ms·

If it doesn't exist, why does anybody care if it gets banned? It would make zero difference.

eesmith 4y ago
You seem to confuse two things. First, "wokeness" exists, which this article points has a long history, with "stay woke" recorded in 1938, and MLK Jr's "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" as examples. Second is the "made-up menace", similar to how the FBI worked to "convince white Americans that King was an anti-American Marxist hellbent on destroying their beloved country". The article characterizes anti-woke as "a modern-day mixture of McCarthyism and white grievance". If either were banned, people would certainly care, because free speech.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  So it exists, and half the country wants it in their schools, and the other half doesn't want it. It should be very easy to keep everybody happy. Unless the real fight is about ideological access to other people's kids. Regarding free speech, I think most people don't care what people say in their free time.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    When you wrote "gets banned", what did you mean? You must certainly realize the term covers an extremely wide range, ranging from "peanuts are not allowed in the school because a student is highly allergic to them" to Comstock laws prohibiting the exchange of personal letters containing sexual content and the Communist Control Act of 1954 which outlawed the Communist Party of the United States (that's one of many anti-communist laws of the time). These latter bans certainly affects what people can communicate and do in their free time, but now you seem to not mean that sort of ban, so what do you mean? The article is pretty clear that it's not about "access to other people's kids", and gives examples of wokeness which are not about children nor the education system, so I don't know what you mean by that either. Using "think of the children" is part of the same well-established playbook that turned “wokeness” "into a pejorative that is synonymous with the demise of everything good and white about America" that the article is about.

You seem to confuse two things. First, "wokeness" exists, which this article points has a long history, with "stay woke" recorded in 1938, and MLK Jr's "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" as examples. Second is the "made-up menace", similar to how the FBI worked to "convince white Americans that King was an anti-American Marxist hellbent on destroying their beloved country". The article characterizes anti-woke as "a modern-day mixture of McCarthyism and white grievance". If either were banned, people would certainly care, because free speech.

Ambolia 4y ago
So it exists, and half the country wants it in their schools, and the other half doesn't want it. It should be very easy to keep everybody happy. Unless the real fight is about ideological access to other people's kids. Regarding free speech, I think most people don't care what people say in their free time.
- eesmith 4y ago
  When you wrote "gets banned", what did you mean? You must certainly realize the term covers an extremely wide range, ranging from "peanuts are not allowed in the school because a student is highly allergic to them" to Comstock laws prohibiting the exchange of personal letters containing sexual content and the Communist Control Act of 1954 which outlawed the Communist Party of the United States (that's one of many anti-communist laws of the time). These latter bans certainly affects what people can communicate and do in their free time, but now you seem to not mean that sort of ban, so what do you mean? The article is pretty clear that it's not about "access to other people's kids", and gives examples of wokeness which are not about children nor the education system, so I don't know what you mean by that either. Using "think of the children" is part of the same well-established playbook that turned “wokeness” "into a pejorative that is synonymous with the demise of everything good and white about America" that the article is about.