Comment by thephyber
6 days ago
> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush.
What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.
I e met many people in group 2 though. Many of them have legitimate political and economic power. You can’t just brush them off as insignificant.
Agree that group 1 is far larger but it doesn’t take many negative experience to sour the way someone feels about a political ideology.
Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.
As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.
There was a period of time on Musk's X where an internal filter would instaban anyone who wrote the letters "CIS" together.
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Dare say something anti-Trump on X and you'll see massive MAGA policing. As a specific example see the responses to this: https://x.com/Aaronsmith333/status/1876813647625810407
MAGA is a nationalist movement, so obviously it doesn't apply to the whole globe, but each country (in the West and elsewhere) have their own nationalist movements.
I'm from Denmark, and we were first-movers in Europe on "anti-wokeness" since our election in 2003 (before the term existed). Interestingly, as Europe has moved more to the right in recent years, the wave has been quietly receding a bit here.
Other countries outside of the North Atlantic West also have intense nationalist and "anti-woke" movements (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Milei, Putin, etc.) which do their own anti-woke policing, sometimes literally, through law.
In general, my feeling is that the main actual threat to free speech globally is nationalist "anti-woke" movements.