Comment by jacobjjacob
5 days ago
“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”
Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.
But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.
Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices?
why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging?
why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?
The premise here is that the existence of trans people is inherently political, but in any case, Graham didn't define "woke" as "political", he defined it as "an aggressively performative focus on social justice". How does that describe sending beer cans to a social media influencer?
3 replies →
[flagged]