if Ron DeSantis is right about Florida being the place where ‘woke’ goes to die, his attempt to kill it at New College will fail because Florida is not Hungary. Weaponizing ‘woke’ is not succeeding.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis says things like, "We reject this woke ideology," and, "Florida is where woke goes to die," at least one important group of voters is left scratching their heads.
What's happening: Some Florida swing voters are confused about what DeSantis means when he uses the adjective "woke," according to two Axios Engagious/Schlesinger focus groups.
- "It's an extreme of some kind?" guessed Katie, 42, an unemployed registered Republican in Bradenton.
- "I'm sorry, I don't know what woke means," said Rosario, 37, a registered Democrat in St. Cloud who works two jobs and would vote for former President Trump in 2024.
Driving the news: Engagious/Schlesinger conducted two online focus groups on Tuesday with 13 Floridians who voted for Trump in 2016 then President Biden in 2020.
- Six are registered as Democrats, four as Republicans, and three as independents.
Of note: While a focus group is not a statistically significant sample like a poll, the responses show how some voters are thinking and talking about current events.
Quick take: "When Gov. DeSantis declares, 'Florida is where woke goes to die,' many of these swing voters have no clue what ideology he's trying to bury," said Rich Thau, president of Engagious, who moderated the focus groups.
www.axios.com/...
Similarly attacking drag queens as some proxy for anti-trans public policy only moves the GOP closer to another aspect of an anachronistic but no less hateful campaign strategy resembling the laws that are more than defaulting to Godwin’s Law. Two distinct laws passed in Nazi Germany in September 1935 are known collectively as the Nuremberg Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These laws embodied many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology.
Perhaps no other word of the moment is so under attack as “woke,” a word born as a simple yet powerful way of saying: “Be aware of and alert to how racism is systemic and pervasive and suffuses American life. Wake up from the slumber of ignorance and passive acceptance.”
But because of its petit power, this small word was a prime candidate for co-option, for being turned against the people who used it. The opponents of wokeness — whether they be conservatives who believe it injures the ideal of America as inherently good, or moderate Democrats worried that it handicaps their electoral prospects — want to kill it.
Republicans want to recast “wokeness” as progressive politics run amok, and many establishment Democrats shrink from the term because they either believe that Republicans have succeeded at the task, or, of even more concern, they agree with those Republicans.
Being awake to and aware of how our systems of power operate creates enemies across the political spectrum because wokeness indicts both Republicans and Democrats alike. Wokeness indicts the status quo.
And so, wokeness has been referred to in the most hyperbolic language imaginable, from ideology to religion to cult. It has been so derided and adulterated that young people who are what one would have called woke five years ago no longer even use the term.
www.nytimes.com/...
