War on wokeness: the year the right rallied around a made-up menace
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> It’s a neat trick, really. But it’s nothing new.
Is how it leads into a fascinating history of this kind of thing.
https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...
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.
Regarding free speech, I think most people don't care what people say in their free time.
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.
“Woke” means using minorities and their very real struggles as pawns in a political debate, a corporate marketing campaign, a movie release, etc.
Woke is the corporatization and exploitation of people based on their gender, race, sexuality, etc.
A lot of people see through the scam and that’s why there’s pushback.
The idea of a common enemy you can destroy (or regulate) into submission is simply delusional facade on so many levels.
People speaking out against this have been branded as bigots and right-wing fascists, regardless of their other political views or motives. Most are actually left-wing women with genuine concerns about safety and dignity.
So I take this article with a pinch of salt. It's using the same rhetorical tactic, to demonise any opposition to a controversial social and political movement.