Florida Notes: The guv's 'anti-woke' obsession
Woke = Cultural Marxism says DeSantis
Wake up everybody no more sleepin in bed
No more backward thinkin time for thinkin ahead
The world won't get no better if we just let it be
The world won't get no better we gotta change it yeah, just you and me
— Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes
Here I am, back in South Florida, listening to Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes singing, Wake Up and waiting out the rain so I can go out and get some dinner. Well, at least the air is breathable and free of smoke from the Canadian wildfires.
The big news here, aside from Trump’s upcoming indictment on espionage charges and the Heat playing the Nuggets in the NBA finals, is that the state has the highest home insurance prices in the nation, employers are panicking over the mass exodus of migrant workers, and there’s been another stand-your-ground shooting of a black person in Ocala.
Oh yes, and a fight broke out in a Tampa movie at the opening of the Disney film, The Little Mermaid. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Everyone knows mermaids are white… Aren’t they?
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Governor Ron DeSantis is still obsessed with “woke.” He really believes his anti-woke campaign will get him elected in ‘24. His problem is that hardly anyone knows what woke means. No one, not even the MAGAs think it will put food on the table or pay the gas and medical bills.
He’s trying to rally the masses in a war against the woke, exclaiming that "you've got to be willing to fight the woke," adding that they have "done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die."
Even his former mentor, Donald Trump he’s nuts.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘woke, woke, woke,’” Trump says. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”
Ryan Newman, DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term refers to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’s communications director, said that “woke” was “a slang term for … progressive activism,” adding that the term also referred to a belief that there were systemic injustices in the United States. — Washington Post
OK. If that’s it, then I admit it. I’m woke.
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It seems the Republicans have moved so far to the right that the indicted fascist grifter, Trump now represents the party’s moderate wing. National Review even accuses him of being a lefty, in bed with that commie Cuomo.
Trump recently talked up the disgraced former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, by arguing that the Empire State’s response to the coronavirus was better than Florida’s. Cuomo expressed his appreciation. Now Trump is embracing the Left’s contention that conservatives are throwing around the term “woke” as a catchall insult without knowing what it means.
Yes, woke, woke, woke, a catchall insult. Anti-woke is the DeSantis campaign in a nutshell (no pun intended). It’s shorthand for anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-teacher, anti-public space, anti-science, and so on.
Wrong, retorts demagogue DeSantis,
“We know what ‘woke’ is. It’s a form of cultural Marxism.”
Ah yes, Cultural Marxism? But what is Cultural Marxism, you ask? I googled it and here’s what I found.
A conspiracy theory that posits that there is an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via a planned culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally liberal values. — Wikipedia
From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
"Cultural Marxism," described as a conspiratorial attempt to wreck American culture and morality, is the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right. Surprisingly, there are signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream.
Karl Marx has been dead for 130 years but his ideas still evoke fear in MAGAland and wherever neo-fascists congregate. And well they should. But imagine, a politician hoping to become the next president of the US, with nothing to offer the voters besides a campaign against cultural Marxism? You don’t have to imagine it. It’s come to pass.
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Marx, leery of the left phrase-mongers of his time to the point of actually denying being a Marxist, never of course, used the term cultural Marxism. But he did have plenty to say about culture. For one thing, he didn’t think culture should be the sole property of the wealthy.
He foresaw a day, a long way off perhaps, when people would be able to create a culture as free, productive human beings, free that is, from capitalist exploitation, poverty, racism, and control by the state.
If that is what DeSantis is worried about, we’re far from it. In fact, in DeSantis’ Florida, we have a culture that’s been weaponized to fight progressivism. It’s a culture of fear and compliance where teachers are afraid to teach, artists are afraid to create, and where laws banning books, African-American studies, saying “gay” or wearing clothes and hairstyles not like his own, prevail.
Not for long, I hope. Stay woke, my friends.
You and I, comrade, and all our friends, are the 'cultural Marxists.' It started when we stop up with all those Black students demanding African American studies programs, and we did so opposing the anti-cultural 'Marxists' who saw this as reactionary. It took us a while to catch up with the impact of the Stonewall rebellion against the closeting of homosexuals, but in the end, we did.
We also have some heroes in our past to look to for inspiration. In 1859-60, there a was a mass labor youth upsurge all across the North, the 'Wide Awakes', backing Lincoln in mass torchlit parades at night. After Lincoln's victory, when he called for volunteers to fight the slavocracy, they were first in line. So yes, being 'woke' means being wide awake to our realities. Reclaim it.
judee hauer <judeeh@hotmail.com>
To:
Mike Klonsky's Edu/Pol
Fri, Jun 9 at 12:09 PM
FEEDBACK PLEASE.....we pump up this USA and people are dying to get in here BUT WE DON"T HAVE places for the guys that are here...we have extreme poverty. Is it right to keep encouraging the illusion????? answers?