US Politics, March 2023: "We want our own safe space, and we deserve it"

.@timkaine is as decent, honorable, selfless soul as you will ever meet. A man with the heart of a servant, who is "woke". @HillaryClinton

— Jennifer Granholm (@JenGranholm) July 23, 2016

nikki haley can't think of anything that is different between her and trump. tim scott is also unable, when asked, to think of what he would do differently than trump. desantis is having great success in exporting his policies for punishing everyone who isn't a straight christian to the rest of the red states, but he's an insufferable prick and doesn't do well on television so is probably doomed. trump is an unsufferable prick but he kind of owns that space, and this morning released a song called "justice for all" which combines himself reading the pledge of allegiance with jan 6 insurrectionists singing the national anthem. he's still the frontrunner.

trump wanted to get pence murdered, and pence can't even talk about it. he is the most pathetic person in this race, which is saying a lot. pompeo is just a giant piece of shit

"Socialism" has taken a back seat to "wokeness" as the bogeyman of the hour. They can't define it, because they don't want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMypXV1YJfw

Half empty hall for Nikki Haley's CPAC speech pic.twitter.com/LMVp9WQWDf

— Alan Fisher (@AlanFisher) March 3, 2023

^^As Rupar pointed out, Big Trump Energy in those empty seats.

Such pessimism. Half full!

most of her stans are out fighting wokeness, they can't be sitting watching speeches while there are wokesters out woking things up

what's the opposite of woke anyway? Asleeped?

woke up, sheeple.

Only a dozen people were there for Haley's CPAC speech but all of them went on to introduce their own anti-trans bill

I looove that Grace Jones track!

Not that this matters, but it's entertaining:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/11h9x4k/jon_stewart_just_completely_destroyed_republican/

Pull Up To The Trumper

Woking in the Rain?

Nobody Wokes in LA

her woke anthem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDhSlFhX-98

President Biden had one cancerous skin lesion removed from his chest on Feb. 16, his longtime doctor Kevin C. O’Connor said in a letter Friday. All cancerous tissue was successfully removed, and no further treatment is needed.

A biopsy confirmed that the small lesion was basal cell carcinoma, O’Connor said. The biopsy was performed on the same day as Biden’s annual physical.

Basal cell carcinoma, O’Connor explained, does not tend to spread or metastasize, as other more serious skin cancers like melanoma do.

Per O’Connor, the area of the biopsy has healed nicely and Biden, 80, will continue under dermatologic surveillance as part of his ongoing health care.

O’Connor noted at the time of Biden’s physical that he had several non-melanoma skin cancers removed before assuming the presidency.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/03/biden-skin-cancer/

So Bolsonaro spoke at CPAC today:

well well look who gets a rock star entrance at CPAC pic.twitter.com/3RMax3sosV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 4, 2023

Wait, what?

(And I realize there’s no shortage of “wait, what?” these days)

CPAC loves any leader who can instigate an insurrection after losing an election.

Why do they love bolsonaro, again? Because he opposes socialism and wanted to be a dictator? And he hates everyone who isn’t a straight Christian?

The WSJ cheered his victory when he won in 2018

i believe you answered your own question

He also wanted to rape the earth so

bolsonaro is strong! bolsonaro is brave and powerful! the people need a king!!

Trump/Bolsonaro '24

I know there’s a thread for it, but jfc the anti-trans stuff that’s moving through OK and AR right now is so fucked and enraging.

This also happened at CPAC:

“Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

These words were in a speech by a major right wing figure at a national conservative conference.

It’s a straight up call for genocide. That’s what this fight is about. They want us gone. pic.twitter.com/HHFyjbCejg

— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) March 4, 2023

The speaker is a Daily Wire Chud named Michael Knowles.

nazi shit getting applause and laughter from a bunch of fucking assholes

I wish just once one of these bozos would define exactly what they mean by "wokeness." I know the Florida AG's office had to do it court a while back and funny how it didn't actually sound that scary when said out loud.

They never will and they can’t, really. It has to keep this mystified separation because you can’t project all kindsa shit onto it

The Twitter responses to Wiener’s tweet are fucking sickening.

I should say that I also hate Scott Wiener, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

from December:

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ Communications Director said “woke” was a “slang term for activism…progressive activism” and a general belief in systemic injustices in the country.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

can we please reclaim woke and just be done with this

I was vaguely annoyed by a Chicago Tribune op-ed this week about a new line of Legos that has apparently triggered the right because it includes people with different skin tones and physical abilities.

An excerpt: "It’s a blind spot that lives at the heart of all the panic over woke-ism: the assumption that there’s one default way to be a human. That everything else is a deviation. An exception. An aberration. A statement. Virtue signaling. When of course there are endless ways to be, to live, to look, to love during our time on this Earth. Acknowledging and celebrating that isn’t woke. It’s awake."

And yes, sure, I agree with the general sentiment, but it implicitly accepts the right's coopted definition of "woke" as something to be avoided.

Woke is a dog whistle now, there’s no way it is coming back

It's not as if the word "woke" was ever indispensable. It was never much more than a bit of shorthand jargon among insiders. In a similar way critical race theory was only an insider term among academics before the right wing noise machine grabbed hold of it and made it a convenient whipping post.

i'm so fucking sick of hearing the word, it def feels like it's past the point of 'coming back'

i mean just not apologising like damn straight i’m woke af what are you

Post-woke

woke vs volk

can it be more ridiculous that the anti-wokers are among the most intentionally ignorant motherfuckers in our political world? if the culture abandons the word, well. otoh if aimless is right and the culture never really made and claimed the word, i guess nhnf.

conservatives get really hung up on words as magic spells that have immutable meanings that transcend time, culture, and language (like how they think of gender!) Basically they’re on the same spectrum as the sovereign citizens who think by uttering gibberish in court that sounds all-legal-like it will get them out of paying child support.

“Woke" feels like a rerun of "politically correct" , but with more bile and nastiness behind it; I remember conservatives (and some liberals) decrying “pc” but didn’t sense the same amount of rage behind it. It was more like handwringing or eye-rolling.

PC was code for "These hippie professors are trying to radicalize our kids"
Woke is code for the n word

tbf i think "woke" has broadened way beyond that, to become just a new shorthand for "liberals we fight in the culture war." its total vagueness in these right-wing statements and overwhelmed county-council meetings is a reflection of how it's come to cover every grievance the old guard have with every social or political change. it's therefore the perfect foil for conservatism, since the whole ethos is finding all forms of progressive change to be not merely discomforting signs of times changing, but evidence of a sinister plot by insufficiently American Americans to destroy the American Way Of Life. "society is in the gutter and these liberals are actively trying to take it there, with their abortions, their gay people, their pronouns, their political correctness, their hippie professors with stink lines. they want to take away your guns and cigarettes and Big Gulps and SUVs and lawn chemicals and racist monuments, they think America has racism in it, they welcome foreigners, they recycle, they disrespect our beautiful police and our beautiful Christmas".... etc. etc. etc.

PC was code for the n word too. No need to overthink it, woke absolutely is PC mark II, updated for the 2010s and '20s. PC lost whatever meaning and bite it ever had just thru relentless overuse — a fate I think woke is well on its way to as well. But they both always mean the same thing — Why Can't I Just Be a Hateful Bigot Any More?

Yeah, but PC wars was never really about taking rights away from people, or preventing them from being provided. It was mostly a fight over free speech and the like, at least as I remember it. So yeah, essentially the right (in theory) to say the n word. The woke war seems to be much more and much broader, about countering literally *anything* deemed liberal. Like, no one ever thought something like climate change legislation was a fight over political correctness, but it is considered by these coconut skulls as "woke."

nah, anti-PC went hand in hand with anti-environmentalism, they just didn't call it climate change yet

But were all liberal policies dismissed as political correctness? Not as I remember it.

PC just never made it that far, but that was always the end game

Biden tweeted about Transgender Day of Visibility and the replies are basically a huge group of Twitter-blue-subscribers-to-block all lined up for you

He probably would never self-identify as a MAGA Republican, but if his talking points are all pulled from the MAGA playbook, he's comfortable taking MAGA money and getting them to stump for him, there's really no meaningful difference imo. He's awful either way.

It’s a bummer how much of the Chicago media/candidates go on about crime, and yet I don’t hear that much about fixing the CTA—despite how hellish it’s become, and how many people it affects daily. I guess that’s a boring discussion in comparison to the "urban chaos" drumbeat.

a MAGA Republican from Naperville masquerading as a Chicago Democrat.

Palos Hills iirc, hence the popular nickname "Palos Paul"

Fucking Florida.

Police just handcuffed & arrested protesters including ⁦@NikkiFried⁩ & ⁦@LeaderBookFL⁩ pic.twitter.com/NCdqHJxmcx

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) April 4, 2023

We need a new monthly thread, who's got a title?

Let’s go with Alfred’s suggestion

US Politics, April 2023: Fucking Florida