Why are Republicans so often so weird?
While now campaigning for president — or, more accurately, the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential race, which it’s unclear he’ll come close to actually winning — Ron DeSantis (the Florida governor) was recently asked to define what “woke” actually means. Republicans of DeSantis’s persuasion obsessively use “woke” to describe social approaches and government policies they don’t like. It often seems like they use the word a lot more than the people they accuse of following the precepts it represents.
Unsurprisingly, DeSantis said a lot in reply but barely even began to try and offer a definition. “Look, we know what woke is,” DeSantis claimed. “It’s a form of cultural Marxism. It’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics, and it’s basically a war on the truth. And as that has then infected institutions, it has corrupted a lot of institutions. So you’ve got to be willing to fight the woke. We’ve done it in Florida. And we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die.”
That’s almost all meaningless gibberish. The only part of his commentary that actually means anything is his claim about prioritizing “identity politics” ahead of merit and achievement, but he presented no evidence that there are any kind of widespread occurrences of this. “Woke is an existential threat to our society,” DeSantis later said in response to a question from reporter Phillip Wegmann. “It’s a attack on truth. It’s a form of cultural Marxism… You can’t have a vibrant, free society if every institution is dominated by woke ideology.” Okay, so being “woke” according to these people is about… lying? Does that mean Donald Trump is woke, considering the many, many documented lies that he has told? How about DeSantis himself, who has falsely represented the status of access to books in Florida, claiming at one point no titles had been banned?
It’s just a mess. Check out the videos below:
DeSantis also addressed this the other day. Here’s his answer then:pic.twitter.com/WKUbKzrxEH
— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) June 3, 2023
