Category: Politics
The lights are flickering in Red America
Here’s the link to this article. You might also want to read this article titled, “Alabama’s attorney general says the state can prosecute those who help women travel for abortions.”
Alabama’s attorney general says the state can prosecute those who help women travel for abortions
by ADAM LEE
AUG 31, 2023
Overview:
Abortion bans, anti-vax ideology, and other right-wing culture-war issues are creating a mass exodus of doctors from red states. Conservative voters will end up paying with their lives for the policies they wanted.
Reading Time: 6 MINUTES
[Previous: Failed states]
It’s a bad time to be pregnant in Idaho:
Bonner General Health, the only hospital in Sandpoint, announced Friday that it will no longer provide obstetrical services to the city of more than 9,000 people, meaning patients will have to drive 46 miles for labor and delivery care.
… “The Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care,” the hospital’s news release said. “Consequences for Idaho physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines.”
… The release also said highly respected, talented physicians are leaving the state, and recruiting replacements will be “extraordinarily difficult.”“Idaho hospital to stop delivering babies. One reason? ‘Bills that criminalize physicians.’” Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Idaho Statesman, 17 March 2023.
The abortion bans springing up across red-state America force physicians into a cruel dilemma. If a pregnant person comes into the emergency room, hemorrhaging or suffering sepsis from a miscarriage or dying from preeclampsia—but the fetus still has a heartbeat—doctors could face criminal charges if they intervene. Their only chance is to hope that the fetus dies before it’s too late to save the mother.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. In Oklahoma, a woman with a molar pregnancy—a cancerous, nonviable fetus—sought medical attention, but was told the hospital couldn’t do anything to help her. Staff suggested she wait in the parking lot until she was about to die so that they could act. She gambled on traveling out-of-state instead, and got the care she needed. But it’s only a matter of time until we have an American Savita Halappanavar.
This is an impossible position for doctors and nurses. They either desecrate their professional ethics by standing by and watching someone die whom they could have saved, or else face criminal charges. Understandably, many of them are voting with their feet. They’re leaving these barbarous and backward places in favor of progressive states where they won’t be jailed for practicing medicine.
Sandpoint, Idaho is a case in point. It used to be a medical hub for north Idaho, Montana and Washington, with an ob-gyn ward that delivered hundreds of babies each year—until the fall of Roe and the enactment of abortion bans.
In March, Sandpoint’s obstetrics department completely shut down as doctors fled. Idaho women with high-risk pregnancies now have to travel much further for medical care, like St. Luke’s hospital in Boise. But that one may soon be closed too. It has only six doctors left, most of whom are near the end of their careers. Two younger, recent recruits have already left the state.
Anticipating the likely result, Idaho’s conservative legislature took action. They stopped collecting data on maternal mortality.
Red state brain drain
Red states are suffering brain drain, and not just in Idaho. Doctors are packing up and leaving states like Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and more.
Wyoming has one of the worst physician shortages in the country, with rural hospitals closing their maternity wards. Meanwhile, the state legislature is mulling an abortion ban that will make the problem worse. In South Carolina, more than one-third of counties have no prenatal care at all. In Missouri, rural hospitals are closing in droves.
Texas is an especially sharp example of the problem. Doctors are fleeing the state, worsening a shortage that was already at critical levels:
Almost every provider I spoke with for this story has thought about leaving their practice or leaving Texas in the wake of S.B. 8 and Dobbs. Several have already moved or stopped seeing patients here, at least in large part because of the abortion bans. “If I was ever touch a patient again, it won’t be in the state of Texas,” said Charles Brown, chair of the Texas district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), who stopped seeing patients last year after decades working as a maternal fetal medicine specialist.
…In 2022, 15 percent of the state’s 254 counties had no doctor, according to data from the state health department, and about two-thirds had no OB-GYN. Texas has one of the most significant physician shortages in the country, with a shortfall that is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next decade, according to the state’s projections. The shortage of registered nurses, around 30,000, is expected to nearly double over the same period.
In addition to abortion bans, right-wing persecution of transgender people is worsening the problem. Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin had a world-renowned adolescent health clinic, which treated conditions from eating disorders to menstrual and hormonal problems.
But in May, Texas opened an investigation into the clinic for providing gender-affirming care to trans teenagers. In response, all its doctors quit. The clinic was effectively shuttered, and kids who had been relying on it were left without care.
In another high-profile case, Dr. Jake Kleinmahon, a nationally recognized expert in pediatric transplant surgery, announced in August he was leaving his home state of Louisiana for New York. Dr. Kleinmahon is gay, and he decided that the state’s hostility toward LGBTQ people and families was intolerable:
“Tom and I have discussed at length the benefits of continuing to live in the South, as well as the toll that it takes on our family. Because of this, we are leaving Louisiana. Our children come first. We cannot continue to raise them in this environment,” Kleinmahon wrote.
“Physicians are human beings too”
These departing doctors won’t be easy for red states to replace, if it’s possible at all. A survey of third- and fourth-year medical students—not just OB/GYNs, but other specialties as well—found that more than three-quarters said that abortion restrictions would affect where they choose to live and practice. Almost 60% said they wouldn’t apply to a state that has them.
The decrease for OB-GYN residency applications, 5.2%, was seen in all states, regardless of abortion laws. That percentage dropped by almost double—to a 10.5% decrease—in applications in states with near-total abortion bans.
If the surveys bear out, there could be a serious shortage of OB-GYNs in states with the tightest abortion restrictions. These states already tend to have higher maternal and infant mortality rates.
Another study gives similar numbers:
Our recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine begins to answer this question. In a survey of more than 2,000 current and future physicians on social media, we found that most (82.3%) would prefer to work or train in states with preserved abortion access. In fact, more than three-quarters (76.4%) of respondents would not even apply to states with legal consequences for providing abortion care. The same holds true for states with early or complete bans on abortion or Plan B. In other words, many qualified candidates would no longer even consider working or training in more than half of U.S. states.
…The reasons for physicians’ practice location preferences include, but are not limited to, patient care. While 77.8% of respondents report that their preferences are influenced by patient access to abortion care, others also prioritize preserved access for themselves or their partner (56.1%) or other family members (42.5%). This should not surprise us: physicians are human beings, too, with healthcare needs and personal lives that are not wholly defined by their career choices.“How Overturning Roe v. Wade Changed Match Day 2023.” Sarah McNeilly, Morgan S. Levy, Simone A. Bernstein, MD, Jessi A. Gold, MD, MS, and Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP. MedPage Today, 20 March 2023.
At the very least, red states will have to pay more to attract and keep medical practitioners. That means taxes and insurance premiums will skyrocket in these states—for everyone. Conservative voters are going to be hit squarely in the pocketbooks by these spiteful, regressive bans they wanted. It’s also likely that wait times will increase and quality of care will decrease, as these states may be forced to take practitioners who can’t get jobs anywhere else.
Heaping more weight on the pile
The U.S. was already facing a shortage of physicians. However, entrenched conservative hostility to science and medicine is making the problem worse.
This began long before the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For years, right-wing refusal to accept Medicaid expansion has been forcing dozens of rural, red-state hospitals to close. Even before abortion bans, large swaths of rural America were maternity care deserts. The South already had the worst maternal mortality and child welfare rates in the country.
Then COVID-19 came along. As the pandemic raged, Republican politicians nurtured a hydra of conspiracy theories. They displayed a bitter resistance to masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and every other policy created by people who were trying to save lives. They loudly proclaimed that “freedom” sanctified their right to get sick, infect their neighbors, and die slow, agonizing deaths. They accused doctors and hospitals of murdering their loved ones.
They paid an awful price for their obstinacy. During the pandemic, conservative voters died at disproportionate rates compared to pro-science Democrats. COVID deaths dragged life expectancy in Missouri down to a four-decade low. So many people died in Alabama that the total population shrank for the first time on record.
Their partisan rejection of science didn’t end with the pandemic, either. It’s spread to become a mistrust of all vaccines. As a result, long-vanquished diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio are making a comeback.
The people who live in red states are confronting a dire scenario of their own creation.
Republican voters are demanding policies that directly harm themselves and their loved ones. In the name of lower taxes, they forced their own hospitals to close. In the name of freedom, they refused vaccines that would have saved their lives during a pandemic. Now, in the name of banning abortion, they’re heaping even more weight on this pile. They’ve passed laws which ensure that their wives, their daughters, and they themselves won’t have medical care in a crisis. Their culture-war victories are purchased at the cost of their own lives.
The people who live in red states—especially white conservatives who live in far-flung, poverty-stricken rural areas—are confronting a dire scenario of their own creation. In the very near future, they’ll have to travel hundreds of miles for routine care, if they can get it at all. The reddest, most impoverished areas will be reduced to medieval conditions. They’ll regularly suffer from outbreaks of disease, dying from conditions that modern medicine could have cured.
The cartoonish corruption of the Supreme Court
Here’s the link to this article.
by ADAM LEE
AUG 28, 2023
Overview:
The archconservative justices of the Supreme Court have been enjoying a steady stream of gifts and luxury travel from right-wing billionaire friends. What checks and balances are there for a corrupt judiciary?
Reading Time: 6 MINUTES
Let’s stipulate one thing to start: I don’t doubt that some people call themselves conservative because they believe in small government, low taxes and individual freedom.
However, even granting this, it’s hard to argue that this is the animating idea of the American conservative movement as it exists today. Based on the policies they support, it’s plain to see that its organizing principle is very different. Namely, conservatism appears most concerned with protecting the privileged class—wealthy, white, male Christians for the most part—and ensuring they can do whatever they want. Meanwhile, they want to subject everyone else to increasingly harsh, oppressive and arbitrary laws.
Donald Trump’s shameless attempts to exploit the presidency for his own profit—about which Republicans raised not a peep of protest—are the most glaring example. However, those efforts were unusual only in that they were so brazen. He didn’t pioneer the tactic. He only engaged in it after lesser lights of conservatism had been getting away with it for years.
With that in mind, let’s talk about Clarence Thomas.
Me and my billionaire friends
Thomas has been on the Supreme Court since 1991. He’s one of its most conservative justices, voting against abortion, against gay rights, against gun control, against church-state separation.
Thanks to reporting by ProPublica, we also know that he’s been living large for years on a steady stream of gifts from conservative billionaires. The plutocrats who’ve lavished their wealth on him include Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate mogul; Paul Novelly, an oil baron; David Sokol, a private equity manager; and Wayne Huizenga, a CEO and investor.
In fact, “gifts” is a massive understatement. That word implies a small wrapped package, like something that would fit under a Christmas tree. The gifts that Clarence Thomas has been receiving are of an entirely different order. They’re entrance tickets into a rarefied millionaire lifestyle that the average American can only dream of.
They include flights on private jets and sailing trips on superyachts; VIP passes and skybox seats to sporting events; stays at ultra-luxury hotels, parties at waterfront mansions, and trips to exclusive resorts for the ultrarich. Crow bought several real-estate properties from Thomas and paid the tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, whom he was raising as a son, to attend private school. He’s even bankrolled Thomas’ insurrectionist wife, Ginni, and her far-right lobbying group Liberty Central (whose mere existence poses its own massive conflicts of interest).
Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.“Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel.” Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica, 10 August 2023.
Thomas has mentioned none of this in his yearly financial disclosures. But don’t worry, his billionaire friends swear that they’ve never discussed business on any of their little trips:
In a statement to ProPublica, Sokol said he’s been close friends with the Thomases for 21 years and acknowledged traveling with and occasionally hosting them. He defended the justice as upright and ethical. “We have never once discussed any pending court matter,” Sokol said. “Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports, and family matters.”
Except:
Last October, in New Orleans, Sokol made a direct reference to a pending Supreme Court case while addressing a group of former Horatio Alger scholarship recipients. (Thomas was not in attendance.)
The speech veered into territory that made many of those in attendance uncomfortable and left others appalled, emails and others messages show. Sokol, who has written extensively about American exceptionalism and the virtues of free enterprise, minimized slavery and systemic racism, some felt. He then criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing Biden had overstepped the government’s authority, according to a recording of the speech obtained by ProPublica.
“It’s going to get overturned by the Supreme Court,” Sokol predicted, echoing a common legal commentary.
He was right. This summer, the court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Thomas voted in the majority.
This poses the obvious question: Was Sokol only guessing at what the court was going to rule? Or did he have insider knowledge from chatting with his buddy?
It’s not just Thomas going for a dip in the waters of corruption, either. Samuel Alito, another of the court’s archconservatives, went on an extravagant Alaska fishing trip with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. Singer flew him there on a private jet costing $100,000 each way and paid for his stay at a $1,000-a-night luxury lodge.
It was a profitable investment:
In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.“Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court.” Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski. ProPublica, 20 June 2023.
Like Thomas, Alito didn’t disclose this trip until it was uncovered by reporters. He claimed that “personal hospitality” is exempt from disclosure requirements. This is a willfully dishonest misreading of the law.
An awareness of impropriety
The legal system has a de minimis rule, which states that some acts are too insignificant for the law to concern itself with. If I invite my friend over for dinner at my house and spend $30 on some hamburgers to grill and a six-pack of beer, that would arguably fall under the de minimis exemption.
However, if I instead invite my friend to a catered party at my multimillion-dollar vacation estate, pick him up on a private plane, and hire a celebrity chef to cook for us both, that’s not de minimis. Any reasonable person can see that there’s a vast and significant difference.
The fact that the justices didn’t report these trips suggests an awareness of impropriety. They knew it would give critics grounds to question their impartiality.
The fact that the justices didn’t report these trips suggests an awareness of impropriety.
There doesn’t even have to be an explicit quid pro quo. Any reasonable person can understand that if a Supreme Court justice is personal friends with a billionaire who showers him with gifts, favors and luxury vacations—how likely is it that said justice will vote against his friend’s desires? There can be an implicit, yet still completely obvious, understanding that if they stopped ruling the way their benefactors wanted, the stream of gifts would dry up.
While I don’t think judges should have to take a vow of poverty or live in seclusion like monks, it’s common sense that they should step back from any case which they have a personal connection to. That rule applies if a case before the court involves one of your friends. It also applies if the case involves the conservative think tank your friend has donated tens of millions of dollars to, or the Fortune 500 company whose board of directors your friend sits on, or the dark-money lobbying group your friend underwrites.
In short, if you befriend ultrarich people who have their fingers in many different pies, you should have to accept there’s a much wider spectrum of cases you have to disqualify yourself from. But the conservatives want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to enjoy the lavish “hospitality” of their wealthy friends, but they also want to keep ruling on cases that concern them. It’s bribery and corruption in the purest sense of the word.
Checks and balances
Much like Donald Trump, these conservative justices are acting as if the law is beneath them. They’re treating their office not as a position of public trust, but as a sinecure they’re entitled to exploit for their own benefit and to do favors for their friends. This would be bad enough in any political office, but it’s especially shocking and revolting with judges appointed to life terms who never have to face the corrective will of the voters.
The simplest Constitutional cure for this rampant corruption is impeachment. Unfortunately, the prospects of that are dim. It takes a two-thirds majority of the Senate to remove a judge from office. In our polarized era, it’s clear that Republican senators value power above all.
Unlike in the days of Nixon, there will never be enough of them who’ll vote to remove a justice of their own party. As long as the Supreme Court’s conservatives keep voting the way they want, they’ll turn a blind eye to corruption or malfeasance, just as they’ve done with Donald Trump.
However, there are other reforms that can be made with a simple majority. For one, Congress could add new justices to the court to counteract the influence of the bad ones.
Or it could impose a mandatory retirement age. That’s a good idea in any case, as lifetime appointments to any office make a mockery of democracy. The judiciary needs regular turnover to keep up with the changing norms of society’s moral consensus. And, of course, it offers a useful test: will those GOP megadonors keep pouring their largesse on their “friends” when they no longer have anything to gain by it?
Lawrence: Trump co-defendant Eastman lied on television about GA indictment
MUST-SEE: Jamie Raskin on Trump’s DISQUALIFICATION from running in 2024
Ken Burns on why the Republican Party completely changed
STEVE SCHMIDT: ” It was an absolute honor to talk to Ken Burns, famed documentarian and national treasure, to talk about the importance of telling America’s story. In this brief clip, we discuss what changed in the Republican party in the last 10-15 years and how we can fix it.”
What a joke
Here’s the link to this article.
AUG 25, 2023
It is hard to sort through the surreality and absurdity of the FOX-hosted MAGA/GOP debate for the “also rans” that linger 40 points behind front runner Donald Trump, who faces 91 felony charges across four different jurisdictions, thus far. Absurdities piled up on top of one another, while hypocrisy, grandiosity, delusion and performative posturing could have been confused by a casual observer as being the necessary qualifications to run for president as a Republican.
Sixty-two years ago, a 43-year-old man rose and swore the 35-word oath that made him the 35th president of the United States. He was a decorated naval officer and combat veteran, who had served as a US senator for eight years and a congressman for six. He was thoughtful, observant, introspective and skeptical. His inaugural address ranks among the greatest in American history, and included these prescient words that I couldn’t stop thinking about last night as a 38-year-old demagogue and fame-seeking millennial took control of the debate from a feckless lineup of collaborators, appeasers, and FOX propagandists, with a fusillade of weapons- grade nuttery, rice paper-thin ignorance, and mind-bending naïveté wrapped together by ad hominem character attacks.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge–and more.
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do–for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom–and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
They most certainly did. Deep inside.
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There were some astonishing and illuminating moments from the FOX-fest, such as when Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis looked left and right before deciding whether to put their hands up and pledge to support Trump for president whether he is convicted, imprisoned, or anything else — no matter what, forever and ever.
Both men came into the debate filled with the conviction that shouting and inconsistencies are the key to projecting strength to an audience of extremists. Clearly when it comes to thinking on his feet and mirroring others, DeSantis was stuck in the pudding compared to Pence, who had much more experience. Let’s watch him do the same thing with water during a White House meeting with Trump before the former president and current criminal defendant tried to hang him:
‘Tis the season for revisionist history, and Mike Pence has made clear that Mike Pence is a hero for telling the man who incited an insurrection that killed and maimed, that he couldn’t help him overturn the election. He tried and thought about it, but when he called Dan Quayle, he told Pence that he was nuts and quite the hero. Watching Mike Pence perform his squinty-eyed, pious Reagan imitation right down to his canned and cheesy line that he is a “Christian, conservative and a Republican — in that order” has always been aneurysm-inducing for people with common sense and character. Mike Pence is a former cigarette spokesperson and lobbyist, who used donor money to live off during his first losing congressional race. He is a fraud, an extremist, and profoundly full of shit. After everything, when the question came about whether he’ll be behind the man who burned down what he said matters most, he made clear what he values — and it isn’t America. I guess there has always been a reason for Mike Pence why American wasn’t on his list. Mike Pence was Donald Trump’s partner and accomplice in all things — except one at the end. Remember though, but for Pence, we never would have gotten there.
Nikki Haley is the exact same person. There were moments in the debate where she appeared honest, cogent, strong, competent and principled. Of course none of those things are true, as has been ably demonstrated over the last seven years. She proved it when her hand shot up during the Trump forever auction. No matter what, she will be with Trump, whom she spent the debate excoriating by proxy through her castigations of Ramaswamy as an unprepared gadly for aping Trump’s positions 100% as his “mini me.” It makes no sense.
The abortion section of the debate was deeply chilling, and should terrify American women who don’t want their Republican member of Congress joining them in their bedroom, MD’s or pastor’s office. Though Mike Pence’s political career is at an end “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not. Can someone call casting please? What a commander he’d make. Chilling though he was, and as extreme as everyone else was, the DeSantis comments were memorable, right? I’m not the only person in America who heard him talk about a friend who survived multiple abortions, and was born in a pan, right? Please tell me I’m not alone in knowing that’s made up. The reason why I’m asking is because it’s important, given there is no such thing as up-to-the-moment of birth elective abortions that Republicans keep talking about. It isn’t real, and it’s never challenged. The failure of the Democratic Party to wrestle this issue into reality is appalling. Nevertheless, Nikki Haley was correct with regards to her worry about the political backlash that is coming to the nuttiness. There will likely be a women’s tsunami at the polls, unless America’s women are ready to sign up for transportation backwards in time about 60 years. I suspect it’s an offer they will enthusiastically refuse.
Lastly, there was the rushed and nervous discussion around the Trump coup that was handled by FOX and the candidates, except Christie and Hutchison, as a live incendiary device on a timer. There are no words to describe the trivialization of the greatest act of treachery and political misconduct in American history by the very same news anchor — Bret Baier— who kicked off the madness with his worries about delivering the news that the orange führer had lost the election to his manipulated, incited and radicalized audience.
What a small, petty affair last night was.
Oh, and Asa Hutchison appears to be a normal, responsible, serious person. He’s clearly in the wrong party to have a chance.
Yesterday, I said the “debate would be a travesty and a farce.” Looking back, I was way too optimistic. What a joke.
Steve Schmidt reacts to the 2024 Republican Presidential Debate on Fox News | The Warning
What is ‘woke’? It’s my trigger word
Here’s the link to this article.
by AUG 19, 2023
Overview:
“Woke” is either the new “libtard” or it means nothing. Either way, it triggers me…
Reading Time: 7 MINUTES
Woke is the mot du jour. It’s everywhere. It’s what Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, uses incessantly. It’s what presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis platforms against with his “anti-woke” campaign agenda. It’s what my father-in-law uses when he’s angry with, in his own mind, some new nonsense—“Oh what’s that word…yes, that’s it, bloody ‘woke’!” It’s what the Daily Mail rails against. It’s what the BBC supposedly is. Or Disney. Or Goodyear.
There is real confusion about what this now-surprisingly-common word actually means. So much so, indeed, that the conservative author Bethany Mandel recently had a car crash of an interview where she froze, completely unable to define what “woke” means. This is somewhat surprising given that she is an author of a book against “wokeism” (Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation) in which she attacks “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child.”
It seems commonplace that people on the right accuse the left of “wokeism” that underwrites a “cancel culture” instituted by the left. The reality is somewhat different, as I argued against evangelical Christian and 2016 presidential candidate David French on Premier Christian Radio.
Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said in 2021, “What you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions, and I view the wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism. They really want to tear at the fabric of our society.”
I am probably the them to his us, the sort of person who wonders why “social justice” has become something bad to aspire to.
So what does “woke” actually mean?
In this general context, not what it originally did.
In its earliest iteration, woke was part of the phrase “stay woke”, being a phrase used within Black communities referring to being awake and “alert to the deceptions of other people.” It was “a basic survival tactic.” The phrase appeared in a 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by blues musician Huddie Ledbetter (known as Lead Belly)—a reaction to nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women. Lead Belly said of it, “I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
At the same time, “stay woke” also literally meant to stay awake, in Black vernacular. in 2008, R&B artist Erykah Badu released a politically themed album with the song “Master Teacher” that included the phrase being used in several different contextual meanings, bringing the phrase back to the fore.
Fast forward to 2014, when Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and the phrase came back to life. Needs must.
The context of the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement saw the phrase, now shortened to “woke”, being associated with anything to do with racial equality. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump to it representing anything and everything liberal in the world.
Because racial equality is the purview only of the left?
A Black person on a BBC show where you might not expect to see them? Woke. (Think the new Little Mermaid film or the recent Lord of the Rings series.) Silicon Valley Bank collapsing? Woke. Yale physician advocating sensible Covid policies? Woke (a “mind virus attempting to destroy civilization,” according to Elon Musk). It’s rather dizzying, keeping an eye on the myriad uses of the term.
In fact, here linked are more than 200 things conservative TV channel Fox News has labeled as woke. A few examples might help to show how woke has become the bogeyman of the right. And it’s a little embarrassing now.
- Artificial intelligence: Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk declared that artificial intelligence will “become a woke super-weapon,” specifying that OpenAI’s ChatGPT will “make the left’s takeover of the West more efficient.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 2/21/23]
- Federal Reserve: Fox Business guest anchor David Asman said, “There’s a lot of pressure being put on banks by the already woke people in the Federal Reserve and other banking regulatory institutions not to give out loans to oil and gas companies.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 3/31/22] And Fox Business host Charles Payne criticized the “woke Fed” for failing to raise interest rates to curb inflation. [Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto, 1/14/22]
- Economic policy: Fox Business host Larry Kudlow called the Biden administration’s economic policies, including the Child Tax Credit, “woke economics.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 7/15/21]
- Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) argued that since “the airline industry is so subsidized … they will always, you know, follow the woke method because they have no fear of going broke.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 1/11/22]
- Xbox: Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt complained that Xbox’s new power-saving feature proved the company was “going woke … because of climate change.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/24/23]
- Covid: Former Fox contributor Lara Trump praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for taking “a common sense approach to COVID” instead of “caving to the woke politics and saying, like, shut everything down.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 4/12/21]
- Homosexuality: Fox host Kayleigh McEnany said Disney’s Toy Story spinoff Lightyear failed to impress at the box office because it was “a bit too woke.” She specifically mentioned its same-sex kiss scene, which “left some conservatives to blame what they call the movie’s woke agenda.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 6/21/22]
- The military: Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway claimed that “woke generals” are “destroying” the military and represent an “existential threat to the country.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 6/22/22]
So on and so forth. It’s a long list. And when you look at every subject included in that list, you quickly realize that “woke” is a very large umbrella term. Gathered under the protection of this term is every single liberal. And every single centrist. And every single person who happens to hold an opinion that someone angrily hopping about on the far right doesn’t agree with.
When you use a term so much, in so many contexts, to attack so many ideas and so many people, it loses any coherent meaning or utility. In economics, this is the Law of Diminishing Returns. The first pint of water in the desert is very useful and rather refreshing. The 31st? Somewhat less so. We are now at a point that the term “woke” is empty, vacuous. It is the new “libtard”. If that’s where we are at, count me out.
It’s a very lazy term.
And the label now triggers me. If anyone mentions it, I take an instant dislike to their politics, to their morality. Because it says more about them than it does about me or their intended target. I can very often successfully sum up someone’s political positioning with their single use of that term in the same way that I can if they use the pejorative “libtard”. It carries about the same degree of nuance.
If you have issues with the use of pronouns and gender identity (and let’s face it, it’s something of a complex philosophical battlefield), then let’s have a reasonable debate. The same goes for climate change. And pandemic responses. And equality—racial, sexual, or otherwise. And…and…
However, if you are going to add into your debating rhetoric the use of the word “woke”, then you have lost me because not only is it completely simplistic, but it is a pejorative: It is used as a term to insult the opposition.
If I was to call every position or person I disagree with “fascist” or “Nazi” then these terms would lose their strength and utility and I would rightfully not be taken seriously. For “woke” I would prefer the term to be replaced with “progressive” in many of the cases because the intention of the target people or ideas is to make the world progressively better. The use of the word “woke” does a real disservice to the original meaning. When used as a pejorative like this, it becomes crass.
I am a socially liberal, economically centrist philosopher and politically motivated person. In the political psychology underwritten by the work of psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt (and his moral foundations theory), there are traits that are more associated with liberals than conservatives and vice versa. For example, liberals tend to be more inclined to an openness to new experiences, and fairness, whereas conservatives (the clue is in the name) tend towards conserving the status quo, being driven more by tradition.
We can see how some shifts in modern society might irk conservatives and motivate liberals. Some of these ideas are consistently seen as the beating heart of “wokeism”—perhaps gender identity, critical race theory and suchlike. (And so often, they are completely blown out of proportion.) Unfortunately, much of the problem comes when every other idea that (conservative) critics don’t agree with also get incorporated into the label.
We must remember that it is often ill-advised to listen to those with the loudest voices. The UK is following America’s lead when it comes to the right shouting about culture wars issues. All you need to know is that when politicians and pundits shout about the war on Christmas, or transgender restrooms, or political correctness gone mad, or the woke BBC, then they really have nothing substantial to talk about. Culture wars discussions belie a fundamental lack of policy.
We have seen this in successive US elections and it is starting to creep into UK campaigning. One side is serious about governing, and the other side has nothing in the locker but a woke checklist.
Do not be fooled.
The bandwidth of political discourse is being strangled with culture wars whinges about woke, and it helps nobody. We have existential crises facing us the likes and scale of which humanity has never faced: climate change and ravaging wildfires, the reignition of the Cold War into a very hot one, population, pandemics, wealth inequality, healthcare, and education. The list is long and worrying.
But when the right distract you with the woes of woke, they are deceiving you. They care little about these other topics, let alone have any actual workable policies on the matters.
There’s an awful lot of work to do without being misdirected by a shoddy magician’s sleight of hand.
It’s probably a tad inappropriate here, but the words of British comedian Kathy Burke (unlikely to be labeled “liberal elite”) are apropos: “I love being ‘woke’. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.”
If I was to be less abrasive and confrontational, I would simply say, “I’m woke. And?” Or, better still, “I’m nuanced. Challenge me on substance rather than throwing about lazy, childish labels.”
The progress towards a better future will be fraught with bumps in the road. We won’t always get things right, but shouting “woke” at anything and everything will end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Simply put, if someone brings up wokeism at the beginning of a political discussion, then they have their priorities firmly in the wrong place.
Richard L. Fricks 