'Woke' - mere right-wing spin?
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 12:49 pm
One of the new words to enter the English dictionary in recent years is the term ‘woke’. It appears to be used primarily by right-wing sources as a device to smear or ridicule progressives. The story in the link provides a good example. It laments the cancellation of a ‘hurrah Britain’ event at an Oxford college – a St Georges Day dinner – and its replacement by – shock horror! – a Muslim event!
What’s laughable is that some historic sources consider that St George was actually a Muslim figure. Others place him as a warrior, and hero, in the Christian crusades against Islam. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to work out which of the two ‘truths’ the writer of the story would prefer.
GB News is an outlet I’m not familiar with, but a quick look at its content suggests it’s very much in the mould of the reactionary Daily Mail. The stylised union flag logo rather gives that away in advance of any reading. The writer of the story, in true Daily Mail fashion uses half-baked facts (cloned from another right-wing source, the Daily Telegraph), to force through the story (university sources dispute the author’s claim that the dinner was an annual event in the first place), but really the whole story is a non-event to everyone either not directly participating in it or wishing merely to grab another opportunity to insinuate the term ‘woke’ into the mindset of the populace as a term synonymous with ‘threat’. In the final analysis, the story is a pertinent illustration of how the right drip-feeds half-baked facts and disinformation, using trigger words such as ‘woke’ and ‘wokism’ into the collective mindset in order to disenfranchise progressives and mould public opinion towards reactionary intolerance and hate. A quick look at the public comments to the story indicates the success of the project, and the mainstream media and corporate mantras are awash with countless other examples.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/magdalen-co ... dinner-eid
What’s laughable is that some historic sources consider that St George was actually a Muslim figure. Others place him as a warrior, and hero, in the Christian crusades against Islam. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to work out which of the two ‘truths’ the writer of the story would prefer.
GB News is an outlet I’m not familiar with, but a quick look at its content suggests it’s very much in the mould of the reactionary Daily Mail. The stylised union flag logo rather gives that away in advance of any reading. The writer of the story, in true Daily Mail fashion uses half-baked facts (cloned from another right-wing source, the Daily Telegraph), to force through the story (university sources dispute the author’s claim that the dinner was an annual event in the first place), but really the whole story is a non-event to everyone either not directly participating in it or wishing merely to grab another opportunity to insinuate the term ‘woke’ into the mindset of the populace as a term synonymous with ‘threat’. In the final analysis, the story is a pertinent illustration of how the right drip-feeds half-baked facts and disinformation, using trigger words such as ‘woke’ and ‘wokism’ into the collective mindset in order to disenfranchise progressives and mould public opinion towards reactionary intolerance and hate. A quick look at the public comments to the story indicates the success of the project, and the mainstream media and corporate mantras are awash with countless other examples.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/magdalen-co ... dinner-eid