Hate influencer Chaya Raichik – who goes by “Libs of TikTok” online – is trying to take her show on the road, and it doesn’t appear to be going well.
Raichik gave a speech yesterday at the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
During her speech, she ranted about “pornographic” books in schools and moved on to her hatred of everything “woke.”
…
Some students started laughing.
“Um, do you have a question? Is something funny?” she asked, apparently not expecting people to find her over-the-top concerns funny.
“How do you define wokeness?” someone in the back asked.
Raichik tried to respond: “Wokeness is the destruction of normalicy [sic] and… And… Um… Uh…” More students started laughing.
“… of our lives,” she said, apparently thinking she was finishing a sentence.
I believe that some of them wholeheartedly do. How many actually do so and how many just use it as an excuse, I can’t tell.
I can respect your analysis of them ,but we’re back to the original challenge. You are having to try to tease out a definition from their own inconstant behavior because they cannot define woke.
Well, that is true. It would seem that each use is subjective to an individual’s own opinion on whether the replacement or the focus is in line with their view of things.
Even if their definition isn’t uniform, when pressed, they can’t enumerate it. They certainly act on it though. To me that’s either bad faith communication (they know and they won’t say) or they wildly lacking in self awareness (they don’t know and act anyway using handwaving to excuse bad behavior).
There’s no doubt bad faith actors are using it for their own purposes and their intended target is the latter kind of person. The lack of self awareness is in my opinion quite common. There’s simply too much to deal with for the average individual on a daily basis to allow ourselves a type of introspection that can clarify who we are and how we act. We are vulnerable to catchy phrases as it is simply too exhausting to analyze every bit of information coming our way, so we accept shallow definitions, we accept a path of superficial righteousness and we accept the paper thin sweetness thrown our way. Only to have it all crumble at a deeper look, taste or thought and leave us helpless.
People are dumb. Intelligence is an exercise. And we have to specialize if we want to achieve something. That means we have flaws to be exploited. And they very much are, in every way.
So I try not to blame the lack of self awareness. Because we all experience it in different ways, of different things. Not knowing is okay. But how many of us can accept that about ourselves or about others? Not many, else the world would be a happier place.