▪️This is nonsense. Woke doesn’t refer to one being “awaken to the needs of others,” it was specifically in reference to being “woke” to racial injustices and activism of the black community. Its roots are in radical black activism, dating back to Marcus Garvey in the 1920s.
▪️Woke broke into mainstream culture during the 2014 Ferguson riots, when it became enmeshed with BLM and the #staywoke social media campaign. It was a call to stay focused on black activism, particularly to stay vigilant on police misconduct.
▪️It then morphed into being focused on the plight of all marginalized communities. Woke was no longer limited to BLM. It was now in the 2017 Women’s March. It included BIPOC, LGBTQ+ & eventually the broader goals of progressive activism. This is when phrases like “white privilege” took off.
▪️Woke ideology viewed history as a struggle between oppressed and oppressors, and attributed all current inequities to structural racism/sexism, etc. To combat this, it sought to group everyone into hierarchies based on their oppressor status (generally based on race and sex).
▪️With this movement came the many whiny, annoying young activists (mostly white) who knew little about anything, but after reading a Teen Vogue article or a Robin DiAngelo book were lecturing everyone about racial inequities and checking your privilege.
▪️Even corporations embraced it, executives would give their pronouns and identify which native tribe the land was stolen from at their conferences. Door Dash had a “black-owned businesses” section, United Airlines announced half their pilots would be women/POC.
▪️It was this quasi-religious wokeness that caused a huge backlash. The right fought back by using the term in a derogatory and mocking way, to great effect. Woke was painted as political correctness reaching absurd new heights, an obsession over identity politics.
▪️The left has recently tried to combat this stigmatization of woke. At first, they claimed woke was a made up bogeyman of the right, a term that no one can even define (nevermind they have no coherent definition of words like racist, late-stage capitalism or woman).
▪️Now they seem to be embracing woke and attempting to redefine it as some generic term meaning nice and sympathetic, wanting what’s best for everyone. This is nonsense and never what it meant.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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