My one caveat is that the cartoon suggests that such people are working class white men when there are many middle and upper class men and women among them.
Of course, cartoonists have limited space to make their point and so some selectivity and lack of nuance is inevitable.
When I was young, the preferred term was “bleeding heart liberals”. Then for a while they adopted “politically correct”. So now we’re on to “woke”. I.e., basically someone who believes in being and actually tries to be a decent human being. Right-wingers hate that type.
@1, moonslicer,
It’s nice to see that they are reducing the number of words they use each time they revise their phrase.
That’s got to make the dog whistle easier to blow.
@ #2 flex
It reflects the steady decline of the right-wing intellect.
Under the Grand Old Trump Party, it’s more of a dog vuvuzela.
I believe this is about how the right wing has made a concerted push for decades to control as much political language as possible. Here is something Gingrich was using more than 30 years ago:
https://uh.edu/~englin/rephandout.html
The word ‘woke’ would most certainly be on any such list made after 2020 or so. The right wing has enough billionaires funding enough propaganda to flood the zone with this stuff. I am at my wit’s end as to how to effectively counter the right wing barrage of language appropriation.
George Lakoff has studied this extensively but he is a teaspoon against a tsunami.
Look at #1.
‘woke’ will be so 2020s in a few years, and whatever new one comes up will have replaced it.
(You ever hear of SJWs any more?)
I reckon that the phenomenon itself can’t be countered since language itself is the encoding we use for communication, and natural language has O so many side channels — allusion, dogwhistling, connotation, sarcasm, that sort of thing.
(Works both ways, but)
Actually I know the original definition of “woke”, which is about three quarters of a century old. Afro-Americans used the word as “watch out for racist cops”. Any white guy like me who claims to be woke icommits cultural appropration.
So… “bleeding heart” is ancient history, “SJW” is over, “woke” is cultural appropriation (which is amusingly recursive in itself…)… so what’s next?
Polarised as politics is becoming, I’m dividing the world into two types of people -- people who I broadly agree with (most of the people posting here, even the benightedly stupid but generally well meaning ones)… and Nazis. I’m Not A Nazi. Are you? Or are you my NAN?
@8:
The IEEE has an encoding for being Not a Nazi: 0x7f800001