All Woked-Up: Hogcalls and Dogwhistles

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote.

“From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

“On Jan. 12, 2023, Florida Gov. and possible GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis extended his “war on woke,” when his administration rejected an Advanced Placement African American Studies class from Florida high schools. The move was consistent with DeSantis’s proposed “Stop W.O.K.E Act” in 2022, which aims to eliminate certain content from educational curriculum, as well as books from school libraries. And on Jan. 20, 2023, a U.S. District Court judge upheld DeSantis’s suspension of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren whom DeSantis claimed had prosecuted cases under “woke ideology.”

Even with the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” that clearly targets content about America’s racist history and systems, the acronym simply stands for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees.” Nothing racial. Just as with all effective dog whistles, the racial implications must be subtle, or better yet, implied.

Republican leaders agreed to go after “woke” spending amid a larger conversation in the GOP around areas to potentially trim in the Pentagon budget.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) signaled support for the push, while taking aim at what he called a “pretty aggressive approach” by the Pentagon in recent years to conduct “trainings that are more in line with diversity, equity and inclusion.”

“Since taking control of the House last month, Republicans have extended those arguments with a series of bills designed to combat a “wokeness that has swept our country,” in the words of Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.). 

So what does this terrible thing, “woke” actually mean? Anyone?

“Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan Newman said “woke would be the belief that there are injustices in American society, and we need to address them.”

Oh. So in other words, trying to fight injustice is “sick and disgusting” according to Marge TG, who brings us to the hog-calling part of our program. During the SOTU speech, MTG led the Republican chorus of moans, squeals, shreiks, bellows, grunts, whines, snorts and various other subhuman utterances, as an appparent attempt at dissent. Since they increasingly rely on incomprehensible mouth noises, made-up words and sandbox babble, it’s hard to tell exactly what they are on about, except they are victims of something.

But Marge always looks like she belongs in a barnyard calling the hogs— or being called — so I found this handy app which translates the various types of calls into component parts, from mating, to distress, to feeding frenzy, which should cover most of her daily activities.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hog-hunting-calls/id1456045846

Being close pals with fellow white supremacist Tucker Carlson, MTG is also a proponent of the delusional “us- poor-beleagured whites” persecution fantasies. Example:

“The fiery derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals in eastern Ohio is coming to represent bigger societal failures. It’s a story about profit-driven rail companies underinvesting in safety, lobbyists weakening rail regulation, and the state government’s failure to assure residents’ security from lingering toxins.

But in certain right-wing media precincts, the disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”

It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.

Carlson ratchets up this vile game by saying that if the accident had happened in Philadelphia or Detroit — wink, wink — there would be no neglect. And the race-baiting gets worse. One Fox News host suggested the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people.” Far-right personality Charlie Kirk decried a “war on white people” waged by the “Biden regime,” which is supposedly allowing the “poisoning” of “citizens of eastern Ohio.” Note the hints of the ugly trope that elites are plotting to exterminate Whites, or at least allowing them to perish.

A great many ‘conservatives’ like Tucky are big fans of the “Great Replacement” theory and white supremacy more broadly. They accuse Jews, “global elites”, Democratic leaders and others of using democratic institutions and processes to eliminate white Christian Americans – or what Carlson calls “legacy Americans,” thus providing the justification and incitement for undermining elections at any cost, and for political violence. 

The racist, antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy suggests that white Americans are being disenfranchised by the usual suspects. Tucky is also concerned about the falling white birth rate and shifting gender roles, another key component of the conspiracy. White conservative guys seems to be obssessed with being “real men.” I wonder why, don’t you?

White "replacement theory" and the idea of a "white genocide" were the pillars of Nazi Germany's ideology, which pointed to Jews as the “single most dangerous threat to white civilization.” Although Hitler felt prety much the same way about immigrants, black people, gays — unsurprisingly, the very same folks singled out as ‘enemies’ today.

Make no mistake — when they say “woke” this is what they are actually talking about, and it’s exactly what their cultists want to hear.