When confronted with basic questions on “60 Minutes,” the group appeared ill-prepared and stumped and alleged their critics were trying to “marginalize us.”
Since its founding in 2021, the conservative organization Moms for Liberty has billed itself as a champion for “parents’ rights,” pushing campaigns across the country to ban books and the use of pronouns in schools. Their crusade, as my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, often alleges that educators, specifically in public education, are out to “groom” and “indoctrinate” kids.
But what, exactly, does that mean? It doesn’t appear as though Moms for Liberty knows either.
In an interview with 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley that aired on Sunday night, the group’s two co-founders repeatedly struggled to explain their platform beyond empty talking points that have fueled the culture war in schools. They also failed to present facts to back up various claims.
This seems to be the same failing those backing “anti-woke” efforts. When challenged, they can’t actually define what they mean by “woke”.
That’s because the right wing has moved far beyond reality, evidence, logic, reason, semantics—only ever casually familiar to them to begin with.
They are now only about feelings.
They are trained, ala Pavlov, to react to the sounds of certain words, not their meaning: woke, liberal, groomer, trans ideology, gay agenda, immigrant, and the like. The right wing pundits could just have easily used different bells and sound clips to evoke the same reactions.
Well, they certainly can define “woke”, but they probably know they can’t fully say the quiet part out loud.
To them, the existence of gay and trans people is “woke”. Teaching about inequality or systemic racism is “woke”. Heck, I’m sure women’s rights and related healthcare is also “woke” to them.
They apparently can’t say any part out loud then because they give no solid consistent definition at all.
The crazy part is, while that’s likely the answer for some of them, but I don’t think it is for all of them. So until they can give a definition they can actually agree on, passing “anti-woke” laws or standing on an “anti-woke” agenda is specious because they can’t even say what that is.
But that vagueness is the entire point to ruffle the feathers of their base and to get them angry at something/anything.
This is just another boogeyman for the GOP leadership to distract their base from any real issues.
Heck, do you hear anything about CRT anymore? Like a school of fish, the entire talking point shifted to “woke” and anti-trans.
i think you would find karlyn borysenko is actually pretty knowledgable. i watch her stuff instead of advocating my friends conduct real pol-ed. it’s honestly very good, she picks great topics, with a lot of queer theory but she never loses sight of the context of anticapitalist struggle. i’d say maybe she’s a bit **too** focused on it in the sort of “no war but classwar”-bros kind of way, but honestly she is very good but not at all leftist.
edit:
also, she has been dunking on MFL basically the entire time
I’m curious why is this so downvoted? I know nothing about karlyn.
she’s definitely not a lefty. she had a pretty good grift being the “liberal who went to a trump rally and found out they werent all monsters” or something. did a media circuit and fell into relative obscurity.
she stirs a lot of drama now. i can’t say that all or even most of her content is worth watching, but she does watch actual leftist seminars and then does her shitty commentary. by shitty i just mean “i disagree”. i’d say usually,she’s knowledgable about the topics.