And this is why we need more decent folk around the country like AOC to run for any and all offices.
Way to advertise what side she’s really on.
Hooray another sack of shit politician attempting to derail from real issues
Ratchet effect at work
Makes me wonder how many more senators in the democratic party have similar opinions. my estimate is at least %70
Slotkin says she wants to take the focus off of Oligarchy and Putin’s smile just gets a few inches wider.
Just another clueless asshole.
Nope, Elissa fails to realize US income distribution is a huge problem in the USA and the oligarchs are controlling it.
No, she can fuck off.
The oligarchy is killing us, and spinning language won’t change that. Meanwhile, ‘woke’ just means ‘social empathy’, which is ironically the solution to many of the problems the oligarchy is causing (and they’re not shy about this – Musk recently said empathy is bad).
We need more ‘woke’, not less. And being butthurt that the fascists are using ‘woke’ as a slur against us is childish and easy to ignore if you’re not too simple to get it.
Fuck this. I’m woke and proud of it. We all should be.
Woke means understanding we live in an oligarchy in my mind. MAGA calls people sheep while complaining about them being woke in the same breath. They don’t even understand the language they use.
Fine. Then come up with a plan to educate conservatives. Because this thing where the state legislates new norms (e.g. bio men in bio women’s sports) is NOT making sense to them. They are freaking out because they don’t understand it. And we can’t just make laws to make them accept it.
From their perspective they are losing their country. We can laugh and call them backwards, but that won’t help. There HAS to be a plan that is better than, f-you wake up.
I’m not sure about this. People with money spent a lot to tell everyone that these things are problems. If we spent the same amount of money to say the opposite, opinions would differ.
That’s a big problem that switching from ‘oligarch’ to ‘king’ won’t solve. Using different words is a very simplistic answer, when what we’re fighting here is not a language barrier but a wide cultural one.
The real issue is complex and multifaceted: conservatives have been highly propagandised through increasingly insulated media bubbles to the point that now there’s very little that can penetrate them, and switching up a few words will not get them to listen. They’ve been taught to be distrustful of facts and reality, and to believe that compassion is weakness.
I don’t know how to fix this, but watering down our language will not help. That’s been tried many times, and it always backfires.
For those of you that can’t be bothered to read more than a headline:
Dem Senator Says Party Needs to Stop Attacking ‘Oligarchy’ and Focus on Losing ‘Woke’ Reputation
AP Photo/Paul Sancya, Pool
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has urged her Democratic colleagues to stop attacking the “oligarchy” on Thursday, arguing that the word did not resonate with most Americans and should be replaced with “kings.”
During an interview with Politico national politics correspondent Adam Wren, Slotkin spoke about her “war plan” to “contain and defeat” President Donald Trump.
Detailing her plan, Slotkin – a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – argued that the Democratic Party needed to lose its “weak and woke” reputation and “fucking retake the flag,” adopting a “goddamn Alpha energy” inspired by Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell.
“She said Democrats should stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes ‘kings,'” wrote Wren, who reported that Slotkin was planning to deliver a series of speeches in the coming months about her plan.
Slotkin told the news outlet, “Trump is doing a whole bunch of things that I think are a threat to our economy and a threat to our Democracy and I have a responsibility on behalf of my state to point that out and try to do something about that.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) – the most likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, according to analyst Nate Silver – recently commenced a “Fight Oligarchy” tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) across the United States.
Last month, after Slotkin was asked by a constituent how she would “step up for us now” like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, Slotkin threw shade at her progressive colleagues.
“Everyone you mentioned has a lot of words, but what have they actually done to change the situation with Donald Trump and the cuts and the attacks on our judiciary and the attacks on our Constitution?” asked Slotkin, who claimed her responsibilities fighting Trump’s government cuts forced her “to be more than just an AOC.”
“I can’t do what she does because we live in a purple state, and I’m a pragmatist,” she concluded.
Her name is: Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)
Just so you don’t accidentally vote for her.
Ulg shes the one voting with repubs
Slotkin just made herself part of the problem.
I’m an independent but mostly lefty guy and this lady has never sat well with me. She’s a corporate dem through and through.
Read the fucking article before you comment. It’s obvious most did not.
I disagree. How exactly is that obvious?
You’re just sore that we all think she’s DNC trash.
The article title is incredibly misleading. Even the first sentence of the article makes clear what she was actually saying:
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has urged her Democratic colleagues to stop attacking the “oligarchy” on Thursday, arguing that the word did not resonate with most Americans and should be replaced with “kings.”
She’s advocating for using a more relatable term, not for a change in party values. The “woke” comment irks me, but again is focused on terminology and not ideology.
When you need the dumb fucks’ votes, you gotta speak their language. Or at least water it down to be palatable to someone who was “educated” in our broken-ass system.
I read the article and I completely disagree with her. ‘Oligarch’ means something different than ‘king’, and many Americans don’t have the same negative reaction to the word ‘king’, which is often romanticised in media, whereas ‘oligarch’ calls up images of nefarious machinations in authoritarian regimes – exactly what’s actually going on.
Also, being whiny that the bullies are calling us ‘woke’ is reactionary and misses the whole point. This is where we should be doubling down, not diluting our language.
e: also also, having spent decades in UxD and usability (which entailed a lot of surveying and analysis), I’d be hesitant to rely on surveys that show a population’s preference for one word over another, because word feels are affected by far more than knowledge of their definitions, and the reasons aren’t easily captured in a survey. The reasons are what matter, not necessarily the word, and I’m sure she didn’t explore this enough to understand the sociology here.
Our country was also founded on saying fuck off to a king. It’s part of the foundational mythology of the country. To a lot of people the word oligarchy means precisely nothing.
Rule by powerful elites isn’t unamarican. It’s actually kinda the opposite, given the caveats on our democratic system and it’s history.
A king however is actually one of the few unambiguously unamerican things out there.This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that it’s not without room for debate.
As for the “weak and woke” bit, I’m gonna disagree. That one read to me as a need to address public perception, not criticism from the right. Backing down from a bully is different from trying to change public perception. I didn’t see it as a statement of needing to be less woke, but of needing to be perceived as being effective and concerned about things other than the most pejorative senses of the term woke.
That political parties need to be viewed in a positive light by the public to be effective is inescapable.
take your upvote for reading the source and making me do the same.
