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Republican governors seeking reelection this year are embracing the bunker mentality of Trump-era culture wars as they seek their place in the new Grand Old Party, both at home and across the nation.

The tones many have adopted are a stark reminder that even if former President Trump is no longer in the White House, and his once-iron grip over the Republican Party is slipping, the divisiveness he embodied has become a guide for others chasing the path to success.

It is also a sign of just how much turbulence Trump stirred up within his own party. If Ronald Reagan taught Republicans never to fight each other, Trump has taken the opposite tact, attacking at will and inspiring outsiders to take on incumbents who must now fight back.

In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) this week signed a new law making it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion, with exceptions only in the case of a medical emergency. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed laws banning transgender girls from high school sports, controlling the way schools teach about race and gender and eliminating permit requirements for carrying concealed weapons.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R), a low-key politician who rarely makes headlines outside of her state, has launched campaign advertisements that echo Trumps evidence-free false statements about the 2020 election results.

The fake news, Big Tech and blue state liberals stole the election from President Trump. But here in Alabama, were making sure that never happens, Ivey says in her first ad. The left is probably offended. So be it.

All three governors face potentially competitive primaries. Polls show Kemp leading former Sen. David Perdue (R), who has Trumps support. Two conservative groups have spent money attacking Stitt; former state Veterans Affairs Director Joel Kintsel (R) launched a campaign against Stitt earlier this week, accusing the governors administration of corruption, self-dealing and cronyism.

Ivey faces a challenge from Lindy Blanchard (R), a businesswoman who served as Trumps ambassador to Slovenia and who has spent her own money on an early advertising onslaught.

Other conservative incumbents who once would have coasted to renomination now find themselves accused of heresy. Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R), Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R), Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) all face primary challenges, though all are favored to win both renomination and another term.

Those who face primary challenges are racing to catch up with other governors who have a clear path to Novembers midterm elections and who have already staked out their trenches in the culture wars ahead.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is near the front of the pack. This year, he has signed legislation establishing a new state agency to combat supposed election fraud, banning abortions after 15 weeks and limiting education on sexual and gender identity for children, a bill opponents call the Dont Say Gay law.

That law is among the conservative measures that has gained traction in other states. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has said he will make a similar version a priority when the legislature returns to Austin next year.

Abbott is in the midst of his own effort to focus attention on the border with Mexico. Abbott has deployed the National Guard to help secure the border, and he has ordered stepped-up inspections on trucks crossing into his state a move Jim Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and executive director of the Texas Politics Project, called a straightforward middle-finger to the Biden administration.

Abbotts administration has also sent at least three buses full of undocumented immigrants to Washington, D.C., where they unload just outside the office building that hosts several media bureaus, including that of Fox News.

The respective motivations for each governor is drawn from their relative political positions. DeSantis will face the winner of a late Democratic primary, while Abbott knows the identity of his opponent: former Rep. Beto ORourke (D). Both Republicans are favored to win reelection, leading some to suspect that they have set eyes farther down the road.

The difference is national attention and ambitions, said Brent Buchanan, an Alabama-based Republican strategist and pollster. DeSantis and Abbott are building national profiles. Ivey and Kemp are just focused on reelection so they can continue implementing conservative policies within their respective states.

Defeating a sitting governor is rare, and the national landscape is so favorable to Republicans right now that every governor seeking reelection is favored to win.

But the governors embracing Trumps culture wars show the salience those issues have among the primary voters who will renominate most, if not all of them.

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Republican governors sprint right, eyeing reelection and 2024 - The Hill

The term woke has its roots in Black culture but has since been removed from this origin and been co-opted a symbol by those who push back against social justice progress. Staci M. Zavattarowrites that for policymakers and activists to affect change, it is important to understand how the social constructions of woke and Critical Race Theory, more specifically, have changed.

During her Senate confirmation hearings for the US Supreme Court this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson endured a series of questions from lawmakers about race, religion, and policing. In several instances, she was asked about Critical Race Theory or more appropriately CRT. Culture wars questions always seem to play out live during US Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and the latest version has focused on CRT and anti-racism.

Why is this sloganeering happening? One explanation is that the word woke has moved from its rhetorical roots in the Black community to become weaponized today to pass legislation undoing much of the social justice progress benefitting marginalized populations. Words like woke and associated imagery including CRT become catalysts to carry out culture war policies harming and aliening people from full participation in democratic society.

In our research, we chose the word woke because it came to prominence in the American lexicon after police murdered George Floyd in Minnesota in May 2020. The murder at the hands of the state seemed to set off a reckoning, especially among White people, about racism and its deadly effects. Corporations jumped into the movement, turning social media profile pictures into black squares to ideally bring attention to these structural issues. Yet with not much long-term change, such pronouncements often seem like mere marketing ploys.

And that was our point. The word woke and its associated imagery became political calling cards for certain lawmakers to pass legislation curbing voting rights, prohibiting transgender women from competing in womens sports, changing school curriculum so it does not hurt feelings, and banning and burning books. In this way, we can see how the word woke moved from its roots in Black culture to todays symbolic politics needing no real meaning anymore because the symbols and words are so powerful.

To better understand how the word woke has changed, we use a theory called phases of the image. That theory from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard explains how something starts with a clear connection to reality then through time can progress into what is called hyperreality. Any connection to a former reality dissipates, allowing a new, socially constructed reality to emerge. A concrete examination of this theory took place in the popular movie The Matrix. In one scene, Morpheus quotes directly from Baudrillard when he says: Welcome to the desert of the real. The movie plays between reality and simulation, as do places such as Las Vegas and Walt Disney World. Virtual reality tools popular today also blur these lines. The simulations become the reality.

The term woke was brought to prominence by William Melvin Kelley in a 1962 New York Times essay, meaning the word was birthed in Harlem, the epicenter of Black culture in America. Kelley argued that when words in Black culture are co-opted by White people, they lose their real meaning. The term became popular in 2008 as singer Erykah Badu used it in the chorus of her song Master Teacher, and in 2015 Google searches for the word increased after police killings of Black people throughout the US. Today, the term woke is removed from its roots in Black culture to a symbol people use to push back against social justice progress.

With its roots in the Black community, wokeness meaning to be awake to social oppression helped bring about legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Learning about and being aware of structural racism led to passage of the (albeit flawed) legislation attempting to dismantle some of those barriers to entry for Black individuals. As the word woke floated from its foundations, the term led to backlash against symbolic activism acts with no real change but meant to make people feel good, such as the aforementioned social media black photos and painting streets with Black Lives Matter. Symbolic acts are hugely powerful, of course, but in our work, we argue how symbolic acts also need accompanying policy change to have any connection to reality. Otherwise, someone might think painting a street in and of itself is enough to move the needle on social change.

The most visible way the term woke has moved into hyperreality is through its rhetorical use in contemporary society. All one must do is look at news outlets to see how the word is being used to denote opposition to any meaningful social justice efforts, indeed even being used as a reason to pass legislation stripping away social progress or putting back into place systemic barriers meant to preserve White power structures. Indeed, using the word woke is a purposeful, powerful tool of mostly right-leaning lawmakers to invoke images of puritanical nostalgia being dismantled by liberal activists.

This is why we chose to use CRT as an example in our work. Critical race theory is an academic field of inquiry that began from a legal perspective to interrogate structural, systemic barriers to equal access and treatment. CRT and woke as symbols and rhetoric are lumped in together to mean anything someone sees as threats to an idealized image of America. When asked to define either term, lawmakers cannot which is exactly the point. In a hyperreality, the image is more important than reality. A pundit summed it up nicely: We have successfully frozen their brand critical race theory into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.

From a public administration perspective, the implications of our work are clear: understand the power of symbolic politics to affect change. Our research focused on the term woke and its unmooring from roots in the Black community as a mechanism to understand some of the public battles playing out today. Knowing rhetorical roots allows public administrators, stakeholders, and activists to learn the symbolic rules to play a similar game.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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Staci M. Zavattaro University of Central FloridaStaci M. Zavattaro, Ph.D., is professor of public administration at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of public managers. Her latest research examines the role of deathcare and death management.

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How woke became weaponized in the culture wars - London School of Economics

AMAC Exclusive By Daniel Roman

For the first time in decades, it is conservatives, not liberals, who are on the offensive in the culture wars. There are a number of things conservatives have done well this time around, including picking their battles, building broad coalitions, and trying to unite rather than divide parents. But a key force in the Rights cultural resurgence is ultimately the Left itself, which has shockingly forfeited the debate. For most of the last year, there has been little to no effort to actually defend the merits of left-wing positions. These days, leftists seem only capable of hurling invective at those attacking them. The American people are not responding well.

It really is not worth dignifying the arguments over whether Lia Thomas should or should not be allowed to compete as a woman by calling it a debate as even those on the Left seem to know better than to deviate too far from absolutist talking points, lest the absurdity of their position becomes evident to all. There is little better evidence that even many liberals dont have their hearts in the fight; they are kept in line by the threat of cancellation, but reveal their private reservations by how they publicly repeat rote lines like no one actually knows what gender really is.

All of this is a consequence of the Left creating an echo chamber where their positions are justified not on the basis that they are well-reasoned or produce good outcomes, but because they are simply asserted by everyone on the Left as the right thing to do. Because they are right, by definition, they should be done, and further debate about drawbacks is not genuine debate but a bad-faith effort to delay the right thing to do. At the root of this twisted logic is an insidious form of identity politics which states that if any marginalized group makes a demand, that demand must be treated as legitimate. This is true even if other members of the group contest it.

For example, even the most extreme demands made by groups such as Black Lives Matter are held to be the legitimate demands of the entire African American community. Those opposing the demands are either racists (if not African American) or not legitimate representatives of the community (if they are African American). The Left has long practiced this with Jews, labeling prominent senior Trump administration officials as Nazis even if they were Jewish. They are now turning this thinking against other groups, such that any woman who is pro-life is no longer considered to be on the side of women. Any gay or lesbian individual who is not supportive of the most extreme demands for sex and gender education in schools is self-hating. A transgender individual who does not believe it is fair for biological men to take part in womens sports, such as Caitlyn Jenner, or one who has serious doubts about childhood transition, is now labeled a transphobe.

Solidarity with any identity group is defined as solidarity with the most extreme left-wing elements of that group.

Politically, this line of thinking has led the Left into a dead-end of policies supported only by the most extremist elements of the communities in question. Hence why Democrats associated the defense of Critical Race Theory with supporting African Americans, when the vast majority of African American parents want their schools teaching math and science, not radical social theories, or why Democrats believe that placating open-border advocates is the key to winning over Hispanic voters.

Perhaps even worse than causing Democrats to push unpopular policies, this line of thinking has prevented them from realizing why they even need to persuade anyone at allwhich is having all sorts of insidious effects on American society.

Conservatives are now winning because they have spotted this vulnerability and seized it. The battles over CRT and reopening schools were a practice-run. Both provided compelling issues for conservatives and had broad appeal to the American public. Significantly, however, the opposition never figured out what their position was. On CRT, was it bad, but not being taught? Was it good, not being taught, but should be taught? Did it exist at all? Should it? Many on the Left tried to hurl these questions back at conservatives, suggesting they lacked a clear definition of CRT, but conservatives could at the very least point to things that were being taught that they wished to stop. The Left, unable to decide whether CRT existed or not, never mounted a coherent defense.

This dynamic extended to the Supreme Courts oral arguments over Mississippis 15-week abortion ban. Lawyers for the plaintiffs repeatedly insisted the law violated the precedents set by Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood but refused to be drawn into discussions about whether those cases were correctly decided to begin with. This purely procedural approach extended outside the court system, where the Left has argued that Roe is under threat, without explaining why a 15-week ban would be harmful or wrong.

With the current debates over Floridas so-called Dont Say Gay bill and transgender issues, the Left has fallen into similar logical black holes. In the former case, Democrats have been maneuvered either to point out problems that might arise in hypothetical situations (which would often require active malice from teachers) or attempting to mobilize high school students and activists against a bill which only applied to students from pre-school up through third grade. There may well have been logistical and legal issues with the drafting, but if there was a case against the bill, it was not one the Left made. Instead, they focused on arguing that this cannot be done, not that it should not. Polls suggest that they lost.

The most extreme example of the Lefts failure to make any real arguments is the fight over the inclusion of transgender individuals in competitive sports. It is an issue that the Left themselves would say effects only the privileged. The demographic of individuals, especially younger biological males, who can attend elite institutions, receive the financial and familial support required to transition at a young age, and would seek to compete against women is a heavily wealthy group. Yet somehow, the Left has decided that the civil rights issue of our time is the right of a specific Ivy League student to win college athletic competitions as their preferred gender. There is no effort to explain why this is more important than any of the other concerns raised (such as biological women having to compete against an individual with a clear biological advantage). There is simply the assertion that it is necessary, and that anyone who disagrees is a bigot.

Cancel Culture worked best for the Left when it was pushed with a mixture of persuasion and force. For the last two years, the mask of persuasion and argument has dropped. The Left has begun treating everyone like they treated their own adherents for the last decade. The result is that they have helped defeat themselves in effect accomplishing what social conservatives have struggled to achieve for half a century: making ordinary Americans hate them.

Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

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The Left is Their Own Worst Enemy in the Culture Wars - AMAC

No governor has drawn more national attention than RonDeSantisof Florida. And sinceDeSantisis a Republican and in the mold of Donald Trump, that coverage has been decidedly negative.

The topic could be his handling of COVID-19. Or his decision to open businesses and beaches earlier than most other governors. Or vaccine distribution. Or his Parental Rights in Education bill (dubbed the Dont Say Gay bill by Democrats and echoed by many in the press). Or banning most abortions after 15 weeks. Or approving an immigration measure that doesnt allow state entities to do business with businesses and companies that transport migrant children who crossed the border illegally into Florida. Or signing a proclamation declaring Emma Weyant the true winner of a U.S. national college swimming title after she lost to transgender athlete Lia Thomas.

You can agree or disagree withDeSantisand the Florida legislature on any of these moves, measures and proclamations. What makes the governor popular among his supporters is that he doesnt appear to give a damn about what the Florida press or the national political media think about how hes leading his state. He has a plan and principles that appear to be unwavering.

Consider a recent exchange the governor had with WFLAs Evan Donovan after the reporter referenced what critics call the Dont Say Gay bill.

Does it say that in the bill?DeSantisshot back, refusing to allow his critics to frame the bill as homophobic.Does it say that in the bill? Im asking whats in the bill because you are pushing false narratives. It doesnt matter what critics say.

It says classroom instruction on sexual identity and gender orientation, Donovan replied while leaving out a very key detail.

For who? DeSantisretorted. For grades pre-K through three, no five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds. And the idea that you wouldnt be honest about that and tell people what it actually says, its why people dont trust people like you because you peddle false narratives. And so we just disabused you of those narratives.

And thats true: The bill applies to kids in kindergarten through second grade being taught sexual instruction. Sounds like something that a parent of a kindergartener or first- or second-grader would support.

Understand, if you are out protesting this bill, you are by definition putting yourself in favor of injecting sexual instruction to 5-, 6- and 7-year-old kids,DeSantissaid during another recent press conference. I think most people think thats wrong. I think parents especially think thats wrong.

The national press is largely against the bill, and headline after headline refers to it as the Dont Say Gay bill, in an apparent effort to push a false narrative.

Take this framing by NBC News: Its headline read, Florida Gov. RonDeSantissignals support for Dont Say Gay bill, followed by a subhead The bill, which would bar the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in primary schools, passed the Florida Senate Education Committee on Tuesday.

The headline itself was misleading, because thats not what the bill is called; its what critics call it. And the story itself, which wasnt an opinion piece, never once mentionedDeSantissmainpoint that the bill bars sexual instruction to 5-, 6- and 7-year-old kids.

Why omit that crucial element of the legislation?Unless, of course, a narrative is being peddled.

Despite all the negative press, Florida voters support the bill as it pertains to banning theteaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade by a solid margin. Per recent Quinnipiac polling, 51 percent of voters there support it while just 35 percent oppose and 15 percent have no opinion.

Overall,DeSantis is leading his Democratic challengers in this years governors race.

If Charlie Crist captures the Democratic nomination in Florida, DeSantiswould beat him 55 percent to 34 percent if the election were held today,according to a pollreleased by the Public Opinion Research Lab at University of North Florida. If matched up against Nikki Fried,Desantishas a 55 percent to 32 percent lead.Other pollsalso showDeSantiscomfortably ahead.

Overall,DeSantis, an Iraq War veteran and Harvard Law graduate, sits at 54 percent while President Biden is at 39 approval in Florida.

Hell almost certainly win in November to capture a second term as governor, which could serve as a springboard to a 2024 presidential run.

When 2024 rolls around, Donald Trump will be 78 years old; DeSantiswill be 45.

A recent CPAC straw poll showed Trump winning the nomination easily, with 61 percent of the vote.DeSantiswas second with 28 percent,up 7 points from last year. No other candidate got more than 2 percent.

But if Trump doesnt run,DeSantisgets 61 percent of the vote. His next-nearest potential competitors, Donald Trump Jr. and Mike Pompeo, each get 6 percent.

RonDeSantisis a culture warrior, just as Trump was before him.His positions may be unpopular with Democrats and the press but if Florida is an indication of sentiment in other swing states, such as Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, this will serve him very well if he becomes 2024 GOP nominee.

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.

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Ron DeSantis is winning the culture wars - The Hill

There is a gathering, and very significant, storm growing on social media to rename the town of Woking, and to change its name back to its Anglo-Saxon form of Wohingas. Superficially, this battle has erupted because the towns name has the term Woke in it. More significantly, however, the row points to greater themes at play within Western society, the media and the culture wars. April is the cruellest month and on such a significant day as today, it would be foolish indeed to ignore the threat faced by Woking.

When you look up the cultural contribution of Woking, it packs a surprisingly large punch for a town which is a byword for the London commuter belt. For example, H.G. Wells set Horsell Common in Woking for the Martians first landing in War of the Worlds. Now cultural fact is stranger than science fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle lands Sherlock Holmes in the town for an investigation in one of his short stories. More recently Woking was compared to Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for by Douglas Adams in The Deeper Meaning of Liff. In February 1982 The Jam reached number 1 in the charts by writing A Town Called Malice about Woking. A town called malice aforethought, indeed.

So perhaps Woking is overdue a bit of the limelight. Now, though, it is caught in the glare of cultural conflagration.

Dig a bit deeper into the political make-up of Woking and the place turns out to be fertile ground for a culture war. The town has a Liberal Democrat Mayor, but a Conservative MP. The Torys have 20 seats in the council while the Liberals have 18. In the last General Election, the long-standing Conservative MP was returned to Westminster, but lost 5.2 percent of his vote while the Liberal Democrat candidate increased vote by a staggering 13.2 percent.

The Tories need culture wars in places like Woking to hold onto power in the Southeast, while pork-barrelling money into the Red Wall. These sorts of conflicts dont do the Lib Dems any harm either; getting them much-needed attention and manufactured relevance for the community they should be serving.

To really understand how Woking could be caught up in a wave of Anglo-Saxon reactionary rage, look no further than the Brexit referendum of 2016. Traditionally the town was the very definition of true blue, but voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union (51.2 percent). Up until the Brexit referendum this was a town which oozed middle class stability, but is now ripping itself apart over what it should call itself.

The Brexit debate polarised everything it touched. To understand this, we must get to grips with the figure of Nigel Farage, who looms so large in the leafy suburbs such as Woking. His personality, more than anyone else in modern political culture, polarised every tacit of British life. Brexit was his Pandoras Box, which lit the tinder chest of culture wars, creating an earthquake to shake the very foundations of what it is to live in a town like Woking. From this spouted the fountainhead of polarisation to create the divided society we live in today. For Brexit, read controversy over trans, BLM, lockdown, anti-vaxers, the BBC, climate change or indeed the woking classes.

Society is now so divided that we cant even agree on names of the places we live in. The Woking controversy is evidence of a collective collapse in Western culture. No wonder Putin is so emboldened. Just imagine what his trolls and bots could do with this war of the worlds: Woking versus Wohingas.

All of this is deeply problematic and goes to the root of who we are and where we want to go. Unless we can rely on what our communities call themselves, how can we avoid a return to Anglo-Saxon attitudes? Not much can be expected from our political overlords. Boris the Deceiver Johnson and Sir Keir Captain Hindsight Starmer are hardly the people to take us forward, but make us look back into an abyss of culture wars constructed for their own ends. With such medieval jesters and knights of the realm in charge, what hope for Woking? As Shakespeare has his fool, Feste, tell Malvolio in Twelfth Night: Then you are mad indeed, if you are no better in your wits than a fool.

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The culture war fight to rename Woking - TheArticle