This is nonsense. Woke doesn’t refer to one being “awaken to the needs of others,” it was specifically in reference to being “woke” to racial injustices and activism of the black community. Its roots are in radical black activism, dating back to Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. 🧵 Woke broke into mainstream culture during the 2014 Ferguson riots, when it became enmeshed with BLM and the #staywoke social media campaign. It was a call to stay focused on black activism, particularly to stay vigilant on police misconduct.

Now this is a whopper. @other98 et al are now sharing memes about coming together & seeing everyone as “fellow Americans” regarding Covid. Let’s take a look back at the memes they’ve shared for the past 2 years, many receipts! Starting w/Jimmy Kimmel’s “joke” about denying care. Years of advocating for universal healthcare all of a sudden went out the window during Covid, as they cheered on bills forcing people to pay hospital bills out of pocket based on vaccination status.

Another “mostly false” debacle, the rating which continues to be the scourge of fact checkers. In most cases (like this case) these should be “misleading” or “missing context.” PolitiFact’s point is that Russia’s oil imports didn’t double because all imports (including crude and refined petroleum like gasoline and kerosene) rose 28%, while it was only crude that doubled.
politifact.com/factchecks/202…

I got some pushback questioning the Snake Island and Ghost of Kyiv story (on FB). Looks like the crux of the Snake Island myth (that they died defending it) was wrong. And that myth was much more plausible than the Ghost of Kyiv.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1498280759509012480

The propaganda on both sides of the conflict is crazy, so be careful believing anything. Being confident about any facts is hubristic at this point. We are all primed to want to believe stories that inspire, shock or reinforce our biases, and the propagandists know that.

This meme seems to circulate every year or so, and it’s back again, so here’s the rebuttal. It claims that the electoral college was the South’s idea and was implemented to help slave states. This is dubious at best 🧵 During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, significant division arose over how to elect the president. Initially, some delegates did propose a direct election by the people. This was championed by James Madison, a southerner, & two northerners, James Wilson & Gouverneur Morris

This meme tacitly admits CRT in schools would misinform students about the history of racial discrimination. It lays the blame on banks without mentioning that it rested squarely on the Federal government & progressive politicians in particular. Here is the real history 🧵 The following comes from The Color of Law, which covers the history of government & racial discrimination. This was written & approved by CRT sympathizers, so they can’t question the source, even though it often reads like a libertarian tract (at least until the last chapter).

This is a great example of citing a study and hoping no one takes the time to read it. Unlike many media outlets, I read it! As those skeptical of these sort of memes might expect, there is much more to the story here than @DanPriceSeattle and @RoKhanna give. Canada” didn’t give homeless people $7.5K, a private non-profit group Foundations For Social Change did. They have an initiative called the New Leaf project, which seeks to empower people to “move beyond homelessness.” They are hoping to rapidly expand and get new fundraising.

This meme from @HKrassenstein is conflating two separate Hunter Biden stories. The one NBC exposed was a 64 page report from a fake intelligence firm called Typhoon Investigations. The supposed author, Martin Aspen, was completely fabricated. This document was released months ago While the fake document was shared among some fringe right wing sites, most probably never heard of it. The NBC story says the original report was shared just 5,000 times on FB and Twitter. Another 25,000 if you include other stories which linked to it.
nbcnews.com/tech/security/…

This meme cuts off the rest of Kavanaugh’s sentence, and presents this as his primary argument for the recent ruling. This is misleading, here’s the background on the recent Supreme Court opinion, which is misunderstood by many. A district court previously ruled that Wisconsin’s requirement for absentee voters to return their ballots by Election Day was unconstitutional, and unilaterally switched the deadline from Nov 3 to Nov 9, as long as they were postmarked by election day.

This is the week of memes changing and inventing long standing word definitions. First it was court packing, then sexual preference and now originalism. There are countless memes trying to invent definitions of originalism to make strawman arguments. They are badly mistaken. First, what originalism does NOT mean is to live like they did in 1789, or even to hold the same beliefs as they did then. To suggest originalism means using a mule for transportation is such a dishonest and shallow take it’s astounding.
scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewconten…

This meme effectively admits it doesn’t know what court packing means. Court packing has long had a specific definition. It’s not changing the political makeup of a court, or even appointing a lot of justices. It’s adding more judicial slots. As the Washington Post defines the term, “Court packing is adding more judges to a court than there are now, something that can be done on the federal level simply by passing a law.”
washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…

In a vacuum this would be one of the more sane memes ever posted by TO98%. But this advice should have been heeded back in February and March, posting it now is disingenuous. The reality was there was much scientific uncertainty about the virus. How did it spread? From surfaces, coughing, sneezing, touching, asymptomatic/symptomatic, prolonged/casual contact, indoors/outdoors, etc.? Were lockdowns more effective, testing, maybe herd immunity? What about masks? Why was it so bad in Italy & NYC but not Japan or Hong Kong?

This meme is both false and incredibly stupid. Dylann Roof was never escorted to a Burger King by police. He was brought BK after his arrest. If this seems like a distinction without a difference it’s not, once you understand the timeline and context. THREAD/ Roof slaughtered nine people at a Charleston, SC church at around 9 pm. He wasn’t captured until the following morning at 10:50 am, in Shelby, NC a small town 245 miles away.
shelbystar.com/20150618/timel…

This viral headline leaves the impression that infectious disease experts are condoning the protests. In reality, this was a Google doc written mostly by non-epidemiological experts, is highly contradictory and not based on science. The NPR headline and article takes just a sliver from the letter, simply claiming it was endorsed by public health and disease experts. But, in the article, the very expert they were using didn’t even sign it!
npr.org/sections/coron…

This viral tweet tries to compare sending a package to sending a letter. The cost to send a letter via first class mail is $.55, not $.50. But the cost to send a package with the USPS via priority mail starts at $7.50. It’s simply wrong to conflate the two... It’s true FedEx can’t compete with the $.55 to send a letter, because they are prohibited from doing so! It’s illegal for any company to send a letter, or send anything to your mailbox. The Post Office has a legal monopoly on these services.

The breakdown:
@KLoeffler didn’t personally make these trades. She has a blind trust, a 3rd party is solely responsible for managing her accounts and making trades. She wasn’t aware of the trades until after they were made. Violating this would be illegal and require evidence to allege. Loeffler and her husband are likely worth more than $500M. Their trades should be viewed in context of that wealth. In a blind trust of this size, it would be expected that a manager would make frequent purchases and sales which look large to the average investor.

This viral tweet starts out with correct information about the Kennedy Center, but ends with a false claim about it donating $5M to the DNC. There is no evidence of this claim, nor any examples of the Kennedy Center making political donations in their past tax statements. The Kennedy Center is a 501 (c)(3) organization, they are prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in politics. It would be a big scandal if they donated $5M to a political party, but alas only this tweet makes the accusation, there are no corroborating news stories.