The attention to those fringe issues is brought by those conservatives and lobbyists etc who explicitly want to distract and divide attention from climate change and renewables.

It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.

Blech. I've done the same thing...

Address climate change, accelerate the shift towards renewables. It's something that actually fucking matters!

> It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.

You fight this by keeping your own ranks in check. The right condemns nazis and racists, so you wont find any open racists and nazis in their ranks. The left doesn't do the same, so they leave themselves open to attacks based on having bad apples in their ranks.

You could argue the right is still worse, but you don't decide that the voters decide, so you have to clean up the ranks until the voters are happy with what you present, otherwise you leave yourself open to attack like this.

IMO, "wokeness" is usually a reaction to the reactionary.

Being transgender wasn't some sort of political football 10 years ago even though 10 years ago basically everything that was happening WRT trans individuals that made the pearl clutchers clutch pearls was happening then and earlier.

The only reason "the left" started caring about trans individuals is because right wing reactionaries decided that it was the source of all the ills of the world. It was a pretty natural "no it's not, you guys are being insane". Especially because as a result to the right losing it's mind over trans individuals, we are seeing all sorts of insane over reactions in the law (In idaho, they are passing a law with a 5 year prison sentence for a trans individual taking a shit in a public bathroom).

This is basically how the cycle goes. The right targets a minority, the left defends the minority, the media capitalizes on the "both sides" of it all at the exclusion of talking about things like taxing rich people, funding public services, or addressing climate change.

The only time I've seen the reverse was BLM, but it's pretty much the same outcome.