Former WH press secretary Jen Psaki blasts Republican ‘woke’ messaging in debut of new MSNBC show
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki blasted the Republican Party for their “woke” messaging on Sunday during her new MSNBC show, “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
In a tweet posted ahead of the debut of her new show, she said she had “a few things to get off my chest about the GOP war on wokewokeism.”
During the show’s debut, Psaki argued that most people do not think of the term “woke” as Republicans might like them to.
“For Republicans, wokeness is Public Enemy number one,” she said. “By the sound of it, there is simply no greater threat to American liberty, whether or not they actually believe it, they clearly think it’s a winning message ahead of 2024. And it makes you think, are they on to something? Should I be freaking out about how right-wing Republicans are co-opting woke and wokeism? My gut here is no, you don’t need to be too worried about their war on woke because the Republican crusade against wokeness may not be as potent of a campaign issue as they may hope.”
She said it simply is “not the boogeyman they have you believe.”
Psaki pointed to a USA Today/Ipsos poll that found 39% of Americans believe “woke” means “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.”
And 56% of Americans believe “woke” means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices,” the poll found.
She also played clips of a focus group in Florida that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020. The members of the focus group were “confused” by the term “woke,” according to Axios.
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Psaki also noted conservative author Bethany Mandel, who went viral recently for struggling to define the term “woke” during an interview about her new book, “Stolen Youth.”
“I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression… Sorry, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite,” Mandel said during the interview.
“It’s hard to explain. Just two-cents from someone who has worked a few years in communications, if you can’t explain it and people don’t understand it in 15 seconds, it may not be the winning message you think it is. So everyone out there, it sounds like you can let your woke flag fly,” Paski said.
Mandel said after her viral appearance that she had been thrown off after hearing her interviewer Briahna Joy Gray on a hot mic “demeaning parenting in general in colorful and nasty terms, stating parents only have kids in order to perpetuate their own narcissism.”
After the show, Psaki tweeted, “let your woke flag fly.”
Psaki left her position as White House press secretary in May 2022.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took over for Psaki following her departure.
