Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative in Florida, proposed a bill there that would ban the Democratic Party and any others with "woke" platforms.
Ingoglia said the legislation is in response to leftist activists that have called for removal of statutes and renaming of buildings because of "things" they said or did. "Some people want to have uncomfortable conversations about certain subjects. Let's have those conversations," he said.
The serious writers have spent so long scoffing at claims the right has turned fascist that they're emotionally invested in it not being described as fascist. Hearing the word (and others like it) makes them angrier than the thing itself does. So when politicians propose outright fascist things, like banning opposition political parties, the vocabulary that plainly describes it has already been cast as unacceptable journalistic activism, as cringe. There's nothing any of them can do but criticize people like Ingoglia through vague euphemism (smoke) and by posing powerless leftist nobodies as equivalently dangerous (mirrors).
