Chaya Raichik left sputtering when asked what “wokeness” is as the audience bursts out laughing
Story by Alex Bollinger• 1d • 2 min read
Chaya Raichik left sputtering when asked what “wokeness” is as the audience bursts out laughing© Provided by LGBTQ Nation
Hate influencer Chaya Raichik – who goes by “Libs of TikTok” online – is trying to take her show on the road, and it doesn’t appear to be going well.
Raichik gave a speech yesterday at the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
During her speech, she ranted about “pornographic” books in schools and moved on to her hatred of everything “woke.”
“It’s been in schools, it’s on college campuses, it- it’s in the workforce, it is in the streets, it’s when you go to the store,” she complained. “I mean, like, you can’t do anything in peace without this wokeness being shoved down your throat wherever you go!”
Some students started laughing.
“Um, do you have a question? Is something funny?” she asked, apparently not expecting people to find her over-the-top concerns funny.
“How do you define wokeness?” someone in the back asked.
Raichik tried to respond: “Wokeness is the destruction of normalicy [sic] and… And… Um… Uh…” More students started laughing.
“… of our lives,” she said, apparently thinking she was finishing a sentence.
Banks then took over and said that wokeness is “anti-Americanism.”
“I’m sick and tired of being taught that America isn’t worth fighting and dying for, it’s a great country, it’s the greatest country in the history of the world,” Banks said.
Two protestors who were chanting were taken away in handcuffs, according to The Bloomingtonian. Authorities haven’t said whether they will face charges.
The paper reported that about two dozen people, mostly men, were in the front rows for Raichik’s speech, while those who disagreed with her were towards the back. From a video posted to YouTube, the men in the front appear to be much older than the average IU student, while the people towards the back appear to be much younger.
People still held signs while inside the IMU, including one that read, “Chaya is a stupid name. It means spinach tree. I’m calling you spinach tree from now on.”
Despite conservatives beating the “wokeness” drum for several years now, Raichik is far from the first to have trouble explaining what that word means. Conservative writer Bethany Mandel was mocked online last year when she wasn’t able to explain what the word means in an interview about her book that is about how “woke indoctrination” is targeting children.
“Woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it,” she said. “It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Sorry I, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”
