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.”
…
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.
Context matters. In a room one-on-one, yes, absolutely it’s like a phone call. Out in public, the non-verbal cues matter much more. As a concrete example, phone calls in the quiet are just fine, but I can’t use a drive-through.
Well, drive through speakers are also notoriously bad. 😅 But yeah fully agree. When I talk to other people in my 2nd language, I often understand them perfectly well in person but the same person talking about the same thing is hard to understand for me over the phone. If I watch something on TV and I can’t see their face, I feel compelled to turn up the volume way higher than I would for English. Language is harder than we think, but our brains are really good at using all information at its disposal and making it feel deceptively easy.