Speaker 1: Let's look at a big time. Wolk short circuit right wing author Bethany Mandel,
who actually wrote a book about Wokeness, was asked what is woke? And she visibly short
circuits. The interviewer is Briahna Joy Gray, who recently attacked me, but yet am still praising
her for asking this basic question because it is a question that should be asked. It's almost I mean,
quite frankly, it's one of these things where it's like, who's the president right now? We
use it as a as a sanity check for a lot of right wingers. What do you mean by woke? It's such an
obvious some are calling it a gotcha, but it's not a gotcha in that it's so obvious. And if
you're going to talk about Wokeism and if you're going to attack Wokeism and talk about all of the
reasons why Wokeism is bad, you should be prepared to explain what it is. And here is Bethany Mandel
asked about her book Stolen Youth How radicals are embracing innocence and indoctrinating a
generation. Sounds very scary. And it's scary because of woke. What is woke? Well, let's see
if she can explain it. You might be surprised by what she does or maybe better said. Doesn't say.
Speaker 2: Far left. Only 7% of Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of
them consider themselves to be woke. And so, you know, when we talk about changing you, would you
mind defining? Well, because it's come up a couple of times, I just want to make sure
we're all on the same page. So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that. This is going to be one of
those moments that goes viral. I mean. Speaker 1: Yes. But for a different
reason than she thinks. Speaker 2: Is something
that's very hard to define. And we've spent an entire chapter defining. It is sort of.
Speaker 1: Guys, you've got to read a whole chapter to understand what it is.
Speaker 2: The understanding that we need to retell, totally reimagined and redo society in
order to create hierarchies of oppression, right? Speaker 1: To create hierarchies of oppression.
What are you talking about, Bethany? Speaker 2: So I it's hard to explain
in a 15 seconds soundbite. Yeah. Time. Speaker 1: I mean, it's one of those things that.
Speaker 3: Everybody is weighing in in. Speaker 1: Okay, so this other dude basically
saves her. This is really, really wild. I mean, that is short circuiting like I have never seen
in a very long time in this sort of context. So a couple of different things. Anybody can lose their
train of thought. Truly, this isn't about, you know, if somebody said to you, hey, when you say
an apple, what exactly do you mean? And you might stumble because it might be like, well, you know,
I mean, around fruit, that's green. Oh, like a lime. Well, no, it's. It's a round fruit from
an apple tree. Oh, but yeah, but you can't say from an apple tree to define it like you could,
you could have difficulty with definitions in this way. And you can also lose your train of thought.
But the critical part when it comes to woke is, as I've been explaining to you for a long time,
it used to mean one thing, its meaning was perverted by the right. But many of those
who attack Wokeism don't actually understand what it is. And that mush mouth, confetti,
word salad, whatever it was doesn't get us any closer. So let me make it like,
abundantly clear to people what we're talking about. The original meaning of woke before
Republicans perverted it. And we've we've done a segment on this, but it should be included here
what it first met before being perverted by the right. The term woke simply meant I've become
aware of causes of social justice that I can support through activism. That's all it means. Oh,
I learned about the fact that public transit can be used in a discriminatory way. I've become woke
to that. Now I understand that that's an issue. Maybe I want to do something about it. That's what
woke initially meant. We might challenge a status quo or we might fight some kind of oppression, and
it's all to create a better world. That's what it meant. Okay. Now, Republicans when they say woke.
It's a shorthand for any idea or policy I don't like. That's on the left. Okay.
That's one version of it. Or also, it's a sort of conversation stopper, the same way that sometimes
people say that's offensive. Oh, but that's woke nonsense. That's fundamentally what it is. Now,
where Bethany Mandel gets into too into a problem here is that she wants to define it.
As the horrible negative thing that the right wants to make wokeness out to be. And
her physical struggle, I mean, she's having a physical struggle to actually spit it out
comes from the fact that it's not what they claim it to be. What the right wants to claim wokeness
to be is some kind of unfair, non evidence based, capricious, far left, socialistic or
communistic attempt to completely restructure the fundamentals of society in some kind of outrageous
Marxist worldview, you know, some some combination of that. And it sounds crazy when you say it.
And so Bethany Mandela's right, it's hard to distill her entire insane chapter about woke
into a 15 seconds soundbite, but it's hard because their view of what Wokeness is is a fantasyland,
imaginary piece of nonsense. So super interesting, super interesting. And I know you know that the
framing is, oh, everybody's going to make fun of her because she stumbled. No, the stumbling on
this particular issue is representative of the way that the right has perverted wokeness, but
also doesn't even really explain that perversion in an even remotely coherent way. That's what we
saw here. And it is absolutely fascinating to see and remember. Check out my segment to two
important segments on this. Number one, the Bill Maher segment, where he's asked to define woke.
And number two, my segment, they don't even know what woke means. Those two segments combined with
this one tell us 80 and 90% of what we need to know about the right's use of this term.