Pill Pod 215 - The New Woke Right ft. 1Dime - PlasticPills - Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Wocism is not anti American. It's actually is an American
as apple pie. You know. In fact, like I think
some of the worst aspects of politics that have spread
to the left come from America. It came from America
to France, rather than from France to America or from
Germany to America. It's actually if you really look at
someone on the right who understands this very well. There's

(00:20):
a guy named Paul Godfried. I think he's one of
the most sharpest minds on the conservative you know, he's
a scholar, so this is part of why. But Gottfried
actually has this great book called The Strange Death of
Marxism where he identifies like the death of Marxism and
he actually thinks, guys, guys, what has replaced Marxism is worse.
And he thinks that like James Lindsay and Peterson have

(00:42):
it backwards. That actually, like there's an americanization of politics
that spreads to France. Now, how does wokeism come to America. Well,
America is the capitalist power of the world. When there
is a shift in the capitalist economy globally, America is
at the center of that. And that you know, when
there's a shift in the economy. There's a shift in idea. Well,
in America, you have a you have a couple of

(01:02):
things going on, moved to producer, from producer to consumer
economy and to like what we call neoliberalism and throughout.
That would facilitate neoliberalism was the decline of class politics.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Hello academic or sorry, wow, I was about to do
the intro. You got the fucking academic insurance thing on
in my head. Now you're primed Jesus. Okay, hello plastic
pills listeners. Today we're looking at what might some might
see like a strange mutation in the cultural war, what
people are calling the so called woke right. I don't
think it was coined, but it was popularized by James

(01:49):
Lindsay uh So. The term claims that parts of the
new right, especially within mega and postliberal circles, are beginning
to mirror the very woke politics they claim to oppose.
According to him and others, they're kind of talking about
victimhood narratives, purity spirals, online mobs, and a heavy reliance
on a kind of identity politics but just flipped for

(02:11):
a different team. So we looked at four pieces that
will have in the show notes. One is like the
Rise of the Woke Right by John stosselin Reason Magazine,
which is like a libertarian magazine. We looked at is
there a Woke Right? By C. J. Angele and The
American Reformer, which I understand to be like a pretty
radical right wing rag online. Then we had how the

(02:34):
woke right replaced the woke Left by Thomas Chatterton Williams
in the Atlantic. And then finally the woke right is
a useless term by James and Till the Third. I
love it when people have the third in their name
in the American Conservative. I feel like that's such a
so distinguished, it's such an appropriate and name to have
writing for the American Conservative. You know, James until the

(02:55):
third anyway, So I guess the question is the woke
right a meaningful label or is it just a rhetorical
move I guess used to discredit some rising voices in
the post liberal rights and to talk about all this
is someone that I think is one of I think
maybe my favorite voice is especially when it comes to

(03:17):
political theory online. I was actually mentioning to Eric just
before that, you know, I have a few I don't
want to say a lot of friends, but I have
at least a few friends with podcasts, and I would
say that very few of them do I actually listen
to their podcast. But I do listen to Tony from
One Dime Radio and the one Dime YouTube channel, so

(03:37):
I will also have a link to his podcast and
YouTube channel in the show notes. I recommend it. It's
just Tony talking to different interesting people, usually political theory topics,
but also broadly political topics, i'd say, and I always
just find them super informative. So welcome Tony, thanks for
coming on the pillpod.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Hell yeah, second time around now I think you're back
now a victor on my pod as well. Yep, not
too long ago.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
You can find me talking ranting about sortition. But uh, anyways,
I guess maybe we'll give you the first, uh, a
first shot at this, Tony, Like, do you what do
you think about this? Obviously it's silly like in some ways,
but I mean, what do you think about this? This
term woke right? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Have you caught it? It's been around for a couple
of months.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
I guess I've been I've been saying there's a woke
right for a while. I just don't think those articles
were very good at describing what it is. James Lindsay
is somewhat onto something. I don't think James Lindsay is
as stupid as some say he is. Yeah, in that
he's pointing to something. I just don't think. He always

(04:42):
tries to bring it to Marxism, and I find that
so weird. I actually think Marxism is the antithesis of
woke politics. There is a kind of voke Marxism, but
I think Marxism is the antithesis of woke politics. But
I won't like give this whole, my whole spiel of
what I think wokeism and right wing wocism is because
that will take a while. But like I mean, first,
maybe I guess your guys' thoughts, Like, if we're going

(05:04):
to talk about right wing wokeism, how are we defining woke?
Like what is woke isness?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
That's a good question. I know, and I know that
Eric was thinking about this when we were initially talking
about doing this episode. I have no idea if you
ended up thinking this through or not, Eric, but I
know that you had thought you were thinking about it's semiological,
or at least just thinking about the term the etymology
of the term woke, right, it obviously originally came from
like black activist movements. I don't know, do you still
have thoughts about that, Eric.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Oh right, Yeah. This well, because the last couple of
weeks we were reading Dary does White Mythology, which is
basically about, well, this metaphor and the metaphorical basis, like
languages metaphorical top to bottom, and the way that words

(05:51):
kind of start out having almost like a common sense
literal meaning to acquiring another meaning where they're used metaphorically,
like they're meaning is transferred to something else, and there's
an implicit comparison then between those two things, like you know,
calling a man a pig, right, like just you know,
not literal's metaphor okay. And then but if you use

(06:14):
the metaphors enough, they lose their original literal meaning and
they become you know, like concepts like in metaphysics. That's
kind of kind of the argument he is evoking and
criticizing is that like progression towards concepts that are not
metaphorical whatsoever, when really they are. And I looked at

(06:35):
woke like that, you know, woke is a verb that
has become a noun. It is a action that people do,
awakening to you know, first from sleep, that's the literal meaning,
and then it becomes a kind of intellectual awakening, kind
of going back to the Enlightenment. But you know, as

(06:58):
words do, they become kind of rigid and categorical, you know,
so to be goes from a verb to a category. Being.
Thinking goes from a thing you do to like a
category thought, static category.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Same with woke.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Woke goes from like an intellectual awakening to being a
category of people.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
The woke.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
It's now a noun. It's now used as a noun.
It's a category, and it apparently is this just describes
this type of person. And now apparently it's growing to
take in people on the right as well. Now people
on the right can also be woke. And that was
the line that I was pursuing. And you know, actually,

(07:41):
really that's about as far as I got with it.
I mean, because Dary does argument is very difficult and
it's hard to just plug terms into it.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
And I definitely don't want to rehash I don't want
to rehash dereed. In fact, I was looking forward to
this episode as being a breath of fresh air from
fucking having to read Dereda. But yeah, I mean it exactly,
not exactly that this is the fresh air, but I
mean yeah, I mean I think that's like a kind
of a useful way to start, because it obviously started
off as one thing, and then it became like a descriptor,
and then it became a pejorative description, right, it became

(08:10):
a certain constellation, and like, at least the way that
it seems like Lindsay is talking about it here is
certainly something that to some extent I've noticed for a
long time, I guess, a certain constellation of behaviors of
silencing opposition, right, some sort of victimhood narrative, some sort

(08:30):
of like a very rigid us versus them, And I
think he's just saying that there's a similar pattern going on,
which is also something I would say that I've been
saying for a long time that like the more you
and I think we've talked about it on this podcast,
also through like psychoanalytic terms, like in Lacanian terms that
you know, canceling or these other behaviors on the grounds

(08:51):
that they're being victimized by some hegemonic group. Well, then
the people who are being accused of doing that can
risk becoming the mirror image of the thing that the
others accusing them of. And I've always thought that, like
there's always a risk that they can become mirror images
of each other. And I think in a way, that's
what James Lindsay is trying to identify here. And I
think one of the interesting things that James Lindsay, I

(09:13):
guess it surprised me as well. I mean, that's like
maybe a different conversation, but because I just assumed that
James Lindsay was totally like mega cult.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
He's a classical liberal, so he's he's always claimed to
be like this sort of enlightened centrist, neither far right
or far left. You know, I think he would be
more of a like a Democrat, really like a Bidenist,
something like Destiny in fact, Yeah, I would say Destiny
with less adderall. I mean, the guy has a PhD.

(09:43):
He's not like completely incompetent. Yeah, I mean that that
demonstrates a level of competence. He might not know what
he's talking about when he talks about Marxism, yeah, but
like for sure he's not He's not a guy who
doesn't think about things. I will say, though, what Eric
was getting at with wocism semiological approaches the exact approach
I take to kind understanding wocism. So I have an article.

(10:05):
If anyone wants to check it out, It's on Patreon,
but I won't keep it there because I only have
it on Patreon because I want to get initial thoughts. Okay,
but it's right now. It's an article that just presents
the hypothesis, which is that, you know, I really attempt
to define what wocism just like is if out of
pinpoint a definition, Wocism is a style of politics that

(10:27):
presupposes that the awakening of a correct consciousness is the
pre requisite to political solidarity. So like the basis of
that politics succeeding is contingent on others being awakened. It's
not this approach of you know, making compromises with different

(10:47):
people forming an alliance. Is No, it's about people awakening.
You have to have the right beliefs, the right etiquette.
It's almost anti political, which is why I call it
anti political politics, because politics itemologically, you know, is about
the pole, which is people coming together, you know, and
making decisions on behalf of a community. What is best
for a community? I think of woke politics, it's very

(11:10):
antithetical to that. Woke politics is all about do you
have the correct views? And I tie the origin of
woke politics to the second and first, the first and
second great awakenings and particularly you know, the rise of evangelicalism,
and so that we mentioned, you know, semiology, the importance
of it. I really wanted to look at like, you know,

(11:30):
woke because everyone likes to only go to the etymology
of its popularization in America with the black community, and
with that it's really it's Marcus Garvey. Actually you kind
of heavily popularizes the word state like the slag saying
stay woke, but it gets more popular with like this song,
and then it gets popular in the nineties is when
it really takes off, when it's like stay woke became

(11:51):
a thing among Black communities that then later got you know,
kind of you could say, co opted by you know,
people outside of that, and it's snowballed into million different things.
But I do think people have a sense of what
like a woke style of politics is because a lot
of people do use it as nothing other than a
disguise to attack progressivism. They might actually like oppose you know,

(12:17):
civil rights politics, they might oppose you know, even just
progressive politics a from a conservative point. But I think, like,
you know, there's an intuitive reaction to woke politics that's
not the same for just progressive politics in general. And
people have trouble defining it, but they'll say kind of intuitively, oh,
they're like woke, and you know, the woke right. What

(12:39):
I think Lindsay does correctly is he associates sort of groupthink,
he associates dogmatism. And you know, one example that I
gave in my sort of like hypothesis of all this
is actually the Satanic panic is sort of, you know,
another example of right wing wocism.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
That's a good example. I've thought about that before too.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
My position on the term it's like woke in the
pejorative way it's been used since say, like the twenty tens,
is that it is. You know, it's a term that
originates on the right, and it's meant as a pejorative
term for certain tendencies among the left that the right
view as extreme or radical. So I don't think it

(13:21):
is really a term meant to describe anything. It's one
of those labels, right, and it's like woke, it's nice,
it's quick, it's one syllable right. It beats it beats
social justice, worrior, it beats cultural Marxism, like all those
terms which are roughly synonymous for what woke is. Woke

(13:41):
is just this catchy, quick term that can be used
to dismiss leftist ideas. So James Lindsay is trying to
come up with this new category, or expand the woke
category to the right by accusing people like Tucker Carlson
of being a right wing version of woke right or

(14:02):
like the Christian nationalist.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Do they say that about Tucker?

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yeah, he should say that about Tucker.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
He says that Tucker Carlson may be like the arch
wokeist on the right right or something like that. And
James Lindsay also calls it woke fascism. He actually uses
woke fascism as a synonym for his turn.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Instead of Marxism. It's there's woke fascism.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
He's onto something there.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
Well, you have to look at it from two ways.
You have to look at it from who is Lindsay
trying to call woke on the right, and what is
their response to being called woke? Right, So you can
go look at Tucker Carlson's response. It's quick, it's dismissive.
How can you be woke? And on the right makes
no side, scrib bro, But like Lindsay is trying to
describe two things with this term that he's trying to

(14:51):
describe the radical far right as woke because they're again
a mirror of the left. Woken is on the left
being very obsessed with identity and race and gender. There's
a mirror of that, where on the radical right they're
very focused on whiteness and males and being victimized. You know,

(15:14):
who is a more persecuted group in America than white
Christian males? Right, All that's so woke of you to
be so focused on your fucking identity and all the
categories are there, religion, gender, and.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Race?

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Right, white male Christian? Yeah, that's woke, that's right wing
identity politics. These are points that mac mcman has made
way back with postmodern conservatism, that conservatism tends to mirror
arguments that the that the left has made, you know,
and James Lindsay even brings this up in his discussion.
He talks about legitimacy by paralogy, which is a term

(15:54):
he got from reading Leotard's Postmodern Condition. He says, what
wokeness boils down to, one of the ways you can
boil it down is to legitimacy by paralogy, which is
like coming up with new game, new moves in the
language games. Right, Like Leotard was very into Wickenstein's later work,
and he took up the idea of language games and

(16:14):
and but for him, yeah, wokeness is like a kind
of that kind of thing, like you identify truth with power,
you reduce everything to language games, and you could just whatever,
throw in anybody else. Now, Fuco does this right, performative contradiction.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Man, Well that's that's that I find funny because to me,
actually Fuco, I I just really dislike Fuco. But I
don't think Fuco is a woke example of voke politics
at all.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Oh yeah, this is all simplification, this is the narrative
he's presenting.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
I don't think any of the postmodern thinkers are really woke.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Just that what woke people do. Bastardize Fucodianism though to
make their argument.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, you know, no, anybody who tries to do what
dary Do does inevitably does a worse version of Darida.
Anyone who tries to do Fuco and does a worse
for it, because you're not fucking Fuco, Right, was it?
Like I want to paint like Picasso? How do I
do that? Well, you can't because you're not fucking Picasso.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
It's not that they're trying to be fou Co. It's
that they use the tools that they think Fuco gave
them to analyze society. And then and I think maybe
misunderstand what he was saying, but I don't know if.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
I do think like all that postmodern Frankfurt's like that
comp toly misses what I think, like that gets us
off what woke is.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, that's all the framework for like wokeism in general.
And what Lindsay is saying is that people on the right,
who he's calling the woke right, are sort of starting
to mirror these things that the left is doing, and
and their version of wokeness is to be focused on
you know, white male victimhood and the other aspect of

(17:48):
it other than the far right is Christian nationalist right.
So the anti war people, the anti war maga people
remember how like before Iran was by the United States,
there was a big split in the MAGA movement because
originally one of the pillars of MAGA was end of
forever wars, no more wars, and then now Trump is

(18:11):
going to bomb Iran, and he does, and then afterwards
Maga's completely on boards.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
That's not true, though, I don't know. I fear a
lot of leftists say that, Like I've paid a lot
of attention to the MAGA people are very divided over that.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
I think they're I think they're dumb forever thinking he
was going to get them out of war, but they
definitely often did believe that, like a lot of them.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
This is why Carlson surprisingly is getting called the like
archwoke person on the right is because he, him and
Steve Bannon and all of them have explicitly come out
as against the Iran war.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, but I don't I don't know if is that
really why they're called woke though, Like, I don't know
if I agree with that.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Yeah, because if you're not for if you're not.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
I don't think Bannon's woke. I think Christian nationalism is
example of woke. But you know, I can get into
why I.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Want your reaction though, Eric to the definition that Tony
put on the table, because I feel like he is
definition gets to something that I think is crucial, which
is like the kind of dogmatism. And I like that
you call it anti political, Like I think that's a
good that's like a good insight, like because what you're
saying woke is what it's getting at is it seems
to me that like when you're awake to some truth,

(19:22):
that's the truth that if you're not accepting, like you're
kind of dead to us. It is reading between the
lines is sort of like the implication of your definition.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
It's consciousness based politics fundamental, and.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
It's like if you're not on it, and it's like
anyone who disagrees with us like isn't worth anything. And
that is anti political because political is like about like disagreement,
it's about people coming together and having legitimacy. And I think, like,
I agree with you. I actually really like that definition
because I think like that is in a way what
can mark what people object to on the left. It's like, yeah,

(19:57):
there are obviously like Eric is right in the sense
that there are are obviously like opportunists that use the
term woke as a weapon to just delegitimize all left ideas.
Obviously that happens, but that doesn't mean that there's not
like a real quarter of the left that has been
conducting politics in this very dogmatic way in in the
definition that Tony put forward. And now I think what

(20:20):
Lindsay and others, I guess like are trying to identify
as like that same pattern of kind of dogmatism, like
if you're not up on the truth, like you know,
you should be canceled. Like all that stuff is connected
I think to this sort of like have access to
the real truth and if you don't have, if you're
not willing to accept it, then like you're not really

(20:41):
worth engaging with. And I'm just curious, Eric, like what
you think about that.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
I like the overall idea that that there's a kind
of anti politics that woke is trying to describe. But
what was confusing when I started looking into what the
woke right is and what I'm still a little bit
confused about, but I feel like I have a bit
more handle on is the term is fundamentally incoherent. It

(21:08):
is trying to do different things and it means different
things in different mouths. Right, So you have Lindsay who
is a centrist, republican, classical liberal, just like Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson also a classical liberal, and he's not really
a Christian, as we're all now learning, He's just he
flirts with Christian ideas, but he's kind of a nihilist.

(21:31):
He's in that sort of camp. Who's going to be
where this term is originating from James Lindsay and who
are they trying to put it on. They're trying to
put it on people like Tucker Carlson, like Candice Owens.
They even brought up Mitt Romney for kind of being
sympathetic to the BLM movement. They bring in a bunch
of different people, right, And so that's why I think
it's fundamentally incoherent. Like it's a term. It's a pejorative

(21:55):
term first of all, So it's being used to try
to criticize parts of the right that are maybe going
out of line. And so when James Lindsay calls Carlson woke,
he says, they're not real conservatives, they're liberals that have
mistaken themselves for conservatives. There, James Lindsay and and Jordan
Peterson are liberals. He says they're not true conservatives, whereas

(22:18):
Lindsay says, no, these woke right people aren't true conservatives.
They fell what James Linden.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Lindsay is a liberal, like he calls himself that, like
old a classical liberal. He's like a Diverban type of guy,
you know, except David Rubbin. Now is this Trump is Dave.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Rubin is actually an idiot too, like, way more of
an idiot than James Lindsay.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Oh yes, I don't even know how to locate them
on the political spectrum. But like James Lindsay's story is
like after World War Two, right, you have this rise
of neo conservatism, Bill Buckley, and they marginalize all the
quote unquote true conservatives and they become the central hegemonic
voice within the on the right. Is these this neo

(23:01):
conservative group right who who for him, I guess are
kind of at the roots of wokeness on the right
because they're super interventionists.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Is that what Lindsay says. I It seemed to me
like actually Lindsay's supported the marginalization of the radical movements.
That's kind of like what he likes about the old conservatism.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, yeah, maybe because the neocons, I guesss are radical
neocons are conservative liberals. That's liberal conservatives. Yeah he could.
He kind of described them as liberal conservatives. They marginalize
the true conservatives who are like the paleo.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
Conservatives, Conservatives, Christian rusts.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah so and those groups which I don't know. This
is why it's so hard to figure out, because I
think the term is a bit incoherent. It's like one
of those what do we call them on the left
contested terms signific Yeah, they're floating. It's a float right now.
It hasn't been nailed down. It hasn't had its it's
its moment of like that poan.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, no, it definitely has not. It definitely has not out.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
It's contested. It's floating around. They're hurling it at each other,
you know, the classical liberals are calling the far right
people that, and the far right people are calling them
woke and like, it's just going around. It has no
basic agreed upon meaning at the moment, but it does
have this sort of trend towards you know, people who

(24:23):
are say against bombing Iran become woke right because they
don't think that they're anti Semitic.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Has anybody actually said that? So, I haven't heard anybody
bring up foreign policy with regard to woke Maybe that's
a recent development. I don't know, Tony, what what do
you think about that?

Speaker 3 (24:39):
I picked up these things in my blitz of blitz
of looking into it the past couple of days. So
I could be wrong. I could be getting my wires
crossed a bit on some of these things. But that's
the general vicinity that I've found this term to be.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Because I don't know that Lindsay would be excited about.
I mean, I sound like I'm fucking defending James Lindsay
and he's a fucking he's kind of a nutcase, well
like in his own weird way. But uh, sorry, Tony,
I want you to I want to get your reaction
to what Eric has been talking about.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
If you allow me, I can give him what I
think is a genealogy of wokeism on the left, please
and broadly on the right. I just want to say so,
out of all the books I've come across in wokeness,
the best one by far has been Moss al Garby's
We Have never been woke, but I still think it
definitionally doesn't nail it down is enough enough? Because yeah,
you're right, like people just throw around this term to

(25:28):
describe stuff they don't like. Frankly, they're very ideological and
how they apply that term. However, I think it applies
to something because if you notice, even the way it's
applied by the left, it doesn't it's not necessarily applied
by the right to the left. It's not applied to
everyone on the left. Bernie Sanders is not usually called woke.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
I've never heard him called woke.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
What do you call say woke? You don't think of
Bernie Sanders even though Bernie Sanders, so you know, he's
not against rights for black people, LGBT people or anything
like that. He's not a Christian nationalist, he's not a conservative.
He's a progressive to the left of a lot of
those woke people. Right, So it's not extremism either. It's
definitely a style of politics. Yes, So the etymology here,

(26:10):
I want to go back to the you know this
word awakening, because why do I center evangelicalism at the
origin of wokeism. Evangelical Christianity is profoundly different from the
rest of Christianity, not just Catholicism, but other Protestantisms, in
that for evangelicals, they believe that what is most important

(26:32):
is not even like the practices, it's the belief in Jesus.
Belief is the most important thing for the evangelicals. Not
only that you have to come to that belief yourself,
you have to be awakened. This is why, you know,
a synonym often for evangelicals is being a born again Christian,
because you have to come to that conclusion yourself. It's

(26:52):
not enough to just simply be born into it, go
to church, do what you're supposed to do. No, no,
you have to come to that correct conclusion yourself. There
is a real belief in, you know, a superiority in
those who come willingly to the truth of Jesus Christ.
And like, this is something that's actually very uniquely American.

(27:12):
I mean, Evangelicalism spread much outside America since then, but
America and the democratization of Christianity played a large role
in this. And it's like, this is what's interesting to
me is wokeism is not anti American. It's actually is
as American as apple pie. You know, in fact, like,
I think some of the worst aspects of woke politics
that have spread to the left come from America, not

(27:34):
like these foreign countries. Like if you look at some
of the worst politics that have spread in the left
came from America to France, rather than from France to
America or from Germany to America. It's actually if you
really look at someone on the right who understands this
very well. There is a guy named Paul Godfried. I
think he's one of the most sharpest minds on the

(27:54):
conservative You know, he's a scholar, so as part of
why but I don't agree with them ideologically he's a paleo.
But Gottfried actually has this great book called The Strange
Death of Marxism where he identifies like the death of
Marxism and he actually thinks, guys, guys, what has replaced
Marxism is worse. And he thinks that like James Lindsay
and Peterson have it backwards, that actually, like the kind

(28:17):
of new left that's you know, emerged, its tendencies kind
of come from America and that in a there's an
americanization of politics that spreads to France. Now, how does
wokeism come to America. Well, America is the capitalist power
of the world. When there is a shift in the
capitalist economy globally, America is at the center of that. Culturally,
in what if you're a Marxist you kind of see

(28:39):
Now I'm not like a doctor in air Marxist, but
I do take a materialist framework to a lot of
these things. And that you know, when there's a shift
in the economy, there's a shift in ideology. And in
America you have a couple of things going on, moved
to a producer, from producer to consumer economy and to
like what we call neoliberalism and throughout. That would facilitate

(28:59):
neoliberalism was the decline of class politics for a lot
of reasons, you know, the failure of communism, failure of
Soviet union, but also the crackdown on unions like this,
the sheer crackdown on unions, globalization that allowed for jobs
to be shipped everywhere. You just have a huge decline
in class politics. Now what do you get out of that?

(29:19):
You get at the kind of moment when you start
having a gradual decline of class politics, an emergence of
consciousness raising politics. This is kind of you know what
people associate with the sixties left. And this is where
a lot of people like Gabriel Rockhill, you know, who
are left critics of this sort of thing, get kind
of wrong. They think that this caused the decline of
class politics, that like, you know, cultural politics is Western Marxism,

(29:43):
that Western Marxism, you know, distracted us from real Marxism.
But what they get wrong is actually, like the decline
of Marxism is what caused the rise of the cultural politics,
not the other way around. And like this kind of
because there was a real lack of class politics, but
you also have real problems society. What do you get
out of that? So you kind of get you know,
race politics changes, waste, civil rights activism changed in the

(30:09):
seventies is actually really interesting to see because you go
from a kind of attempt at politics of emancipation. You
see this with Martin Luther King right that ultimately believes
in a universality of humankind. It's thver a universality universalists.
So it's almost like post racial right with you started
getting the rise of like black nationalism. Now, I'm not

(30:30):
one of these people who thinks black nationalism is equally
bad as white nationalism or anything in terms of effects,
it's ridiculous. But black nationalism is very focused in that,
you know, believing in the idea of a black nation
presupposes that there is a shared essence, a shared consciousness
or shared possible consciousness among black people. It's actually kind
of the mirror of racism, you know, the idea of

(30:51):
having a shared whiteness, a white culture. It's totally illusory
because if at the level of material reality, white people
are you know, completely different and like Finland and Russia
and England, I mean just as different as people you know,
might like far more different than like black and white
Americans are. Not to mention Africans right ask tell a

(31:11):
African person you're black, They'll be like, well, what do
you mean. You know, it's like they'll say, like you,
you know, like the talk about black nation to African person,
They'll look at you like you're crazy, because African countries
are so different from one another, and African people internally
so divided some different groups. I mean, at the level
of material reality, you see that this woke politics is illusory.

(31:33):
But that's the thing about woke politics. It's about consciousness first.
It's ultimately about the idea of being people with a
shared sense of consciousness have this solid area together. You know.
You get this as a result of the decline of
class politics. So it's not like engineered by the CIA
or whatever. They didn't have to do that, you know.

(31:54):
I mean, yes, there is like Culture Congress and cultural
freedom and stuff like that, but like, I don't think
that was necessary, that that might have just aided what
was already happening. And like, you know, an interesting case
in woke politics is the evolution of Malcolm X. Malcolm
X is somebody who I would say very much embodied
for most of his life, you know, at least ever

(32:15):
since you know, I was in prison, got out of
prison and was an activist. He kind of embodied I
would say, like black wokeism, but he actually kind of
firmly turned against it.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
You know.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
It's part of when he realizes the Nation of Islam
as a cult, that this form of politics, that is
the idea that you know, black people need to just
find go their separate way and you know, adopt a
separate religion, you know, being Islam. It's just not the
basic good basis of a political solidarity to actually change anything.
And he actually regrets some of his comments. He said
about you know, white people not being able to join

(32:47):
the cause, because there's that famous scene where you know
that's it's depict in the movie, but he talked about
in real life where a white girl asked, what can
I do? And she's like, white people can just stay out,
and you know, again it's very like kind of I mean,
you know, there's also within this sort of community a
very against race mixing. You get the sort of dodgy stuff.
But you know, he kind of, you know, unfortunately he

(33:09):
was assassinated before you could really see his thought evolve,
but I mean, he'd very much turned kind of against
that towards the end of his life. I would also say,
you know, the Black Panthers were a Marxist politics that
were not Wocust politics. But when you get the decline
of the Panthers due to complex set of reasons, what
replaces the Panthers is actually like black nationalist groups like

(33:31):
the Black Liberation Army. And you know, you could say
even today that what is the Black Panther Party? Officially?
It's you know, against race mixing. It's you know, very
this idea, a very essentialized idea of what black people
are and you know this. Okay, so this is race
woke politics, but there's actually a Marxist woke politics too,
and this might surprise people. Under Stalin you get actually

(33:52):
kind of the origin of standpoint epistemology, which is one
of the things that people associate with wokeism. Standpoint of pistemology.
You know, this idea that your position racially in terms
of gender and even class, it like determines your worldview.
And of course there's some truth in that, but like
it it determines right. It gives you as an authority

(34:13):
on truth. That's interesting. But like the way in which
class politics was used in Stalin's USSR was to kind of,
you know, I was ultimately availed to persecute people. But
it would often say, there's this idea of like proletarian
consciousness and a bourgeois consciousness. If you look at what
like Marks thought, it's not that's not like the way

(34:34):
he thought of it. But there was this idea of
like the idea of class consciousness got very much bastardized
to mean that if you're working class, that's the only
way you can have the correct perspective, and if you're
like a Kulac, for example, you just can't really like
be taken seriously. It's what you have to say about it.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Well, that was kind of wasn't that nascently there in
like the Hagel master slave dialectic a little bit that
like that's like that that idea, right that like the
slave has insight that the master doesn't have.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Well, that's what I was going to bring up, not
take it back to Hegel, but at least say, you know,
class consciousness is something Marx talks about and sees as
fundamental to the emergence of communism is you know, the
working class becoming conscious of its economic position within the totality.
I mean, you just can't do without that, right, And

(35:20):
this is where all.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
The ideology class consciousness.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
Well, peasants in Russia were a different thing, right. He's
obviously got that letter to Zasulitch later in his life
and how he thought.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
Class consciousness not not peasant consciousness. That's very important. But
why does he working class?

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Why does he center the work working class?

Speaker 1 (35:39):
It's because of the real material power. It's not because
of like class figuring out that they're oppressed. The way
in which class consciousness gets used later on is to
this idea that like you have a perspective because of that.
But for Marx, it's like it's you're the in the
reality that actually matters, the objective reality. So like workers,
it's not just a matter of like figuring out we're oppressed.

(36:03):
It's because they could actually do something when the way
that peasants couldn't, you know, like they were like they
can actually organize where that's why I'm I don't yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
But then the reason I would think that, well, we
were looking at Wilhelm Reich and the early sort of
ideology studies people, and you could include the Frankfurt school too.
The reason they turned to ideology as an as trying
to explain why, you know, the revolution wasn't happening, How's

(36:33):
how's are these wars? How's the twentieth century so unenlightened
in terms of these wars? Right when there's massive like
worker unrest and all the workers seem to be abandoning
or not reaching class consciousness and instead allying themselves with
like the fascists or the bourgeois, and they're looking at
these questions like why is this happening? Right, and they

(36:56):
turn to ideology, They say you can't just explain this
with material conditions. You need to think about the subjective
element of history too, which is consciousness, and that's an
important part.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
Sure, so it originates with like Haygeld too, right, with
the dialect the subject object dialectic, and I mean you
could trace this complicated history, but like do like.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
Not divorced from material conditions. Like in the case of MARCUSA.
He's often understood as a guy who thinks people are
just like brainwashed or whatever. But like for him, the
whole basis of the one dimensional society is the fact
that capitalism really does deliver the good. I mean he
says that like over and over that the reason why
this works, the reason why people are able to buy
into the system is because they buy into the system.

(37:37):
I mean they do get like cheap commodities. So like
the ideology, that's part of it. So it's like, I
think the Frankfurt school are truer to Marxist view in
that they actually like they look at the superstructure and
base in a kind of dialectic as opposed to something
that is you know, like vulgar vulgar Marxist like economic vulgar. Yeah,
they're not vulgar Marxist, they're just I think they're really

(37:57):
Marxists in that respect.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
I also think, I mean, I don't know, like at
least the way James Lindsay tells the story, like like
complimenting what you were saying, I liked what you were
saying about, sort of flipping flipping around Gabriel rock Hill's
kind of narrative, saying it's actually like the decline of

(38:20):
Marxism that that opened the way towards kind of identity politics. Whatever.
I don't like using the term wokeism because I think
it's fundamentally pejorative and dismissive.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
But that's the episode we're doing, or error.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
Call it whatever the hell you want. Yeah, anyway, yeah,
attention to issues other than class, like the sixties whatever. Yeah,
he says, you know, the neo Okay, we discussed this earlier,
the rise of neo conservatism. He says, marginalized woke fascism,
right woke fascism saw itself as the check on the left,

(38:56):
on the radical elements of the left. Now, he says,
when when new conservatism rose in the sixties seventies, with
like Bill Buckley and people like that, which we've done
a bit of an e we did a few episodes
on this earlier. Actually, from his perspective, they marginalized the
woke right, the woke fascists, that's true, and.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
So these sort of destroyed the KKK the FBI. A
lot of people don't remember that. Well when I mean,
it didn't get obliterated, but that like KKK was far
bigger than it was like today today, it's like an
insignificant force.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Well, yeah, I did know that the FBI did a
lot of like of undercover operations where they had people
in all the KKK cells and kind of disrupted I
don't know how they just like, you know, dismantled it.
But I know that I knew that. I knew that.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
So the way the way Tucker Carlson reacted to being
called woke right was to say, well, they're neo cons,
and neo cons were originally on the left anyway. Weren't
they all Trotskyists to begin with? Weren't they American Trotskyists
to begin with, Which isn't fucking true at all, But
that's the narrative on the right, is that the neo

(40:03):
conservatives used to be Trotskyists and Marxist Leninists and part
of the American Marxist parties in the early twentieth century,
and then they had this disillusionment and went over to
the right. And now we can say they're not really
right because they weren't right from the beginning. Like, I
don't know that's the cope anyway, The on Tucker Carlson's

(40:24):
part and the cope, I mean a lot of them
are just to say. The other cope with it is
to say, well, the Christian nationalists will say, well, we're
not woke because woke is fundamentally like a leftist term,
and we're not on the left, we're on the right,
so we can't be woke.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
And then the right left is like, woke is a
rightst term, yeah, which yeah, I think buys into the narrative.
It's a mirror. I think it's neither left or right.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
Ironically, it's a term that originates on the right to
hurl at the left as a pejorative label, and then
it has another different, very different history before that than
like the black movements, black liberation movements and stuff like
that as well, but it evolved into this very pejorative term.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
We should also I think we should also be very
careful in saying that though, because like you know, I
always this is the narrative I always heard, and when
I when I looked into it, I was like, wait,
wait a minute. You know, this is a common defense
of like wokeism, is that this idea that I originated
with black liberation movements, but it's actually very specific kind
of black liberation movements is not like just black politics

(41:29):
in general. I mean, you know, I mean one of
the first people to really use the term woke stay
woke is actually Garvy. And if you know, like what
Garvey's politics where they're completely insane, I mean, Marcus Garvey
is often like you know, it's easy to like the
like you know, because there're people like black nationalist iconography,
the flags, I understand it. But black nationalism is ironically

(41:51):
a very American centric thing. It's known it's never really
been taken seriously in the third world, in actual African countries,
because like you know, Harvey had this idea of like
uniting black people under a common state. Really, I mean
you really thought like African Americans had more in common
with black people in Africa because and that's like I'm

(42:13):
literally ironically believing in racism. I mean, because the sociologically
is total rubbish. I mean, like the idea that like
black and black Americans are far more in common with
white Americans than they are like someone somewhere worth a
completely different language, completely different religion. I mean, you know,
there's this great moment of Floyd Mayweather when he's asked

(42:34):
an interview, you know, the famous boxer. This is a
great moment where he was asked, you know, how does
it feel to be the first African American person with
like five hundred million dollars or whatever or some question
like this it was, and he said, let's stop using
this word black African American. Man, I'm American. What makes
me different from my opponent today? Like I'm American. Stop

(42:56):
using this. And I actually kind of like this, because, like,
if we're to actually moved beyond racism, the best way
to not to like get rid of racism is to
stop reifying race. I really think that.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Also, what you said reminds me of that great scene
in The Sopranos. I don't know, I often think about
that scene. I don't know, if you're a fan Tony,
if you watch the sopranos. But maybe maybe maybe it
was before your time. I'm not sure, but I.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Have friends who do. And it's too long for me
to start, but I would like to.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
It's good. It's a great show. There's just there's just
like a moment where like you can feel the Italian
Americans sort of like reifying Italian culture and they kind
of have this fantasy and they have like someone who
came over from Naples who's working for them, and they're
like talking about how they want to celebrate Columbus Day
parade because he's like a great Italian and like the
actual Italian guys like I fucking hate Columbus because he's

(43:47):
from the North and he's like the fucking North are
always fucking over the South. And they're all like confused,
and they're like.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Have you seen the TV show Dear White People? No?
I have, Actually I can't. I still don't really know
if it's parody or not, because to me it seems
like a parody of vocism. If it's not, that's really bad.
But I think as a parody of vocism and its contradictions.
The language of Stay Woke is explicitly used by the characters. Yeah,
but you see the contradictions of that politics play out
in the show. It's very brilliant. But you know, I'm

(44:15):
sympathetic to the aims. That's why I want to like
not do this thing where you're equating like black pro
black activists and like white nationalists. It's very different.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
I was actually about to say, like it's useful for me.
Maybe it's useful to like resituate ourselves to thinking about
it as like, is it convincing to think of it
as like more of a style of politics than a
content of politics, right, because the content, because obviously we're
going to be like more sympathetic to like all the
like left woke content in a certain sense, but then

(44:48):
we can still be like kind of disturbed or at
least in disagreement with the style, right, which is which
is this kind of like dogmatism, this kind of like
rigid insider outsider kind of essentialism, which sometimes it can
be strategic essentialism, which I don't agree with. You know,
this under sort of strategic essentialism of Spevac. But uh,

(45:09):
but but like yeah, but I don't know, Eric, what
do you think?

Speaker 3 (45:13):
I was just on that last point. I just thought
it was funny that that James Lindsay defines woke in
general as like an epistemology, and he defined it. I
wrote down his wording he said. He said it was
a preference for knowledges from outside of the hegemonic truth.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
That was weird.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yeah, that's what woke.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
That's what he says woke is.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
So you're a dissenter, You're just a dissident.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Yeah, like oh yeah. That clearly identified him as like
a centrist right of center person right because he applies
this label.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
That's how he defines right and the whole left.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
He said, it's a preference for knowledge from outside of
the dominant truth regime. So that's like the ideas like
like rewriting history revisionism is a woke move that right
wing people are now starting to do. Victimhood right, posing
putting yourself, like putting the white person as the victim
of structural oppression, right is woke. Right for him, digging

(46:11):
up the past of people to cancel them for him,
that is woke move. Baldfaced lies to people like I
don't know who you just you always accuse people you
disagree with of just lying through their teeth whatever. But
that's what he says, lying is woke right, Like, of course,
of course.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
I said those articles are pretty bad by it. I
didn't I don't want to call him actually defining it.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
Well, this is him he's using So so the where
this term is coming from is James Lindsay is going
on this podcast called Triggernometry, and he is trying to
launch his concept from there. So I watched a bunch
of their content trying to get their fucking definitions and
what the goddamn hell is this term mean and what
are they doing with it? And who is it being
applied to? And I wrote down names of the people

(46:56):
they brought up they describe as as woke right, and like,
that's where I got the name Tucker Carlson from. And
this is why Tucker Carlson dismisses it and calls the
neokons fake conservatives because they were liberals originally, he says, right,
And it's being applied to It's being applied as part
of the contest within like over in within the right,

(47:22):
over bombing Iran right. If you're against it, you're anti
Semitic and therefore woke. If you're for it, you are
obsessed with whiteness and pretending that jewishness is a form
of whiteness, and that whiteness is victimized by structural oppression.
So you're woke, right, So it means opposite things. It
is a contradictory concept. At the moment, maybe a dominant

(47:46):
meaning will come out and it will be start to
be used in a very concerted and coherent way, But
right now the term is fundamentally incoherent. Woke fascism woke right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
I mean, you know, I agree. I think I think
we can spend all day kind of attacking you know,
these sort of low hanging fruits. But like if I think,
if we if we want to get into like what
is bright wing wocism? Okay, I think a very easy
litmus test to tell if someone like a falls under
the kind of category of woke style politics. You know,

(48:19):
the word wake up, awakening frequently shows up in their language.
I mean, it's really not that hard a spot. Look
at Richard Spencer's advertisement. I was around like the Charlotteessville time,
like twenty sixteen fifteen. There's this advertisement he produced which
was like trying to scare people about the white genocide, right,

(48:39):
and you know, at the end of it, which was
like way, it's time to wake up, and it was
like this like or red pill, red pill. Yeah, red
pill is a good, very good example. You know, we
wake like, you know, wake up to the fact that
men are actually being totally like you know, enslaved by whatever.
You know, it's just okay. But the about red pill,
as I view it as like more consciously a cultural phenomenon,

(49:04):
it's right, but it is that is a style of
woke politics because it's about waking up. But really it's
a problem. There's only really a problem. Woke politics is
only a problem, and the problem is only when it
prevents you from doing something you want to do. It's
something that is an obstacle. So if you're a right
wing are why is wocism a problem on your If
you're a left wing or why is wokeism a problem?

(49:26):
I think? Okay, if we're to look at examples of
right wing politics, one of them is, you know, white nationalism,
race based politics, which presupposes a kind of consciousness among
white people. I mean, you know, it's kind of what
the race and IQ debate's about. At the end of
the day, it's trying to like divide people among these
lines and you know what they're capable of intellectually and stuff.

(49:49):
And you look at Christian nationalism, which I think is
really the origin of wocism, as I mentioned, you know,
because it's it's very specific type. It's this idea that
it's not like, oh, anyone can just join the club
or you're born into the club. No, it's like you
come to this yourself. And that's why there's a kind
of zelotry in the evangelical movement that's unparalleled in other

(50:12):
Christian movements. Something also very powerful. I mean, they have strength. Actually,
I won't say it's always a liability. It's a liability
politically because you with that kind of politics if you
believe that the only way to the only way, I
have the correct ideas, if you become awakened to this
set of you know views, It's why evangelicalism doesn't really

(50:34):
like win politically, even though it does like have an influence,
but like it, no president gets elected being like an
evangelical zealot like and if they do, they have to
really compromise their own ideas, even like the most you
know who used to be the evangelical's favorite president, Ronald
Reagan did a lot of things they didn't like. I mean,
he's I think no fault there's a no no fault divorce.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
But I mean I think I read about that something
like that, Like there's a bunch of stuff that happened
under his administry.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Aggressive things happen under Reagan that they did not want,
you know, I mean, black Supreme Court justice, you get
that too. I mean I don't I don't know if
they're I don't know if they would be against that actually,
because the Christian Nationalists isn't always very racial no racist, no, yeah, well,
but I did I.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Beg to differ on that point because.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Sometimes I think car I think Tucker Carlson is a racist,
but like that's my.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Yeah, I do too, I do too, but I just
just let me quickly quickly, Eric, I just want to
I kind of want to ask you though, because like
I feel like you're kind of doing this thing. Maybe
you can correct where like you're like, Okay, this concept's
in coherent and it's sort of like a bit of
a handwaybe like move like to kind of be like, well,
this doesn't matter. But like I just think.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
I'm not saying it doesn't matter I'm not saying it
doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Okay, okay, because because there's a bunch of concepts that
like are incoherent, but they're having like quite substantive effects
on society, I'm not sure that. Well, I mean, I
do think that like wokeness or accusations of wokeness and
the fact that like it is pointing to some style
that people recognize, where like I think they're like it
was a reason why Trump won at least in part,

(52:06):
Like I think that that they were and a lot
of that is just right wing propagandists, but a lot
of it is because they were able to point to
real behaviors, real styles of politics, to kind of use
the way that Tony situates it that that people found
objectionable and we're like, well, I don't want to vote
for those people who are like, you know, for whatever
canceling or silencing or example are looking at.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
Yeah, I have a great example. I remember when people
tried to say AOC was woke but Bernie wasn't and
they woke. People would say that's a racist or you know,
sexist claim A good example or get an example why
that's not the case. Is you rarely like Zohan Mamdani,
who just won mayor of New York. Actually, like the
woke label wasn't generally applied to him. I'm sure there's

(52:51):
some right wingers out there who say that, but like
I mean, from what I've seen about the right, they
just kind of call him like they just they just
say racist shit about him.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
Or they just call him a Marxist.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
I think he's a socialist, and they're freaking out right now.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Right, But that's that's the kind of thing, Like Bernie
is not associate it was never really associated with being woke.
I mean, some people say that he played into the
woke in twenty twenty, but like, he's never accused of
being a woke guy. Biden wasn't accused of being woke
in the way that Kamala was. Right, Kamala, you know,
because she played into the kind of language games more.

(53:24):
Biden's too old for that. He's just before any of this.
He just doesn't like understand it. He'll you'll say that
the thing about okay, woke politics, right, I'll give you
a good example, the way we talk about minorities. A
lot of woke people have this certain way of talking
about minorities that totally backfires and does not benefit the
minorities they seek to represent tolerance versus acceptance. In a

(53:48):
liberal society, it is in line with liberal principles for
people to have basic rights to do what they want
to do. And I think most trans people, for example,
that's all they really want. They want to be left
in peace. They don't want to be you know, dis
criminated based on who they are. They don't want to
be denied a basic humanity, basic opportunities that other people
are right, that all other people have. The problem with

(54:09):
the idea of acceptance is acceptance implies changing other people's
views to not only be okay with that, but to
actually like believe in that. So this is where you
get like transgenderism as a debate versus trans rights. And
I'm not like saying I'm not going to give a
view as like what I think of transgenderism. But the
thing about it is why it's different when we talk

(54:31):
about things like transphobia. It's interesting to me because some
people say, oh, you know, like like we equate transphobia
racism and sexism, Like transphobia's now use a slur that's
like as bad as being a racist. But what did
the Civil right and you know it and the matter
is like you know, policing people to not have these views,

(54:54):
But what did the Civil rights movement actually do? It
implemented laws that made it, you know, illegal to discriminate
against black people, I mean, and any that is like
the most you can really do. You can try, you know,
slowly to change, you can truly try even maybe also
again maybe not just have black people play the funny
black guy in media and actually be you know, play

(55:17):
normal roles like other people. But if you try to,
like in a very forced way, which is what people
have issue with, DEI change culture by changing people's ideology.
And even worse though, is if you actually police people
out of a movement for not harboring that ideology. That's
kind of woke politics because that presupposes having the right ideas,

(55:37):
whereas you can be, like I think for society to
work right. The Civil rights move was like, you know,
didn't a civil rights move didn't end racism. It ended
it ended like really bad systemic racism. You could argue
as to whether that's fully ended, but like it definitely
ended it more than you know, like to a large extent,
undeniably patriarchy. Patriarchy is very important today's day and age

(56:02):
as a discourse because the way we talk about it's
weird and it ties into woke stuff, woke people who
try to push like anti patriarchical stuff. It's all about
erasing patriarchical attitudes, which involves policing people's thoughts, which is
where you get the connection between woke politics, cancel culture,
political correctness. That's the connection right there. It's that through line.

(56:23):
What it actually matters when it comes to patriarchy. It's
not whether people have sex's views. It's whether there's a
structural power dependence that women have on men. That's what
patriarchy is, usually in a scholarly way defined as it's
real dependence on men. The therefore a subordinated class. Whether
you have patriarchical views doesn't matter, isn't so far as

(56:45):
whether the woman actually, you know, is subordinated by the man.
So like this is what kind of the issue when
you try to police people for their views, it has
a reaction to it, you know. So I think red
pills a reaction to left wocism, and you know what
I mean, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Yeah exactly. But well I wanted to say like in
agreement that Actually I think recently, Sarah McBride, who's like
the first openly trans member of Congress, was on on
what's his Name's pod, Ezra Clines podcast, and she made
a very similar argument to what you just said, which
is like her diagnosis is, you know, when gay marriage happened,

(57:21):
it was like kind of easier to make that argument
because all we were saying was like, let gay people
get married, it doesn't really affect you. But when trans
politics came in, it's like we got meaning like the
progressive movement got over confident because we were like, look
how much we won with gay marriage, and now we
can smash this like trans writes thing. But then they
like went beyond just like legal stuff. They started policing

(57:44):
people and saying like you have to like, for example,
the pronoun stuff right, Like people are like, oh, don't complain,
it's not a big deal. But it's like okay, now,
like I have to not only tolerate, right, I have
to like accept, and then I have to start using
your language. And in a way like this kind of
like enforcement of language was a thing now, Like so
I agree, I think that's like a good analysis and

(58:05):
I think that is what happened. But now the question
to me is like, is something analogous to this happening
on the right? Are we seeing like similar levels of
policing of language. Maybe it hasn't been long enough, but
another good point that Sarah mcbridemade on that on that
episode was like that she thinks that now in a way,
that overconfidence is maybe happening on the right, where like
the same overconfidence that the left had. It's like, we're

(58:28):
winning all the culture war stuff. Now we can just
start like changing culture at the granular societal level and
we'll just keep winning. But it's like they push too hard.
And she's like, well, maybe that's going to happen now
on the right, that they think they're winning so much
that they're going to start pushing for these sorts of
cultural changes. Maybe like the Israel Palestine thing is an example,
but maybe they're going to start pushing too hard on

(58:49):
like porn or something like that. Right, They're going to
start like making porn illegal or other kinds of I mean,
I guess that would be like a legal change, though
that wouldn't be like trying to enforce societal behaviors. But
I guess like because you frame it tony as about
like the beliefs, like kind of policing beliefs, and that's
definitely like a part of it. But then what was

(59:10):
kind of interesting was like that on like the woke left,
it was actually like policing behaviors right. It was like,
say you're preferred pronouns, right, And it's like and in
a way they're like, we don't like hopefully by forcing
you to do that or socially pressuring you or like
land acknowledgements is another one, right, which happens in academia
at least, and it's starting to happen in other places.

(59:31):
It's like, it doesn't really matter if you like believe
like that. It's just like enforcing that normalizing that behavior
as like kind of a almost like an etiquette, a
form of etiquette or politeness that you ought to do
those things. But are we seeing those similar things on
the right?

Speaker 1 (59:46):
I guess I think though I want to address a
comment that someone probably is going to be typing right
as you're saying that, which is you know, who cares?
Are these real problems? And I'll say why you should care? See,
I'll be honest with you I don't give a damn
really like about the pronouns stuff personally, Like I'll call
people what they want to be called. Down't care.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
What I mean is I'm not going to say my
preferred pronouns are he him.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Yeah, well it's I also find it kind of unnecessary,
right like, but it's the kind of thing like all
these are, I find them, But I want to say
why it does matter? It matters actually ironically for people
those groups the progressive is because how do you want
like do you want to think about it? You should
measure the success of your politics based on does it
actually like lead to better outcomes? And woke politics is

(01:00:33):
a total failure, do you know what I mean? Like
on that ground, Like it's kind of what has happened
to transroits has actually been rolled back in America. I
mean I remember not too long ago. I mean I'm
not that old, but like I'm pretty young, and the
thing is I have like I even remember when trans
stuff was not politicized, Like I remember, like trans was
the kind of thing where it's like, oh, they exist,

(01:00:55):
you know, some people do that, but it's not like
it's not like like a huge deal. It's like whatever,
those people, you know, simpleium, they might be able to
considered weird on the fringe, but when people started getting
pissed off, and yes, you could say is drummed up
by the right, but being any you can't. You have
to assume a massive, colossal level of stupidity on people
to think that, like people who are propagandas can just

(01:01:18):
create an issue out of thin air. I mean people
propaganda is capitalize on people's existing resentments, you know. So,
like I think what people got pissed off with the
trans question is that not only are you asking them
to accept trans people, which I think is a very
sensible obligation, it's to accept the idea of what justifies

(01:01:39):
being trends, which is transcenderism, which is the idea of like, actually,
you know this, our ideas of men and women are wrong.
You know, gender is fluid. Now, I actually think we
should question you know, I think gender is complicated. But
do I assume we have the correct idea that we
can go and impose on people. I actually don't think
we do. If you look closely at these things within
the gender stuff, like like Lacanians have a completely different

(01:02:01):
theory the psycho.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Very clearly a contested a contested arena of.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
Yea, we should allow it. We should allow it to
be contested, rather than being like, you know, say, this
is the correct way to think about it, like yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Actually in the Supreme Court, in the Supreme Court case
recently that I don't know, the decision hasn't come out yet,
but it's like about books that children have in height
in schools in the US, and I remember one of
the examples was like it was kind of like a
book teaching children like I think under sixth grade. I
forget what grade, and it would kind of be like, oh,
like you know, doctors, you have a children, and then

(01:02:39):
doctors kind of they see you and then they take
a guess about what your gender is. Sometimes they're right,
sometimes they're wrong, and like, I don't know. I when
I read that, I was like, wow, that's like, I mean,
that's pretty like that's a pretty controversial way of framing it.
To children, I would say that they're just like taking
a guess.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
But there's also a material basis to all this stuff,
and I think this is the most important thing. There's
a material basis to this kind of politics. Ironically, even
though it's a non material politics. But like in the
sense of wokeness, right, why does you know, are these
people who are having the style of politics on the
left at least, because if we care about that more

(01:03:19):
than you know, as people who tend to be left leaning,
why are they just stupid or is there a real
reason why they do this? And I think the part
of the reason why is because a lot of what
makes up the left are legitimately like people who are
either in the professional managerial class or PMC aspirants mean
that they aspire to be part of the professional managerial

(01:03:40):
class but are actually you know, economically working class, but
they adopt the sort of etiquette and sociological makeup of
someone in that strata, you know, And as a result,
they kind of in a very in the case of
the people who are comfortable enough to not really care
about the bread and butter are issues, they genuinely do
want to commit themselves to a cause, but they don't
care that much about the you know, the bread and

(01:04:01):
butter issues, so they want to pick and choose these
other issues. It's also a lot easier for capitalism, isn't
it for a progressive movement to exist that talks about
all these issues that don't threaten capital than it is
to ones that do.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
And we've definitely talked about that before.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
Yeah, of course, and then that I'm not by I'm far.
You know, many people pointed this out, but it's like, yeah, people,
there's people who genuinely do care. It's not just both
people are stupid. I saw that a lot of us
saw this in the Bernie stuff. I remember it was
always fascinating to encounter when you would see like a
student who supported like someone like Pete Boodhagidge over Bernie

(01:04:36):
or Liz Warren over Bernie. And I always thought, like why,
like all the things you seem to like about this candidate,
you like like Bernie does but better. But it's because
they would always they would care about a specific issue
like more than you know, the common majority issues, like
for example, if you're a bootajage person, you go hard
on the LGBT, you know stuff, With Liz Warren you

(01:04:56):
would usually be a woman. I mean, like ultimately, that's
what it boiled down to, Like, but I noticed with
class people with with people who are you know, legitimately
like really struggling. I mean, Bernie resonated the most and
I don't want to say but that's not always the case,
but it's more likely to be the case. So when
you see these woke divisions, it's not just like the

(01:05:18):
people are stupid. A lot of the times where woke
politics exist, it's because you have people who are not
working class who want to commit themselves to a kind
of cause, and they do so this way because it's
also easy. There's a whole activism industry. Like why actually,
like think too hard about these things when you can
just work for an NGO and like do DEI and
you're helping the world that way, right.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
But then then my question though, and actually maybe I
don't know, I know, Eric, you haven't said it something
in a little bit. I'm curious what you think. But
I want to get back to like the right wing version, right, So, like,
is there something analogous happening on the right, like I
think in the on the kind of basic style of
politics point, I think, you know, we do see and
and obviously, like I think the one obvious thing that

(01:06:02):
we should say as well is like I think all
of us are probably at least pleased, at least somewhat pleased,
or at least amused by the fact that this is
leading to some kind of right wing infighting right that
like they're pointing fingers at each other, calling each other woke.
But is it correct to say, like like you were,
like Tony, you were talking about this, this whole industry.

(01:06:23):
But I don't know, is there like a woke right industry?
I mean, I guess in a way maybe there is
on like YouTube right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
If there is, and it's I don't think it's actually
grown as dyed. So I think right wing wocism has
already died in the same way that left wing wocism
has been dying, in that it became a circular bubble
that pleased itself police anyone you know who didn't fit
the box out and became so marginal and became more
extreme as it got more marginal and got more extreme.

(01:06:50):
It's a feedback loop. Good example is a Christian nationalist movement.
You see that, you know, the Christian movement, particular evangelical movement,
gets as it gets more marginalized, it got more extreme,
and it got more as it got more extreme, it
got more marginal. There's a whole industry of like Christian
podcast that I didn't even I wasn't aware of and

(01:07:12):
when I was aware, like became aware of it, I thought, interestingly,
I've never been shown this. It's like a whole other universe.
And it's like sometimes when I talk about certain things
to people who are not like, you know that political,
They're like, I have to check myself because I'm like,
you know that, I'm in a leftist bubble, you know,
because like it's really easy to get into these niches.

(01:07:33):
But the right wing wocism, yeah, I think it marginalized itself.
I mean, the race one, It's very obvious to see
why that would marginalize itself in today's day and age.
I mean, there's the funny thing about like that, there's
a I saw this meme that was actually differentiating left
and right wocism, but it was kind of like a
meme but it got edited truth. It was showing like
left wocism, it's like you're a you're a transphobe, or

(01:07:55):
you're a you know this, you're that, And on the
right it's like your jew Like it's just like racism,
anti semitism. I mean, that's definitely a thing with the
parts of it. But you know, you know, when I
first made this connection between the evangelicals. And I think
this was fascinating because when I was trying to search
is to see if like there was this connection that

(01:08:17):
was made between evangelical Christianity. I'm still looking, It's why
I haven't put out the completed, the full thing. But
there's actually this book by a Christian right winger moderate,
a Christian right winger, and her book is called Awake
but Not Woke, And in it what's very interesting is
she says she tries to define like wocism in all
the kind of typical ways a right winger often does,

(01:08:40):
but she says like, yeah, it's it's if she calls
it like a fake religion and that it's really it's
a fake religion, and they you know, but the problem
isn't that it's a false awakening. And what we need, though,
is the real awakening christ. And I thought it was
interesting because that's like an endorsement of right wing wocism
very explicitly there. What I would say is like, what, actually,

(01:09:01):
how do you actually change shit? It's people who have
the interest to change shit, you know. Forming an alliance
is to get with each other to change shit. Yeah,
different classes of people who have a basis of you know,
common interests to do stuff. That's what would make sense.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
Yeah, it's it's that that's an interesting connection. But Eric,
I don't know, do you have any real any kind
of final thoughts or reactions.

Speaker 3 (01:09:24):
Yeah, I I was just I was. I was listening
the whole time because I was trying to figure out
whether it is we disagree or whether we're just talking
about completely different things. Because you guys, you guys presumably
consider yourselves to be on the left, and yet you
take up this woke term like at face value, like

(01:09:48):
it actually describes something that's happening on the left, and
it's not just a rhetorical.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
But I don't think they face value. I don't think
that's just face value.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
Well you called it, you said, I was, well, hang
on you that I was hand waving the term away
by thinking of it in purely rhetorical terms, which it is.
It's a rhetorical term. It's not describing in a it's
not an objective description of something that's happening in the world.
And we're and we're sort of confusing again like woke
as it's been used since twenty ten, as it was

(01:10:18):
appropriated by the right and used as a bludgeon to
hit the left with, and then like we we passed
by that point, we accept it, and then we suddenly
just shift right back into talking about woke as if
it describes something on the left.

Speaker 1 (01:10:36):
I've been That's what I've been trying to show this
whole time, is that there's actually a consistency in woke politics.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
Well, that's what That's why I that's why I just
kind of jokingly questioned the leftist credentials because I think, like,
why would you want to do the right of favor
by giving this time?

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Like, I think handwaving it isn't an appropriate I'm not
trying to handwave it. I'm like, this is this is
a dangerous ideological term that should be like, you know,
decried as a rhetorical strategy. And I think what we
were saying earlier as like, now, why is woke right important?

(01:11:14):
I don't think it's a coincidence that this giant chasm
opens up very briefly on the right over like you know,
Trump and Forever Wars in Iran, that the term then
returns home all of a sudden, just at the moment
that big divisions are emerging on the.

Speaker 1 (01:11:31):
Right, I think the wrong side of the zeitgeist here, buddy,
I have to say, I think I've never seen more
in my life people who are late to the party
all dropping woke like flies. I mean, you see it everywhere.
It's funny like stuff that I was seeing in like
post left discourses. And I wouldn't say I'm like a
post leftist, fully, but it's like stuff that I was

(01:11:53):
seeing in post left areas or like dirt bag left
areas as it was called. Now it's just become like
the norm and spaces take accept like you see now
like big shows, you know, like well, like you know,
Joshu's Sorderella is popping off, that's kind of he embodies
that sort of you know, changing view. I mean even
AOC AOC has dropped a lot of that kind of language.

Speaker 2 (01:12:13):
She got rid of her pronouns in her Twitter profile.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
Yeah, but even like look at how she talks. She
doesn't like, she doesn't do the there were she used
to do these very annoying things where she would like
always like be so scoldy. You know, she's she's almost
become like she's taken some of the criticism, and I
think it's good. I think the people who are critiquing
the left from the left were good. Why is that?

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
Why is pointing that out helping the right? I mean,
isn't it helping ourselves to be like, let's stop doing
these things that are losing us elections like this?

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
I think taking the term woke at kind of face value,
which is is what's the problem. Like when I try
to be critical of the term like woke, I try
to look at how it's being used, which is why
I trudged through a whole bunch of like James Lindsay
and Christian National like I wanted to see how it

(01:13:03):
was being used, who was being applied to, and how
those people on the right woke right were reacting to
the term and pushing back against it. And to me,
that's like, you know, you don't need to dignify it
with a one hundred and fifty year history of conceptual evolution, Like,
it's just it's a term. You know, James Lindsay came
up with it like seven months ago.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
Do you think that my definition of woke dignified their
version of woke? I think the whole thing is it
shows what it actually is, and it kind of disrupts the.

Speaker 3 (01:13:32):
Lindsay and I think it's I think it's very helped.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
Lindsay thinks wocism is extremism or just like anything that
is outside of the norm. What I have to say
about that has nothing to do with it the whole.
Like Victor, Victor, you got it when you said it's
more of a style of politics than a content of politics.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
Well, that's what I was trying to focus on, is
how James Lindsay was sort of using this term woke, right,
And you know, I guess I guess my early stated
belief about wocism in general is that, you know, my
the post twenty ten pejorative sense of the term. I
find that history very helpful. I don't know the history

(01:14:11):
of the term woke before it kind of came into
the media sphere. And you know, my own experience with
it is being at university and having universities being called
bastions of wokism, and then looking around and just seeing
this extremely neoliberal institution with a very conservative people running it,

(01:14:32):
like battering down Palestine protests, and then I'm like, okay,
how is this place woke? Like it makes no sense.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Because you're in the university. Actually this is what I've noticed.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
It wasn't until well, yeah, I was on the inside
while people were saying that going this is not right.
What they're saying about what's happening at university is patently false.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Well look but what program? What program did you do
in university?

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
Woke one oh one baby.

Speaker 2 (01:14:59):
And you all you also almost got canceled, Eric, I mean,
we don't have to tell that story, but like you did,
like you literally did for something super stupid, like you
were a victim of it too.

Speaker 3 (01:15:09):
And that and that really opened my eyes a bit
to what does happen on the left. And I think
your story does capture you know, there are definitely very
excessive tendencies on the left, and I became aware of them.
But then then.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
I look on it was nothing serious. By the way,
if if we don't edit this part out, I just
want to make it clear for the listeners, like this
was not like anything bad. It was literally just him
asking a question of someone who was in his department
lounge and being like hey, like like are you supposed
to be here? And then the person was like, oh
my god, they're not letting people of color like into
this lounge and it was total bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
Well, yeah, it's good content.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
I want to like give the opportunity maybe like like
like just like a minute to kind of like wrap
it in a bow here. But like I don't know,
Like it seems like there's broad agreement, but I'm not so.
But is there like is there a product room in here?

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
Well that's what I was trying to identify, because I
just I I have a hard way of saying. I
don't take the term seriously, but I do.

Speaker 1 (01:16:13):
Yeah, stopped halfway. You were analyzing it, and I think
you were onto something, but then you stopped and you
were like you you dug and you saw the contradictions.
But then you stopped at the contradictions. Whereas what would
Hegel do? Hegel? You get at the contradictions. That's how
you get at the truth. You get at That's why
I'm waiting.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
But Hegel knew that you know that the owl of
Minerva flies at dusk. Right, we have to wait to
see how this all shakes out. And that's what I
was saying. Right now, it's a contested term. We're going
to see where woke rightism lands. Who what group is
it going to be? The Christian nationalists who the term
finally kind of sits on, or is it going to
be these centrist people right like James lindsay, are they

(01:16:53):
going to have the term actually pushed back onto them?
Which force is going to prevail? Because right now, I
think woke right it has different contradictory meanings. You're pro
war with Iran and defending Israel or anti war with
Iran and defend I've seen these things, you know, I
watched a Christian national podcast. And it also can mean

(01:17:17):
you know, are you obsessed with like white male victimhood
or or like doesn't mean something else other than that,
Like there's a few different like meanings competing for dominance
under what woke right means. That's my point, and we do, yes, Hey, Galian,
it's a dialectic. We have to wait and see. We

(01:17:37):
can't just run ahead of the dialectic to see where
it's gonna land. We just have to wait and see.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
Well, I think I do think that Tony offered a
pretty plausible account of like the landscape so far, of
like how we can understand it.

Speaker 3 (01:17:50):
And the history does help you tell where things might go,
it does, it does help like that and I did
find it, and I found his explanation to be helpful,
especially I liked and I I liked the way he
turns the tables on Gabriel rock Hill and and the
and the kind of that that's one of those Marxist

(01:18:10):
Leninist lines of argument about Western Marxism, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
But yeah, anyway, a tony final final thought because I
do have to go, So why don't we get Do
you have any any any last remarks?

Speaker 1 (01:18:23):
You know this this article where I first articulated the ideas.
It's a called defining Woke, defining Wokeism, Yes really, and
uh like I want to put it out on a
kind of magazine of some sports, and I've thought of
different ones. But also I'm trying to think carefully because
I don't want to put it on a magazine where leftists,

(01:18:44):
we are already skeptical of that magazine, are going to
click off. So I'm still like not sure, and I'm
still in the process of when whenever it comes to
putting out my own theories, I spend a lot of
time before I like write it, like put it out,
you know, like the you should just substock it. I
might just do that yeah, but it'll be make for
a good essay video essay too.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):
Well, if you if if, if Tony decides to make
it available, it'll be in the show notes. We'll find
out if he decides to make it available. If not,
maybe it won't be, but if not, stay tuned for it.

Speaker 1 (01:19:16):
I think one of the things that helped comes to
that conclusion is the videos I did on the Cultural Revolution.
Oh yeah, yeah, which I recommend some of my best work.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Is that cool?

Speaker 1 (01:19:26):
That's an example of left wocism, the Red Guards.

Speaker 3 (01:19:30):
I think we talked about that a while back then.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
We did talk about that. We did talk about that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
I'd say for everyone should go check it out and
the and the article.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
Everyone should also check out Tony's podcast. Consistently good stuff
on there, interesting people, if you want to get an
insight to a lot of issues relevant to those who
are interested in theory and political theory and political issues generally.
Thanks for coming on, Tony, and thanks for listening, Thanks

(01:19:59):
for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:20:00):
All right, till next time.

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Pill Pod 215 - The New Woke Right ft. 1Dime

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