Juno News - November 04, 2023


Is wokeness here to stay？ (ft. James Lindsay)


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

179.98279

Word Count

2,092

Sentence Count

103

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 One thing that was quite interesting here, I spent a bit of time on Monday kind of doing
00:00:13.400 the contrast between the ARC Forum and its logical counterpart in some ways, the World
00:00:20.440 Economic Forum. These are both global summits with leaders from various fields that are
00:00:25.120 coming together to talk about ideas. And the key contrast between the two, I think, is that the
00:00:30.520 ideas here at the ARC Forum are rooted in the value of the individual, the celebration of humanity and
00:00:37.960 Western civilization. The ideas you hear about at the World Economic Forum are nihilistic and cynical
00:00:43.980 and very anti-human and certainly anti-individual. And I think there's, generally speaking, a broader
00:00:51.340 understanding of that here. It was a very optimistic place. Now, politics has not been an optimistic
00:00:57.360 place in the last few years, and I would say for good reason. We've had some of the most incredible,
00:01:03.020 incredible incursions on our civil liberties, not just our own bodily autonomy, but our freedom of
00:01:08.440 speech, our freedom of movement. And politics has become a lot more reactive as a result. So I worried
00:01:16.120 that everyone coming together would kind of be more grievance-oriented in their way. And I was quite
00:01:22.520 pleased and, I will say, pleasantly surprised to see that was not the case. There was a message
00:01:28.060 of hope. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't some skeptics among us. I had a few little snide
00:01:33.680 conversations on the sidelines. Not snide, I should say, but a few more, I'll say, cynical conversations
00:01:39.800 on the sidelines with people. But of all the backgrounds we saw, people from the US, the UK,
00:01:45.660 Canada, Spain, Germany, Austria, Australia, people from media, people from politics, all of this,
00:01:52.500 people had their own approaches, their own backgrounds, their own challenges. There was one
00:01:57.480 common thread that I saw in almost everyone there, which was a rejection of wokeness and a rejection
00:02:05.420 of wokeism. That, to me, is so key here. And I think there's actually a fair bit of hope
00:02:11.940 in all of that, that you can bring together so many people from around the world, and everyone
00:02:16.980 says, all right, we may disagree on this policy or that policy. You may be from the British House
00:02:21.280 of Lords, and I may be from Duck Dynasty, but surely we can all agree we don't want wokeness.
00:02:26.740 Now, what is wokeness? Well, you ask some different people, you're going to get different answers.
00:02:31.340 One of the things that I will point out, though, is that there was a rejection of this idea that
00:02:37.300 children should be taught just untenable things about the world, which are simply not true. Like,
00:02:43.660 oh, I don't know, there are 47 genders instead of two biological sexes. That parents are not the
00:02:50.460 ones that should be responsible for their children's education. That we should allow grievance and
00:02:56.620 microaggressions to govern speech and discourse rather than just allowing humans to govern themselves
00:03:03.380 and be civil, and if they're offended, to just not want the state's intervention. I mean, these are all
00:03:08.820 very anti-woke values, which shouldn't be left versus right, but have increasingly been so. And I had a
00:03:16.520 number of conversations where I wasn't even intending to set out down this road, and one of them I did,
00:03:21.780 and that was with James Lindsay, who you may know from X, or Twitter as we used to call it back in
00:03:26.800 the day, by which I mean like two weeks ago. James Lindsay, who goes by Conceptual James on Twitter,
00:03:32.620 and actually was speaking to a very large crowd in Alberta a few weeks ago, and I was trying to get
00:03:39.460 him on the show then, and we just weren't able to work it out time-wise. But I sat down with James
00:03:43.540 Lindsay, and I wanted to talk about wokeness in that proper context here, where it comes from,
00:03:48.740 and more importantly, what on earth we do about it. Not sure if you can distill this big question
00:03:55.540 down into a simple soundbite answer, but I'll give you an opportunity to do so. Where does wokeness
00:04:01.220 come from? Hell, no, it's the evolution of Marxist thought into the Western context. The Western context
00:04:11.780 is not suited to an economic Marxism, because the Western world, with its, you know, access to
00:04:18.580 liberty and markets, has enabled upward mobility economically. So it's very hard to say that the
00:04:24.220 worker is intrinsically oppressed, and motivate a workers party, when the worker can look at his
00:04:29.260 buddy who said, well, they'll just work harder, and you'll get, you can move up, and you can start
00:04:32.620 your own company if you want, and everything. And so they had to modify it in thought. You see this in
00:04:38.300 the 60s. They say that we have to move from working, the working class as our base for revolution,
00:04:43.580 and into identity politics. We have to look for a new basis for this energy, because the West wasn't
00:04:48.820 suitable to it. So that's where it comes from. The oppressor-oppressed dynamic makes for some very
00:04:54.000 weird and inconsistent positions. I mean, you were just in Canada recently, you know that, you know,
00:04:59.520 Muslim families were leading the charge on the parental rights battles, kind of getting gender ideology
00:05:05.580 out of schools. You fast forward a couple of weeks, and all of a sudden, now, Muslims are the
00:05:10.380 oppressor, or the oppressed group, instead of the oppressor, if you talk to some of the people on the
00:05:15.860 left. And the people on the left don't seem interested in trying to reconcile these inconsistencies.
00:05:22.280 Yeah, that's because this oppressor-oppressed thing is a useful kind of naming heuristic,
00:05:29.700 but what really it is, is the people in groups and situations that are advancing leftism are good.
00:05:35.580 And the situations and circumstances and groups that are hindering leftism are bad. This is explicit,
00:05:41.740 and I think this is a Maoist project. Woke is a Maoist project come to the West. Mao actually says,
00:05:49.140 and he gave a lecture in 1957, or a public speech, on the correct handling of contradictions among the
00:05:54.940 people. And he says immediately, well, who are the people, and who are the enemies of the people?
00:05:58.480 Let's distinguish. And he says very clearly, the people who are advancing the cause of building
00:06:02.420 socialism are the people. The people who are hindering the cause of building socialism are
00:06:06.140 the enemies of the people. So it's very clear. That which they can use to advance leftist agendas?
00:06:13.200 Oppressed. That which they can't use, or that's stopping them from advancing? Oppressor. Bad. Destroy.
00:06:19.720 People on the right oftentimes want to deal with this by going after the institutions that tend to give the
00:06:25.660 woke us their support. Is that the right approach? Where do you think the way in is to start pushing
00:06:31.940 back against this? I mean, they've infiltrated so thoroughly that it's very difficult. We do need
00:06:38.340 to start working our way back toward reclaiming which institutions we can. That's going to happen
00:06:43.980 through personnel. In other words, firing woke people when they abuse their positions in power,
00:06:49.860 which they want to do eventually, and replacing them with people who are not woke, and having
00:06:55.200 policies arranged to push in that direction, or push back in that direction, and simultaneously
00:07:00.260 through changing what I refer to kind of broadly as the liability field. What I just talked about,
00:07:06.540 it's a liability to get hired, it's a liability to keep your job, to be woke, blah, blah, blah.
00:07:10.680 That's part of the liability field, but usually I'm talking about lawsuits where there are, you know,
00:07:16.480 discrete harms that are so egregious in a place like Canada. It's got to be so egregious that the
00:07:21.280 courts can't ignore it. The U.S. is a little more friendly to that. I also think, by the way,
00:07:26.420 that the U.S. and Canada, just to remark, should keep bouncing the energy against woke ping pong ball
00:07:31.640 across the 48th parallel, because we're doing a great job motivating each other. I think we're
00:07:36.080 actually a wonderful pair for once. There is an anti-woke left. I'd say it's probably not as large as it
00:07:42.080 should be, and a lot of the people in it tend to get typecast as being, you know, evil right-wing
00:07:46.700 racist Nazis and whatever, but is there a concern that that coalition among the anti-woke will be
00:07:53.080 too thin to survive if you drill down and, you know, people who are in the trenches saying,
00:07:58.140 yeah, we don't like wokeness, don't really agree on anything else? The thing is that the anti-woke
00:08:03.020 left is beholden to the power center of the left by virtue of the fact that they still commit to the
00:08:09.080 left. And the power center of the left currently is woke. So they are caught between a rock and a
00:08:14.160 hard place and sort of almost a black hole. It either sucks them in or flings them completely
00:08:19.040 out into, like you said, right-wing nutjob land, even though they're kind of determined leftists.
00:08:25.580 And it's a very big challenge that this group has to deal with, that they would also benefit from
00:08:34.980 woke losing its influence over the left in a, you know, whether sane is the right word or not,
00:08:40.240 but a non-woke left emerging back into the, you know, the ecosystem of left-wing thought that's
00:08:47.960 permissible would be, you know, beneficial for them. I think that under present circumstances,
00:08:53.080 unless woke has actually dealt itself a fatal self-inflicted wound with this supporting Palestine
00:09:00.220 Hamas thing, I think that that's going to be a very challenging thing for the left to do. The woke
00:09:05.100 are going to have to be discredited on other terms. Do you think gender is the issue that's going to
00:09:11.260 destroy that leftist coalition? Because it seems to be the one that has the most broad support for the
00:09:17.560 anti-woke position. The, you know, idea that there are two sexes. If you talk to, you know, ordinary
00:09:21.840 people on the street, that's a relatively universal thing, but you wouldn't see that reflected in the
00:09:26.060 institutions. Well, until three weeks ago, I would have said most definitely because I hadn't quite
00:09:31.780 considered how powerful, how powerfully the antisemitism would, would manifest itself. And
00:09:38.560 that seems to be waking people up much faster and in particular waking up people with money
00:09:42.140 who are very concerned about what they're funding. I think there's a little bit of irony. We've had such
00:09:46.480 a robust education in the West about Nazis and how bad Nazis are and everything, which are good for
00:09:52.080 that. So that we're very sensitive to recognizing those trends. And we're very sensitive to wanting
00:09:56.880 to shy away from them immediately. But on the other hand, we've learned virtually nothing about
00:10:00.760 communism. So now we find ourselves in the position where the left is championing something that's
00:10:07.360 calling, I mean, at times explicitly for gassing Jews. And all of a sudden, this is a shock moment
00:10:13.440 that is breaking people open. As for gender, though, it's the most obviously most untrue position.
00:10:19.660 It's the one that touches the most lives. Being a parent is not a political position.
00:10:24.560 Unlike what the feminists want to say, that the personal is political, parenting is not a political
00:10:28.960 act. And most parents don't think of it as a political act. They think of it as a get through the day and
00:10:33.820 make these kids have enough to eat in the best, you know, environment that they can on a day by day basis
00:10:40.060 with just the challenges of parenting. And so what it threatens to allow and what it is allowing, like we saw in
00:10:45.680 Canada with Muslims and Sikhs and Christians and agnostics and Jews all coming together up until
00:10:51.140 this recent conflict, what we saw was that parenting transcends all the other boundaries, political,
00:10:57.600 religious, and it gives the ability to build a gigantic coalition, plus to start shaking people
00:11:04.480 loose from the cult and thinking something's badly wrong here. We're doing to be as generous as
00:11:11.320 possible, highly aggressive surgical interventions on mentally unwell children as the pathway to
00:11:17.240 treatment, as the primary pathway to treatment and threatening to take parents' parental rights
00:11:22.720 away from them through the state if they don't go along with this. This is a scary moment for parents
00:11:27.680 and scary moments wake people up. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by
00:11:32.960 donating to True North at www.tnc.news.