00:00:00.000also a a upside to it there was like a positive spin on the bush era of we are going to free you
00:00:08.740and liberals had a hard time disagreeing with it you know they would basically say like war isn't
00:00:16.340the right way to spread liberal democracy but did they really have a disagreement with george w bush
00:00:23.500when he said that in every human heart there's a democrat there everyone's longing for freedom
00:00:28.620I don't think they really disagreed with that. So maybe you could say that the millennial psyche was connected to the war on terror and especially connected to Obama's neo war on terror where it was about like, you know, promoting token ethnic minorities in Afghanistan and doing the war on terror right and smart and so on.
00:00:57.140I think there might be a connection there with that whole period, actually.
00:01:06.480I wanted to ask you, what do you see as the evidence for millennials being more woke than the managerial class at the time?
00:01:16.940because wokeness was organic in many ways and wokeness was on social media at a time when
00:01:24.980only the millennials were on social media or at least they made up a very strong majority majority
00:01:30.040like wokeness origin i mean i i've heard this like the first hashtag or hashtag divism or whatever
00:01:39.020it's called was about stephen colbert of all people in 2012 and it was stephen colbert made
00:01:47.340a ching chong joke about the chinese and there was like you know not my culture my culture is
00:01:54.460not a costume don't culturally appropriate me not all agents or whatever they were saying
00:02:01.020and it's interesting i don't i don't think we should underestimate the degree to which
00:02:06.560wokeness was organic that is bottom up as opposed to top down now corporations adopted these things
00:02:14.180no doubt and remember gay marriage was accepted at major corporations well before it was accepted
00:02:20.440in the um on the national level in politics yeah no i agree with you but i would argue that
00:02:27.700at the time millennials weren't really in the managerial class no but but boomers reacted to
00:02:36.240their children telling them these things and they basically implemented it fair enough yeah
00:02:42.700yan man i'm actually looking up an actual video of um boomers react to gay marriage being
00:02:51.600legalized hey can you hear me yes go for it uh yeah i think um a lot of like the dashing of
00:03:00.820like the millennial optimism was kind of like a like a double whammy of like disappointment from
00:03:07.240the obama era like combined with like the destruction of the sanders thing destruction
00:03:17.100of the bernie sanders campaign yeah interesting we can't beat the boomers they're gonna cheat to
00:03:23.740win i don't i don't know like i've i'm not really sure how to articulate it but like the sanders
00:03:30.700critique was something like there's like mass corruption in the system and the like what you
00:03:38.000were saying earlier about like wokeness being like mostly a top down thing as opposed to like
00:03:42.500a bottom up thing i think there's a lot of truth to that oh i'm not denying that it's top down but
00:03:50.100I think that I think we're wrong to to like ignore the bottom up quality of this stuff.
00:03:57.460I mean, the protect trans kids and so on, that's coming from social media well before it's coming from the government and even before it's being recognized by politicians and celebrities.
00:04:12.660right yeah i i think that's right but i think there's also like an aspect of like especially
00:04:18.860during the occupy movement or whatever like it's almost as though the woke thing was like glommed
00:04:25.460onto by politicians like who saw like the best way out of the critique like of wall street and
00:04:34.820big money and politics as i've heard this before i i agree with this just to some extent i mean
00:04:41.300this is sort of a it's a kind of conspiratorial critique of Occupy Wall Street was genuinely
00:04:48.480radical it came after the stock market crash and it sort of hit its peak a few years later like 2011
00:04:54.560and it was genuinely radical and they said what are we going to do we're going to like confuse
00:05:03.360them by making them talk about critical race theory and sexism and structural racism and
00:05:10.460and they'll just confuse the hell out of them and get them at each other's throats and then
00:05:15.120we'll continue to have profits i've heard this before and i i definitely think there's something
00:05:21.040to that notion but i i don't know i i just sort of want to put i i just want to push back i mean
00:05:29.020like i think social change is like possible and the millennials proved it by promoting this stuff
00:05:36.680and it went from being positive in a way like legalize love or what were some of the
00:05:44.680gay marriage chants like legalize love or um love is love love is love yeah just all that kind of
00:05:52.580stuff it was very positive and it was sort of ineluctable it's like how could you how could
00:05:57.780you really keep steve and gary like away from each other like they're i i definitely i i moral
00:06:04.700than we are i've been divorced four times like steve and gary that's true that's true love what
00:06:11.040i see right like there there was a lot of that going on and i think it just sort of like flipped
00:06:16.500over into its opposite i definitely wouldn't claim that like the woke thing was like a totally top
00:06:23.020down that i think you're right and that it's like mostly bottom up um but like it just had like a
00:06:28.700memetic fitness or something it was like a very fit idea like yeah this whole this whole critique
00:06:34.560that like yeah absolutely it's because it also like there's no doubt that you know tim cook of
00:06:43.120apple particularly when they were just making insane levels of profits every quarter that he
00:06:51.480would prefer to talk about you know lgbtq awareness at the corporation he would much
00:06:59.040prefer to do that shtick than like talk about the fact that he's paying himself billions in
00:07:07.720stock options or or whatever you know there's no doubt about that right i don't know i i just like
00:07:15.000i just feel like the sanders thing was almost like a like an insult on top of the injury of
00:07:19.880like people like putting so much hope into like Obama killed Sanders I mean I there's yeah I
00:07:27.220agree trying to like needlessly disagree with you I just I think I do have a different perspective
00:07:31.360it's like the whole Sanders phenomenon reminded a lot of people of Trump for one thing but also
00:07:37.860remind me reminded a lot of people the Ron Paul movement which was a Gen X phenomenon but it's
00:07:43.640just like there was an odd overlap like you know no more war bring everyone home no more taxes
00:07:51.780out at the fed like all of that stuff there was a sort of i don't know there was like a rogan
00:07:56.560sphere but in a good way kind of vibe to it all and i think there was that with with bernie sanders
00:08:04.460even though it was socialist because it wasn't about you know questioning your identity it wasn't
00:08:10.600about is talking about structural racism it was basically just like you can't afford college
00:08:16.960you're massively in debt life sucks you can't afford a house like we're just gonna give it to
00:08:23.500you so you can be free it was like positive liberalism as isaiah berlin would say like
00:08:28.740it's it's not just being free to make money it was a you could you're free to live your life
00:08:34.540because you don't have to worry about money yeah i feel like what gave it what gave it so much
00:08:39.000energy that was like the basic or critique though of like woke killed the bernie sanders movement
00:08:44.420and i yeah when did what's her name like elizabeth warren well elizabeth warren definitely
00:08:52.020debbie wasterman schultz yeah but who's that like she has like three names she's she's this
00:08:58.620black political commentator brianna joy gray brianna joy gray yeah okay was she in 2016 or
00:09:05.5202020 both both yeah she was like oh sorry go ahead it's p it's people like her that destroyed it
00:09:14.180yeah she was a black pillar on bernie i forgot i forgot exactly what the reasoning was
00:09:19.660uh i'm trying to remember what the reasoning was but um yeah she was like one of those woke
00:09:26.180scoldy types this this new dude graham plattner and she's like oh yeah i'm not gonna vote for
00:09:32.080grand planner because he had like this totem conf tattoo on his chest and it's like okay what
00:09:36.780matters more you know reducing the cost of living or like you know virtue signaling you know so yeah
00:09:42.320she was on that she was on that whole thing yeah yeah i i i might even agree with her on some of
00:09:49.380her critiques i just kind of disliked that um yeah yeah she has that that energy she has the
00:09:58.360woke skull to energy um regular guy i think a lot of this can be traced back to um millennials just
00:10:08.080wanting to ape the civil rights movement in many ways because um i remember you know i i'm like a
00:10:15.660younger millennial and every year it was always like the civil rights movement it was great it
00:10:22.540was great it was great hey also by the way look at how non-violent they were look at how non-violent
00:10:27.700they were they didn't want revenge um it's going to be great in the future and um the gay marriage
00:10:34.700movement and um wokeism was kind of just an addition to that um and you can and primarily
00:10:43.320i agree with what you said it was a bottom-up thing of them just absorbing um the whole civil
00:10:50.920rights movement due to schools having a you know left liberal bias and all that um really i think
00:10:59.400isn't most everything almost bottom up do you think or i'm genuinely asking i'm trying to think
00:11:06.760of something that was more top down rem theory is a very elitist theory it's basically claiming that
00:11:13.500there are like a handful of initiates who are making all salient works of they're talking to
00:11:20.260one another intergenerationally so i mean we do have a very elitist theory but rem is not everything
00:11:27.160i mean they're you know they're also like the products of that deep culture as we call it of
00:11:32.800rem can manifest in all sorts of different ways but i i don't know i i guess i push back like
00:11:40.620when vivek ramashwamy says that like woke is a trick played upon us by big corporate like
00:11:49.580big corporations in the un or something and no one believed it and it's totally artificial and
00:11:58.060i i just don't buy this i think it's actually very organic and real people genuinely believe
00:12:05.240in it yeah it's it's the ideology of people that um can't uh launch a kind of haitian style
00:12:13.120revolution and kill all white people nor do they mostly have the stomach for that and thus they
00:12:18.680resort to slave morality um don't you think it it's also like a way of neutralizing potential
00:12:25.840problems because you know the the dissident right has this idea of globo homo or you know where
00:12:33.480it's like everything's gay and at the risk of agreeing with these assholes i i like there is
00:12:41.220something to that but i think they don't fully grasp it you know because it's like the