RadixJournal - March 20, 2026


Keep Calm and Carry On

What Is the New Antisemitism NeoCon Idealism vs. Trump's War In Iran

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

153.69

Word count

1,966

Sentence count

7

People

Also mentioned:
George W. Bush Elizabeth Warren Obama Graham Plattner Bernie Sanders Isaiah Berlin Ron Paul Gen Z Richard Sanders Alex

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Wokeness, we talk about why millennials were more woke than the managerial class at the time of George W. Bush's presidency, and why that's a good thing. We also talk about the role of social media and the role it played in shaping the culture of the post-9/11 era.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 also a a upside to it there was like a positive spin on the bush era of we are going to free you
00:00:08.740 and liberals had a hard time disagreeing with it you know they would basically say like war isn't
00:00:16.340 the right way to spread liberal democracy but did they really have a disagreement with george w bush
00:00:23.500 when he said that in every human heart there's a democrat there everyone's longing for freedom
00:00:28.620 I 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.
00:00:57.140 I think there might be a connection there with that whole period, actually.
00:01:04.240 Alex?
00:01:05.620 Hey, Richard.
00:01:06.480 I wanted to ask you, what do you see as the evidence for millennials being more woke than the managerial class at the time?
00:01:16.940 because wokeness was organic in many ways and wokeness was on social media at a time when
00:01:24.980 only the millennials were on social media or at least they made up a very strong majority majority
00:01:30.040 like wokeness origin i mean i i've heard this like the first hashtag or hashtag divism or whatever
00:01:39.020 it's called was about stephen colbert of all people in 2012 and it was stephen colbert made
00:01:47.340 a ching chong joke about the chinese and there was like you know not my culture my culture is
00:01:54.460 not a costume don't culturally appropriate me not all agents or whatever they were saying
00:02:01.020 and it's interesting i don't i don't think we should underestimate the degree to which
00:02:06.560 wokeness was organic that is bottom up as opposed to top down now corporations adopted these things 0.72
00:02:14.180 no doubt and remember gay marriage was accepted at major corporations well before it was accepted
00:02:20.440 in the um on the national level in politics yeah no i agree with you but i would argue that
00:02:27.700 at the time millennials weren't really in the managerial class no but but boomers reacted to
00:02:36.240 their children telling them these things and they basically implemented it fair enough yeah
00:02:42.700 yan man i'm actually looking up an actual video of um boomers react to gay marriage being
00:02:51.600 legalized hey can you hear me yes go for it uh yeah i think um a lot of like the dashing of
00:03:00.820 like the millennial optimism was kind of like a like a double whammy of like disappointment from
00:03:07.240 the obama era like combined with like the destruction of the sanders thing destruction
00:03:17.100 of the bernie sanders campaign yeah interesting we can't beat the boomers they're gonna cheat to 1.00
00:03:23.740 win i don't i don't know like i've i'm not really sure how to articulate it but like the sanders
00:03:30.700 critique was something like there's like mass corruption in the system and the like what you
00:03:38.000 were saying earlier about like wokeness being like mostly a top down thing as opposed to like
00:03:42.500 a bottom up thing i think there's a lot of truth to that oh i'm not denying that it's top down but
00:03:50.100 I think that I think we're wrong to to like ignore the bottom up quality of this stuff.
00:03:57.460 I 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.
00:04:12.660 right yeah i i think that's right but i think there's also like an aspect of like especially
00:04:18.860 during the occupy movement or whatever like it's almost as though the woke thing was like glommed
00:04:25.460 onto by politicians like who saw like the best way out of the critique like of wall street and
00:04:34.820 big money and politics as i've heard this before i i agree with this just to some extent i mean
00:04:41.300 this is sort of a it's a kind of conspiratorial critique of Occupy Wall Street was genuinely
00:04:48.480 radical it came after the stock market crash and it sort of hit its peak a few years later like 2011
00:04:54.560 and it was genuinely radical and they said what are we going to do we're going to like confuse
00:05:03.360 them by making them talk about critical race theory and sexism and structural racism and
00:05:10.460 and they'll just confuse the hell out of them and get them at each other's throats and then
00:05:15.120 we'll continue to have profits i've heard this before and i i definitely think there's something
00:05:21.040 to 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
00:05:29.020 like i think social change is like possible and the millennials proved it by promoting this stuff
00:05:36.680 and it went from being positive in a way like legalize love or what were some of the
00:05:44.680 gay marriage chants like legalize love or um love is love love is love yeah just all that kind of
00:05:52.580 stuff it was very positive and it was sort of ineluctable it's like how could you how could
00:05:57.780 you really keep steve and gary like away from each other like they're i i definitely i i moral
00:06:04.700 than we are i've been divorced four times like steve and gary that's true that's true love what
00:06:11.040 i see right like there there was a lot of that going on and i think it just sort of like flipped
00:06:16.500 over into its opposite i definitely wouldn't claim that like the woke thing was like a totally top
00:06:23.020 down that i think you're right and that it's like mostly bottom up um but like it just had like a
00:06:28.700 memetic fitness or something it was like a very fit idea like yeah this whole this whole critique
00:06:34.560 that like yeah absolutely it's because it also like there's no doubt that you know tim cook of
00:06:43.120 apple particularly when they were just making insane levels of profits every quarter that he
00:06:51.480 would prefer to talk about you know lgbtq awareness at the corporation he would much
00:06:59.040 prefer to do that shtick than like talk about the fact that he's paying himself billions in
00:07:07.720 stock options or or whatever you know there's no doubt about that right i don't know i i just like
00:07:15.000 i just feel like the sanders thing was almost like a like an insult on top of the injury of
00:07:19.880 like people like putting so much hope into like Obama killed Sanders I mean I there's yeah I
00:07:27.220 agree trying to like needlessly disagree with you I just I think I do have a different perspective
00:07:31.360 it's like the whole Sanders phenomenon reminded a lot of people of Trump for one thing but also
00:07:37.860 remind me reminded a lot of people the Ron Paul movement which was a Gen X phenomenon but it's
00:07:43.640 just like there was an odd overlap like you know no more war bring everyone home no more taxes
00:07:51.780 out at the fed like all of that stuff there was a sort of i don't know there was like a rogan
00:07:56.560 sphere but in a good way kind of vibe to it all and i think there was that with with bernie sanders
00:08:04.460 even though it was socialist because it wasn't about you know questioning your identity it wasn't
00:08:10.600 about is talking about structural racism it was basically just like you can't afford college
00:08:16.960 you're massively in debt life sucks you can't afford a house like we're just gonna give it to
00:08:23.500 you so you can be free it was like positive liberalism as isaiah berlin would say like
00:08:28.740 it's it's not just being free to make money it was a you could you're free to live your life
00:08:34.540 because you don't have to worry about money yeah i feel like what gave it what gave it so much
00:08:39.000 energy that was like the basic or critique though of like woke killed the bernie sanders movement
00:08:44.420 and i yeah when did what's her name like elizabeth warren well elizabeth warren definitely
00:08:52.020 debbie wasterman schultz yeah but who's that like she has like three names she's she's this 1.00
00:08:58.620 black political commentator brianna joy gray brianna joy gray yeah okay was she in 2016 or
00:09:05.520 2020 both both yeah she was like oh sorry go ahead it's p it's people like her that destroyed it
00:09:14.180 yeah she was a black pillar on bernie i forgot i forgot exactly what the reasoning was
00:09:19.660 uh i'm trying to remember what the reasoning was but um yeah she was like one of those woke
00:09:26.180 scoldy types this this new dude graham plattner and she's like oh yeah i'm not gonna vote for
00:09:32.080 grand planner because he had like this totem conf tattoo on his chest and it's like okay what
00:09:36.780 matters more you know reducing the cost of living or like you know virtue signaling you know so yeah
00:09:42.320 she was on that she was on that whole thing yeah yeah i i i might even agree with her on some of
00:09:49.380 her critiques i just kind of disliked that um yeah yeah she has that that energy she has the 0.83
00:09:58.360 woke skull to energy um regular guy i think a lot of this can be traced back to um millennials just
00:10:08.080 wanting to ape the civil rights movement in many ways because um i remember you know i i'm like a
00:10:15.660 younger millennial and every year it was always like the civil rights movement it was great it
00:10:22.540 was great it was great hey also by the way look at how non-violent they were look at how non-violent
00:10:27.700 they were they didn't want revenge um it's going to be great in the future and um the gay marriage
00:10:34.700 movement and um wokeism was kind of just an addition to that um and you can and primarily
00:10:43.320 i agree with what you said it was a bottom-up thing of them just absorbing um the whole civil
00:10:50.920 rights movement due to schools having a you know left liberal bias and all that um really i think
00:10:59.400 isn't most everything almost bottom up do you think or i'm genuinely asking i'm trying to think
00:11:06.760 of something that was more top down rem theory is a very elitist theory it's basically claiming that
00:11:13.500 there are like a handful of initiates who are making all salient works of they're talking to
00:11:20.260 one another intergenerationally so i mean we do have a very elitist theory but rem is not everything
00:11:27.160 i mean they're you know they're also like the products of that deep culture as we call it of
00:11:32.800 rem can manifest in all sorts of different ways but i i don't know i i guess i push back like
00:11:40.620 when vivek ramashwamy says that like woke is a trick played upon us by big corporate like
00:11:49.580 big corporations in the un or something and no one believed it and it's totally artificial and
00:11:58.060 i i just don't buy this i think it's actually very organic and real people genuinely believe
00:12:05.240 in it yeah it's it's the ideology of people that um can't uh launch a kind of haitian style
00:12:13.120 revolution and kill all white people nor do they mostly have the stomach for that and thus they 0.99
00:12:18.680 resort to slave morality um don't you think it it's also like a way of neutralizing potential 0.99
00:12:25.840 problems because you know the the dissident right has this idea of globo homo or you know where 0.99
00:12:33.480 it's like everything's gay and at the risk of agreeing with these assholes i i like there is 0.98
00:12:41.220 something to that but i think they don't fully grasp it you know because it's like the 0.99