00:00:40.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:24.000This is part of a series of conversations we are doing about where does woke come from.
00:01:30.000You know, the book that really changed my perspective on this was, of course, Christopher Caldwell's book, Age of Entitlement, where he dared to question the idea of the origin of the civil rights law.
00:01:41.000So we're going to spend the whole hour on this.
00:01:42.000I just want to talk about some of your pieces on foreign policy.
00:01:45.000But first, Richard, take some time to introduce yourself to our audience.
00:01:48.000Yeah, well, I'm glad to be here, Charlie.
00:01:50.000I mean, I've always been a big fan of your show.
00:01:52.000I've been a big fan of what, you know, the empire you've built.
00:02:25.000I think most conservatives can define what woke is.
00:02:30.000Maybe call everything racist till you control it.
00:02:32.000Write things that make no sense reasonably or rationally.
00:02:35.000Some people can't, but very few people have done the research to say, where does this come from?
00:02:41.000And you've done a phenomenal job in this book, Origins of Woke, to do the research.
00:02:46.000And you say here, and I want to just read part of the introduction, that this has been over a decade of thinking.
00:02:52.000It was only in the mid-2010s that the subject of wokeness came to dominate political discourse.
00:02:56.000The phenomenon seemed to start on college campuses, but in a few years it has migrated to other institutions.
00:03:02.000So Richard, where does this come from?
00:03:03.000What thinkers, what philosophers started what we now call the woke?
00:03:09.000Yeah, so Caldwell's book talked about the Civil Rights Act.
00:03:12.000And it was really the years after the Civil Rights Act where government bureaucrats, judges, people, you know, like the EEOC and other departments of the executive branch, they came out and they started basically interpreting non-discrimination in the way that we consider, you know, that we would call woke today.
00:03:31.000People think these are new ideas, for example, that if cops harass one race more than others or they or one group does better on a test than the other, the test must somehow be racist.
00:03:42.000This was the interpretation of the Civil Rights Act from like the first decade, right?
00:03:47.000And you could actually trace in the book.
00:03:50.000I don't focus on thinkers as much like my friend Chris Ruffo does and some other people in their books, because you can really show how it's pretty direct from the government.
00:03:59.000The government basically says you have to think about race this way.
00:04:02.000You have to classify your workforce this way.
00:04:04.000And you see historically the rise in, for example, human resources departments, which start just going up on the 1960s, 1970s.
00:04:13.000You see Title IX used at the universities where the government, I mean, it's direct.
00:04:16.000It's not, you know, it's the government coming in and saying, you have to hire these people.
00:04:23.000You have to sort of micromanage their sexual relations.
00:04:26.000You have to change your sports programs.
00:04:28.000And so, yeah, the argument of the book is that basically it was the perversion of the Civil Rights Act and a few laws that came after it that really forced institutions to become hyper-aware of race and sex and to judge people on that basis, even if there was no, even if companies didn't want to, even if they didn't buy into the ideology, it became something like a state religion starting in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's only expanded until then.
00:04:56.000And also, it's now had impact in culture.
00:04:59.000And so, Richard, I want to just ask this question.
00:05:02.000Typically, the American right will use the Breitbart quote, which I think can be right.
00:05:08.000Politics flows downstream from culture.
00:05:10.000But in some ways, culture can also flow downstream from politics.
00:05:14.000You can legislate things that can then impact the culture.
00:05:18.000Do you believe that is true, especially when it comes to wokeism?
00:05:22.000Because in some ways, we were heavily legislating something, whether it be affirmative action hiring quotas, whether it be race-based preferential treatment, you know, disciplining based on race.
00:05:35.000And in some ways, that built this standard in American life that the unforgivable sin was thou shall not even think a racist thought.
00:05:45.000It was worse than being a crummy person, worse than even, quite honestly, some sexual crimes.
00:05:50.000It was worse that you've even had a thought of racism in your mind.
00:06:07.000I mean, imagine a world where politics didn't influence culture or culture didn't influence politics and law.
00:06:12.000Look, I mean, regulations come from the government.
00:06:14.000Businesses have to go through their, you know, go through their work thinking about these regulations and thinking about what's going to get me in trouble, what's going to bring good press, what's going to keep the federal government off my back.
00:06:25.000And so, in many cases, you can see the direct connection between the law and then the culture.
00:06:32.000So, for example, how we classify race.
00:06:35.000The words, you know, Hispanic and Latino, you know, I show an analysis of Google Engrams and the word like AAPI, Asian American Pacific Islander, didn't exist in the English language, really.
00:06:45.000I couldn't find any use of it in any book before 1975 using the Google Engram search.
00:06:50.000But then, governments put these groups together, and suddenly we have AAPI Heritage Month.
00:06:58.000Like these categories that make no sense.
00:07:00.000And people start talking about individual ethnicities like Mexican-American or Puerto Ricans less than they did in previous decades.
00:07:08.000So, in many cases, you can actually see the direct connection between the government doing something and then the culture changing.
00:07:15.000You know, the idea that, like, for example, tests are racist, this was not part of American culture in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, but it was part of law in 1971, the Griggs v. Duke power case.
00:07:26.000So, the government first told people that it's racist if you have a test where whites do better than blacks or any, really any hiring criterion on which whites do better than blacks.
00:07:35.000And that didn't become part of the culture until decades, decades later.
00:07:39.000So, I think in the case of wokeness, you could trace it pretty directly by just looking at the history and looking at things chronologically.
00:07:46.000These things were mandated by law, or there were classifications or regulations that people or businesses or institutions had to adopt.
00:07:53.000And then the culture changed decades down the line.
00:07:56.000So, in some ways, this was inevitable, right?
00:07:59.000You can't build this entire civil rights leviathan or machine that has such a hyper-fixation on race and then act as if race will stop being a big part of the American narrative and political life.
00:08:16.000And the country I desire to live in is where race really isn't that big of a deal at all.
00:08:21.000It's the country that I used to live in, at least culturally.
00:08:26.000And so, what we saw, at least how I understand, is that in an attempt or an intention to de-emphasize race, we actually live in a country that is more focused on race anytime since the 1960s.
00:08:42.000Yeah, I mean, you know, you and I both want to live in that country where people are judged based on their individual attributes and accomplishments.
00:08:49.000The federal government, I mean, the point of my book is the federal government has made that impossible.
00:09:05.000I think it's sort of miraculous like how long it took for us to become this race obsessed.
00:09:11.000And I think that, yeah, we're going to have to change the laws in order to go back to the country that you and I both want.
00:09:16.000Origins of Woke is the name of the book.
00:09:20.000It's being very well reviewed and it is very deep because people say, Charlie, where does this come from?
00:09:25.000Let me read to you some of the chapter titles.
00:09:29.000For example, government as the creator of new races and genders, social engineering as a cause of stagnation and social strife, Republicans and civil rights law, and what is to be done.
00:09:40.000You can check it out, Origins of Woke.
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00:10:46.000So some of these laws say, quote, you can't discriminate based on race or sex, but the exact opposite ends up happening with mandatory discrimination.
00:10:57.000So you go back to when they're passing the Civil Rights Act, and you have these, you have these senators.
00:11:03.000I mean, people knew that reverse discrimination was a possibility.
00:11:06.000They knew that there could be something like disparate impact, where you would just declare tests or other kinds of things racist because one group did better than the other.
00:11:15.000The senators who were trying to get their colleagues to vote for the Civil Rights Act, they swore up and down.
00:11:19.000They said, if there's anything in here for quotas, Hubert Humphrey said, you know, I'll eat the bill.
00:11:22.000I'll start eating the pages of the bill.
00:11:24.000There was others who said an employer can still set the standard as high as he wants, even if all of his employees end up being white.
00:11:32.000All they said was we are ending racial discrimination, Jim Crow-style discrimination, and discrimination also in the private sector too.
00:11:38.000But that meant explicit, intentional discrimination, not wanting to hire a group of people, right?
00:11:44.000And, you know, everyone, the Civil Rights Act gets signed.
00:11:47.000Everyone is sort of happy Americans pat themselves on the back because they think they overcame the racist, the race problem because it was, you know, it was something limited to the South and they were moving beyond it.
00:11:58.000And, you know, the U.S. goes back to, you know, most of the country goes back to their normal lives and their normal politics.
00:12:05.000But these bureaucrats who are concerned with racial equity, a lot of them sort of have communist or socialist backgrounds, they keep working and they push for numerical representation.
00:12:16.000And when they get to court, they think they're going to lose, but the judges actually end up agreeing with them.
00:12:21.000They end up throwing out the original intent of the Civil Rights Act.
00:12:24.000And they basically implement what today we would call the racial equity agenda.
00:12:28.000And so, yeah, we've been in this place for the last 50 years where even if you, you know, until recently, until sort of the rise of people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, your mainstream leftists would still say, you know, we want to treat people as individuals.
00:12:43.000Oh, maybe black people haven't been treated so fairly so fairly in the past.
00:12:46.000Maybe we need to do something to overcome discrimination.
00:12:49.000But the ideal was always there that we would be treated sort of as individuals.
00:12:55.000Like the people need to understand that.
00:12:57.000The law has required racial classification, has required employers, private institutions to take steps to restrict speech in order not to create a hostile work environment.
00:13:10.000And so I really go in depth in how like you think you've lived your whole life in a country where race doesn't matter, or at least everyone aspired to a world where race doesn't matter.
00:13:20.000Your federal government has not been acting like that for a very, very long time.
00:13:23.000And I just want to sort of expose that and get people excited about potentially changing it.
00:13:29.000So the question I have then is if they can totally invert the law, then how do we then fix it?
00:13:35.000And can't they just invert the next law they pass?
00:13:38.000Or is there some sort of a trick or some sort of lesson that we can learn so that the next intent is not just used if we're able to actually fix this legislatively?
00:14:25.000Even in the last few years, just with a little bit of pushback from conservatives, people have been sort of abandoning woke capital.
00:14:31.000Conservatives have actually been winning these boycotts in these culture war where companies aren't becoming conservative, but at the very least, they're taking a step back and saying, maybe we don't want to be at the forefront of Pride Month or any of these other things.
00:14:44.000And so, yeah, I do think that there are places where the ideology of the places are so far gone.
00:14:50.000Conservatives just don't have representation within universities' admissions departments.
00:14:55.000And those people have different ideals.
00:14:57.000And it's great to make their lives harder.
00:14:59.000It's great to make them have to hide it or make them have to do this or that.
00:15:03.000But I think for the rest of society, particularly private institutions and just like the lived experience of most Americans most of the time, public opinion is with conservatives on these issues.
00:15:14.000All polls show that when they go to the ballot box and vote on initiatives, we know we see that people want colorblindness.
00:15:21.000So I'm optimistic that we change the laws, we fix them in a smart way, we can potentially change the culture.
00:15:28.000We're finally waking up and realizing that the ideal that we thought we were living under is not quite that, that it's a different legislative reality.
00:15:38.000And that a huge part of the menace of the anti-white hatred that is happening in our country is made possible because of the legislative fights that we didn't pick the last couple of decades.
00:17:32.000But some things are relatively easy within the political system, like executive orders and judicial decisions.
00:17:38.000Vivek Ramaswamy has promised to repeal the executive order because I told him about it, about the, that requires affirmative action in government contracting, which covers a huge part of the private workforce.
00:17:50.000So a president can do that on day one.
00:17:52.000I have those kinds of, I have those kinds of suggestions.
00:17:55.000I have a nice table which tells you what judges can do, what legislatures can do, what states can do, what potentially the next president can do.
00:18:04.000And so, yeah, I think people should really like, I think people should look at what Vivek is saying about these things and sort of encourage other presidential candidates to make promises on these matters, the ones that I highlight in the book.
00:18:18.000And I think there's the understanding, you know, there has to be an understanding that this is, you know, conservatives win on this issue.
00:18:25.000I mean, Glenn Youngkin, when he, you know, when he won the governorship of Virginia, it was about, you know, it was about the schools and what they're teaching kids.
00:18:31.000It was just sort of wokeness and civil rights law, you know, just sort of implemented in education curriculum.
00:18:43.000Don't give them special privileges on account of race.
00:18:46.000Don't let liberals get away with the lie that all they want is to end discrimination, right?
00:18:51.000Don't let them get away with the lie that all they're doing is looking for a level playing field because you can see throughout the law and throughout what the things that get them angry and what they're pushing for, that that's not absolutely true.
00:19:03.000So there is a culture component to this, and there is a legal sort of bureaucratic judicial component to this that people can start pushing on, pushing back on immediately.
00:19:12.000So what people don't realize is that when it is left to the voters and affirmative action is asked the population, affirmative action is deeply unpopular.
00:19:26.000And I know you mentioned this in the book, that conservatives should actually run on this electorally, but they're afraid to.
00:19:33.000And this is another part, another element here.
00:19:35.000If I were to say one of the strengths of the bad guys, one of the strengths of the wokeys is they're able to weaponize name-calling, the R-word, to create the American right to be in a state of perpetual paralysis.
00:19:50.000That we will do, we'll talk about tax cuts and we'll talk about regulatory reform, but we won't actually talk about, I don't know, anti-white race-based discrimination and hiring practices in college universities.
00:20:05.000So Richard, talk about how not only is it the moral right thing to do, it's actually insanely popular to get rid of these laws, these traditions that discriminate against groups of people, in particular, white people.
00:20:21.000And then I'm going to do a follow-up question on the war on white people in a second.
00:20:32.000I think conservative media now is focusing the focusing Republican politicians and they care more about that than they do the mainstream press.
00:20:41.000I just saw a news story a couple of months ago that Greg Abbott in Texas banned DEI hiring within Texas state government.
00:20:48.000You know, great, but, you know, Texas, you know, Texas has been controlled by a Republican governor for 30 years, right?
00:20:54.000I mean, they could have done this a very, very long time ago.
00:20:56.000The fact that they're doing it now, I mean, first of all, shows that Republicans have sort of been asleep, you know, asleep at the wheel for these last several decades, but also that something is changing.
00:21:06.000I mean, because of my book, because of people like Rufo really bringing to people's attentions, you know, just how pernicious and how deep, you know, and thanks to people like Kendi, to be frank, who just made it so obvious that the liberals had lost their minds.
00:21:53.000So let me ask you just about, you talk about the origins of woke, and there is almost this built-in acceptance of just kind of anti-white dialogue and hiring practices across the board.
00:22:09.000So you sent out a tweet recently that I thought was really smart.
00:22:12.000You said that, okay, totally get the anti-Jew hatred.
00:22:16.000People should stop giving to these universities, you know, if it's against your values.
00:22:20.000But Richard, you also said that there has been a repeated track record of courses at University of Chicago, for example, abolish whiteness.
00:22:30.000Yale University had a ridiculous one about getting rid of white people.
00:22:33.000I could go through the examples off the top of my head.
00:22:35.000But why is it that there is such a resistance to isolate and to stop donations based on that?
00:22:45.000Where does the self-loathing in waspy upper middle class white America come from where people are okay with that kind of narrative?
00:22:55.000That I guess it's okay to do a seminar about what's wrong with white people or a struggle session or to have wine moms sit around the table and hire some DEI administrator to berate you.
00:23:06.000In fact, there's a video on a play on that in a second.
00:23:10.000Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, you go back to the civil rights movement and there was, you know, always this idea that there were two groups of Americans, whites and blacks, you know, Native Americans, too.
00:23:21.000But basically, people saw white as sort of the default American.
00:23:24.000So there really wasn't a sort of white category.
00:23:28.000I think Jews, because of the history of their distinct religious group and because of the Holocaust and sort of the way we think about ethnicity in these countries, are sort of in this in-between place where they're considered white people, but can also be considered a minority group that could be subject to discrimination.
00:23:44.000And I think a lot of Jews feel that, and a lot of Christians feel that on behalf of Jews, that when they see open anti-Semitism on university campuses, they're ready to stop donating money to really attack them to take some action based on that.
00:24:00.000I think white Americans have just been sort of, it's like this concept these left-wing people have that it really is one I think point that they make that's actually true.
00:24:09.000It's like it's sort of the, it's still seen as sort of the default ethnicity, right?
00:24:13.000It's sort of seen as like, okay, you're, you're just a white person, right?
00:24:16.000You could be from Armenia or you could be from Sweden.
00:24:18.000That's just like sort of the default American and everyone else sort of gets a government category.
00:24:23.000I think that changes, you know, as white people get attacked for being white, right?
00:24:29.000I think that, you know, I think that when you say, you know, most people, most people, you know, in a previous generation, 10, 20, 30 years ago, they didn't think of themselves as a white person.
00:24:37.000Maybe they thought of themselves as an American or maybe Irish or Italian or something like that.
00:24:42.000But when you really go out of your way to attack people as a group, that builds a kind of group consciousness.
00:24:51.000And, you know, I don't want white racial consciousness.
00:24:52.000I don't want racial consciousness for any group of people.
00:24:55.000But I think this is an inevitable backlash to the way liberals have been sort of thinking about and talking about race.
00:25:03.000It's still not there yet, where like whites are still not completely comfortable pushing back against that against this stuff, but we're getting there.
00:25:09.000And I think that like, you know, I think that people are just sort of understanding the left has sort of forced it on people to think about these things in a way they didn't really want to before.
00:25:19.000Yeah, I mean, there's an ugliness that they're almost inviting here.
00:25:22.000And I don't know if they even thought this through.
00:25:24.000I want to play this piece of tape here, Richard.
00:28:09.000As you know, following this week's horrible events, Israel is at war.
00:28:13.000The people of Israel are under attack from brutal terrorists, targeting innocent civilians, including women and children.
00:28:18.000There's over a thousand casualties, as well as kidnapping and infiltration of southern Israeli towns.
00:28:22.000Israel is now retaliating and could escalate with a ground offensive against Hamas militants.
00:28:27.000The situation is critical, which is why I'm partnering with our friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews to rush emergency relief to the hardest hit areas.
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00:29:01.000Call 800-235-887 as we rush urgent need right now to help Israel through the International Fellowship of Christian Jews.
00:29:29.000I don't know that I was all that racist to start with, but I also would be more aware or hyper-aware of my thoughts or reactions to circumstances that would be racist.
00:30:52.000There is a sort of foreign policy component to this.
00:30:54.000And there's a way that foreign policy and the dangers that you actually feel are related to just how goofy and silly you can be in your domestic politics.
00:31:03.000In closing here, Richard, you have another book, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy, How Generals, Weapons, Manufacturers, and Foreign Government Shape American Foreign Policy.
00:31:12.000How should we think about the Israeli conflict unfolding right now?
00:31:19.000So, yeah, I mean, I have a recent article that said wars of necessity and wars of choice.
00:31:24.000And I think that, you know, we in America, since, you know, the Second World War, really, have been fighting what have unquestionably been wars of wars of choice, right?
00:31:33.000And I think Israel is in a war of necessity mode.
00:31:36.000I think that what the attacks by Hamas showed in the, you know, last week was that we cannot, you know, this is not, this is not sustainable, right?
00:31:45.000You can't have a population on your border that fires rockets.
00:31:48.000It's going to occasionally do raids that you're going to have to worry about them taking, you know, taking women and children hostage, you know, slaughtering families.
00:31:57.000And so, yeah, I think we should be supporting Israel here.
00:32:00.000I think this is, you know, the right to self-defense that any government would be entitled to and would, you know, would undertake without hesitation if they were in similar situation.
00:32:12.000And so, yeah, you know, I hope that the U.S. stays strong by the side of Israel during this conflict.
00:32:17.000It just sort of understands that for us, the Middle East, we can take it or leave it.
00:32:21.000We don't have to be involved in the Middle East.
00:32:28.000And so that's why they're in such a tough situation.
00:32:32.000So Richard Hanania is the author of several books, Origins of Woke being one of them.
00:32:39.000And very important, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy, How Generals, Weapons, Manufacturers, Foreign Governments Shape American Policy.