Richard Hanania, author of the most important book of the year, "The Origins of Woke," joins Lou Dobbs on The Great America Show to discuss what it means to be "woke" and how to combat it.
00:03:50.060At least we wouldn't be subsidizing woke madness and abject corruption throughout the entire federal government on the current cosmic scale.
00:03:59.480Ours was once a rational system of government and a reasonable society, as close to a meritocracy as could be found on the planet.
00:04:09.600But now our military budget has to include funding for gay pride celebrations, woke initiatives throughout our government, and quotas, it seems, for everything.
00:04:24.400Our guest today is Richard Hanania, author of the most important book of the year, in my opinion, entitled The Origins of Woke.
00:04:33.280And importantly, in this outstanding book, Richard devotes his energy and his intellect and a lot of pages to how to combat wokeness and its corrosive impact on our society and nation.
00:04:45.260Richard, welcome to The Great America Show.
00:04:47.800Thanks for being with us, and congratulations on your book.
00:04:50.960The title, The Origins of Woke, folks.
00:06:17.220You know, have a work environment that's welcoming to all, you know, as defined by the DEI or the HR office.
00:06:23.420And then you need, as implied by number two, you need a bureaucracy in order to enforce this, these attempts to overcome disparities and then these restrictions on speech.
00:06:33.060And so, these three pillars of wokeness, I think, basically encompasses what people are talking about.
00:06:37.460And the book goes on to show that a lot of this stuff is based on law.
00:06:40.840And, you know, there's something we can – there are ways through the legal system, through politics to fight back against it.
00:06:45.820And you chart the path of moving from a society whose strength was not diversity, but the ability to bring all sorts of folks into one common loyalty to a nation.
00:07:07.140And to aspire to the same thing, to principally be part of the middle class, which is where the heart of the American dream beats, and to all who aspire to it.
00:07:20.260And suddenly, we are a society that looks first and foremost to that which makes us different.
00:07:27.100We look at differences rather than commonalities.
00:07:31.180And when we find differences, that gives government license to seek equity.
00:07:40.780I mean, you're right that, you know, this stuff doesn't serve to divide people.
00:07:45.160I mean, even the way we classify ourselves by race, the categories Hispanic, Latino, they really didn't exist to any large extent before the government started using these terms.
00:07:54.100Asian American, Pacific Islander, didn't even exist in the English language.
00:07:57.720I showed through some text analysis of books until the government created that as a category.
00:08:03.300And now people sort of believe in these categories, right?
00:08:05.520And we financially incentivize people to lead into their identities.
00:08:10.540There's potentially, you know, a huge payoff if you say somebody made me uncomfortable because, you know, of my race or sex.
00:08:16.820So, yeah, you have these, you know, these legal structures and these incentives that, you know, one of my arguments in the book is they change institutions.
00:08:23.440So, the institutions have to keep up with the law.
00:08:25.760They, you know, they're regulated and they have to engage in self-regulation.
00:08:29.020At the same time, you're also, and I think I showed this pretty clearly, changing people's psychology, changing how people see themselves and see one another and see themselves in relation to the nation.
00:08:39.340And so, yeah, the law could have, you know, serious downstream effects.
00:08:42.780And I think, you know, a lot of people have documented just how bad wokeness is.
00:08:46.160I don't think anyone has gone back and sort of traced it in the legal and bureaucratic, you know, to its legal and bureaucratic source.
00:08:53.860Let's go to the idea that suddenly we are watching an alliance among human resources departments in corporate America.
00:09:02.780We are seeing alliances there with the Marxist left.
00:09:07.280They have found common ground in wokeness that it adheres to their benefit.
00:09:17.760And it's going to be very difficult to break, don't you think?
00:09:21.160Yeah, I mean, I think that one way the law interacts with sort of these ideological factors, you know, I have a friend who calls it a force multiplier, right?
00:09:29.740So if you start out dividing the government forces businesses and the government does it itself, divides people by race, divides people by sex, creates incentives to people to see for people to see themselves that that way and eventually profit off of it.
00:09:43.640And, yeah, I mean, you have communists and you have people who are far leftists and, you know, people who are, you know, radical feminists and they can go and they can, you know, they can they can instrumentalize this and they can basically, you know, profit, profit themselves.
00:09:57.820So you'll find, you know, there's a there's always been a long history between sort of people in so-called civil rights and, you know, Marxism, far leftism.
00:10:06.980And so, yeah, I think the law opens up these sort of opportunities.
00:10:10.260And, you know, it's not just about changing the log, you know, rolling back a lot of the doctrines that have been bad.
00:10:15.860You know, I you know, it's important to fight on the cultural level, you know, in the media, you know, through the education system, which I see conservatives doing, too.
00:10:23.800So, yeah, there's there's there's there's a lot going out here.
00:10:28.280There's an interesting, if you will, constraint on the part of the of the right Republicans, conservatives.
00:10:36.980Independence who are unwilling to to tiptoe up to the edge of saying, wait a minute, this is Marxist philosophy and doctrine at work here.
00:10:46.500When you attack the nuclear family, when you attack the the standards by which a country lives, our cultural, cultural inherited and heritage is just rife with splendid examples of heroism.
00:11:07.220And a history that is remarkable compared to any nation on earth, American exceptionalism.
00:11:14.520But you can't say that because not all Americans are exceptional subtly.
00:11:19.140And therefore, you have to be very, very careful because group and identity politics will weigh in very quickly.
00:11:26.040What are we to do what are we to do to return to a time where we were colorblind, where there were no quotas and where everyone who is who aspired to achieve in this country got a fair break.
00:11:41.900And it was a meritocracy, not fully and not perfectly, but certainly more so than it is today with institutions that now have decided that diversity is our strength and that they can weigh in.
00:11:55.860You know, they can weigh in on the scales of equity and equality and forget, don't worry, you're pretty little head about real equality.
00:12:07.140Yeah. So there's been. Yeah. I mean, you know, the way I put it in the book is that, you know, this we didn't get to this point culturally overnight and we probably won't get out of this overnight.
00:12:17.800Right. It's been these, you know, these extreme civil rights laws have been there for sometimes in some cases, four or five decades.
00:12:23.960We can, but we can start today and we can, you know, argue and we can argue in the marketplace of ideas, of course, education system.
00:12:30.840But what the book really stresses is that I give specific advice for people who are in the judiciary, people who are legislatures and people who are going to be in the next in the executive branch in the next Republican administration.
00:12:44.440You can you can repeal affirmative action in government contracting.
00:12:47.600You know, you can do that on the first day of Vivek Ramaswamy has already promised that.
00:12:52.180And then you can the Supreme Court can revisit some of these harassment decision laws and particularly Griggs, which had disparate impact, which said that if you give a test or any kind of metric to measure employees or to hire or fire them or promote them.
00:13:06.440And if one group doesn't do if one group does better than the other, that's presumably racist.
00:13:12.400It becomes a burden, becomes on the employer to justify it.
00:13:15.980And so, yeah, I have an entire chapter.
00:13:43.760We're back now with Richard Hanania, and he has authored the brilliant new book, The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
00:14:00.800And one of the things I love about your book is you provide prescriptions for resolution.
00:14:09.620You also, in doing so, test my my skepticism a bit because I see a federal government that is made up of primarily Democrats and the permanent bureaucracy,
00:14:23.300a federal government that's under the control of the deep state, the Marxist Dems without any and there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that that is a statement of fact and truth.
00:14:34.940And I don't see how the Republicans gained sufficient parity to to move forward from this point without a righteous clash in the public arena in the in to win elections and to do so with all their might.
00:14:54.180It is a time of terrific turmoil and conflict in this country.
00:14:59.320But too many on the right don't recognize it.
00:15:59.660And, you know, it's easier for the left to continue programs that exist than it is to bring them back once they've been undone.
00:16:06.760So a combination of sort of Republicans knowing what the stakes are, having the judiciary in their favor, having public opinion on their side and and, you know, just being, you know, just just sort of knowing and having sort of the path to go forward.
00:16:21.120I'm optimistic that something can be done.
00:16:23.020I think the the the SFA, the Harvard decision and Trump's last day in this last months in office, we had the executive order on critical race theory trading to the federal government that there are all these stories about, you know, these people's businesses, you know, they're losing these government contracts.
00:16:43.260But that's hopefully something you do in the next administration at the, you know, at the start of the administration rather than the end.
00:16:49.220And on top of that, there's just so much more that a president can do.
00:16:53.020There there is there's an old saw that a president has immense power when it comes to destruction, very little power when it comes to construction.
00:17:03.800And that is a dilemma for every president except except one.
00:17:33.220We are we are at sea in this American society.
00:17:37.540And and it's going to be quite some time, I think, before we can rationalize even what is happening with corporate America, because importantly, corporate America's HR departments are a huge part of the problem here.
00:17:51.160We are looking at ESG, Blackstone, BlackRock and Wall Street driving ESG effectively, CRT as well, creating a not only a culture, but an architecture and a structure that absolutely demands wokeness.
00:18:15.160And this was this was a country at one time where the Republican Party was hand in hand with corporate America and business interests, big business interests.
00:18:26.240And now we see that foundation and it is shifted entirely to the Democratic Party.
00:18:33.160Your thoughts on how easy that will be to break corporate America of wokeness.
00:18:38.480Yeah, I mean, I really trace the history of the book about how HR really the entire industry grew in response to civil rights law.
00:18:47.340And, you know, I think I'm more optimistic on corporate America than a lot of people are, because, you know, I think in the capitalist system, I think given human nature, they want to make a profit.
00:18:56.880And so for a long time, the profitable thing has been to go along with wokeness because the media had so much power.
00:19:02.220It was almost like the mafia comes by and, you know, says, you know, nice business you have here.
00:19:06.120Be terrible if something happens to it.
00:19:07.620And the person pays the, you know, pays the pays the protection money.
00:19:10.940It doesn't necessarily mean that they love the mafia.
00:19:13.880Right. I mean, that's just sort of that's their only option.
00:19:16.940And so just, you know, I think that if the incentives change, I mean, I think that corporate behavior will change with it.
00:21:44.180I mean, some people are fighting, for example, the accreditation boards that are pushing diversity classes and affirmative action on universities.
00:21:53.100And, you know, I think conservatives have to do a better job of sort of reaching young, educated people.
00:21:58.600I mean, it's you know, there's the you know, it's not just a lot of these professions are not just how they just haven't got liberal or got woke because, you know, conservatives are not allowed in something.
00:22:07.660I mean, sometimes there is discrimination against conservatives.
00:22:10.340But, you know, I think we need you know, I think we need to make clear to people, you know, just how bad liberal ideas and policies have been for the country.
00:22:18.300Again, you know, another one of these the goals and goals of this book, just to tell people, you know, the social engineering here has been extreme and it's had harmful effects on the economy and on society.
00:22:29.560We're going to continue with Richard Hanania and his book Origin of Woke.
00:22:35.760And what we're really talking about is how to kill woke.
00:22:39.340We'll be right back with that in just one moment.
00:22:41.640We're back now talking with Richard Hanania, the author of the beautiful new book, The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
00:22:58.680It's that triumph of identity politics, Richard, that I have a lot of trouble with.
00:23:04.440There's a victory, a triumph for the left on civil rights law, on corporate law, you name it.
00:23:20.340You know, you're right that on some things like civil rights law, I mean, they've been sort of running on a post for a really long time.
00:23:26.280At the same time, I think, you know, we should see that there are, you know, conservative victories out there when conservatives just sort of worry about policy and advocate for their views.
00:23:35.180So if you look at like that, you know, I have an article that said conservatives win all the time.
00:23:39.020So I pointed, for example, gun laws, right?
00:23:41.080Gun laws were much more strict 30, 40 years ago.
00:23:43.800Now, practically every state has concealed carry, which wasn't always the case in this country.
00:23:49.500We've seen amazing we've seen amazing progress on school choice just in the last two years.
00:23:55.260Ten states now have adopted some form of universal vouchers.
00:23:59.920You know, this was again, this was something five years ago, 10 years ago.
00:24:03.520Nobody would have thought this possible.
00:24:05.280Now, there are some things where conservatives haven't done all that much.
00:24:09.360And that's because they've either neglected the issue or they haven't they haven't fought for it.
00:24:13.820And so one thing I argue in the origins of woke is that civil rights law has been one of these issues.
00:24:18.860It's hard because civil rights, just people think of Martin Luther King.
00:24:45.920And I guess we are coming to the same place.
00:24:48.300I believe right now that if the Republican Party doesn't have more fight, more strength, more passion than it's exhibiting right now,
00:24:59.980it will be, in my judgment, a very difficult fight.
00:25:04.120And you have laid out, and God bless you for doing so, a way forward to deal with what is the antithesis of this country's founding values, wokeness, the Marxist philosophy that is the foundation of the current Democrat Party.
00:25:23.520They are truly Marxist Dems and are aligned more with this president, for example, is aligned more with the CCP than he is with certainly any other element of this country that is not outright left wing.
00:25:38.980We're watching what has grown into a fifth column in this country.
00:25:43.260When you look at the institutionals, the institutions, whether it's academia, public education, K through 12, whether it is corporate America, whether it is politics, you name it, they own it.
00:26:05.760I mean, you're talking about the decision on Harvard University.
00:26:09.840At the same time that they won on affirmative action at Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts says, and here's your path to an escape, hands everybody an escape clause.
00:26:23.180Just have them write an essay for crying out loud.
00:26:26.320What do you do when your judiciary is that corrupt?
00:26:31.440Because that is both cynical and corrupt, in my opinion.
00:26:36.740Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, I think, you know, I read that decision very closely and I think people might be a little bit too hard on Roberts there.
00:26:45.860I mean, he also says, you know, he says very clearly, you know, don't don't think that you can just recreate the old system through essays and don't listen to the dissent because the dissent says to do this.
00:26:56.460They're not the best, you know, people to to be advised on how to comply with this decision.
00:27:00.960I mean, you can't say, you know, he couldn't say you can't mention race, right?
00:27:04.280You could have you could, of course, have essays. Of course, it might come up.
00:27:07.460But I think what the court showed in SFFA v.
00:27:11.040Harvard is that they're going to be very skeptical of all race based remedies.
00:27:15.320And look, the universities are the hardest thing.
00:27:17.480The universities are, you know, when you say Marxist, I mean, this is this is the this is the these are the institutions where that's most literally true.
00:27:24.200Right. People whose entire identity, whose entire existence is overcoming racism, overcoming sexism and so forth.
00:27:30.980Right. So they're going to try. They're going to do whatever they can.
00:27:33.600And, you know, the conservatives don't have the representation in the universities.
00:27:36.420And it's going to be very difficult. Now, when you move to corporate America, right, when you move to other other places, right,
00:27:43.320they're not going to be as creative and as determined, you know, to overcome the law.
00:27:47.140Right. And so I think you're I think you're going to once, you know, and the Supreme Court hasn't even ruled on one of these business decisions, civil rights.
00:27:53.880You know, I want the conservative movement. It's not just about the court ruling.
00:27:56.440It's about the activists and the conservative lawyers to find the cases.
00:28:02.440And I think Stephen Stephen Miller's Stephen Miller's think tank is doing this think tank or, you know, activist organization or whatever.
00:28:09.260They're they're doing this now. It's getting those cases in front of them.
00:28:12.020And when they rule on them, you know, it's not going to be like it's not going to be like the universities.
00:28:16.180Right. Because these people care about profits. Their whole identity is not engaged in social engineering.
00:28:22.020And in this case, I think, you know, I think we can see serious changes.
00:28:26.520So, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a multiprogged approach.
00:28:29.000I mean, I have you know, I try to talk to as many different people as I can in the book.
00:28:32.240I say if you're an activist, this if you know, if you're if you're a you know, if you're a if you're a judge or a judicial clerk, think about this.
00:28:39.020If you're a lawyer, this is what you might have to do.
00:28:41.620You know, the left didn't win by just one person, you know, coming and magic a lot, waving a wand.
00:28:47.740Right. They had people who, you know, put their nose to the grindstone.
00:28:51.040They work in all kinds of different professions.
00:28:53.060And it's going to be the exact same thing if we ever get back to a meritocratic for your country like we used to have.
00:28:59.060Well, I think your book is going to be a very important, a very important element of that.
00:29:05.480And I am I want to repeat again the the author of the new book, The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights, Law, Corporate America and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
00:29:18.080Richard, you've done a you've created a masterful read and a critically important read for this country.
00:29:26.200I want to and I think, by the way, to support your view, I think that we heard Bob Iger of Disney recently say that he's going to walk back Disney from the culture wars.
00:29:38.160Now, whether he does or he doesn't, that's an important statement that he made.
00:29:42.780And Wall Street is where a lot of wokeness resides.
00:29:46.500And they had to be thinking, wait a minute, ESG isn't the big deal here?
00:29:51.120Actually running your business and making money, which Disney hasn't been making in the at the levels that they're supposed to for some time now.
00:29:59.500Their stock is near an all time low because they they went in a very bad direction.
00:30:35.840And as you say, it's going to be a long, long haul.
00:30:40.540I just I I'm I'm wondering just how much of this is science, how much of this is politics, how much of it is profit and how much of it is outright ideology.
00:30:50.800And I think ideology is winning right now.
00:30:53.400But there are some biological issues, too.
00:30:55.400We're watching a country that has in terms of abortion over the since Roe v.
00:31:02.860Wade, there have been 60 to 70 million abortions in this country.
00:31:06.660Meanwhile, American citizens are going to Mexico to get abortions, while Mexico is sending illegals from 150 countries into the United States by the millions.
00:31:17.040We're in a period of absolute societal, to me, societal psychic break.
00:31:25.200It's it's irrational what we're doing and what we're witnessing and the public policies that created all of this turmoil.
00:31:31.040Yeah, Lou, I mean, we have a lot on our plate, unquestionably, everything from abortion to migration to identity politics, you know, to the culture.
00:31:42.940But, you know, I think, you know, well, all we do is we sort of we try to trace the history.
00:31:48.740We understand how we got here and try to find the policies that can reverse them.
00:31:53.260And I hope when people read my book, they see in one this one sort of narrow area.
00:32:05.860Yeah, it's you know, it's about meritocracy, free speech, the kind of people who staff our institutions.
00:32:13.620Actually, a lot of the other stuff is downstream of that, too, because a lot of these people who adopt crazy policies tend to be people who are, you know, not qualified for their jobs.
00:33:51.020The book, again, The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, and According to The Atlantic, A Pathway to White Supremacy.
00:34:01.940What a hack, cliched expression they came up with.
00:34:07.160They could have done better than that.
00:34:10.580Thanks to Richard Hanania, and I urge you to arm yourself with both the knowledge and Richard's insights and thoughtful responses to the Woke Myth column that is now threatening meritocracy and America.
00:34:23.480The book is Origins of Woke, a terrific book.
00:34:26.980Thank you, everybody, for being with us.
00:34:28.460On The Great America Show tomorrow, we'll have author, journalist, Great American Lee Smith as we take up the insidious and venomous Marxist Dems and their intended devastation of our great country.
00:34:40.580Please join us here tomorrow and each and every day, of course.