Western Standard - Fighting woke, see something, say something

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.

00:00:21.320 I'm Nigel Hannaford. It is Thursday, June 26, and my guest today is Simon Hankinson,

00:00:27.620 a Senior Research Fellow in Border Security and Immigration at Washington's Heritage Foundation.

00:00:34.900 Welcome again to the show, Simon.

00:00:37.260 Thanks for having me.

00:00:38.620 Simon, we usually turn to you for what's happening on the border,

00:00:41.740 and I do have a question on that for you in a few moments.

00:00:45.900 But first, you've left your track.

00:00:49.980 You've written a book, and it's called Ten Woke Commandments You Must Not Obey.

00:00:55.660 Interesting way of putting it.

00:00:57.020 I think we all know what woke is, even if we can't define it.

00:01:02.260 It's sort of like pornography.

00:01:03.560 We know it when we see it. 0.98

00:01:04.700 It's something silly that makes normal people roll their eyes. 0.92

00:01:08.180 But it's dangerous, all right. 0.82

00:01:09.560 And you're telling people to fight back by not obeying the woke commandments.

00:01:15.080 Like what?

00:01:16.780 Well, as you say, it's a whole package.

00:01:19.720 We know what woke is when we hear it.

00:01:22.380 It used to have a pretty innocuous and a positive meaning about being aware of

00:01:26.500 injustice when it's out there. But now it's a series of things that you are instructed to

00:01:31.800 believe. And if you don't believe them, you're going to be canceled. You might lose your job.

00:01:37.320 You might lose your friends. You might have members of your own family turn on you.

00:01:41.620 And I've never, I'm only pushing 60, but I've never seen this before in my lifetime. When you

00:01:47.500 had this raft of beliefs, it reminds me very much of what the communist world was like,

00:01:52.500 what life was like in fascist dictatorships if you read history books. I'll give just a couple

00:01:59.340 examples. You're not supposed to have a nation. You shall reject your nation. You have to reject

00:02:06.120 your history. The United States is a bad, you know, white supremacist, horrible place that 1.00

00:02:12.220 wasn't founded in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but back in 1619 with the first 0.91

00:02:17.720 arrival of chattel slaves. You must not know what a woman is. You must not know what a man is, 0.98

00:02:24.320 even though we all know what those things are and can define them very simply. You must trust the

00:02:29.240 media and institutions, even though we can watch those institutions crumble in front of us. And

00:02:35.300 the media has never had lower credibility and lower trust in my lifetime. So you're expected

00:02:41.420 to to believe all of these things even if your own eyes tell you that they are false and i and i'm

00:02:48.100 saying uh that you have to you have to fight this is the time to stand up for what you believe in

00:02:53.000 and to stand up for truth well i think you're talking our language but a lot of people say

00:02:56.880 all right yeah you know i this has happened to me or it's happened to my neighbor uh and in fact i

00:03:02.580 know several people who are in uh in private business never mind in government who have had

00:03:08.880 to go and listen to the DEI presentation and sign off that they've got it. And any pushback

00:03:18.760 is not appreciated. So how did we go from this being something that happened in left-wing

00:03:27.180 governments to something that happens in fairly non-political or even slightly conservative-minded

00:03:36.080 businesses? That's a fascinating sociological, historical question that we're going to have to

00:03:43.560 answer in the future, I hope, when we vanquish this thing, like the Salem witch trials. At the 0.85

00:03:48.380 time, it must have made sense. I mean, the Spanish Inquisition, if you look at medieval Europe,

00:03:53.740 Henry VIII and burning heretics and the Thirty Years' War in Germany, it was a madness that 0.66

00:03:59.460 burned over the country that in retrospect looks absolutely insane, but at the time swept along

00:04:05.460 most of the population with it. Look, for companies, it's clear. They're trying to make

00:04:10.260 money. Why did they put Dylan Mulvaney, this man who wants to be a woman, as their spokesperson

00:04:16.580 very briefly for Bud Light Beer? Because they wanted to sell more beer.

00:04:21.280 You didn't think about work, did it? Didn't they lose about $5 billion?

00:04:25.760 It backfired spectacularly, but that was the motive. The reason why they put DEI and there's

00:04:32.780 you know, a pride month and about 15 other special days set aside for sexual minorities,

00:04:38.060 let's say, is because they're trying to sell more product. So I want to say their hearts

00:04:42.960 aren't really in it. With academia, unfortunately, it is what they are taught from kindergarten

00:04:50.080 through 12th grade. And then when they go to teachers' colleges and even our best universities,

00:04:55.180 our formerly best universities in the Ivy Leagues, they are constantly fed a diet of

00:05:01.140 intersectionality and critical theory and critical race theory and gender ideology so that they have

00:05:07.760 to be pretty tough and have a pretty strong spine to emerge unscathed. So you have these schools

00:05:13.420 feeding into companies and the government in particular, non-governmental organizations,

00:05:19.340 people who are already completely indoctrinated. If you look at the way, and one of my chapters

00:05:24.220 that talk about communist China and the cultural revolution, the way they punished people for

00:05:30.080 thinking independently and freely and had these mobs of students running around literally beating

00:05:35.260 up teachers and parents who didn't do what they were told. This is the way it happens. It captures

00:05:41.200 a culture slowly. It creeps up on you. And then all of a sudden it's out. And then the person who

00:05:47.340 stands up like a J.K. Rowling and says, well, hang on a minute. It isn't right to put a full-grown

00:05:52.520 male rapist in a women's prison. They're the ones who are looked at as the bad guys. And they're 0.59

00:05:58.780 the ones who are supposedly speaking hate speech looked at by whom i have anybody who i mean okay

00:06:06.500 i i'm a conservative and i run in conservative circles so i'm probably not going to be exposed to

00:06:11.860 to the the kind of people who would jump on jk rowling but you know i have a feeling that

00:06:18.600 most people say well yeah you know and yet she is still criticized by who people in the media 0.99

00:06:26.020 so the media have gone woke i think i don't think that's news but

00:06:32.080 again it goes against common sense and the evidence of your own eyes and i like to think

00:06:38.700 that people in the media although some of them are a bit strange nevertheless believe in truth

00:06:46.180 that's what gets you into the business in the first place well what happens to them how did

00:06:51.680 they how did they pick it up yeah chapter seven of my book is called you will bear false witness

00:06:57.180 trust the media and i used to read the new york times regularly i used to read the washington post

00:07:03.380 i still kind of do uh but it's it's a painful experience uh and these are not the same newspapers

00:07:09.920 that they were 30 years ago newspapers are obviously made up of editors and writers and

00:07:14.640 the culture has shifted there was a famous meeting i think it was around 2016 where the editor of the

00:07:20.340 York Times was meeting with a bunch of younger journalists. And they were essentially telling

00:07:24.480 him, look, we should not be objective as reporters. We should cover every story through a lens of

00:07:31.420 racial justice, social justice, gender ideology, so that we say the right thing. And instead of 0.73

00:07:38.240 having an editorial page and then people who just wrote what they felt was the objective truth and

00:07:43.880 allowed readers to make up their own minds, we now have headlines that essentially are opinion

00:07:51.500 pieces. They're not analysis. And we have articles that are so biased that they should not appear in

00:07:58.600 a straight news section. And I've got example after example in my book from CNN, from the

00:08:04.680 Washington Post, from the New York Times, from USA Today, all of our legacy media, sort of 90%

00:08:11.000 of the media that people consume has lost credibility, which is why they're turning

00:08:16.060 to alternative sites in the United States, like, you know, the Daily Caller and the Daily Signal

00:08:21.620 and the Daily Wire. I don't know why daily is such a popular title, but they're turning to sites

00:08:27.360 where they think they can get something that it may be ideologically based, but at least they're

00:08:33.080 not pretending to be objective. And the objective old school media like CNN are just losing viewers

00:08:40.360 and readers by the legion well now there's a current example of that i'd like you to comment

00:08:45.320 on this the a week ago the u.s air force bombed the fordo site in iran and from what we can tell

00:08:56.760 and from what the israelis on the ground reported did significant damage enough to set back the

00:09:03.320 Iranian nuclear program for a very long time, if not forever. Then a source, an unnamed source,

00:09:11.720 and therefore completely unaccountable, is supposed to have appeared, which says,

00:09:16.920 no, no, we didn't do that at all. Trump's overblowing what he's done. And it gets picked up

00:09:23.000 by the two institutions that you just mentioned, CNN and the New York Times.

00:09:28.120 I look at that and I say that's obviously just sowing a lie so that there is some doubt so that

00:09:40.600 President Trump cannot be given any credit for anything it's a little bit like the Russia hoax

00:09:46.800 there was nothing to it but it would it served the purpose of this discrediting him in the eyes

00:09:56.120 of many at a significant time how do you see this particular story about the no we didn't we didn't

00:10:04.600 do any damage uh line that they're taking well first of all it's very distressing to me as someone

00:10:12.600 who formerly had a top secret clearance and never leaked anything to have people who whose job it is

00:10:19.960 to keep our nation's secrets leaking them for partisan purposes that disgusts me i don't care

00:10:25.640 if you agree with it or not, it is your job to keep those secrets. That's why you get paid and

00:10:29.760 why you get a pension. So that's a very distressing phenomenon that now we can't trust some people who

00:10:35.880 are in positions of extreme sensitivity, even in the White House. So you think there really is a

00:10:41.500 source here, and this is not just completely fabricated? I don't know. I don't know. But I

00:10:46.220 do know that there have been a lot of leaks, particularly under the Trump administration,

00:10:50.100 that probably are coming from legitimate sources, and I think that is disgraceful,

00:10:56.040 and anyone who does that should be severely punished.

00:10:58.920 Now, let's look at CNN.

00:11:00.340 In my book, I look at one case.

00:11:04.080 There was a hostage whose name was Hirsch Goldberg Pollen,

00:11:07.820 and he was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th.

00:11:10.740 He was kept in captivity.

00:11:12.080 I think his arm had been half blown off, and eventually he was killed.

00:11:16.600 And the headline from CNN, the first headline they had was that that Hirsch Goldberg Paulin has died as if somehow he had caught an illness and passed away.

00:11:28.800 They took the the action verb. They took the responsibility away.

00:11:33.040 And I don't believe that that was accidental, that maybe they just didn't have all the information.

00:11:36.980 Give you another example in New York Times. On one day, their headline page, and I wanted to have a picture of this in the book, but they wanted $1,500 for the privilege, so I decided not to. And they had a picture of Kamala Harris sort of looking like this, you know, staring like George Washington off into the distance, looking beautiful and nicely dressed.

00:11:56.260 And then below it, they had a cartoon of Donald Trump as a claymation sort of orange balloon floating in the sky with ridiculous yellow hair.

00:12:05.820 You know, so it's ways like that that they they bias the reader.

00:12:10.320 They cover Trump, whether you like him or not, they do not cover him objectively.

00:12:14.780 Every single article on that page was critical of Trump and positive toward Harris.

00:12:19.240 So I'm afraid they start with an agenda and it's inductive reasoning.

00:12:23.820 they try to prove the point that they want to make. So with this CNN story, I frankly don't

00:12:28.900 know. We obviously, you and I, do not have access to the classified intelligence that the Israelis 0.98

00:12:34.440 have and that hopefully our guys have that will tell us what really happened. And it may be true

00:12:39.700 that we don't even have accurate reports because these places, a lot of them were underground.

00:12:44.560 They were extremely well protected, at least as far as the Iranians could protect them. 0.85

00:12:48.680 So maybe we don't have incredibly accurate intelligence about what happened. I don't know.

00:12:53.820 But what I don't ever do is believe what I hear coming off the battlefield or the first report after a mass shooting or a bombing or an international event.

00:13:04.540 So it's a twin phenomenon of bad things here.

00:13:08.040 We've got one, people potentially leaking or at least trying to spin things in a way for political advantage and not for the national interest.

00:13:16.580 And then we have media that is deliberately trying to cover it in a way that will minimize any possible advantage to President Trump and maximize criticism.

00:13:27.280 Because, look, Trump will make mistakes in foreign policy.

00:13:29.700 Every president does.

00:13:30.580 And he will win some and he will lose some.

00:13:32.560 But when I remember he went to the Middle East, the article was something like, Trump is going to the Middle East.

00:13:37.940 It's all about his family business.

00:13:39.600 And then I looked and two years ago in 2022, Joe Biden went to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia.

00:13:44.380 And the article is about all the good things that Biden was planning to do in the Middle East.

00:13:48.540 And then they allowed Biden to write an opinion piece in their newspaper saying why I'm going to the Middle East.

00:13:55.540 So the coverage was just, in Trump's case, set up deliberately to make it fail with no interest in the things that he might have done that were positive.

00:14:03.960 And in Biden's case, it was it was giving him every opportunity to succeed.

00:14:07.900 You know, that's that's so true.

00:14:11.600 And Simon, I also noticed that in what you just said, you did something that we all do.

00:14:18.960 You said whether you like Trump or not.

00:14:22.160 And it seems like we have been so conditioned that we have to say that in order to give ourselves permission to say something positive about him.

00:14:30.840 Like conceding that, well, really, you know, he's a controversial character.

00:14:34.660 But in this case, you know, like him or not, he may have done a good thing.

00:14:39.040 So it's an unfortunate thing that's been imposed on us, and I guess this is the success of wokeism that it makes us do those kinds of concessions to an orthodoxy that we don't even subscribe to.

00:14:52.620 I want to take you back to where this comes from.

00:14:55.600 You talked about how it's taught in teachers' training colleges.

00:15:01.980 Well, as a matter of fact, we have corroborative evidence right here in Alberta that that is the case in this conservative province with a conservative government, and yet the teachers' training colleges do use textbooks that basically are awoken in their concept and teach this whole business that you refer to of intersectionality, DEI.

00:15:30.700 Now, okay, we elect politicians, politicians we think control their departments, so should we blame the politicians for this?

00:15:44.380 We can blame politicians who don't make an effort to correct it, but the rod is very deep.

00:15:49.580 There was a Brazilian Marxist, or at least far-left, educator named Paulo Freire, who wrote a book I think called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

00:15:58.520 And this book is sort of well, that's actually in there. I gather they use that in Alberta. So it's required reading in teachers colleges. And they teach a lot more about leftist theory than they do about how to teach English and math and the sciences and the things that they're actually going to teach to the students.

00:16:15.820 And so it's a rare student that comes out of a teacher's college without this indoctrination. And they have to be exceptionally smart. There are some of them out there and a few of them have websites and podcasts and things.

00:16:27.720 But let's take Florida, for example. You had Governor DeSantis in Florida. There was a part of the University of Florida called New College, which had gone so far down the left wing rabbit hole that they were losing students.

00:16:40.540 They couldn't even recruit enough, you know, far left rainbow flag carrying students who are willing to take these ridiculous courses because presumably some of them wanted an education. 0.89

00:16:50.980 And even the kids who believed in all that theory felt unsafe on campus because they or at least they felt they couldn't express themselves and have conversations.

00:16:59.260 It was like a French Revolution or Chinese Revolution style, you know, purity test every time they went out and opened their mouths. 0.82

00:17:05.920 So the governor said, all right, well, we can either ditch this or fix it.

00:17:09.320 He decided to fix it.

00:17:10.280 He appointed a new president and a new board, and they turned it around.

00:17:15.600 In a couple of years, they got recruitment way above what they wanted.

00:17:19.600 They brought in money.

00:17:20.860 They introduced a sports program.

00:17:22.720 And did it turn conservative overnight?

00:17:24.800 No, and that was never the purpose.

00:17:26.280 We don't want to do the opposite of what they do and have everything be conservative or right wing.

00:17:30.820 We want to have free speech and free expression and create a balance in the universe again instead of a 95 or 98 percent left wing bias on our campuses.

00:17:41.820 So I would only fault those politicians who don't even make the effort.

00:17:45.560 We know what the battle is.

00:17:46.800 There's plenty of people out there fighting the fight in the courts, on gender ideology, on parents' rights. 0.99

00:17:53.140 And we just need to have those politicians support it like they do in Florida, in Ohio, and in a lot of our states.

00:17:59.220 and like they obviously don't in places like New York

00:18:02.160 and California and Massachusetts.

00:18:04.840 So you just said we don't want to do what they do.

00:18:10.280 And I'm going to be playing the devil's advocate here a little bit

00:18:14.740 because actually I agree with you.

00:18:15.760 But we allow, we promote, we appreciate free speech.

00:18:21.800 So the left uses the free speech that we are happy to have,

00:18:28.500 let's have the debate. But once they achieve power, then it stops. And then we are faced with

00:18:37.880 the woke commandments that you're telling us to reject. That's what happens when the left takes

00:18:44.020 over. So is it actually the smart thing for us to do to not reverse what the left has done?

00:18:56.160 Is it really possible to have a free speech campus, a free speech society?

00:19:03.420 Well, I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to reverse what they've done.

00:19:06.920 I do want to reverse what they've done.

00:19:08.320 I'm just saying if you have a university, for example, where and there are some, you know, not one single faculty member identifies as a conservative or Republican, then you're not going to get to 50 percent overnight.

00:19:19.440 You know, you're not going to get to 100 percent ever.

00:19:22.460 You have to try to fight incrementally.

00:19:24.720 the same with our our businesses you know you can't replace the entire executive suite uh overnight

00:19:30.800 you can't uh you know destroy entire institution well you can but but that's you know in many

00:19:36.560 cases you're killing the golden goose there some of these institutions are worth saving not all

00:19:40.960 by any means um but i don't see why for example the budweiser beer company not that it's my favorite

00:19:47.280 beer but i don't see why they can't uh anheuser bush can't you know get past this and decide that

00:19:52.800 that they want to be a company that makes beer people want to drink as opposed to a company

00:19:56.900 that promotes woke ideology. And you're actually seeing many companies pulling back from their

00:20:03.120 subsidies for pride parades and gender ideology because they realize that's not their core

00:20:09.480 business interests. The Los Angeles Dodgers should be playing baseball. They should be

00:20:15.660 fielding a great team and providing a great family experience at a reasonable cost. They should leave

00:20:21.380 immigration enforcement to the federal government as the constitution empowers it. So that's all

00:20:26.280 I'm saying is not that we shouldn't go for it, but that we have to be realistic in what we can

00:20:31.080 achieve in a short time. This is a generational, it took us a generation to lose this battle to

00:20:37.340 the left. I think we were kind of asleep when all the 60s radicals, the Bill Ayers types and

00:20:43.020 the Bernadine Dorns, they went off from throwing hand grenades and trying to kill people to college

00:20:49.100 campuses where they started indoctrinating our youth of the time. And now those youth are in

00:20:56.000 their 60s and they've educated two generations. So it's going to take us some time to undo this.

00:21:01.480 So I think a lot of what you said about the corporate America, and by the way,

00:21:06.280 corporate Canada too, rolling back their support for woke causes has been attributable to one man,

00:21:14.820 And Robbie Starbuck, who's really taken that show on the road and done incredibly well

00:21:19.240 with it, the courage of one individual in a sense of purpose is obviously one of the

00:21:25.860 takeaways from this discussion is that each individual has to fight this battle.

00:21:32.360 But let me give you, we're almost out of time, but what encouragement can you give to somebody

00:21:38.120 in this situation?

00:21:39.020 you're working for a bank

00:21:41.240 and you're at a middle management position

00:21:45.300 they like you, you're probably going to go further

00:21:47.340 and they pull you in one day and they tell you

00:21:49.560 well you need to go to this course

00:21:50.920 and at the end of the course

00:21:54.320 we're going to ask you to just agree

00:21:57.620 on the following suite of woke values

00:22:01.740 all of which you've enumerated in your book

00:22:05.520 so there he sits

00:22:08.340 The kids need braces, the mortgage is not paid off, the future is kind of his to grasp, but there is this test of conscience.

00:22:20.920 Do you have any advice for a man or a woman in that position?

00:22:25.920 I do.

00:22:26.500 I had to be gender equivalent, man or woman, yes.

00:22:31.960 They're in a tough spot.

00:22:33.080 Look, I worked for the federal government for 23 years and I got out just as this was

00:22:37.920 becoming really, really toxic.

00:22:40.400 The pronouns in the bio, it was a suggestion when I retired in 2022.

00:22:45.180 It was a commandment a year later.

00:22:47.960 And if you are in that position, I fully understand why you can't speak out.

00:22:52.560 You know, we have this thing called the Ben Franklin Fellowship where retired people like

00:22:56.640 me who were in positions in the State Department in foreign policy, we could speak freely.

00:23:00.920 But people who support us, who may even support the administration's policies, they have to keep quiet and they have to do their jobs.

00:23:09.440 If you work in a company and that company has a policy of putting pronouns in the bio and you kind of buck that trend, it might make your life difficult.

00:23:16.160 Like you say, you've got bills to pay. But here's what I advise.

00:23:18.700 Every one of my chapters ends with somebody to follow on social media, with a good book to read and with an organization that's working in a field.

00:23:27.380 And I think advancing the cause in the right direction.

00:23:30.220 Those are just some suggestions. You talked about Robbie Starbuck. I think he's actually associated with the Heritage Foundation now, too. Chris Rufo from the Manhattan Institute has done incredible work. And there are other whistleblowers out there and people writing about it. Lior Sapir at Manhattan Institute writing about gender ideology. You should blow that whistle. You should let those guys know, shine the light of public interest on your company if they're doing something that's illegal.

00:23:56.160 For example, they have scholarships open or internships only to people of one color or one sex. Once people find out about that, that company might change their minds. The Department of Justice has gone from suing fire departments for not hiring enough women and police departments for not hiring enough people of color to actually enforcing civil rights law. And they are going after, under Harmeet Dhillon, companies that discriminate against people for reasons that are illegal.

00:24:24.540 So I think the way to go if you're in that company is maybe not always to stand up and, you know, put your hand in the air and maybe get struck by corporate lightning, but to let somebody know and make the company defend that policy.

00:24:39.220 And if it's defensible, great. But if it's illegal, then people will find out and they may have to experience some litigation.

00:24:47.400 Okay. Now, I did say that I would come back to you for a quick progress check on Canadian border administration. Are we doing any better?

00:24:58.400 I have not heard anything about the northern border in weeks.

00:25:04.400 Is that good?

00:25:05.400 I would say that's pretty good. I would say no news is good news.

00:25:09.400 And I will say this purely personally, I don't meddle in other countries' politics, but I was very impressed by Pierre Poilievre. I will never forget his destruction of a reporter while he was eating an apple. And I thought he would have been a fantastic counterpart to have north of the border, especially after you've experimented with, what, 10, 12 years of Justin Trudeau's liberal government.

00:25:33.300 But, hey, you guys get to pick your leaders, and I wish you all the best with that.

00:25:38.080 On the border, I sense that things have improved.

00:25:41.440 On the southern border, things are 90-plus percent better in terms of illegal crossers.

00:25:46.640 And we have enforcement in the interior of people who are here illegally.

00:25:50.780 And fortunately, they're not Canadians because you guys can come here under so many legal ways. 1.00

00:25:55.500 We have so much positive trade with Canada.

00:25:57.600 this. So I don't want to, I'm going to touch wood as I say this, but I feel like between the U.S.

00:26:01.940 and Canada, things are looking better. That's wonderful news, Simon. Look, it's always a

00:26:07.820 pleasure to have you on the show. So thank you again. I think this is your third time. It's

00:26:12.540 really good to see you. So God bless. And for the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:26:27.600 Music

Western Standard - June 27, 2025

Fighting woke, see something, say something

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript