An anti-woke campaigner got in a tizzy after she was asked to define what ‘woke’ means.
During an interview on The Hill’s online programme Rising, Bethany Mandel was stumped when co-host Briahna Joy Gray asked her to define the infamous term which has become a mainstay of right-wing criticisms of anything vaguely liberal.
After plugging her book, Stolen Youth, which claims the far-left has indoctrinated today’s youth with racial ideology, a “victimhood” culture and “gender madness”, Manel was put to task by Gray, who was a former adviser of Bernie Sanders.
“What does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke?” Gray asked. “It’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
Mandel, unfortunately, was unable to get on that same page.
“So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um,” the conservative writer stammered before presciently adding: “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”
A struggling Mandel continued: “I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Um, sorry, I—it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”
While Gray told Mandel to “take your time,” Soave jumped in to offer his guest a bit of assistance.
“I mean, everybody is weighing in against wokeness,” Soave declared. “Like we do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”
Gray, for her part, then asked her co-host to define “wokeness,” prompting the Reason writer to claim that “it’s the tendency to punish people formally or often informally for expressing ideas using language that is very new that no one would have objected to like five seconds ago.”
Watch the clip in full below:
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