LEMON DROP | Has the Right Gone WOKE?!
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What is 'the woke right' and why is it the focus of this episode?
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Don Lemon Show. You know, Donald Trump's return to the White House and his subsequent moves to take a blowtorch to DEI programs has led many to declare that the progressive wokeness movement is dead. And we're going to talk about that in this episode. Dead and buried, not six feet under, but 60 feet under, as a matter of fact. But what if I told you something may be rising up to take its place? I think you might be surprised about what it is, because it is the woke right movement. Yeah, the woke right, not the woke left. It's just as eerie as it sounds. To define the woke right and talk about all of its implications, I'm happy to be joined by Thomas Chatterton-Williams.
He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. Thomas, good to see you again. How are you? Great to see you, Don. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. You have everybody not chattering, but chatting, the chattering about the woke right. So I want to ask you this. Before we even get into the woke right, I just want to take a step back and have you expand on what you think wokeness is, as in OG wokeness, you know what I mean? Because... It tends to be different for everyone. And let me just say in your essay, this is what you write. I'm going to quote here. You said one of the defining features of the social justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas assault Hamas assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language.
You write many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words. Can you say more? Is it is it just about the policing of language? What do you how do you see this? Sure.
Yeah, no, not at all. The policing of language is one element of it because one of the, you know, wokeness is this nebulous kind of word that I don't love. I never loved it when it was applied to the kind of social justice orthodoxy that really defined the 2010s, peaked in the summer of 2020, and then fizzled out by 2023 or so. But that's the term that we have. And one of the defining features of it is this kind of need to politicize all aspects of life. So what type of books you read, what words you use, language becomes very important and the control of language, the assertion of authority. overlanguage becomes a very important exercise of power. The guiding way of seeing all politics and social interaction is of power relations in that there are two different classes of people.
There is the oppressor and the oppressed. Victimization, the victim status becomes a kind of an entitlement to do away with the norms of polite society, to stop business as usual. We're in a state of emergency. Society must be remade. There's no time for being neutral. That only reinforces the status quo. So this sense of aggrievement really fuels wokeness and the self-righteous need to dispense with due process and things like this. And so then there's always a power relation perceived in every aspect of our collective lives. Language is, of course, how we mediate our collective lives.
Well, it was supposed to be about just being aware of the inequities in society, right? But it sort of morphed into what you're saying, where it became virtue signaling. Don't you think, did it become, I'm better than you, and if you're not as good as me and don't live up to the ideals that I believe, then you must be cast aside and banished with a scarlet letter. Maybe that's a bit extreme.
Yeah, no, I actually don't think so.
It had become a religion. It had become a religion.
It became cult-like and even religious in its fervor. And there's nothing like the fervor of the new convert. And it was an unforgiving religion. It was the worst kind of religion, a religion without grace. So there was a constant need for scapegoating when the left really controlled that energy in society. But what is happening now is that that energy has drifted to an ascendant right that does see itself as equally victimized and aggrieved, that sees identity as central to its victimization and centers whiteness this way, and also has married that sense of aggrievement and that desire to see things as a state of emergency, suspend norms, to actual government power, which the left didn't really have.
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