Video summary
The video argues that while the specific manifestations of "Woke 1.0," characterized by the intense focus on identity politics, defunding the police, and systemic racism debates of the early 2020s, may have peaked around 2022, the underlying ideological framework has not disappeared but rather evolved into a more dangerous "Woke 2.0." The speaker suggests that many on the left, including high-profile figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are attempting to distance themselves from their past radical statements due to political necessity and backlash, yet they have failed to challenge the fundamental philosophical roots of these ideas. Instead of abandoning the core concepts derived from postmodernism, intersectionality, and altruistic identity politics, these ideas are being channeled into new dogmas that continue to dominate academia and progressive circles without genuine intellectual reckoning or analysis.
This evolution marks a shift from racial politics to class-based economics and anti-Israel sentiment, which now serve as the primary drivers of the left's agenda under this new iteration. The movement has reoriented itself around Marxist ideology, advocating for wealth taxes, rent controls, and state intervention in industries like AI, often dismissing economic evidence that debunks these proposals as central planning solutions. Simultaneously, there is a pronounced hatred toward Israel and an alignment with Palestinian causes, framed through the same lens of oppressor versus oppressed dynamics previously applied to race. The speaker notes that this new focus on economics and foreign policy represents a return to older roots while maintaining the toxic tribal mentality where truth is secondary to group loyalty and adherence to the current ideological dogma.
Remarkably, this "woke" epistemology has spread beyond the left to influence the right as well, creating a unified culture of tribalism where facts are ignored in favor of reinforcing the views of one's chosen leader or tribe. On the right, this manifests as an uncritical defense of policies like those involving ICE and tariffs, driven by a desire to avoid being labeled as "the guy who actually said something wrong" rather than engaging with reality. The speaker warns that while the specific tactics of 2020 may seem extreme now, the incentive structure to conform to tribal dogma remains intact across the political spectrum. Consequently, society is facing a new phase where irrationality and groupthink are normalized on both sides, potentially leading to further polarization and the rejection of candidates who do not fully align with their respective tribal lines.
Ultimately, the video concludes that "Woke 2.0" is not a resolution but a morphing of the same problematic mentality into different costumes, making it arguably worse than its predecessor. The fundamental issues of unthinking conformity, the dismissal of objective truth, and the reliance on emotional dogma over factual analysis persist, now fueled by economic anxiety and geopolitical tensions. As long as these core epistemic flaws remain unaddressed, the cycle of tribalism will continue to dictate discourse, ensuring that the basic ideas of Woke 1.0 survive in a new form that threatens to undermine rational debate and democratic stability for the foreseeable future.
Read the full video transcript
talking about bad ideas.
There's a lot of talk right now, a lot
of uh energy right now, a lot of people
writing about woke 1.0.
Woke 1.0 suggest a woke 2.0. So, we'll
get to the woke 2.0 in a minute, but but
let's let's uh let's try to resurrect
where this woke 1.0 has come from and
why suddenly all this interest in um in
resurrecting woke. I mean there's a
general there seems to be a general view
that woke as we knew it in the late 201s
and early 2020s kind of peaked somewhere
in the postco era maybe in 2022.
uh the number of uh of cancellations,
the just the the the the sheer um uh
vitrial around woke, the the
intersectionality, the the um
the identity politics, all of that kind
of peaked and and certainly with with
Trump's election has been in decline as
DEI becomes less popular and uh as uh
government backs away from DEI and
corporations seem to back away from DEI
and that a lot of these issues
uh and a lot of the kind of the the
statements were made during the heyday
of the of 2020 uh riots defunding the
police and things like that. All of that
kind of peaked back then and things are
calmer now and and more rational now and
seen now. Uh at least that is um that is
the I think the the perspective most
people have and there's a sense in which
that is true. Woke one 1.0 know that
phase of the woke era I don't think it's
the last phase but that phase of the
woke era seems to be over and that
particular framing of issues
while it is still dominating academia so
one wonders how that'll manifest itself
is still dominating academia that
particular phrasing might be over and
the question is what replaces it because
again
we'll see this there's been no reckoning
on the left around walk 1.0
around walk I'm using their terminology
now now 1.0 you know, but um around
Woke, there's been no real intellectual,
you know, thought and and and and
analysis and there has been on the right
and there has been by some on the center
left, but not that many. and and it just
hasn't been kind of all the all the
professors who arguably created
woke all the professors who you know all
those ideas of postmodernism that
manifest in in kind of postc colonialism
and intersectionality and the identity
politics and and and
everything else that expressed
themselves in DEI and ESG and all these
other things. None of those professors
have gone anywhere.
None of those professors have gone
anywhere. They're all there. The
material is still being taught. The
ideas are still alive and well.
Uh you could argue that their expression
has changed. We'll get to that when we
talk about woke 2.0.
The manifestation of those ideas has
changed. But
you know, so so the trans movement is
not as big and the trans issue is not as
dominating and a lot of people on the
left have walked away a little bit from
the trans issue because they saw it it
is a losing issue. But there's been no
rethinking. There's been no challenge to
the fundamental ideas the fundamental
philosophical
if you want to call them philosophical
ideas of
that led to well
so that set of agenda items might have
been put to the side
but all those ideas the again the
postcolonialism the intersectionality
the the the the real altruistic
driven by altruism and the the um uh the
the the uh identity politics, all of
that is going to have to be channeled
into new ideas
and we'll talk about what those might be
in a minute. So, how did we get suddenly
everybody talking about u woke 1.0?
Well, uh, AOC,
um, AOC, the congresswoman who has, we
are told, ambitions to run for the
Democratic nomination for president in
2028. She was on ABC this week, uh, this
last Sunday. Um,
and she was asked about some of the
positions that the Democratic Socialists
took around 2020. So not about the
democratic socialist positions right
now,
some of which are completely insane, but
around the democratic socialist
positions in 2020, primarily I think
defund the police and do away with
prisons and things like that.
And her response was, look, those were
products of the time.
And she made the statement of quote,
woke one was crazy.
and she left
and then she quoted a polit politician
friend and said quote and I think that's
what's important is that we have to
assess what a candidate is saying now
unquote. So don't look back at what they
said in 2020. Yeah, things were crazy in
2020. People said crazy stuff in 2020.
We shouldn't evaluate people today on
what they said back then because it was
crazy. I mean life was crazy. the the
environment was crazy, the influences
were crazy, so evaluate them now.
Um,
[laughter]
you know, she went on to say, you know,
it was the pandemic, there was a lot of
tens, there was a lot of stress. Uh, you
know, those discussions were all
fruitful, but quote, uh, the rhetoric in
that time is not rhetoric that we would
use today. Why not? because that
rhetoric got Donald Trump elected.
She didn't say that. I'm saying that.
But that's the reason, right? Do they
not believe it anymore? No. Many of them
still believe it to the extent that they
believed it back then, right? A lot of
them believed it back then. Why? A lot
of them believed it back then because
that was the thing to believe. That was
the cool thing to believe. That's what
you retweeted. That's what got you in to
the right kind of leftist circles is you
holding these views, not holding these
views, you an outsider on the left.
And in those days retweeting and
restating and rearguing
without thinking completely tribal
tribal mentality of the left of around
you know defunding the police around uh
uh you know violence the systemic racism
remember systemic racism. American
society was filled, you know, saturated
with systemic racism, uh, and everything
else that that that, you know, the woke
um, uh, the woke agenda dictated back
then.
Uh
so uh
you know uh uh there's a number of
high-profile candidates who are trying
to wipe their 2020 record clean and it's
hard to do because it's all public
stuff. Nobody's going to let let it go.
Um, I mean, Harris tried to do it
during a, you know, during a 2020
presidential uh campaign. Harris
endorsed taxpayer funded medically
necessary gender transition surgeries
for federal inmates,
decriminalizing border crossing, and
banning plastic straws, among other
things. four years later when she ran
for president she tried to completely
reposition herself as center left and
walk away from those uh from some of
those ideas
and you're seeing it now um with a lot
of the candidates and of course
Francesca Hong who was the uh Wisconsin
gubernatorial
uh candidate
a democratic socialist who has who once
called for the elimination of the
as well as elimination of prisons, even
proposed doing away with Thanksgiving
because it's a horrible, you know,
racist holiday. Um
they um you know, she tried to walk away
from those and she probably lost the
primary to a more centrist Democrat as a
consequence of not being able to fully
walk away from that. was a consequence
of people remembering all of that and
and and and not wanting uh to walk away
from it. So, um what one was crazy is a
superficial
laugh off the problem and ignore uh
ignore the fundamental issues, ignore
the underlying ideology and philosophy
uh that you'd expect from AOC. I mean,
laugh it off, not take it seriously, and
and uh move on, right?
And of course, she's going to want to do
that. AOC, if she wants to run for
president, she's not going to run as
woke 1.0 candidate. And if she if she
doesn't run for president, she'll almost
certainly run for Senate. And again, she
is going to have to
moderate,
you know, and and and uh kind of walk
away from kind of the position she and
and so many of her colleagues took back
in um in 2020.
Will voters accept that? Will voters
just accept, "Yeah, I was crazy back
then. You're forgiven. Anything you said
back then, that doesn't count. We won't
count it against you. Just whatever you
want to say, that's fine.
Anyway, there's a there's a real
wrecking going on. A lot of people are
writing about woke 1.0 and what happened
and and what it is and and um and and
what's happening today and and is is
woke really gone? Has woke morphed? What
is woke today?
Um but I mean what characterized woke
was the the sense of you know among the
tribe the need to reaffirm whatever
stupid idea was being promoted at the
time.
you know, um,
you know, uh, uh, Manning Glacius, who
is, uh, kind of center left but is way
way way too accommodating of the the
nutty left. He he he writes, "Those who
actually said nutty things have suffered
for it to an extent, which is actually
why there's now this effort to slick
away from them.
But those who ended up on the wrong side
of woke one fads also suffered. The
winners were those who ducked the storm.
Budget experts who knew it wasn't true
that cities spend more money on police
than schools, but didn't say so and
emerge with their reputations unscathed.
That incentive structure, he continues,
to avoid being the well actually guy is
still very much with us and means that
any kind of discourse could go widely
off the rails. And unfortunately, while
we are now deeply into an anti-woke
backlash on the right, the backlash
isn't taking the form of resisting the
poor epistemic practices of the woke
left.
It's resisting the value of caring
about, you know, he says the weak and
unfortunate while replicating the same
toxic dynamics.
And I think he's right. We've replaced
woke 1.0 with woke 2.1 and woke 2.2.
Woke 2.1 is the complete and utter
tribalism we're seeing on the right. The
exact same kind of epistemic mentality.
Epistemic means epistemology. From
epistemology,
not bothering to figure out if
something's true or not,
not looking into the facts, not
evaluating,
but just following the dogma,
following the tribe. And you know while
there are several tribes now,
there are several tribes now
on the right.
Uh they each have their tribal leaders
and they each have their tribal dogma
and the tribal dogma gets repeat repeat
repeat recycle repeat recycle.
the
the the idea
of um you know the the the phenomena of
wokeness which in involved
not bothering with reality, not
bothering with thinking
but buying into whatever it was the
leaders of the movement dictated
whatever they said.
Not bothering with statistics or facts
or evidence or anything like that. that
unfortunately that postmodern and I
think it's very postmodern that idea
that truth is whatever that truth is you
know let's not let's not take truth very
seriously that is very much alive and
well and it's on the right and it's on
the left
and
you know nothing
In in that sense, nothing has been
nothing nothing's changed.
Nothing's changed in terms of the
fundamental ideas the left still holds.
And if anything, the epistemology of the
tribalism of that woke mentality has now
spread to many, many other parts of,
you know, our culture and many, many
other parts of our nation. And now it
unites both left and right.
uh
you know there's a uh there's a an essay
in uh in the Atlantic about uh woke 1.0
and and you know uh what is uh
and
it it you know it it makes the case that
at the end of the day
the fundamental ideas haven't changed.
So now it's a question of what becomes
the new dogma and if you look at the
right well the new dogmas around uh
Trump anything he does right he can't do
any wrong that is weakening as people
are becoming more and more and more
frustrated with Trump it has to do with
ICE and not even thinking about what I
is actually doing what the facts
actually show and and you still feel you
see people defending ICE on the basis of
law enforcement and protecting us from
criminals
when what ISIS is doing has nothing to
do with that and never had anything to
do with that. You still get uh you still
get, you know, on the right people
people retweeting reinforcing
uh Trump's genius, Trump's 3D chess in
in all kinds of aspects of what the
administration is doing. There's less of
that on tariffs recently, but it's the
same phenomena. And then on the left,
what you're getting now is
what you're getting now is really this
um this democratic socialist. What
you're getting now is woke 2.0. 2.0 is
less about racial politics. It's less
about the oppressor and the oppressed.
Although you know that manifests itself
particularly in the Israeli Palestinian
conflict and in the
just unthinking attitude towards Israel
and towards the Palestinians just
unthinking that has become dogma in woke
2.0 for the left and to some extent for
the right.
But then now you've got a morphing from,
you know, racial politics to class
politics. So now it's just it's just a
given that we need a wealth tax. It's
just a given that the rich uh these
horrible people that that need to be
need to be suppressed and taxed and and
and reaned in. It's just a given that
inequality is exposed and it's
destroying this country.
it it's just a given that you know young
people are struggling and it's just
horrible and it's just difficult to you
know everything about America is is uh
is is horrible and destructive and what
we need is radical change through some
kind of form of socialism even if we
don't use that term socialism.
So
what you're seeing on the left
is a reorientation
around an older kind of Marxism
and a hatred of Israel. Those are the
two big issues right now on the left.
hatred of Israel, uh, alignment with the
Palestinian cause, alignment with Hamas,
and a resurrection
of
Marxist ideology.
And as the Democratic given that the
Democratic party today is dominated by
college educated by the college educated
again nothing in their education has
changed. So a press applied to Israel
Palestinian since October 7th that has
been the main issue that has you know
animated the left and then beyond that
it's cost of living. you know, young
people are are really struggling and
what we need in order to solve this
problem are things that
economists
have debunked over and over and over
again and it doesn't matter one iota.
Price controls like like rent control by
the way price controls are very popular
across
uh the political spectrum in in America
right now. I mean the the the sheer
ignorance, central planning, industrial
policy, bringing their jobs back
somehow.
So now,
you know, maybe defund the police is not
high on the agenda. Although if you read
the Democratic Socialist of America
platform, it is it makes whatever was
said in 2020 by the radical left. It
makes it look like child's play, right?
I mean, they don't just want to abolish
the police and abolish prisons. They
want to bolster us the Senates and they
want to get rid of the Supreme Courts
and uh you know they they they basically
want to get rid of they want a
completely different form of government.
They want to get rid of the
constitution. they are far more
you know
extreme and anti-American and
anti-American system and than even woke
and they are running candidates and
those candidates are for the most part
fairly successful
and they're really all over the place.
Now I don't think they can win. I've
I've said this many times. I think
ultimately the more democratic socialist
of America you become, the more you will
fail, the more voters will reject you.
Uh I I worry more about um like this als
I I I just read about alsad is uh he is
claiming he's a capitalist.
He's uh he's claiming he is uh this is
the uh the the the leftist who just won
the Democratic primary in Michigan. uh
and he's claiming that the problem is
that uh you know we don't have we don't
have we we need to resurrect we need to
save capitalism and uh we we need more
competition we need to do that you need
more state in involvement and we need to
break up the AI monopolies by having the
state own them but that's capitalism to
him so he's of the Elizabeth Warren
school uh who's not a democratic
socialist Elizabeth Warren has always
claimed that she's a strong believer in
capitalism she wants to save capitalism.
She wants to protect protect capitalism.
And you need strong state involvement,
strong regulations, strong, you know,
central planning in order to save
capitalism from itself.
Those people scare me more than the
democratic socialist of America who I
think don't have a chance.
But it's going to be interesting given
the tribal mentality that we're seeing
both on left and right. It's going to be
really interesting to see how
um you know how the the features of woke
tribalism
um uh you know in an inroups outroups
based on uh you know tribal belonging
and tribal uh acceptance. Um I mean
again we don't need these woke
terminologies. I think tribalism
captures it. uh woke captures certain
mentality. I I I think this idea that
there's a woke 2.0 is probably
ultimately going to be pretty silly. Uh
and given that
the epistemic issues across the entire
political spectrum, I'm not sure how,
you know, it's going to be 2.1 for the
right and 2.2 for the left or what how
exactly you're going to talk about what
it actually means, right?
Now,
you know, right now the left is
ascended, particularly among young
people. Um, Trump is unbelievably
unpopular. Republicans unbelievably
unpopular, as they should be, and the
left seems to be strong as a
consequence.
U and the people who are most vocal on
the left, the people who are succeeding
on the left are the most extreme people,
which again you'd expect because they're
the most consistent people.
And
you know, we'll see whether people get
cancelled and how they get canceled. I'm
sure people are still getting cancelled
and and uh you know Twitter mobs are
still out there trying to discipline
people around stuff. It's not the kind
of hysteria that we saw in 2020, but
it's still out there.
Um so we'll see how all this evolves. Um
I you know I don't really expect the
particulars of uh the woke phenomena to
come back but the basic ideas
again the the tribalism the unthinking
the um the not caring about truth but
caring about which group you belong to
that is with us and it's going to be
with us for a long time and then
together with that this idea of I I
don't know if you cancelelling, you
know, but I've said many times I'm awful
cancelling. I'm not against cancelling
uh in and of itself. It's cancelelling
for unjust reasons. Canceling for
trivialities. Canceling because you
didn't quite tow the exact tribal line
that you were supposed to. That is what
seems so irrational and stupid at the
time.
And that might come back. That might
come back. Wouldn't be surprised.
All right. Um, so again, the the the new
thing is anti- rich, anti-Israel. That's
that's the big stuff. That's that's
where the ideas are concentrated on. Um,
it's it's just the same play of
oppressed oppressor uh manifest
differently. instead of racially,
although that will probably come back as
well. Instead of focusing on the racial
aspect of it, it's focused on um on uh
soio economic on economic sorry not
social on economic which is again a
return to kind of a Marxist roots and
focused on
very ancient roots which is you know
Jews successful, Jews running the world,
uh Israel, Palestinians, Palestinians
oppressed, Jews rich and successful. Uh
and and that's that's just the
postcolonialism
stuff. Uh and um and again completely
embraced by the right which is
interesting by the Tucker calls it right
completely embraced.