Origins and History of Woke | HISPBC Ch.1 (Hanson) — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:09- Bill Whalen- So, my understanding,
2. 0:11this is the last class you have of the  Policy Boot Camp, so please don't all
3. 0:15stare out the window counting down the clock. I  remember back in grade school, the last class,
4. 0:19the last day of school, I always felt bad for the  professor as to what was going on, but Victor,
5. 0:24great to see you. I hope you had a nice ride up  to Palo Alto from the Central Valley. If you're
6. 0:28not familiar with Victor's background, Victor is  a multi-generational Californian who has a family
7. 0:34farm in the Central Valley. And I think coming up  here is always something of a culture shock. No?
8. 0:39-Victor Davis Hanson- Yes, it is. It's a different
9. 0:42century than Palo Alto, but it's a good cross  section of driving across California and you
10. 0:48can see the decline in infrastructure  and trash on the side of the road or
11. 0:53you go to a public facility…homeless.  So, you can see as you get closer to
12. 1:01this area, it starts to increase the viability.  It used to take me ,20 years ago, three hours,
13. 1:08and now it can take four or five and sometimes  six or seven depending on the construction.
14. 1:14- Bill Whalen- At what point do you see the Teslas?
15. 1:16-Victor Davis Hanson- Yeah, on the high-speed rail,
16. 1:17of course dissects my route and it's  $15 billion and not one foot of track,
17. 1:23but a lot of delays and it sounded  like it looks like Stonehenge,
18. 1:29just a bunch of overpasses, nothing after  15 years, not one foot literally of track.
19. 1:37- Bill Whalen- Yes, Victor and
20. 1:38I write a lot about California, and I think  we've both written God knows how many columns
21. 1:41from High-speed Rail over the last 10 years.  Let's talk a little woke, Victor. The year is
22. 1:461938 and the Blues musician Led Belly records  a song called “Scottsboro Boys”. Any of you
23. 1:52know who Leadbelly is? Any of you know who Kurt  Cobain is? Good. We've got some Nirvana people
24. 2:00out here. Kurt Cobain was inspired in part  by Leadbelly. He was a Mississippi musician,
25. 2:04a guitarist. I think Cobain spent ridiculous  amounts of money buying his guitars when he
26. 2:09was still with us. Cobain's been gone about 30  years now, but in 1938, Leadbelly writes a song
27. 2:14called Scottsboro Boys, Victor. It's a song  that's dedicated to nine black males who were
28. 2:20accused of raping two white women, one of whom  later admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.
29. 2:25And in his notes, he writes, and I quote, “I  advise everybody be a little careful. Best
30. 2:31stay woke. Keep their eyes open.” Fast forward  now to the year 2012. Victor hashtag emerges
31. 2:37on X or Twitter or whatever the heck we call it  these days X, I guess, the hashtag is #staywoke.
32. 2:43And this is in the aftermath of the shooting of  Trayvon Martin in Florida. We now move forward to
33. 2:47the year 2017. Woke has actually shown up in  dictionary form. Merriam Webster defines it,
34. 2:53and I've quote – “Aware of and actively  attentive to important facts and issues,
35. 2:59especially issues of racial and social justice.”  Now we're in the middle of a presidential campaign
36. 3:04season right now. Republicans are having  the first debate next week. I'm sure the
37. 3:08word woke is going to get tossed around right  now. Ron DeSantis has made it a core part of
38. 3:12his candidate identity. Vivek Ramaswamy laments,  quote, “the woke industrial complex in America.”
39. 3:19Nikki Haley calls wokeness and I quote,  “A virus more dangerous than any pandemic,
40. 3:23hands down.” So, Victor, you have a  dictionary to write. How do you define woke?
41. 3:28-Victor Davis Hanson- I think it even precedes Leadbelly. It was this,
42. 3:32it's a direct evocation to the 19th century  revival, the Protestant, the Great Awakening,
43. 3:40awakening. And it was the idea that people woke  up to Christ in our secular, atheistic or agnostic
44. 3:49society. You wake up suddenly and you realize  the way the world supposedly is. So, what is
45. 3:54it? And it seems to me that it's the old bromide  from antiquity that we're going to have a quality
46. 4:04result society that mandates parity on the backend  and that requires a level of government or state
47. 4:12control interference in a person's own life for a  noble purpose of making us more or less equal in
48. 4:19correcting injustices. Where it's different from  Marxist doctrine is it has substituted race for
49. 4:27class. And it really started with Barack Obama. We  had this word diversity, but it was not really in
50. 4:34common currency and we… race in this country,  there had been every group had experienced
51. 4:41discrimination by the majority of population, but  it was largely a black-white dilemma going back to
52. 4:49slavery and Jim Crow. But Barack Obama redefined  diversity as everybody who is not purportedly
53. 4:56white. And that brought the population that was  non-white or oppressed to 30% of the population
54. 5:03rather than just 12. And then he did something  quite differently. This was the foundations of
55. 5:09woke. He separated oppression by class for  race. So, he said that class is not really
56. 5:19the barometer. If you're in East Palestine, Ohio  and you have nothing, you're still an oppressor
57. 5:25because you're white If you're in Bakersfield,  California, I was there not too long ago. And
58. 5:29you see people who there hasn't been one person in  their entire family that's ever gone to college,
59. 5:36but they’re oppressors by the nature of their  skin color. So then race becomes the barometer.
60. 5:41And that's very helpful for the Marxist  interpretation because it's immutable.
61. 5:47Whereas Marxism always failed in the United  States because of class mobility. Some of your
62. 5:53parents are very wealthy, you may not be wealthy,  some of your parents are very poor. You may be
63. 5:59upper middle class or wealthy. And so that  fluidity meant it was very hard to get a static
64. 6:05permanent underclass. But when you introduce  race into it, and unlike gender you say you
65. 6:10can't construct your race, it's permanent  and therefore you're a permanent victim,
66. 6:15then it's a much more powerful idea that  we have to use the state to make a quality
67. 6:23of result primarily, but not exclusively on  race. And then you get these idiosyncratic,
68. 6:29strange things. That's why I think the  strange case of woke. So, we're supposed
69. 6:34to believe that LeBron James is a victim. He's  a multi-billionaire. And every once in a while,
70. 6:40Barack Obama ventures out from his Colorado  mansion or his Martha's Vineyard mansion
71. 6:46or his new Oahu mansion to lecture us on  our illiberalities because he's a victim.
72. 6:54Whereas in the old days, under the old paradigms
73. 7:01because of a history of racism, people who were  not white might've had a larger percentage that
74. 7:07were poor. That's no longer necessarily  true. If you look at 17 ethnic groups
75. 7:13have higher incomes than so-called whites do.  And that Indian Americans, Japanese Americans,
76. 7:22Arab Americans, Nigerian Americans. So,  it was really a substitution of race
77. 7:29for class, and it was very effective. And so  now we're sort of polarized and we're trying
78. 7:36to make everybody equal. And we do that in  a variety of ways. We do it with admissions,
79. 7:41we do it with hiring, we do it with exposure on  culture. And ultimately whether we like it or not,
80. 7:48it's at war with meritocracy because meritocracy  is blind, supposedly. Not that it always is that
81. 7:55way in practicality, but ultimately, it's going  to take a toll because it substitutes something.
82. 8:02And that's something is not necessarily merit.  I'll just finish with I was in Libya in 2006 & 7,
83. 8:12and I was wondering why every time I got there,  there was a big pothole. I don't mean a pothole,
84. 8:17you get stuck in. I mean the whole car was  submerged in it and we would get out with a driver
85. 8:22and pick it out. And so, I said to him, you're  the fifth largest exporter of oil in the world,
86. 8:30the chief ingredient of asphalt, why can't  you fix it? And the driver turned to me said,
87. 8:35we hire our first cousins. And what he meant  was the basis by which we hire is not on a
88. 8:42civil service meritocratic system. It's a tribal  consideration. And I don't think we want to get
89. 8:49to this because we're the only multiracial  democracy that works. Nobody's ever tried
90. 8:54it before. Brazil is the only contemporary  one in maybe India that are multiracial,
91. 9:00multi-ethnic democracies, and they're  not working nearly as well as we do.
92. 9:05So, this idea that American can be defined by  anybody's looks and then defined by a cohesion
93. 9:14of ideas that you're an American because you  have a common ground that you believe in the
94. 9:18constitution, you believe in these tradition  customs and self-improvement, self--, that's
95. 9:24what makes what we're doing. So, this is a very  reactionary pre civilizational idea that we're
96. 9:28going to go back and start judging people by their  superficial appearance. That should be incidental,
97. 9:34not essential to who we are. But when you make  tribalism essentialism, then history is going
98. 9:41to say, if you go down that road, you're going to  share a lot of things with the Stasis at Corcyra,
99. 9:47and Thucydides history, you're going to see a  lot of things that went on in the Balkans over
100. 9:53a thousand years. You're going to see things  that went on in Rwanda and Iraq, so be warned.
101. 9:59- Bill Whalen- So before woke came along, Victor, there
102. 10:01was the phrase politically correct PC for short  in which you would say something and say, Victor,
103. 10:05that's not pc. Yeah. So, what happened to PC?  Did woke replace PC or is woke just a variation
104. 10:10-Victor Davis Hanson- Of PC woke? As I said,
105. 10:12it was different than PC because it had this  zealousness attached to it that comes back from,
106. 10:18as I said, the 19th century great awakening.  So, it was not just a rational decision to
107. 10:25become woke, it was an emotional, it was  a frenzied reaction. It was something that
108. 10:30was far more furious and powerful than just  checking the boxes on political correctness,
109. 10:36and then political correctness it had things like  gender and environmentalism. You're politically
110. 10:44incorrect when you talk about your climate  denialist, but woke was focused more on race than
111. 10:52any type of ideology that we've seen in a long  time. It was the idea that you were permanently
112. 11:00identified by your superficial appearances,  and you cannot change that. And therefore,
113. 11:06that will be the barometer of success or failure  in this country. And we're going to start talking
114. 11:12to people in collectives. So yes, there may  be individual exceptions, but we can use,
115. 11:18if we say white, we can say white rage, white  supremacy, white privilege, and we mean all white
116. 11:23people or we wouldn't collectivize it. And that's  something that has a bad history in civilization.
117. 11:30- Bill Whalen- Okay, next March,
118. 11:31Disney has a film coming at its remake of Snow  White. It's actually a live action version,
119. 11:36not a cartoon. Its stars. Rachel Zegler, who  you might recognize while she was in the West
120. 11:41Side story remake. She's been doing a lot of  interviews and whenever she does an interview,
121. 11:46she tends to cause trouble. The Disney probably  doesn't want, she has branded the prince in the
122. 11:51story, a stalker, and she said the following  about Snow White story, quote “she's not going
123. 11:56to be saved by the prince and she's not going  to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming
124. 12:00about becoming the leader she knows she can be,  and the leader that her late father told her
125. 12:04she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave,  and true.” Now, does that make Snow White woke?
126. 12:11-Victor Davis Hanson- Well, again, you can't look at
127. 12:14woke in the present without a historical context.  So, we have precedence for what they're doing,
128. 12:19taking Classics of literature or music or  statuary or art and recalibrating them for
129. 12:26contemporary political purposes. And in  Rome, great statues of Roman empire of
130. 12:35emperors would be there. And then they called  it damnatio memoriae. When he became unpopular,
131. 12:42you could save money by erasing his face and  just putting the next emperor's face on the
132. 12:47old emperor's body. In the Soviet Union they  did it by a process called Trotskyization. So,
133. 12:53all of a sudden, Trotsky is the hero of the  revolution, and then you want to get rid of him,
134. 12:57so you hire hundreds of thousands of people  to cut his picture out of every newspaper
135. 13:02and magazine. I lived in Greece during the  dictatorship of 1973; fascist dictatorship,
136. 13:10and they had certain ideas about going back to the  Byzantine morality of the 10th or 11th century.
137. 13:17They changed the language. They used the  Katharevousa dialect almost as if we were
138. 13:22going to speak ancient Greek. They started adding  accents, and one of the things they believed,
139. 13:26and you couldn't show the female physique.  So, they had literally people who were going
140. 13:32through magazines and when women had bikinis,  they would cross hatch between the top and the
141. 13:38bottom with the Marks-a-Lot before they could  sell it. And that's what this is right now when
142. 13:44we take Classics and then we recalibrate them to  fit contemporary views. And the problem with this
143. 13:51is it never ends. So, all these woke people  think they have reached the end of history,
144. 13:55they have moral superiority that's never been  seen before. They have an intellect that is just
145. 14:01superior to everyone, and they never think that,  well wait a minute, once we set this model that
146. 14:07each generation gets to tear down statues, rename  names, why do we think it's going to be static?
147. 14:14So, it's conceivable that 50 years we  might have a conservative, reactionary,
148. 14:20nutty regime that says, I can't believe you people  in 2023, you aborted 1 million children. We don't
149. 14:29do that. I cannot believe you people. You  had a million and a half homeless people. So,
150. 14:33what we're going to do is we're going  to start changing names from your
151. 14:37generation and we're going to get rid of all  references to these things that you did 50,
152. 14:4360 years ago that we find deplorable. And it never  ends. And so, the better way to look at it with
153. 14:50Snow White or Kill a Mockingbird or a statue  of James Longstreet is these are images of the
154. 14:59past and they can be contextualized and they're  reminders of good and bad and they're tragic
155. 15:05rather than to take the arrogance that we're going  to look at history as melodrama. And it's always
156. 15:11going to be one bad person and one good person.  That's not shades or gradations of bad. That's
157. 15:18what tragedy is. Great-- good people that do bad  things and bad people that can do good things. And
158. 15:25it's a very sophisticated complex matter. And for  these arrogant people, the present to say we have
159. 15:31enough intelligence and morality that we can pick  everybody in the past and make a line that says
160. 15:38he's exempt and he's culpable. If you want to do  that, you've got good company, you've got Hitler,
161. 15:44you've got Stalin, you've got Mao's Cultural  Revolution as your kindred predecessor.