Richard Spencer and the host dissect the Bush era's "free you" narrative, arguing millennials organically drove wokeness via social media rather than corporate top-down mandates. They trace how slogans like "Love is love" shifted into virtue signaling that derailed Bernie Sanders by prioritizing identity over economics, while debating whether movements like Occupy Wall Street were co-opted to protect profits. Ultimately, despite claims of artificiality, the discussion asserts wokeness remains a genuine, bottom-up ideology reshaping political discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
There was like a positive spin on the Bush era of we are going to free you.
And liberals had a hard time disagreeing with it.
You know, they would basically say, like, war isn't the right way to spread liberal democracy.
But did they really have a disagreement with George W. Bush when he said that in every human heart, there's a Democrat?
Everyone's longing for freedom.
I don't think they really disagreed with that.
So maybe you could say that the millennial psyche was connected to the war on terror and especially connected to Obama's neo-war on terror, where it was about like, you know, promoting token ethnic minorities in Afghanistan and doing the war on terror right and smart and so on.
I think there might be a connection there with that whole period, actually.
Alex?
Hey, Richard, I wanted to ask you, what do you see as the evidence for millennials being more woke than the managerial class at the time?
Because wokeness was organic in many ways, and wokeness was on social media at a time when only the millennials were on social media, or at least they made up a very strong majority.
Like wokeness originally, I mean, I have heard this, like the first hashtag or hashtagtivism or whatever it's called was about Stephen Colbert, of all people in 2012.
And it was Stephen Colbert made a Qing Chong joke about the Chinese.
And there was like, you know, not my culture.
My culture is not a costume.
Don't culturally appropriate me.
Not all agents, or whatever they were saying.
And it's interesting.
I don't think we should underestimate the degree to which wokeness was organic.
That is bottom-up as opposed to top-down.
Now, corporations adopted these things, no doubt.
And remember, gay marriage was accepted at major corporations well before it was accepted on the national level in politics.
Yeah, no, I agree with you, but I would argue that at the time, millennials weren't really in the managerial class.
No, but boomers reacted to their children telling them these things.
And they basically implemented it.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Yan Man, I'm actually looking up an actual video of boomers react to gay marriage being legalized.
Hey, can you hear me?
Yes, go for it.
Yeah, I think a lot of like the dashing of like the millennial optimism was kind of like a double whammy of like disappointment from the Obama era, like combined with like the destruction of the Sanders thing.
Destruction of the Bernie Sanders campaign?
Yeah.
Interesting.
We can't beat the boomers.
They're going to cheat to win.
I don't know.
Like I've, I'm not really sure how to articulate it, but like the Sanders critique was something like there's like mass corruption in the system.
And the like what you were saying earlier about like wokeness being like mostly a top-down thing as opposed to like a bottom-up thing.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Oh.
I'm not denying that it's top down, but I think that I think we're wrong to like ignore the bottom-up quality of this stuff.
I mean, the protect trans kids and so on, that's coming from social media well before it's coming from the government and even before it's being recognized by politicians and celebrities.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
But I think there's also like an aspect of like, especially during the Occupy movement or whatever, like it's almost as though the woke thing was like glommed onto by politicians like who saw like the best way out of the critique like of Wall Street and of big money and politics as I've heard this before.
I agree with this just to some extent.
I mean, this is sort of a, it's a kind of conspiratorial critique of Occupy Wall Street was genuinely radical.
It came after the stock market crash and it sort of hit its peak a few years later, like 2011.
And it was genuinely radical.
And they said, what are we going to do?
We're going to like confuse them by making them talk about critical race theory and sexism and structural racism.
And they'll just, we'll just confuse the hell out of them and get them at each other's throats.
And then we'll continue to have profits.
I've heard this before.
And I definitely think there's something to that notion, but I don't know.
I just sort of want to put, I just want to push back.
I mean, like, I think social change is like possible.
And the millennials proved it by promoting this stuff.
And it went from being positive in a way, like legalize love.
Or what were some of the gay marriage chants?
Like legalize love?
Love is love.
Love is love.
Yeah.
Just all that kind of stuff that was very positive and it was sort of ineluctable.
It's like, how could you, how could you really keep Steve and Gary like away from each other?
Like they're definitely more than we are.
I've been divorced four times.
Like Steve and Gary, that's true.
That's true love, what I see, right?
Like there was a lot of that going on.
And I think it just sort of like flipped over into its opposite.
I definitely wouldn't claim that like the woke thing was like a totally top-down thing.
I think you're right in that it's like mostly bottom up.
But like it just had like a mimetic fitness or something.
It was like a very fit idea.
Like, yeah, this whole, this whole critique that like yeah, absolutely.
It's because it also like there's no doubt that, you know, Tim Cook of Apple, particularly when they were just making insane levels of profits every quarter, that he would prefer to talk about, you know, LGBTQ awareness at the corporation.
He would much prefer to do that shtick than like talk about the fact that he's paying himself billions in stock options or whatever.
You know, there's no doubt about that.
Right.
I don't know.
I just like, I just feel like the Sanders thing was almost like a, like an insult on top of the injury of like people like putting so much hope into like Obama.
Woke killed Sanders.
I mean, I, I get, there's yeah, I agree.
I'm not trying to like needlessly disagree with you.
I just, I think I do have a different perspective.
It's like the whole Sanders phenomenon reminded a lot of people of Trump, for one thing, but also remind me, reminded a lot of people of the Ron Paul movement, which was a Gen X phenomenon.
But it's just like there was an odd overlap.
Like, you know, no more war, bring everyone home, no more taxes, odd at the FED.
All of that stuff.
There was a sort of I don't know.
There was like a Rogan sphere, but in a good way, kind of vibe to it all, and I think there was that with with Bernie Sanders, even though it was socialist, because it wasn't about, you know, questioning your identity, it wasn't about talking about structural racism.
It was basically just like you can't afford college, you're massively in debt, life sucks.
You can't afford a hat, like we're just gonna give it to you so you can be free.
It was like positive liberalism, as Isaiah Berlin would say.
Like it's, it's not just being free to make money, it was a you could, you're free to live your life because you don't have to worry about money.
Yeah I, I feel like what gave it?
What gave it so much?
Like the basic critique though, of, yeah, woke killed the Bernie Sanders movement and I yeah, what when?
Did what's her name?
Like Elizabeth Warren?
Well, Elizabeth Warren definitely meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz?
Yeah, but who's that like?
She has like three names.
She's she's this black political commentator Brianna Joy Gray.
Brianna Joy Gray yeah, was she in 2016 or 2020?
Both both, yeah, she was like oh sorry, go ahead it's, it's people like her that destroyed it.
Yeah, she was a black pillar on Bernie.
I forgot, I forgot exactly what the reasoning was.
Uh, i'm trying to remember what the reasoning was.
But um yeah, she was like one of those woke scoldy types this, this new dude, Graham Plattner and she's like oh yeah, i'm not gonna vote for Graham Plattner because he had, like this totem conf tattoo on his chest and it's like okay, what matters more, you know, reducing the cost of living or like, you know, virtue signaling.
You know, it's just yeah, she was on that, she was on that whole thing.
Yeah yeah I, I I might even agree with her on some of her critiques.
Millennials Aiming for Civil Rights00:02:57
I just kind of dislike that.
Um yeah yeah, she has that, that energy, she has the woke skull energy.
Yes um, regular guy.
I think a lot of this can be traced back to um, millennials just wanting to ape the civil rights movement in many ways because um, I remember, you know, I i'm like a younger millennial and every year it was always like the Civil rights movement.
It was great, it was great, it was great.
Hey also, by the way, look at how non-violent they were.
Look at how non-violent they were.
They didn't want revenge.
Um, it's gonna be great in the future and um, the gay marriage movement and um, Wokeism was kind of just an addition to that.
Um, and you can and primarily I agree with what you said it was a bottom-up thing of them just absorbing um, the whole civil rights movement due to the schools having a, you know, left liberal bias and all that.
Um really, I think, isn't most everything almost bottom-up, do you think?
Or i'm genuinely Genuinely asking, I'm trying to think of something that was more top down.
REM theory is a very elitist theory.
It's basically claiming that there are like a handful of initiates who are making all salient works of art.
They're talking to one another intergenerationally.
So, I mean, we do have a very elitist theory, but REM is not everything.
I mean, they're, you know, they're also like the products of that deep culture, as we call it, of REM can manifest in all sorts of different ways.
But I don't know.
I guess I push back.
Like when Vivek Ramashwami says that like woke is a trick played upon us by big corporate, like big corporations in the UN or something, and no one believed it.
And it's totally artificial.
And I just don't buy this.
I think it's actually very organic and real.
People genuinely believe in it.
Yeah, it's the ideology of people that can't launch a kind of Haitian style revolution and kill all white people, nor do they mostly have the stomach for that.
And thus they resort to slave morality.
Yeah, but don't you think it's also like a way of neutralizing potential problems?
Because, you know, the dissident right has this idea of globo homo or something, you know, where it's like everything's gay.
And at the risk of agreeing with these assholes, There is something to that, but I think they don't fully grasp it, you know, because it's like the