Columnist Bethany Mandel was on Briahna Joy Gray’s Rising show to plug her new book, “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” which she co-wrote with Karol Markowicz.
“Would you mind setting the revival? It’s come up a few times and I just want to make sure we’re on the same page,” Gray said.
“So, I mean, woke up is kind of the idea that, uh… This is going to be one of those times that’s going to go viral,” she said. (She was right. Here’s her last tweet that went viral.)
“Woke is something very difficult to define and we spent an entire chapter defining it. It’s kind of the understanding that we have to totally reimagine and remake society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. It’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”
Wait, you mean identifying injustices and wanting to fix them? The horror!
Maybe Bethany shouldn’t throw Republican talking points on the banana without really thinking about it.
It’s a perfect example of what I call “modular thinking”, and look, we’re all guilty of it at one time or another. When you’re not actually choosing your words through a process of thoughtful analysis, you’re just plugging in a tag – someone else’s pre-digested thoughts – and using them as your own without any nuance.
(In Bethany’s defense, she has five kids, one of which was delivered in her car, and the occasional cerebral fart is inevitable. My mom also had five kids, which is probably why she hosted so many cocktail parties. late afternoon with our neighbours.)