Conservative author Bethany Mandel struggled to define the term “woke” on Tuesday while discussing her new book “Stolen Youth,” which accuses liberals of targeting children with “woke indoctrination.”
“So, I mean, woke is, sort of, the idea that, um,” Mandel began, after The Hill Rising’s Briahna Joy Gray asked her to define the term. The author added, after a pause, “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”
“Woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it,” Mandel said of her and co-author Karol Markowicz. “It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Sorry I, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”
While Gray told Mandel to “please take your time,” her fellow Rising co-host Robby Soave jumped in to offer Mandel a reprieve.
“It’s one of those things that, everybody is weighing in … against wokeness,” Soave, an editor at Reason Magazine, said. “We do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”
Gray, who served as press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, then asked Soave to define “wokeness.”
“I would say it’s the tendency to punish people formally or often informally for expressing ideas using language specifically that is very new, that no one would have objected to like five seconds ago,” Soave said.
“It’s easier to come up with examples, like you know punishing people for using the wrong pronouns or identifying structures of that kind,” he added.
While the idea of “wokeness” has become a central issue for Republican politicians, it appears to have limited salience for many Americans. A recent USA Today-Ipsos poll found that the majority of Americans — 56 percent — had a positive association with “woke,” understanding it to mean “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.”