https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-kids-are-all-woke/
Forty years and three months after that hotel-room embarrassment, my memory of it came rushing back when I happened upon a YouTube video in which Bethany Mandel – the co-author, with Karol Markowicz, of the new book Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation – was asked by an interviewer for The Hill to define “woke.” In reply, Mandel choked out: “Woke is …sort of…the idea that…um…[seconds-long pause]…this is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral.”
And indeed the video, originally posted on March 14, did go viral. The woke left had a field day, crowing that this woman who’d written a whole book about wokeness couldn’t define it. They cherished her flub because it fit their narrative to the effect that “woke” is a meaningless label that right-wingers use to mock progressives’ noble values. A writer at the black website The Root sneered: “Within the past two years, conservatives have coveted ‘woke’ as their new buzzword to drive their agenda. Most of those jokers don’t even know what ‘being woke’ even means, which was proven through an interview with conservative columnist Bethany Mandel on The Hill TV’s ‘Rising.’” At a website called The Mary Sue, one Kayla Harrington jeered: “It was incredibly embarrassing for someone who’s made fighting against ‘wokeness’ the centerpiece of their brand, but not surprising to see as so many on the right seem to use ‘woke’ as a vague term for anything left-leaning that they don’t like.” At the Huffington Post, Sara Boboltz explained Mandel’s inability to define “woke” by stating that the word is simply “a racist dog whistle that riles up conservative voters.”
And so on. Afterwards, Mandel explained that she’d been thrown by a demeaning comment she’d overheard on a hot mic just before the interview started. In a follow-up article for Newsweek, she mentioned that she’d done the interview from home, in the presence of her husband and three of her six kids, one of them a two-month-old infant that she’d just put down for a nap. Good Lord! There’s a big problem right there: not only did she agree to do a series of high-pressure interviews so soon after giving birth; she tried to leap across the psychological gulf separating mommy mode from the mindset of a cultural warrior while her offspring were still in the room. That’s a challenge that even Meryl Streep, I daresay, would have trouble pulling off. For my part, I’ve always tried to avoid doing such things from home precisely for that reason.
Still, I suspect that the underlying cause of Mandel’s momentary muteness was that, like me with modernism all those years ago, she’d been immersed in wokeness for so long that, yes, it could take more than a second or two to step back and define it – to see the forest instead of the trees. In any event, after owning up to her “brain freeze” (as she described it) Mandel did offer up, on Twitter, a fine definition of “woke”: “A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.”