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Bad Faith

Episode 185 - Is "Wokeness" Killing the Left? (w/ Freddie DeBoer & Pascal Robert)

Bad Faith

Bad Faith

News, Comedy, Politics

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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Last week, Sam Adler-Bell's provocative New York Magazine piece on the problem with contemporary "wokeness" discourse launched a thousand Twitter threads and response pieces. Many were critical, but does he have a point? Is there something toxic about how resistant some on the left are to talking to people who don't already agree with us? And if the goal is to reach a wider audience, doesn't that require us to use different language than we do when preaching to the choir? At what point does changing our language implicate the underlying morals and values? And does abandoning woke language mean abandoning the populations it's meant to serve? Pascal Robert of This is Revolution & Freddie deBoer of his eponymous blog join Briahna to talk Lizzo's lyric change, that NPR tweet about "menstruating people," the viral "What Is a Woman" film, and more.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I don't trust Democrats to get in the scrum of that and do a good job of communicating

0:06.0

it.

0:07.0

Instead of saying, you know what matters to me is that we all recognize the equal rights

0:10.6

and dignity of trans people who work together to keep them safe, right?

0:13.8

I don't want Joe Biden fucking wandering into the territory because I'm like, they're

0:19.2

going to ask him, so why can't you just say what a woman is?

0:21.8

That's going to be the response.

0:22.8

I mean, I just, there has to be a way to say, to express total support for trans rights

0:29.8

without appearing to tell the American people that it's not the case that most people are

0:34.8

boys are.

1:02.1

It is truly my pleasure to be joined today, returning to the podcast Pascal Robare, co-host

1:08.5

of this is Revolution podcast.

1:10.2

Welcome back.

1:11.2

Thank you for having me.

1:12.5

And Freddie DeBore of the eponymous substack.

1:16.2

Welcome back to the podcast Freddie.

1:17.5

Thanks for having me.

1:18.5

Okay, so this is what we're talking about today.

1:21.3

Those of us who are online know that a couple of days ago, Sam Adler Bell wrote a piece

1:27.2

in New York magazine, critiquing the term, wokeness.

1:31.5

Right off the bat, everyone's going to go, OMG, this is spicy, this is perhaps too online,

1:37.7

this is, you know, we're in this realm of cancel culture in all of these terms that promote

...

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