Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of

the Bullwork and this week we're talking about the Great War of Western civilization,

the Woke Culture War. The general of the Culture War, soon to be presidential candidate

Rhonda Santis, will probably run under the slogan, America, where Woke goes to die.

And Wokeness is such a catch all villain that when Silicon Valley bank collapsed last

week, to Santis, Josh Hawley and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, inexplicably

blamed it on Wokeness. Now, we wanted to get a sense of how voters across the political

spectrum think about a lot of the big culture war buzzwords of our time. And unsurprisingly,

we found that people are talking past each other a lot. Now, I'm very excited. My guest

today is Jane Coastan, opinion writer at The New York Times, and one of the most incisive

commentators on our political discourse today. Jane, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. So correct me if I'm wrong, but your thesis on the

Culture Wars is that they make great political sense because they are unwinnable and unloosable.

Can you tease that out for us, especially in light of all the legislation we're seeing

around the country that do not real wins and losses in some of these culture war battles?

They do not real actual wins and losses. And I think it's important to note that a

forever war has casualties. If there's anything that we've learned from our own actual

forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

But what I mean by not having winners or losers, I mean that they can be fought forever. Because

what wouldn't mean to win the Culture War? What would I mean if for Republicans to make

a reference to scripture, if every knee-bended, and every tongue confessed that

Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, that the people of style might be doing that somewhere. But

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