Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Don Lemon Show. You know, Donald Trump's return to the White House and his subsequent moves to take a blowtorch to DEI programs has led many to declare

that the progressive wokeness movement is dead. And we're going to talk about that in this episode.

Dead and buried, not six feet under, but 60 feet under as a matter of fact. But what if I told you

something may be rising up to take its place? I think you might be surprised about what it is because it is the woke right?

Yeah, the woke right, not the woke left.

It's just as eerie as it sounds.

To define the woke right and talk about all of its implications,

I am happy to be joined by Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's a

staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White.

Thomas, good to see you again. How are you? Great to see you, Don. I'm doing well. Thanks for

having me. You have everybody not chattering, but chatting, the chattering about the woke right.

So I want to ask you this, before we even get into the woke right, I just want to take a step back and have you expand on what you think wokeness is as in OG wokeness.

You know what I mean? Because it tends to be different for everyone.

And let me just see, in your essay, this is what you write, I'm going to quote here, you said,

one of the defining features of the social justice orthodoxy that swept through American

culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas assault, Hamas' assault

on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language, you write.

Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.

Can you say more? Is it just about the policing of language?

How do you see this?

Sure. Yeah. No, not at all. The policing of language is one element of it,

because one of the, you know,

...