Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. I'm your host Andrew Heaton and I don't go into a lot of culture

worse stuff on this program. A little, a little, there are some interesting touch

points, but I generally avoid it because I think most culture worse stuff tends to just boil down to naked tribalism just a lot of

cherry-picking obnoxious examples of whichever team you're not on and using it as ammunition.

This show's not about ammunition, it's about luminosity, or perhaps humor, I don't know.

I'm trying to be funny and substantive, I'm not really trying to provide you ammunition with which to defeat your friends and arguments and so forth.

So for me to get interested in culture war stuff, there needs to be something bigger than

look at this example of the other team being snotty.

So I try to only wait in if I think that there's something really interesting for us to mull over,

or if the snotty thing somebody did is so egregious, I can draft my comedian friends on to the show to make fun of it, in which case great.

All bets are off if something can be used for comedy fodder.

I've always approached the woke phenomenon as a kind of nascent religion, complete with its

own heresies, blasphemies, and very complex and somewhat esoteric points of theology.

And I don't have a problem with religion, but I do have a problem with kind of

theocratic bullying. And so it was the hard-shelled religiosity of

wokness that's always been the turnoff for me the preachiness and the

bullying which accompany it but my guest today is going to challenge my thinking on this very topic.

He's going to make the case that the woke have always been a part of society, it is not new,

and that what I have hitherto identified as preachiness is

partially correct but that I am missing the broader point.

Something along the lines of, look, name a great moral evil like slavery or

Jim Crow laws or frosted tips, maybe bell bottoms, take your pick.

...