Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Teddy Kupfer, an associate editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today are Charles Lehman and Aaron Sabarium.

Charles is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

Aaron is an associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon, and both of them have been writing about the spread of what might be called

a wokeness through American institutions,

from business and medicine to higher education and the federal government.

It's a popular topic to write about nowadays, but what sets their work apart is that it avoids a haphazard connect the dots approach to intellectual history and instead seeks to

understand the institutional roots of this ideological transformation.

Charles and Aaron, thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you for having us.

Glad to be back on the podcast.

Glad to have you.

So let's discuss the historical and theoretical background before we turn to some real-world examples.

We should begin, although not everybody will agree, by stipulating that

there actually is something called wokeness, some package of beliefs maintaining, for example,

that racism is embedded in American life, that disparities among groups are evidence of widespread

bias, that interlocking systems of oppression exist and must be dismantled,

and that we all have a duty of root them out, whether we're a politician, a schoolteacher,

or an editor at Bon Appetit magazine.

I think it's fair to say that such a stance exists and is increasingly visible,

but where did it come from?

...