Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to quilett.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

This subscription will also give you access to all our

articles and early access to Colette social events. And on this week's

episode I'll be talking to scholar Musa Al Garby, author of the acclaimed new book, We Have Never Been Woke,

the Cultural Contradictions of A New Elite, published this month by Princeton University Press.

Now, as some of you know, I don't tend to use the word woke a lot,

because it's become a term of abuse that gets thrown around a lot in culture war sloganeering.

But this isn't that kind of book notwithstanding the title, and

Musa Al Garby certainly isn't that kind of author. Rather, what he offers is more of a deconstruction

of the whole idea of wokness, which he presents more as a set of status-seeking strategies from an elite socioeconomic class facing financial and career frustrations. Moreover he points out that

Conservatives use their own kind of intellectual and status-seeking tricks which are

analogous to what we call wokness. So Musa Al Garby fires on both sides to the extent this is any

kind of culture war book. Now we're going to be talking about scholars like

Pierre Boldieu and Chomsky and Foucault, and I know a lot of it is going to sound very abstract and academic, which to be fair his book kind of is.

But I'll reassure you here that we spend a lot of our time in the next hour talking about

down-to-earth case studies that signify what his arguments actually mean on the ground.

We also talk about Musa's own fascinating backstory, which begins with the military family in Arizona,

has the author going through a stint as a shoe salesman, and involves a right-wing cancel

campaign orchestrated against Musa by Fox News. That and a whole lot more in my

...