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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, October 19th, 2021.

I'm John Bobhord. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor

A Greenwald Hyade. Hyde John, associate editor Noah Rothman, Hyde Noah, Hyde John,

and senior writer Christine Rosen, Hyde Christine. Hyde John. And joining us today, the first

in a series of guest appearances we're going to have on the podcast over the next week to 10 days

of the authors who are included in our very important special issue November special issue now available

at commentary.org. Woke the threat, a compendium of articles that attempt to detail why it is

that wokeness, try to define wokeness and then explain why it is a threat to

speech, to language, to the Jewish people, to education, to comedy, and to the good working social

order of the United States. And one of the authors in that compendium of pieces is with us today

Wilford Riley associate professor of political science at Kentucky State and a frequent contributor

to commentary. Will welcome back to the podcast. Great to be back, John. Okay, so let's talk about

your piece which is I would say more of a sociology of wokeness than it is a analysis or a sort of a

deep plumbing of the problems of wokeness. The piece is called the whiteness of wokeness and

I want to you explain what it is that you focus on or sort of try to zoom in on as a quality of this

new revolutionary idea. Sure, well like a lot of the things I write, this actually had a pretty

direct inspiration. I'm a casual friends with Andy Know, the sort of Gonzo or better say independent

journalist. And I was looking through his antifamukshot series online. It's a whole series of images

where he documents the people that were actually arrested for any serious crimes at antifam BLM.

So in events and it struck me that at least in the Pacific Northwest they were all white.

And that was a bit bizarre because a lot of the events specifically had Black Lives Matter in

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