Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a show for jolly deep thinkers, square pegs, round

holes, and pirates. I'm Andrew Heaton. And today's an awesome episode. I enjoyed this so much.

I am a big fan of my guest, Musa Al Garby, not least of which, because I just genuinely like the guy.

He's such a dork. My guest is such a dork, but in a really good way. Like half the time he's talking,

it's an interesting chat, half the time he's talking, I think to myself, we would have played

Dungeons and Dragons together if we went to the same high school. And then part of me thinks,

we may yet still. But that's not why today's episode is so fun, the chumminess.

What makes the conversation so fascinating is that Musa has developed a comprehensive

theory on what causes wokeness.

Have you ever thought about that before?

To put it another way, all the culture war stuff that we've been talking about this last decade, the so-called great awokening,

what sparked it? And he's going to make a very good case that it's not the first time that this

has happened. It's not unique. And if so,

what causes the phenomenon? I'm one of those folks who tends to see whokeness as a kind of

secular puritanism. And I basically still think that. But it's a fascinating question to ask,

what is the instigating factor?

Not the phenomenon itself, which is how I typically approach it on the show, what is happening,

but rather what triggered it, what caused it to happen, what changed to make it happen when it did,

as opposed to 10 years prior. And if so, what might

change in the future to precipitate the next great awakening? That's what we're going to dive into

today right here on the political orphanage.

My guest today is Musa Al Garby. He's a sociologist at the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, and he is the author of We Have Never Been Woke, the Cultural

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