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For years, they excoriated "wokeness" in all its forms. They issued dire warnings about an ascendant left-wing authoritarianism, about speech codes, forbidden words, coddled students, a new McCarthyism from the left. And now they live in a world in which not only are in fact all these things coming from the right -- where students are disappeared off the streets for having written an op ed, where a single word can get your research defunded. But what's worse: the right is doing all of these things while invoking the dread curse of wokeness to justify them. Where does that leave our anti-woke pundits and public intellectuals. What does Trump 2.0 reveal about their project?

Comments

Aria Buckles

Thank you both for the great episode and Adrian for all the editing! Your podcast is a big part of what's keeping me grounded in 2025, and I really appreciate both of your knowledge and voices (and wit in the after dark episodes!)

William Knight

My theory is that in addition to sexual harassers wanting to reassert patriarchy (probably reason 1) and general desire to quiet restive journalistic ubderlings in general, some senior people in journalism were threatened by how abusive behavior in general (including non sexual abusive behavior) was briefly lambasted in the wake of me too. I am thinking about how the On Point guy got fired from WBUR because he was so awful to his staff. Based on the experience of friends who are journalists, senior managers in the field were used to getting away with stuff that wouldn’t fly as easily in other industries. Berating staff, horrible boundaries, demanding unpaid work etc. I can imagine pushback to this was threatening to the higher ups in places like the NYT. Might also explain how easily HR became a villain, along with the misogyny in how HR gets gendered.

William Knight

Honestly though I don’t think this can be disentangled from the support for racial and gendered hierarchies in news rooms by senior management.

LimaBeen

Adrian was so focused on fixing Moira's mic audio that he forgot to add the airhorn!

Valentine

What’s the polite way of saying “you guys bring out the capitalist wants higher productivity” in me? Bc I am upset that this was below 60 min and also that I have to wait til May 15 for something related to my whole rereading of “I shall bear witness” Hegelian thinkers have as much patience as we have sentences with decent punctuation 😭❤️

Katie

Thomas chatterton Williams is a millennial?! I assumed 90+ British ghost based on the name alone

Ren

The fact that his middle name is Chatterton definitely makes him seem like a Dickens character

Odile

I actually gasped out loud at the Norton anthology reveal

Charlotte

Yeah, I'm shocked! (I'm also a millennial with a double surname, but I don't write dumb anti-woke essays, so...)

Valentine

This comment is proof that capitalist threats work! 😭❤️

basil water

I get all my favorite insults from this podcast and "noted demon twerp" absolutely just topped the list

James Talley

A lovely pairing with If Books Could Kill on this. They did it their way, you did it yours. Chef's kisses all around. Love you all.

A Shade In Shades

Thanks for a great episode. I would be interested in you touching on the facism as "counter revolution" aspect in your 1933 series. My impression is that the Weimar German status quo was under a far more real threat from a Communist / left revolution. This time around it seems to be a pure mirage. Also who was 1933's Thomas Chatterton Williams? Probably a British aristocrat called Sir Thomas Chatterton Williams I guess...

Elizabeth Weisenburger

I always hear Hanania as the chorus of What's My Name by Rhianna "Hanania what's my name" instead of "hey nah nah what's my name"

Brian

This is unrelated to the episode (which was great!!) but can we also get a short Adrian explainer on the chancellor election for the normie Americans who do their best but lose track of both the system and the parties?? Maybe a quick note at the start of the next project 1933 episode?

R. Athena Fenniman

Who's the author of that book Moira mentions towards the end?