Credit where due: Bethany Mandel correctly foretold the viral nature of her awkward answer to a fairly straightforward question about what she meant by “wokeness.”
Mandel is a conservative columnist who has contributed to numerous publications. On Tuesday, she appeared on The Hill’s morning program “Rising.” After repeating the word “wokeness” several times, cohost Briahna Joy Gray pressed Mandel on what exactly she meant.
The clip started with Mandell noting how few Americans consider themselves very liberal, “and probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke.”
Gray then interrupted her guest, asking, “what does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke? Because it’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that…” Mandel stammered, after which she paused for roughly 10 seconds, though it felt longer. “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral,” she noted in a remarkably prescient moment of self-awareness.
“I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define,” she finally proclaimed, though that wasn’t an answer to the question actually asked. “And we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally re-imagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression.”
Hmmm. An objective observer might say she wasn’t terribly well prepared for her answer, which she seemed to be aware of with a forthcoming apology. “Sorry. It’s hard to explain in a 15 seconds soundbite.”
Systemic hierarchies of oppression are difficult to explain in a 15-second soundbite, which curiously hangs a lantern on the lazy use of the term “woke.” That term and its many variants have recently become conservative buzzwords, earning derision from some progressive media outlets as well.
Watch above via The Hill TV (originally flagged by The Vanguard podcast Twitter account)
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