“What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?” Adam Baldwin asks in our latest episode. “Do you have, a woke breaking point that you can remember in your, in your past or recent past?” More and more people have found theirs of late, and even in some cases celebrities on the Left. Americans may finally tire of the dead-end politics of immutable-characteristic determinism, but wokery won’t go down without a fight — and a fight is what’s needed, Adam says, to achieve “clarity.” And part of that clarity is defining what woke really is.
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Welcome back to my VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
James Lindsay asked this question in June 2020, but the timing was tough. The world was in the middle of a pandemic, and America in the middle of paroxysms over the death of George Floyd. That question becomes more acute each day, however, as Adam notes. “It’s planting the seed of questioning, Well, where is my red line,” Adam says. “Is it violence? Is it your friends getting canceled or doxxed? What would it take for you to reject this movement is that the, the drag queen shows in kindergartens, where is it?”
Adam and I then discuss our own red lines. Mine was pronouns, but Adam says his awakening to the hypocrisies of wokery came much sooner. However, the best public definition may have come from Bill Maher in his interview by Jake Tapper, I argue. “Wokism is the idea that identity is the only value that matters when you’re dealing with people in society, when you’re dealing with outcomes,” I explain. As a result, “we’re incentivizing identity. I mean, they’re multiplying like rabbits.” The competition for primacy has even been formalized to an extent with “intersectionalism.”
Adam and I debate whether this is cultural Marxism, Maoism, or simply an American guilt neurosis turned psychosis. Join the debate in the comments!
