Am I Responsible for WOKE Nonsense? | A Conversation with Alex O Connor in Oxford
In this episode of The Poetry of Reality, Richard Dawkins joins Alex O’Connor for a breakdown of his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead. They also reflect on new atheism and the meaning vacuum, Richard’s debate with Jordan Peterson, and the concept of God followed by audience questions. This episode was filmed at New Theatre, Oxford, on the 21st of Oct 2024, as part of Richard Dawkins' tour.
Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer, and public speaker, best known as the host of the Within Reason podcast, with over one million subscribers on YouTube. He has appeared on television programs such as Piers Morgan Uncensored, BBC Sunday Morning Live, and Channel 4 News. O’Connor has debated and discussed topics including the philosophy of religion, free speech, monarchy abolitionism, and skepticism with notable figures such as Richard Dawkins, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Slavoj Žižek.
This is a silly charge. What created run-away-woke was an activist culture that was fueled with a lot of bad ideas coming out of the Sociology and Anthropology departments, a great deal of post modernist criticism of Western Culture.
The woke that rioted in Kenosha or burning and breaking things at Berkeley because Charles Murray would be there weren’t carrying copies of the God Delusion in their brains. They were carrying the likes of Ibram X Kendrick, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’m quite over this blaming of the new atheists for the woke virtue signaling brigades that we dealt with for ages.
What people seem to have missed is that the Republican Party aka MAGA and Trump, did a masterful job of hijacking the term “woke” for their own gains. They bastardized the term and instead of the left picking up on it and calling that out for what it actually was, which is “Overtly Woke” just like every fringe radical arm of any movement, they caved and now everyone who was considered woke is now wondering just what that means. Ffs if you want clean drinking water and air your woke! Just as there is a far right there is a far left, just as there is a woke there is an Overtly Woke. Being able to understand both what that means and how the propaganda team for the maga mob have twisted it to suit their political playbook is how we start realizing how they have not only divided the left and right so deeply but how they’ve also divided the left itself.