The Establishment Left Concedes the Argument on “Woke”

The big event for me this week was my appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast. Because we’re in the era of Trump 2.0 and “woke” has waned, it was especially interesting because much of the podcast revolved around renegotiating the terms of debates in which the Left simply refused to engage for many years: on immigration, race, demographics, and other emotionally fraught and previously off-the-table issues.

Klein tried to trap me with claims about Tucker Carlson’s supposed “white nationalism,” but I made the argument that this language is meant to obfuscate the real issues, and that it’s totally legitimate to be concerned about rapid, large-scale demographic change caused by mass migration. Once we shifted the ground from personality to principle, Klein was much more thoughtful, and he even made what are major concessions for a New York Times personality, such as admitting that anti-white racism occurred during the woke era, that the Left engaged in unjust campaigns of social annihilation, and acknowledging that it is totally legitimate to be concerned about “large-scale, rapid demographic change.”

This is a major turn. Anti-white racism was dismissed as a far-Right talking point for many years. And any talk of the relationship between mass migration and demographic change incurred left-wing attacks that you were trafficking in the “Great Replacement Theory,” that you were a purveyor of white nationalism, and that you were engaged in KKK-style white supremacy.