Welcome back to the 10 blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is Eric Kaufman. Eric is a professor of politics and the director of the Center for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, and he's an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's the author of several fascinating books, including White Shift, Immigration, Populism, and the Future of White Majorities. His writing on policy, culture, demographics, education, free expression, has appeared in City Journal and in many other publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other outlets. Today we're going to be discussing his brand new book, The Third Awakening, a 12 -point plan for rolling back progressive extremism, which was published last month. So Eric, great to have you on 10 Blocks again. Great to be back, Brian. So in this very interesting new book, you write that the West is going through a wave of leftist ideological enthusiasm. You call it the Third And a strain of radicalism has clearly swept our institutions as you describe. This has, among other unfortunate effects, produced a crime wave, worsening educational system, border chaos, social division, and more. So just to get some definitions down, what in your view does it mean to be woke and how does this third awakening relate to earlier radical waves? Yeah,

really good questions. And so the first answer there is that woke, I believe, has an analytical value. It does describe something real in the world if used correctly. And so, my definition is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. That is woke in a sentence. And out of that arises a sort of fuzzy ideology, which says it is an outrage if we have anything less than equal outcomes between, for example, black and white or male and female. And also, if any of the marginalized groups or the most sensitive member of them, even hypothetically, is offended by anything that is said by some who's not of those groups, then that also constitutes an outrage and that speech must be censored and the individual excommunicated or canceled. So we have those two prongs, equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for sacralized minority groups. And that's sort of been driving a lot of what we've seen in terms of cancel culture, the attacks on history, and even gender ideology.