Conservative Author Bethany Mandel Freezes on Air & Can’t Define “Woke”

Hi guys. Welcome back to the Liz Wheeler Show. It’s every broadcaster and commentator’s worst nightmare, freezing up on air, having a complete brain smoke down, not being able to answer the question. And then as if that’s not bad enough. This is like the premise of stage fright, right? As if that’s not bad enough, having that clip go viral.  

This exact scenario happened to conservative author Bethany Mandel. She’s the author of the new book Stolen Youth, and she was on the show Rising, which is put on by the hill, and was asked what the definition of woke is. Now this is very pertinent question because this is the full title of her book. Let me bring it up. It is “Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” The argument she makes in this book is that wokeness is coming for your children.  

So asking the definition of what is woke, what is the definition of woke, is a very pertinent question. But Bethany Mandel froze up on air. She could not reply, could not respond to this question. And as of the last time I checked the video, the almost one-minute video of her freezing up has gotten almost 10 million views on Twitter alone. Take a look.  

Americans consider themselves very liberal and probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke. And so, you know, when we talk, what  

Does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke? Cuz it’s come up a couple times that I just wanna make sure we’re on the same page.  

So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that I, this is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral. I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Sorry, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.  

Yeah, take your time,  

Okay. I know it sounds harsh to say this about someone on the same side, on the right, but it’s kind of painful to watch that. I actually laughed the first time I watched that because in the midst of this brain smoke down, Bethany says, well, this is one of those moments that’s going to go viral, which is very, very Bethany to recognize that in the moment. She’s an extremely nice lady, a good, a good member of the conservative movement. And this was not a good look. This is not something that anybody wants to happen.  

However, what I wanna do today is I wanna talk to you about how, why this scenario, which is not ideal. It’s not ideal for her. Of course, nobody likes to be piled on like this or mocked or ridiculed. It’s not ideal for the conservative movement to not be able to define woke or have a member of our movement not be able to define woke after publishing a book on it. However, there is a very positive outcome that can happen, be got of this non-ideal scenario if the conservative movement plays that correctly.  

So let’s get to talking about that because we have an opportunity here as conservatives, an opportunity that’s going to pass as soon as the new cycle passes in. This video is no longer going viral, but if we take advantage of this, we can actually turn this on its head and hold the Left to account for its wokeness. Let’s get to it.  

Okay. I told Bethany earlier today that I hope that this, at least this viral video, this massive pile on the Left, is mocking her and ridiculing her. I hope at least it tr uh, translates into a lot of book sales. So if you haven’t already picked up a copy of her book, it’s called Stolen Youth, and you can get it wherever books are sold here.  

So let’s be very blunt and very honest about this. First of all, as I said before, this is every political commentator’s worst nightmare, every broadcaster’s fear. This is the, this is the premise, the basis, the foundation of stage fright. Stage fright is not actually the fear of talking to other people. It’s the fear that you’re gonna freeze up. The fear that you’re not gonna know what to say, the fear that you’re gonna black out and your body is going to be paralyzed and your mind is going to be paralyzed.  

You’re not gonna know what to say. And it’s a very real fear because for most of us, it’s happened at some time or another, especially if you spend a great deal of time in front of the camera. So looking at it from that perspective, I see something like this and I think, okay, well, it, it happens to everyone. It’s not that big of a deal. As a political commentator, I look at this and I see two things.  

I see a scenario that if this had been a video of a leftist who couldn’t define a word that she had just written a book about it, I would be equally as savage as leftists are being towards Bethany. So from a purely political game standpoint, okay, it’s fair game. Go ahead, make fun of her, make fun of it, make fun of the whole scenario. It, it is what it is, it’s going to happen.  

It’s also objectively not a good look for a conservative who just wrote a book about wokeness not to be able to define wokeness. Now, you can argue that at the very end of that clip, Bethany defined wokeness, and she clearly knows what wokeness is. This wasn’t a good, a good illustration of her knowledge or her understanding of the concept, but all of those things can be true at the same time.  

The woman, however, who was asking the question, the woman on the Left, she’s a host for Rising, which is a show that’s produced by The Hill. Her name’s Brianna Joy Gray. Now her name might sound familiar to you because she’s a former political operative. She actually used to be the press secretary for Bernie Sanders for president, his campaign for president in 2020. So Amir, three years ago, this woman was the propaganda shill for Bernie Sanders.  

So you can see you can see the tone of voice. It is not the question, I don’t have a problem with her question. It’s actually pretty astute question. Then go ahead and define woke if you’re using it. But you can see the tone of voice and the body language, and that’s, that’s the background of it. Now, the background here is important because Bethany responded to this pile on or this tweet going viral. I wanna read you what she said. Let me bring it up.  

She said, so everybody has seen my viral brain fart from rising this morning. I can see why it went viral. Of course, for those who haven’t seen it, here it is. She said A little bit of backstory just before we went on air. Brianna Joy Gray was on a hot mic. I heard her demeaning parenting in general in colorful and nasty terms stating parents only have kids in order to perpetuate their own narcissism.  

Robbie, the other co-host responded, there are some good ones and some bad ones. As a mom of six, Bethany says, including a newborn, this threw me off a bit. Not an excuse, just a reality. I’m human as for wokeness, she writes, here’s the actual definition, a radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint and forced by an angry mob.  

Now we’re gonna talk about the definition of of woke in a minute, because I actually think it’s much deeper than that. We did a whole episode just a few weeks ago with, with Dr. James Lindsay talking about what is the definition of woke? What is woke? And some of the answers that we discussed are very pertinent now very pertinent now, but I’d like to say I have no reason to doubt Bethany’s story.  

She’s a very honest person. Anybody who knows Bethany actually knows that she’s honest to a fault. She’s honest so much that if you’re not ready for her honesty, you better not ask for it. And so I have no reason to doubt that she heard this conversation on hot mic. Hot mic of course means that the microphone is not muted yet, you’ve not gone on air.  

So if, for example, I’m sitting here before we start broadcasting and I’m talking to my producer Matt, or I’m talking to my executive producer Chad, or I’m talking to my audio engineer Robin on a hot mic, the people watching the broadcast would be able to hear those words. Now, ordinarily in those scenarios before before you go live on air, your microphone should be muted. But it’s a rule of thumb. Anybody who’s in broadcast knows you always assume, even if you know for a fact that your microphone is muted, if you have a mic on you, if you are in a studio, you assume that studio is live and you assume that mic is hot.  

Otherwise, yeah, you’re gonna have things overheard that you didn’t want broadcast , that’s just human nature for you. And especially in politics, it’s probably going to be brutal. So all of that being said, I have no reason to doubt what Bethany Mandel said that she overheard Brianna Joy, grace saying, and if Brianna Joy Gray said demeaning things about parents and said that parents only have children to perpetuate their own narcissism.  

That’s a really horrendous thing to say. It’s really awful. It’s the antinatalists viewpoint that we’ve talked about recently on this show, this idea that it’s not, that people who don’t have children aren’t just choosing not to have children because they don’t want to, but they actively degrade and demean those people who do have children. Bethany Mandel just gave birth a couple months ago. She’s been toing around her newborn baby, sweetest little infant you ever did see to most of these, these book pub or these book publicity events.  

And to have someone say that when her newborn child is probably right next to her when she has been sacrificing her time and her body for this baby is really horrendous. And I can totally understand why that would throw you off right beforehand. I actually think it’s something that Brianna Joy Gray should respond to, because if true, it’s a pretty nasty thing for a company to allow a host to say.  

When a guest who is a parent and whose platform is built on parenting can hear that very clearly, that’s a pretty nasty, toxic workplace workplace scenario. All of that being said, the reason I think ultimately that this is a good thing, sorry, Bethany, I have to say this. The reason I think that this is a good thing that Bethany froze up on air and went completely viral is because it gives us a great opportunity to actually nail down a definition of woke.  

Now, you and I might know what woke is for two different reasons. We might know what woke is. Intuitively we might be able to look at the Critical Race Theory that’s being taught to our children in school. You know, when our children are taught, if you’re white, you’re inherently racist. Even if you don’t feel feelings of racism, little black children in school are told you’re inherently oppressed.  

You are a victim. Whether or not you think you’re a victim, you’re less, you’re not as worthy. You’re always going to face discrimination and oppression. We might look at that and say that right there is wokeism. It’s kind of like the Supreme Court. When they originally defined pornography, they defined it as, you know what? You’ll know it when you see it or when you see it, you’ll know it. They didn’t have a concrete definition of pornography because you know, you’ll know it’s pornography.  

When you see it’s pornography that is from a Supreme Court justice that’s similar to woke for a lot of people. It doesn’t mean that an actual concrete definition of woke doesn’t exist, but it does mean that you and I, the everyday American, the everyday parent, the everyday citizen who is politically active, we have an idea of what woke is when we see it. We know that when Disney inserts their own admission, a queerness agenda into their children’s programming, that is woke.  

We know when companies choose to operate through the lens of ESG, when they have abandoned their customers, they’ve abandoned their shareholders, and they instead are focusing on environmental, social, and governance metrics that prioritize climate change. We know that is woke when they’re sending, when, when companies are sending their employees to different states and paying for abortions for those employees in different states and then publicly bragging about it, even though that’s not in the interest of their employees or their customers or their shareholders.  

That is wokeness. You recognize it, you feel it, you, your intuition gives you a red flag when you encounter woke. And if you are one of those people sitting here watching and listening today, and you are thinking, you know what, if I was asked for a definition of woke, I respond the way that Bethany did or, or because I know it when I see it. But how do you describe it? Let me tell you, don’t let the leftist pile-on tell you that your viewpoint and how you understand woke is illegitimate.  

It’s not. It’s completely legitimate. It’s completely legitimate by the Left’s own standards, which is sometimes my favorite way to make this argument. I want to read you a tweet from James Lindsay who wrote this and he’s responding of course to this video going viral. And Bethany Mandel in the definition of woke, he says, when they say, we can’t define woke, there’s a perverse abuse going on.  

Many can’t define it, but have a clear tacit under or knowledge of it. This articulation gap is used to bully and gaslight, which is psychological abuse. The perverse part is that quote unquote lived experience refers to tacit knowledge. The tacit knowledge, think intuition plus counts, their intuition counts. Yours doesn’t. They can’t be asked to articulate it because that’s proof that you don’t understand it. If you can’t articulate yours, you are dumb and crazy and motivated by evil.  

He says that, you know, something that you can’t quite articulate is used as grounds to marginalize and abuse you exactly like they misbelief about their own experience that they claim. The same thing is used to further marginalize and abuse you. Marginalization and abuse are their game. The fact is, James Lindsay says, most of you can’t define woke, but you know what it is. And then he of course goes on to say, I can define woke.  

And we’re gonna get to his definition of woke in a second because it’s a really good definition, but it’s a very important point to make. The first of our three points that we’re going to be making today is that even if you can’t define woke, if you recognize it, that’s enough. If you recognize it, it doesn’t mean that you’re incorrect. It means that the Left is simply using this false standard of, oh, if you cannot provide an immediate academic definition of this word, then you don’t understand it and you cannot speak to it. You cannot condemn it.  

You cannot oppose any of our woke, neo-Marxist, far-leftist political ideologies that we are embedding in every institution in the country. If you cannot provide a professor level, a graduate level, graduate degree level definition of the word woke, do not let them gaslight you.  

You understand what woke is, even if you can’t define it. That being said, there is a definition of woke that we should understand. We should strive to be able to articulate what woke is because woke is not a cultural term that just organically appeared on Twitter, for example, or that that caught fire because someone used it in a speech and it was a catchy term. Like, like the phrase. I’m gonna give you two examples here. Like the phrase digital fentanyl.  

Digital fentanyl is a phrase that’s been used to describe TikTok because TikTok is very addictive and it’s very destructive. And once you are hooked, you were, it’s, you’re, you’re gone. Your mind is completely turned to mush. That’s a great phrase. And a lot of different people are using it, even though ultimately it was coined by one person. I don’t even know who the one person was who coined it.  

That’s how viral it went. That phrase, because it’s such an accurate description of TikTok. Another phrase that went viral, and I do know who coined this one, is the phrase groomer. Over the course of the past year, as we have seen for ourselves, these teachers in public schools across the country who have been actively indoctrinating children in queer theory, telling them that boys can be girls if they wanna be, that girls can be boys, if they wanna be telling them that, you know, they’re non-binary and to use neo pronouns and yada, yada, yada, all the queer theory garbage.  

Those teachers were quite literally grooming children to accept neo Marxist queer theory identities. And to call them groomers is a very, very apropo term to use. And James Lindsay coined it on Twitter. He was actually banned on Twitter for coining it and for using it until he was reinstated by Elon Musk.  

But that phrase organically went viral because it combined what we were seeing with these teachers actively grooming children into these identities with the preexisting definition of rumor, the preexisting definition, we understood to be an adult who was conditioning a child to accept sexual abuse.  

Well, that’s also what these teachers were doing with their radical indoctrination of queer theory. They were conditioning children to accept sexual abuse, not necessarily physical sexual abuse from the teacher, not sexual abuse, that the teacher got sexual gratification from by inflicting on the child, but grooming this child to conditioning this child to accept sexual abuse, bodily abuse in the name of sex and gender. And so the combination James created this term, it went viral. That’s not the same as what happened with the term woke. The term woke came from a very, very specific place, and it has a very specific definition.  

So the word woke has a definition, and even, even if you can’t define woke, doesn’t mean you don’t understand. It doesn’t mean you don’t recognize it, doesn’t mean you can’t d oppose it. The left is simply gaslighting you. But to elevate our fight against Marxism so that we’re not just playing defense so that we are actively pursuing the eradication of Marxism in our nation. It’s important that we understand the definition of woke.  

A couple weeks ago, James Lindsay was on the show and we were talking about the Left’s latest narrative. Their latest talking point when it comes to woke and the Left’s talking point a couple weeks ago, was that any conservative who used the word woke as a descriptive word explaining Critical Race Theory or queer theory or abortion activism at the corporate level, whatever the woke, the woke thing of the day was the Left said, any conservative that uses the word woke as a pejorative is actually, it’s a dog whistle that doesn’t just mean leftist ideology, it means anti-black.  

This was what they were saying. If you say that something is woke, then you actually, you’re actually a racist. What you mean is anti-black. And so I asked James Lindsay, I said, how would you define the word woke? And this is what he said. What I wanna ask you first before we get into the structure or the cult-like structure of the Left, and I’m talking about the ideological left right now, I wanna ask you how you would define the word woke.  

As you know, a lot of, a lot of leftists on Twitter in the commentariat are trying to redefine this word saying, whenever Republicans use the word woke as a description, they’re using it as a pejorative. And these leftists are claiming that Republicans who use the word woke, actually mean anti-black. How do you define the word woke?  

Okay, so depending on how long we want to spend on this, I can tell you why they’re not exactly lying, but in fact that they’re operating from broken definitions. The woke means having critical consciousness. It’s not more complicated than that. It actually just means being ized as the Brazilian critical Marxist by the name of Palo Freire explained it. He said that the point of education, in fact was to become ized. Becoming ized means understanding the structural reality in which we live. So now you’re seeing the world differently. You see it in terms of structural forces, dehumanizing forms. He said, you know, so we might have systemic racism, systemic sexism and transphobia and homophobia shape our reality, our social reality. And thus our lived experience or our lived realities becoming awakened to that is being woke, becoming awakened in free goes on to explain that.  

Conscientization means that you understand that if you aren’t awakened to it and you just go along with things as they are, or you know, truth or education or whatever knowledge as you think it, sh it is, as the society says it is, that you’re engaging in what are called domesticating modes. And so being woke means being aware that people are trying to domesticate you all the time if you’re one of these activists. So then we get back to this point that they say it means being anti-black.  

Well, first of all, black for them means something different. It means being ized into a critical consciousness of what it means to be a black person in the west. And so if you are against the idea of a critical consciousness of race, then you are technically by their definition being anti-black. And when you say that being woke is bad or that having a critical consciousness approach to race or sex or gender or sexuality or any of these other factors, if you think that that’s bad, well, what you’re actually trying to do is domesticate the activists.  

So you are engaging in the domesticating modes. And so being woke means being awakened to the fact that society is structured this way, that it, this way, and that we must resist it using a form of criticism that Freire outlined, which is the critical method, critical theory is what we’ve probably heard of, but that’s one of denunciation of these domesticating forms and modes and these dehumanizing structures. It’s relentless denunciation of those through a critical perspective in a way that announces the possibility of a better world.  

I saw a quote that isn’t quite exactly what we think of by woke the other day by Greta Thunberg saying, where she was being interviewed about what they were doing. And she says, well, it isn’t our job to provide solutions. It’s our job to demand change. And that’s what we’re talking about there. It’s that you can see all the problems in the world and you can demand that somebody do something about them. And it doesn’t matter if you know what it is you’re supposed to do or not, but that’s what woke means. Woke means having a critical consciousness, having been awoke, awakened, or awoken to a new way of seeing the world in terms of structural power and how it operates and how it harms people, et cetera.  

Okay, there you have it. That’s your homework for today. Very simple. A three minute monologue to memorize so that you can answer you can answer the question, what is the definition of whoa, should be no big deal, right? This should, this should all take us five minutes to memorize and then we’ll be perfectly prepared to answer the question.  

No, in all seriousness, it is, I would love two things. I would love if conservatives were able to take that definition that James Lindsay offered and, and deconstruct this so that we can actually articulate it. Maybe not in as nerdy of a way as James presents it to us in his academic way. But if we were to understand that this is the definition of woke, that it doesn’t, it’s not just a recently invented term used to refer to the big bucket of radical leftist ideology that woke means critical consciousness, which is a phrase that was, that was coined by this Brazilian Marxist Palo Frier to describe looking at society and culture and being through a lens of critical theory, critical theory being the Marxist theory that we talk about that came out of the Frankfurt School.  

Critical theory, meaning a lens through which you define everybody as either being the oppressor or the oppressed. And you reach critical consciousness. When you look at everybody and everything through this lens, whether it’s queer theory, whether it’s Critical Race Theory, whatever kind of Marxist theory that neo Marxist theory that you wanna talk about, those are the two most prevalent right now. That’s what woke really is. That’s what critical consciousness is.  

And as James said, once you are awakened to that, once you’ve been indoctrinated to look at the world through that lens, then you are actually woke. So that when you and I use this term woke, we are using it to describe the Leftists, whether they are knowingly neo-Marxist or whether they are simply water carriers for this Marxist cult that they are viewing the world viewing, you and I, our education system, families, everything, race sex through a lens of critical theories through their lens of neo Marxism.  

That’s the definition of woke that we all should be able to articulate. And and I don’t mean that as, as a shot at Bethany. I already told you what I thought of that. I don’t think it’s a great look. I understand it. She knows what woke is. This is a wonderful opportunity for us, not just to learn the definition of woke ourselves, but to take this one step further. This is the part that I’m actually really excited about. We should be able to define woke.  

We should study the tactics and the ideology of the Left enough to understand what their tactics are first, first comes the recognition that we can identify it, even if we can’t articulate it, then comes the ability to articulate it. But here’s the real kicker, here’s the real kicker. The reason it’s actually fabulous, that, sorry Bethany, that Bethany Mandel went viral because she stumbled over, had this brain fart over defining the word woke is because it gives us the opportunity to force the Left to embrace the real definition of woke.  

The left must embrace this, and this is our opportunity to put this in front of them. We always talk about wanting leftist politicians and leftist activists to actually answer questions like, do you support transitioning children? Do you support transgender surgeries on children? Do you support abortion up through nine months of pregnancy? Do you support confiscating people’s ar fifteens, they’re their legally owned AR fifteens? Do you support taxing a wealth tax?  

We always wish that we had the opportunity to put the questions, these yes or no cut and dry black and white questions in front of leftists because we know what their answers will be. They just dance around it and say, well, we want, we want people to pay their fair share. We want women to have the opportunity to choose. We want children to be able to, you know, be comfortable in their identity if they use these mushy, mushy, dodging euphemisms to avoid answering the question.  

Why? Because when they actually answer the question, it’s a huge turnoff to people, people don’t agree with them. This is true for members of Congress who members of Congress do not want to go on record. And this sadly is true. Both Democrat and Republican don’t want to go on record on many, many issues. They want to avoid voting on as many things as possible because they want to avoid the criticism.  

They want to avoid constituents holding them accountable for their views. They want to avoid any challenge that standing for your principles might bring that the brutal honesty of actually, I think it’s okay for males to go into women’s locker rooms if you believe that we wanna know. And so they avoid going on record and saying these things because they don’t want us to know where they truly stand on this issue. My friends, this is our opportunity to get leftists on the record.  

We can define woke. We define it, we know what it is. It’s communism. It’s viewing the world through a neo-Marxist lens, labeling everyone as an oppressor or as oppressed. It’s a strategy, a political tactic to completely reeducate people, to change the fabric of society, to impose Marxism. And it’s being, it’s being used in all aspects of our society, from corporations to entertainment, to our children’s classrooms. That’s why we all recognize it implicitly.  

But I would love to hear a leftist, actually let me bring this up on the Twitter to tweet and said, I have still not found one conservative who’s able to define woke. And this is a very common refrain on li on Twitter over the past day or two. A very common refrain is, oh, conservatives can’t define this. Hahaha. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Hahaha.  

What I have not heard is a leftist respond to the real definition of woke. Do you support viewing society and reshaping culture through the lens of neo-Marxist ideology? Do you support or do you reject the Brazilian Marxist Palo free critical consciousness? People wanna know. If you believe that wokeness is a positive thing, then define it. Define what wokeness is. Now they’re gonna throw something out there and says, oh, you’re awake to oppression deeper than that. I want a deeper definition of that. What does awake to oppression mean? What awakened you? What do you see now that you’re awake? 

Because ultimately, if you drill down with a leftist, if you continue to ask these pertinent questions, they either are completely ignorant themselves and are just the water carriers for this woke cult, or they’re just sort of victims of the cult, is what that means. Water carriers is, is sometimes the loudest, most annoying members that are repeating the neo pronouns and repeating, oh, Critical Race Theory is just teaching about the history of slavery in our country.  

These trite and false talking points that nobody really believes anymore. But they, they, they continue, they persist in, in perpetuating these talking points. Either they’re dumb, they’re water carriers for the woke cult, they’re repeating these things, but they don’t really know what they mean. Or the ones who do know what they mean when they say we’re awake to the oppression of our society. They know that awake means looking at the world through a lens of critical theory.  

And they know that critical theory is Marxism. Therefore, when they say awake to oppression, they know it means the Marxist worldview and the vast majority of people, this is where Bethany Mandel was 100% correct. The vast majority of people, including the vast majority of liberal voters, do not want Marxism. They reject cultural Marxism. And if they knew that, that’s what woke means. And they knew that leftists in political commentary, in activism in public office supported Marxism, supported wokeness and embraced the definition of wokeness for what it really is, a Marxist worldview, they’d be shocked and they would withdraw their support.  

This is up to us to force leftists to say, okay, okay, maybe Bethany didn’t define wokeness in the most articulate way that she could have, but here’s the definition. Do you support this or do you oppose it? Do you embrace this or do you reject it? If we can do that, if conservatives can turn this around and do that, then that video is gonna have a net positive for our movement.  

It’s gonna be a wonderful opportunity for conservatives to turn this on its head and get leftists on record telling the truth about whether they support, support a woke worldview in our country. Okay, speaking of woke, I wanna give an example, another example. Pertinent, unfortunate example of a corporation that has embraced a woke policy. The Silicon Valley Bank, which failed, did not have a risk management department or a head of risk management, a chief risk officer for nine months.  

None a bank. The sole purpose of a bank is for you to deposit money for the bank to loan out your money and for the interest on that loan to both profit the bank and profit you with interest. To do that in a wise and prudent way, a way that actually works, you have to calculate the risk of different loans, the risk of different things that you do with depositors money.  

If you don’t prudently catalog this risk, then you run the risk of doing exactly what Silicon Valley Bank did, which is buying treasuries, which maybe was an okay thing to do when the interest rates were really low, when, when depositors were only earning a half a percentage of interest and the treasuries were earning maybe like two or 3%, but then when interest rates increased and these treasuries essentially became junk and this bank owed depositors a higher percent of interest on their deposits than this bank was earning an interest from the treasuries that they had purchased.  

This becomes an unsustainable business structure. And what seems very obvious in elementary would be, okay, well your risk department would hedge against a rising interest rates. Since interest rates tend to be cyclical, it’s not like it’s gonna be a low interest rate forever. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket and just buy these treasuries because they happen to be profitable for you. Now, what happens when interest rates go up?  

A risk management department, a chief risk officer would hopefully you would think, have foreseen that circumstance, which would have partially prevented Silicon Valley Bank from failing its depositors the way that it did. But Silicon Valley Bank not only didn’t have this chief risk officer for nine months, they were very, very committed to using their money elsewhere. They were very committed to ESG. They were very committed to D E I, very, very woke tenants.  

They, in fact, Silicon Valley Bank had pledged $74 million to Black Lives Matter. Now, you might be wondering what kind of investment is that? If you’re taking depositors money and you are giving it to a political activism organization, how is that profiting? How, how is that profiting your investment and therefore profiting your depositors? And if it’s not, then why are you doing that? The reason they did that, of course, is because they are operating through the lens of ESG, environmental, social and governance metrics, this social credit score system for companies and banks potentially in the future for individuals forces, businesses like Silicon Valley Bank, if they embrace the idea that they are trying to achieve a high, a high score on an ESG metric system, it forces them to operate as political activism institutions and not as businesses.  

So they give $74 million or pledge 74 million to Black Lives Matter, basically just as a down payment on a high ESG score. This is wokeness. Think about for two minutes. What would have happened if Silicon Valley Bank had taken the 74 million and kept it on hand to pay out depositors. Think about how many depositors at this bank maybe wouldn’t be wondering whether they’re going to actually receive the amount of money that they kept in Silicon Valley Bank. I know the FDIC is pledging to comp all of these, all of these depositors, we’ll talk about that in a second. But think about all the different people that would not have had to worry about whether they’re going to be completely wiped out or think about if Silicon Valley Bank had paid even a fraction of the 74 million to having to towards a risk mitigation department that could have prevented their bad banking, bad business practices from leading them to the point of collapse.  

This is wokeness. When you view society through the lens of neo-Marxism. Black Lives Matter is an openly Marxist organization. The founders of Black Lives Matter admit that they are trained Marxist. It is racialized Marxism, they’re giving, Silicon Valley Bank is giving $74 million to a neo-Marxist organization. This is what happens. It leads to failure, it leads to collapse. It wipes people out. And the bailout, by the way, the FDIC bailout is a bailout. It’s not, it’s not sidestepping that I know that Democrats Biden and Janet Yellen are all saying, oh, taxpayers aren’t gonna be on the hook for this. Well, not directly. It’s not like the federal government is going to tax people take a little bit out of your paycheck and say, this is going to go to the, to the depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. But the FDIC is a government trust comprised of the, some of the biggest premier banks in our country.  

And those banks are now on the hook for paying out Silicon Valley’s bank’s debts. And those banks aren’t gonna want to pay that out. So what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna pass that cost onto the consumer. The consumer is the bank consumer, which is you and me. Anybody who has a job, anybody who deposits money, we are going to see increased costs at our bank and we are going to be the ones that ultimately pay that out.  

So it is a bailout. And the reason for that bailout is because of wokeness. It’s because of the woke agenda. The woke agenda is not just something that you see on Twitter. It’s not just something that you run across in a political argument on a cable news channel in a podcast. Wokeness is an actively destructive force in our nation and if we don’t define it and turn it on its head and force the Left to embrace or reject the real definition of woke system, which is looking at society through the lens of critical theory defining people against their will is either oppressed or oppressors and trying to destroy civil society through that definition, well then they’re going to be successful in destroying civil society.  

And that’s a scary thing that we shouldn’t want to happen. Furthermore, Moody’s, which is a uh, credit ranking system, has ranked or has said that their outlook on the entire US banking system is negative. This is not good. That’s really, really not good. And the reason that they moved the overall ranking of the banking system in the United States a negative is because they say it’s due to a rapidly deteriorating operating environment. What they mean by that is confidence.  

Consumer confidence in regional banks specifically and stock values is plummeting. People wonder, well, is my bank gonna go under? Cuz it’s not just Silicon, Silicon Valley Bank, it’s Signature Bank. There are some other banks that it looks like the same thing’s about to happen to. We’re not really sure. We can’t really tell. But here’s the thing. This is a very dangerous scenario for our country to be in because if regional banks, if there is a cascading effect, if there is a ripple effect on this, if other regional banks fail, it’s going to cause consumers, bank users to turn to the bigger banks, say Bank of America as an example.  

And the bigger banks are the ones that are committed to wokeness. They’re the ones that are committed to ESG. They are the propagators of wokeness, the propagators of ESG that forces that wokeness on your business. If you want a line of credit that forces that eventually on you as an individual, we are at a very pivotal moment in our country where an understanding of the word woke is not only necessary and arms you well for political debates, it’s critical.  

If we want to fight back against the Marxists that want to destroy our nation, we have an opportunity today to force those democrats and liberals and leftists and neo-Marxist on the record, do you support Marxism or not? Because that’s what wokeness is. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.