I’ve never interviewed Ron DeSantis, and it is highly unlikely that I ever will. If I did, however, it would go something like this:
C: I want to make it clear before we start this conversation that while I’m not woke, and I don’t work for the MSM, I don’t agree with most of what you say about wokeness or anything else. I’m not really here to argue with you, however. I want to help define what it is you believe in, and let the American people decide for themselves.
D: OK.
C: In our first conversation, I will be focusing on what wokeness is and how it operates. In subsequent discussions, I will ask questions about what you propose to do about wokeness at the federal level, and about mostly unrelated foreign policy and domestic issues.
D: Fine.
C: We’ll start with the obvious question. Donald Trump says most people don’t know what wokeness means. How do you define it?
D: Wokeness is a series of pernicious ideas held by the left that falsely identify straight white American Christians as bad people who should be forced to give up their freedom.
C: You sometimes call wokeness “cultural Marxism.” I think you would agree that nothing in your definition has anything to do with economic determinism, the class struggle, or dialectical materialism. Why do you continue to compare it to Marxism?
D: Marxism holds that groups of people are bound by history to fight each other, and that a government takeover by the largest group is necessary to prevent oppression. In Marxism, the groups are classes; in wokeness, they’re racial and gender groups. It’s basically the same thing.
C: Even though woke people don’t argue that straight white Christians are bound by some sort of natural law to be oppressors?
D: Yes. It’s the focus on groups fighting each other that matters. It prevents us from seeing all Americans as being Americans, period.
C: Is wokeness primarily a public or private sector phenomenon?
D: The ideas usually come from the private sector. The government abets them and sometimes enforces them.
C: Is Joe Biden woke?
D: Half the time, he isn’t even awake. So, no. But he runs a government that is avoiding its obligation to tear out wokeness by the roots, so he’s responsible for it. He’s in the way. He has to go.
C: You sound like a Jesuit doing battle in the Counter-Reformation.
D: Well, I am Catholic.
C: In keeping with that theme, is wokeness a kind of heresy?
D: It’s a national spiritual sickness. The country can’t be great again until it has been eliminated.
C: Do you hate woke people? By your definition, there are millions of them in this country. A lot of them vote.
D: I hate wokeness, not people. You know–love the sinner, hate the sin. The government needs to do everything in its power to eliminate the sin. Then we can move forward as a single healthy nation again.
C: Would you burn woke people at the stake?
D: We don’t have to go that far, but wokeness requires strong medicine. We need to make the consequences of being woke clear. First, we have to shut woke people up. Then we need to punish them by using the criminal law where possible, and by making them lose their jobs and their families. That will turn them around. You’ll see.
C: I’ll get back to that in our next conversation. Let me throw out some analysis for your reaction. I have identified four different threads of wokeness in my writings. I want you to react to the classification system.
D: Shoot.
C: First, there’s racial wokeness. According to you, I think, racial wokeness revolves around the notion of systemic racism. You would argue that it doesn’t exist, and that anyone who says it does is the real racist. You would say that the law should be completely color-blind, and that no one is entitled to any kind of government privilege.
D: That’s right.
C: Second, there’s gender wokeness. You support traditional values relating to sex and gender. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a pervert or a groomer.
D: I have religious texts and thousands of years of history on my side. The idea that people are naturally non-binary is disgusting to me and to most Americans. The recent increase in the number of queer and trans people is proof that the government needs to step in to avoid contagion.
C: Third, there’s climate wokeness. Climate change is just a hook the left uses to increase the size of government and reduce the freedom of white Christians to drive cars and eat meat. It is a form of left-wing oppression directed by the self-serving elite.
D: That sounds about right.
C: Finally, there’s public health wokeness. This involves the medical elite creating mandates based on poor science to restrict the freedom of real Americans. Americans should be free to decide how they want to deal with medical problems. If that means relying on the internet rather than so-called experts, so be it.
D: Public health was kind of my gateway to the whole concept of wokeness. I didn’t truly realize how evil the elites were until they started criticizing my treatment of the pandemic. Everything fell into place after that.
C: But you’ll agree that mask and vaccine mandates don’t really sound like a form of Marxism, so that part of your definition doesn’t work.
D: It’s not a form of identity determinism, but it does involve government oppression. That’s part of Marxism, too.
C: Would you agree that you didn’t really say anything about wokeness during the first few years of your term in office?
D: Yes. As I said, it was the pandemic that opened my eyes. I didn’t really understand the vast scope of the problem until then.
C: This sounds like a good place to stop. Next time, I will be asking you about how you plan to use the federal government to eliminate the four threads.