This is such an interesting and thought provoking article. It’s kind of a grand unified theory of woke culture. As author David Samuels explains it, woke culture may have gestated in the fever swamps of leftist academia but it came to dominate our national discussion and overtook the political structures we’d all grown up learning about in school because its methods were useful to certain progressive politicians, especially Barack Obama.
Samuels is telling this story as the history of particular ideas about social control going back to the 1920 but his own introduction to it really began with the Iran deal which he reported on as it was happening.
When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs…
