i m alisyn camerota. welcome to cnn tonight. we just heard the kind of conversations that a lot of us are having at our own dinner tables. bill maher talk to jake tapper about politics and race and cancel culture and wokeness. how do you define wokeness? because i hear people use the term all the time. and it means something different to everybody. well, again, i think it s this collection of ideas that are not building on liberalism, but very often undoing it. i mean, five years ago, abraham lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. we liked him. [laughter] now they take his name of schools and turned down his statues. really, lincoln is not good enough for you? are we all having conversations also where we accidentally step in it? and what conversations do we now feel uncomfortable having because we re afraid to get it wrong? so, our panel is going to tackle all that in just a moment. also, the supreme court hearing challenges to president biden s student
afraid that a conversation is getting too dicey now? not well, actually, it s funny for me, because i do this for a living now. and i actually increasingly just feel like i don t feel like having these arguments in my off time. so, yes. so, then your putting yourself in an ecosystem or in an echo chamber, a silo in a way. i m not in a silo. by choosing not to engage in the kind of cross pollinating discussion because it s too tiresome. well, yeah, sometimes it is tiresome. but i don t know, it somehow that is feel like i m off the clock. why is it tiresome though? it s not tiresome. i think look, i think what you re getting at is is there something now that there wasn t 20 years ago? maybe not in the context of the etymology of the end of this sort of interesting historical context of the word woke. but in the context of what is permissible speech and what is not permissible speech, take the academy. i mean, it in the 1950s william f buckley junior rights in god and m
In the mid-1950s, the danger of an ever-expanding state was clear, but conservatives could not agree on an appropriate response, including whether the greater danger lay at home or abroad. The three main branches of conservatism traditional conservatives appalled by secular mass society, libertarians repelled by the Leviathan state, and ex-Leftists alarmed by international Communism led by the Soviet Union remained divided. Noting that “The few spasmodic victories conservatives are winning are aimless, uncoordinated, and inconclusive…because many years have gone by since the philosophy of freedom has been expounded systematically, brilliantly, and resourcefully,” William F. Buckley Jr. resolved to change that. His vision of ordered liberty shaped and guided American conservatism from its infancy to its maturity, from a cramped suite of offices on Manhattan’s East Side to the Oval Office of the White House, from a set of “irritable mental gestures” to a political force that
the republican rage that now consumes the party is built on betrayal. it all began, with the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, william f. buckley jr., defined that movement as standing athwart history, yelling stop. what buckley was trying to stop was the new deal. the expansion of government, under franklin roosevelt. he was, also, referring to the growing secularization of society. his first book, god and man at yale published in 1951 was a diatribe against what he believed were the anti-christian and anticapitalist forces at the nation s best universities. buckley yelled stop, again, during the civil-rights movement. writing, in 1957, that the south must prevail, because the more-advanced, white race, had an obligation and right to rule over others. he changed his mind, during the