How the Culture Wars Weren't Won (with Jane Coaston)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're talking about the great war of Western civilization, the woke culture war.

The general of the culture war, soon to be presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, will probably run under the slogan, America, where woke goes to die. And wokeness is such a catch-all villain that when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last week, DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page inexplicably blamed it on wokeness.

Now, we wanted to get a sense of how voters across the political spectrum think about a lot of the big culture war buzzwords of our time. And unsurprisingly, we found that people are talking past each other a lot. Now, I'm very excited. My guest today is Jane Koston, opinion writer at The New York Times and one of the most incisive commentators on our political discourse today. Jane, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but your thesis on the culture wars is that they make great political sense because they are unwinnable and unlosable. Can you tease that out for us, especially in light of all the legislation we're seeing around the country that do not real wins and losses in some of these culture war battles? Right.

They do notch real actual wins and losses. And I think it's important to note that a forever war has casualties. If there's anything that we have learned from our own actual forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. But what I mean by not having winners or losers, I mean that they can be fought forever because we're

What would it mean to win the culture war? What would it mean if for Republicans to make a reference to scripture, if every knee bended and every tongue confessed that Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, I think people still might be doing that somewhere, but there is no means by which you could tell that you were winning and you're always losing, but you're also always winning.

I've referenced this before, but there's this understanding, and I'm going to use the F word here, but I don't mean it in this way. There's an understanding in the study of fascism that fascism's enemies are always portrayed as being simultaneously overwhelmingly powerful, but also really stupid. That they are just fumbling idiots, but also they're going to kill all of you.

And I feel as if sometimes that's how culture wars are performed, that the enemy in the culture war is evil, but stupid. They will beat you, but you could easily beat them if you just try it a little bit harder. And so when I talk about how they are unwinnable and unlosable, I mean that there's no marker at which you could say we won, we did it. I cannot think of the number of national review pieces that are X number

indicates that we are winning the culture war. I remember there was a poll, I think, in 2009 in which support for marriage equality ticked down slightly. And this is before marriage equality, I think, reached like 75% approval, which is what it has now. But it was like, oh, you know, we're winning this war. Well, I mean, how did that go? But I think it's interesting to me that the culture war has become

Everything is wrapped up into it. Every decision, even decisions that have nothing to do with culture, even decisions that seem completely untethered to the culture war become part of the culture war. And ideas that were once believed to be on one side of the culture war can easily switch sides. I wrote a piece that came out this week about horny bro conservatism.

This idea that there's the so-called barstool conservative who just doesn't want to be told what to do. It's fascinating to me that some on the right have claimed those people as being on their side in the culture war when this is a particular side that's pretty much like pornography is fine. Having sex out of marriage is fine. Abortion is fine. Just don't tell anyone what to do.

And so the culture war can take on new applicants. The culture war can take on new topics. It is always growing and changing, but it never has to end. And isn't that because culture is not a fixed thing, right? So if culture is always changing, then there's always a new front in the war. Exactly. And there's always something.

I'm reminded of when I was in high school. I was in high school in the early 2000s. My freshman year, the second week of my freshman year of high school was 9-11.

And so the culture war, I remember, was people being very mad at the Dixie Chicks over their opposition to the Iraq War and over being mean to George W. Bush. But also the culture war was about the over-sexualization of teen girls, which has been an ongoing concern for pretty much forever. You had kind of the last vestiges of the moral majority that was very upset about this.

But I've been struck now by how culture has shifted in a sense to

And now you see some on the right complaining that teen girls aren't hot enough anymore and that people aren't sexy enough anymore. For instance, certain celebrities aren't hot enough to be celebrities or models aren't thin enough to be models. And it's interesting how as the culture shifts, people find new things to be mad about. It's not that they're wrong to be mad or right to be mad. It's that there is always something to be mad about. Culture shifts.

Do you remember when people were extremely mad after the Columbine massacre, which it turns out had nothing to do with bullying or the trench coat mafia, but had to do with the fact that these two kids were evil assholes? I know that's okay to say. But there was a lot of people who were like, Marilyn Manson did it in violent video games.

Some of these culture wars, I'm a World War II nerd. And so the way that I think about, like, ah, remember the Battle of Market Garden? I sometimes wonder if culture war veterans are like, ah, remember the battle over video games? Like when Grand Theft Auto came out and people were convinced that that was going to cause...

Oh, yeah. Undue suffering. And then we all moved on from whether it caused undue suffering. So there's always a new front in the war. A new front in the war. And then also, I mean, one of the things we wanted to do with these focus groups is get them to sort of define woke and talk about what that means. But it always has struck me that the conversation around wokeness is very old wine, new bottle.

So there's both this idea that culture is always shifting, so there's always a new front in the war, but also, like, I grew up fighting political correctness while you were still in high school and I was a young conservative working at a conservative think tank.

Political correctness was very much a thing that sort of consumed people. And Donald Trump ran on political correctness. Like people are acting like Ron DeSantis like invented this woke culture war. But what he did was he put a new word around a phenomenon that the right has been mad about for as long as I've been around.

But the challenge, as I wrote this week, is that the right is always divided between whether or not they want to protect you from being told what to do by these evil PC people or whether they want to tell you what to do. It's also interesting how political correctness really was this moment because it became so all-encompassing that how we talk about speech and how we talk about speech that we find impermissible is

it became very in vogue to rail against political correctness. And then there'd be the moment where the person on behalf of you are railing says something that's like one step over the line. And then you realize, hang on a second, actually, I have something that I also object to. And I think that that's the challenge we have now with

And we'll get into whatever woke means, because I've been struck by how some people think that woke has a very specific meaning. And I need those people to talk about how, why does woke mean there's a black person in a movie? Right.

And someone was like, ah, a woke picture. And it was literally an image of Chris Pratt, the star of the film, with an African-American actress. And everyone was like, what's what's woke about that? And I do think that that's one of the the fascinating things about the terminology is.

is that now it seems it is a catch-all term, which I think only benefits some of the worst people in society, because you can decry wokeness and people will think that you mean their wokeness. Totally. Like, you know, you mean something that you don't want your kids to see in school, but for some other people, it means Black people appearing in a place that they shouldn't be.

Yeah, so we were eager to ask people to define this term. So we asked a couple of Republican groups the ways in which the country is becoming too quote unquote woke. And we got a laundry list of complaints. Let's listen.

Wokeism is treating people as members of groups. We're not treating people as individuals. We're defining people by the groups they're in. It's like gender politics. It's like identity politics. And I was just thinking about this the other day. I was watching a TV show. I was watching Survivor, actually. And Survivor has a new rule where you have to have so many Blacks, so many Asians. You have to have so many what they call minorities. Rather than the best candidates...

for the show and we see this in movies all the time you're not picking the best actors you're picking the black or the asian or the gay person so it's this identity politics of forcing people to be thought of as members of groups rather than treating them as individuals and that's what aggravates me the most is we're getting away from thinking of people as people and we're just classifying them according to the group there and that just aggravates the heck out of me

It seems like everybody's leaning more towards what you call the Hollywood liberals and, you know, what they think is okay. And if you dare speak out and say you don't believe in something that they do, then they're trashing you. And it almost seems to me like I still think that those Hollywood liberal types are in the minority, but that's what you hear about 90% of the time in the news or social media and sort of,

to make you believe, you know, I don't really know what I'm trying to say. I don't know if that makes sense or not. But yeah, that everybody has to believe this one way that the very liberal believes, or you're just really shouldn't have any beliefs at all. It means...

The way they're cramming the racism, homosexuality, transgender, critical race theory, let's put it that way, all those things. And they want everybody to believe because I'm white, they want me, oh, I'm racist because I was born white.

And, you know, I'm not, I'm not racist, but I don't like that crammed down my throat through every movie that you watch anymore. They got to throw in all of their...

Oh, I got to try not to say these bad words. Homosexuals, mixed families. It has to be a white man, black woman or black man, white woman. You know, and, you know, the kids are really, you know, there's a black one, a white one and something in between.

you know, I'm just tired. As a millennial, I feel like I see like woke culture like all the time. I don't know. I feel like, you know, I'm like forced to accept other people's beliefs no matter what, whether I agree with them or not. Like they're just like the Democrats seem to be just hammering it down our throats all the time that, you know, you constantly have to agree with everything. I would say like, oh man, like, you know,

Transgenderness, that. Thank you. I don't know if I'm supposed to be PC in here or not, but like, it's like, it's a random, I throw it and I'm like, I don't care if you are, but like, I don't have to agree with it. And don't get mad at me if like, I don't, you know, it's, it's my, I use. I work at a very local company, Starbucks, and I just try and do my job. They're all the time trying to push everything. And, you know, when they want to,

they will, you know, give us a pride shirt to wear, you know, during pride week or month or whatever. And that is one shirt I chose not to wear. Nobody says anything to me. I just make that decision. I'm not going to preach to anybody. I work with people that think differently than I, but we don't go there. And, you know, just like with the vaccine thing, you know, you just,

I was just going to write it out. I didn't lose my job. I think that was a question. But just those things that I think if I had my druthers, I probably wouldn't even get in the conversation. But if somebody asked, I probably would tell them my opinion. But again, I feel like we're being silenced.

Okay, so there's some not great stuff in there. There's a lot there. A lot to get into. Let's start with really the most important point. Do you watch Survivor? I do not watch Survivor. Okay, all right. I watch Survivor, religiously. I love Survivor. And I got to tell you...

there's a lot of stuff to unpack in there. A lot of stuff that I don't agree with. There's a couple of things where I think people have a point and I'm going to take the most charitable view with folks and, and, and say, I was, I was watching survivor and I,

They have absolutely made an effort to make the cast more diverse. One of the things about Survivor is Survivor is like this comforting show where even though it sort of has evolved over time, it's like very much the same in a lot of ways. And so Jeff Probst, the host, is always saying certain phrases all the time. And one of the things he does whenever people come in for a challenge is he says, come on in, guys. A few seasons back, he stops everybody and he says, does anybody object to me using the term guys? Right?

And a bunch of people say no, and everybody's sort of shaking their head. And then one person, one gentleman who's gay, and I think had a trans partner, if I recall, trans husband, objected, said, I do object to the term, guys. And Jeff Probst said, okay, I'm not going to use this anymore. And he like changed that phrase that he used.

And I rolled my eyes at this so hard and was like, are you serious? We can't say guys anymore? And so there's a part of me, there's a part of me that identifies with

the annoyance that people feel over some of the evolving language that has been heretofore harmless and suddenly they are being told that it is actually harmful. Is there a part of you that sort of understands like that piece of it or do you think these people are being very unreasonable?

I think I understand when people have a thing that they didn't even realize that they were kind of just used to. And then the thing changes in some way and they are annoyed by it. I used to write about college football in the NFL. And it is interesting to me whenever there is a rule change, how you're like, oh, that sounds reasonable. And then you see it executed for the first time. You're like, well, that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

For instance, there have been rule changes that are supposed to protect the quarterback, which we've learned so much about CTE. And you've seen horrifying injuries happen. And you're like, that sounds great. Don't need another Trent Green situation in my life. And then you see some of the penalties people get for what looks like just gently brushing the quarterback. And you're like, well, this is ridiculous.

I mean, the challenge that we seem to have, whether it's about Survivor, which every time I am reminded that it is still going on, you cannot kill a CBS series. They will be airing Blue Bloods until the day after I die. But I think that one of the challenges here, I mean, I say this all the time about how

To borrow what used to be on Pimp My Ride on MTV, it was like Exhibit asked us, like, I heard you wanted criminal justice reform. So I got you this weird survivor challenge language change. I feel as if a lot of this is because people and corporations specifically witnessed what has been happening over the last five to 10 years.

and decided to react to it in the most small ball way possible and didn't make anyone happy. No one has been bettered by changes to how people talk on Survivor. And I think that's one of the things where I keep thinking about how we are asking...

culture to solve political problems, but no one wants to actually solve those political problems because it's really hard and people might get mad at you. And then we ask culture to respond to them or cultural entities to respond to them. And they are doing so in a way that feels to everyone overbearing and simultaneously insufficient. And so I understand the annoyance

But at the same time, I'm thinking like, this seems like something that happened because something else bigger didn't happen somewhere else. Well, maybe, but like take the woman who there at the last clip where she's talking about the pride shirt. Right.

I totally am on her side. Like, I think it would be so weird for an employer. I think it is weird the way these companies are saying to people. And you know what? I got me one of those gay marriages. I like the gay marriage. I like the gays. It's great. It's great. It's great. But I am. It's weird to ask people like the Pride Month. Like my Uber suddenly has like a rainbow tail on it. Like for an entire. I'm like, this feels like a strange way for our culture to respond. It's just let us be married and exist.

Yeah, that's the thing is that like, I think again, it is an indication of corporations specifically attempting to respond to

with a cultural action when they're not responding to, say, a political action. Like Starbucks, for example, attempting to discourage people from unionizing. Or for folks, you know, you're working 80-hour weeks and working all on the weekend, but you got a pride shirt. That's great. And so it reminds me, after the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, people on Instagram started doing this thing of like,

I'm posting a black box because that means I'm listening on racial justice. And I was like, that's not doing anything. Civil asset forfeiture is not being stymied by your black box. We're not getting the elimination of qualified immunity because of your black box where I'm just annoyed with you. I was struck because you haven't mentioned this yet and I understand why, but I was struck by the woman who, and this is always a fascinating tell to me. I am the product of a interracial couple.

And I am always struck by how there is a way in which people talk about mixed race couples. I'm also in a mixed race relationship.

that they are a sort of plant by the media, that they aren't real, that this isn't a real thing that happens, that no one is in an actual interracial relationship, despite the fact that the number of people in interracial relationships has been skyrocketing dramatically over the last 30 years. But it's a fascinating tale that somehow that woman listed homosexuality, trans people, and mixed race relationships. I was like, oh, wow.

Oh, I see. Oh, I see. There is something about how our culture works that we cannot tell in which direction our cultural moors move, whether they go from the bottom up or from the top down.

And I think that one of our worst inclinations as people is to assume that the only reason people are gay or trans or in a mixed race relationship is because they saw it in a movie or because the cultural overlords made it look like it was okay. You know, I think that the Lovings who had to go to court in 1967 and go to the Supreme Court to challenge the state of Virginia for their marriage, I am pretty sure they did not do so because they saw it in a movie.

And I'm always struck by this idea that you are having mixed race relationships shoved down your throat. But I'm like, what? So the jammed. My parents are just like hanging out. So the jammed down your throat piece is. It's always that terminology. I know, it is. So obviously I view myself, I'm at the perfect place in the culture. Like I have the perfect position on culture. And I think everybody would agree that Sarah Longwell's position is the perfect position on culture.

I was in the bank yesterday and there is a picture of a gay couple doing banking there. And there is kind of like a montage. There's a picture of a gay couple and there's like a black guy who's like a carpenter, I think. And it's like a collection of people who do banking. And I think this would qualify to some of the people in this group as shoving it down their throats. Whereas I'm like...

Like, these are people who bank and the bank would like to show that many different people bank here lest you be one of those people. And we'd like to see you reflected in it because we would like you to bank here. And so to me, that is a normal thing to do. Whereas I think forcing people to wear a pride shirt or the bank having a pride month, I think that is like on the other side of things where I'm like,

I think that some of the things they identified as shoving down their throat are just, hey, these people exist and we're going to like show you that they exist. Whereas there are things that I might agree feel like kind of shoving things down somebody's throat. And what's hard, it's hard to tease that out. Right. I remember that there was a Wells Fargo ad a couple of years ago. Now, keep in mind, Wells Fargo was one of the companies that really screwed over people during the Great Recession.

and signed people up for credit cards they didn't sign up for took a ton of people's money but they also had this ad that was about like a lesbian couple adopting a deaf child and i was like don't don't bring no no no no don't bring this into this and so i don't like using that kind of

cultural swordsmanship, the argument that you aren't going to do real things to benefit people, but you'll do this kind of performative action. I don't like that being included with there's a biracial person on my television and I don't like it because I don't think it's real. I don't like the fact that that can all be called a wokeness and you could have someone who campaigned against quote unquote wokeness and someone would interpret that to mean I won't have to see biracial people on television anymore. Right.

We played like a pretty long section there of those groups. And I think it's very accurate of what we hear all the time. But you also hear like, it's sort of inconsistent, right? People have different ideas, very much of what woke means to them. And I had a reporter asked me one time, they were like, just do people use the word woke in focus groups? And I was like, not really. Like we had to ask them sort of for the purposes of this, like what does woke mean to you for people to say it? And they all had a variety of different opinions and they're all sort of

It's some like sub substructure of a culture war thing that particularly annoys them. This is allowed to exist under this umbrella phrase woke for them. And actually, I'm going to get into that a little more. But before you do, I want to listen to the Dems. Yeah. You know, and you'll hear, I think, the disconnect between the way that the Republicans were talking about what woke is and what Dems say woke is. The term woke means state educated.

And that's all it means, stay educated. But when you hear, and it's typically used by white Republicans, when you hear them saying the woke generation, they're talking about black people.

And no one wants to address it. I believe we have to talk, first of all. We need to talk. We need to understand one another. And I say this because of my foundation. We have a saying that says in order for humanity to survive, we must care for one another.

So we have to take the time to listen to each other and understand each other. Don't take a term that you know nothing about and run with it and use it in a way that's demoralizing or condescending to the next person. Governor DeSantis is the governor of Florida, and he loves throwing that term out when he wants to disparage something. And it really angers me to hear it have a negative connotation.

I don't look at it in a negative way at all. I think awareness is important for change. So I don't like how he uses that term and has made it negative. I don't look at it as a negative thing. Anytime you want to have a change, it's like to mock you. Oh, you're so woke. It's like to cut that dialogue out because it's done a very condescending way. Yeah.

Yeah, like a staff is coming from like, you know, like a Caucasian type person, like you need to be more woke. Like, I guess it's in their delivery, their tone of how they're saying this. So if it's, I guess just depending on the situation, you know, and how they're just presenting it to you, you know, it can come off as rude, you know, it can come off as kind of like a, they're kind of trying to be kind of controlling.

They're trying to make you aware of something, but it's kind of like a privilege type thing. I would be proud to be called woke. I think it's a compliment. So the funny thing about this word is that the definitions vary widely. And I think, you know, for the Democratic group, they didn't so much want to define woke as define like the way it is hurled at them.

Right? Right. And I think that this also goes to the thing about how a culture war cannot be won or lost is that like, now you hear some of those Democrats being like, hell yeah, I'm woke. Jesus was woke. Jesus was the original wokester. Exactly. And you know, screw you. Screw these people. People aren't like, oh, oh, I'm so sorry about my wokeness. I will repent. Like, no, that's not how people react to things. Like,

if you attempt to ban something, everybody's more interested in it. If you attempt to decry something, in general, people become like very defensive of it. Then you ask more questions and people might be like, oh, well, I don't like this. I don't like that. But using it as a cudgel doesn't do what you think it's going to do. It was notable. There's a number of people who hear it very distinctly as a dog whistle. And what's interesting to me about the term woke is

that's what happens when it can mean so many things. On one hand, it is a racial dog whistle. On the other, for a lot of people, it's talking about like gender ideology, or it's talking about what's being taught in schools, or it's about how they want to be able to say a certain thing and they feel like they can't because it's not politically correct. Or it's about, you know, CRT, or it is about race and it's about, you know, a multiracial family on TV, all of those things. When you hear it, do you hear it as a racial dog whistle?

Yes and no, because it is often used as a racial dog whistle, because I think that that, again, when you use this term as an umbrella term, it becomes...

I now hear the woman who doesn't want to see biracial people on television. You might have meant something entirely different, but all I'm hearing is there are too many mixed race couples on my television and I don't like it because, you know, I remember when I was a kid, woke was what the guys in the barbershop would say about how you needed to be worried about the fluoride in the water. Cause you have to stay woke. Like they won't tell you about this.

And so that's how I heard it. And then you had to stay woke because, you know, the FBI wanted to kill Martin, which is sort of actually true. And so this idea like wokeness was this conceit that you need to stay aware and stay awake. You need to keep your eyes open to how the powers that be are

were prepared to mistreat you and mistreat people like you, generally African-Americans. And it's interesting now to see it become this catch-all term when it will always, to many African-Americans, always sound like they were right all along. They should stay aware. They should stay awake to the way in which power structures can be wielded against them.

So one of the things that I use the focus groups for is to help me think about messaging. And on this sort of idea that it is difficult for people to define woke and you learn a lot by sort of throwing out an open-ended question about like, what do you think is woke? You know, there were just saw this prominent anti-woke activist group.

Bethany Mandel, she was asked on television, she has a book out about how, you know, wokeness is destroying children. And she was asked to define woke on TV. And she kind of had like this brain freeze because she couldn't conjure a definition. And the Dems, rather than getting sort of mad or I think that they should just constantly when people say like, oh, you're woke. What's that mean?

Tell me what that means, because I think that people will betray themselves pretty quickly in terms of what it means to them. Yeah, I think that asking people what they mean by something is often the best question any journalist can ask. I also think that if I were doing democratic messaging, I would...

really focus on how this seems to be a distraction from a lot of actual issues. Like maybe the actual war that exists? Yeah, the actual war or actual wars. I mean, many of the same people who decry wokeness are currently proposing that we bomb targets in Mexico because apparently war is cool when it's here. That sounds great.

Or you think about so many of the issues people are struggling with in actual life and people attempting to tether that to some sort of wokeness issue, but not actually doing anything about it. Because again, culture wars should not be won and they cannot be lost.

That's not the point. The point is not to do anything about any of these actual issues. The point is to have something to fight about on the internet or on television for the rest of our lives. Yeah. So I would always say that, like, one, what do you mean? What does wokeness mean? And two, what does this have to do with any actual problem for people who are not on the internet all the time? Right.

Speaking of things that happen on the Internet all the time, I want to talk about our second culture war buzzword, which is cancel culture. Now, I know you hate it, but among our Republican groups, they had a very strong sense that Republicans exist in a world of fear with cancellation by the liberals in their lives just around the corner at any moment. Let's listen.

The left, they can't really make their point as to why they believe that way. They just want to scream in your face and tell you they don't believe in the things that you do. I think there's hotbeds. I mean, you know, abortion, hotbed. Religion, hotbed. Politics, hotbed. And it's not that we can have political discussions anymore. We can't.

People aren't happy if you don't agree with them, especially the liberals. You just can't go out and have that discussion anymore because people want to try to convince you. I always have a rule of thumb at a party. You don't talk politics, you don't talk religion because you're not going to convince anybody to change.

It really is like a problem like in families because people feel like a certain way. It just it's scary when you can't have conversations. It's like you're not allowed an opinion. I mean, we've been like not so much myself, but my husband, like, you know, really put like in a place where

from our granddaughter. It's like, it's a crazy time. If you don't like go along with what you're supposed to do, you're just old and stupid, you know? But I know that we're not stupid.

I understand all of the things that everyone has said because we've experienced all of those things in our household as well with family members disowning us because of our political votes, where they've gone, vaccinations, COVID, school, like all the things. We are participating and having all of that happen to us in our lives too.

So like people talk like this in the groups all the time where they basically use the term canceled when they mean someone got mad at me for my opinion. Right. I am also curious in the family examples. I'm like, what exactly did you say? Like, yeah. But again, this is why I think having these catch all terms is so difficult, because, for example, when people talked about

cancel culture to begin with. It was these specific examples of the woman who tweeted something about how she was going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. And by the time she landed, she had gotten fired from her job and everyone hated her on the internet. Again, a lot of this is on the internet. The words on the internet should be added to all of this.

or people who are wrongly accused of something and lose their jobs, lose their career. I generally don't think of famous people in this way because I think that famous people have the unique way to always come back from pretty much anything. I think of people who it's like you were seen in a viral video doing something awkward and somehow lost your job because of it. But now it has become encompassing

to mean someone didn't like my opinion and they were mad at me for it. I've been canceled. I wonder who have these people canceled? Against whom have they wielded the cancel culture cudgel? Yeah, there's a fair amount of lack of self-awareness oftentimes in the groups. I mean, but I got to say, this to me is the kind of organic genius of Republican messaging because they're able to provide sort of a pernicious term

that people can tap into when they want to describe things liberals in my life do that annoy me. Then the family ones come up all the time in focus groups. And it's a lot of it's sad. You know, it's like people who don't talk to each other anymore. It's just a function of our political polarization. But like the woman here who was talking, our husband, it sounded like was having an argument with the granddaughter over, it sounded like immigration and things got heated. She got mad. I think the granddaughter called him racist.

and that clearly hurt them. But like that was their definition of cancel culture.

And that's just like all over the Republican groups, this sort of grievance of people. They'll get mad at me for my opinion. But they're so different from the Democrats, though. I want to listen to the Democrats. And then I have a question because I I would say that the cancel culture stuff, unlike wokeness, where the Dems were pretty resistant to letting Republicans get away with calling things woke, cancel culture, the Democrats were more sympathetic to this idea existing.

I think I became concerned about it many years ago before it even came to the point where it is at now. You know, I think things that should be canceled isn't canceled and things that should stay in place, they're canceled. And for what reason? It makes no sense. You know, and I don't get it. I'm grateful that my children are no longer in school. They're adults. But I feel bad for the children that are coming up in this era now because there's a lot of things that they're canceling that

it shouldn't be canceled but it's things that they're letting fly by that need to be canceled if I don't agree with something or if I'm prejudiced against something I'm gonna try my absolute hardest to get as much people behind me to cancel something um and not

you know keep it going not keep it alive i think you know people who have been cancelled in the past we've all been children we've all been young and dumb at one time and something that i say or do when i'm immature and young should not come and haunt me you know 10 15 years later down the road

In the United States, murder has no statute of limitation, but rape does. Crimes against children. It depends on what you've done. I believe in holding people accountable. And some things you just can't say sorry for. But instead of canceling them, I think that people need to have time to look into it. Some people will lie on you, and a lie travels faster than the truth.

So in order to hold someone accountable for something horrific that they've done in the past, you have to look into it. But we all make mistakes. We all fall short. And we've all done some things in our past that we wish we would not have done.

So I found it interesting that a lot of these people on some level, like they believe in holding people accountable for their worst moments, but they also have this instinct toward grace. And I think especially for older people, you know, they think about their worst moments and if it had been captured on camera, like they grew up at a time when not everybody had a camera. And so it sounded to me like a lot of them felt like,

like people were being too hard on people oftentimes or that like we should have some, some room for people to make mistakes and be allowed to come back. I found their answers to be quite compassionate. Unlike where the Republicans felt like cancel culture was the thing that was visited on them. Right. Democrats felt like cancel culture is a thing that's kind of real and we should be careful with how we wield it. Right, exactly. And I think that that's the thing is that like cancel culture, I think strikes also at a personal level.

But I am almost certain that there are certain things that have been deemed cancel culture that people are like, oh, yeah, that guy. Absolutely. Like the Dilbert guy recently where I'm just like, well, you know, you don't have a legal right to have your cartoon in newspapers. Right. Is the challenge of these overarching terms. Right.

I was of like kind of the first generation on Facebook. And I remember in about 2008, 2009, where everyone was about to graduate from college, where all of these people I knew from high school took down so many of these pictures of themselves that they had taken drinking or doing something debaucherous.

And I just keep thinking about like, imagine if those photos come back. And we've seen so many examples of that happening to actual people. And I think that that is something that people see as so different than like Louis C.K. getting to perform again. It's difficult that we don't have a diversity of terms to talk about the diversity of experiences that we have.

And we just have this way of talking about how do we move past either our own mistakes or the transgressions of other people, which transgressions have reached the bar where we don't have to get over them. And how do we talk about that? Yeah, totally. Totally. OK, I want to pivot back to Republicans for these last couple of clips because they relate to sort of the biggest culture war third rail, which is kids.

Right. Because a lot of us, you can sort of say, well, I'm a grown up. I can, you know, we'll talk about trans issues. But like it's about the kids. And this is Ron DeSantis, I think, has put sort of the kids squarely at at the center of how he's talking about sort of wokeness. So the Republican groups, once again, they have a laundry list of grievances over the way public schools are being run currently. Let's listen.

That's the problem with critical race theories. You're now starting not just to teach facts, but to actually influence the interpretation of facts by giving an interpretation of facts. And that's why I think parents do have a legitimate need to understand what's being taught and have some influence over it, whether it's input, influence, control, whatever. I think we do need to know what our kids are being taught because it's quite possible that it's being flavored with a political agenda and it's not just teaching facts.

I don't like the recent culture of you have to address me the way I think you have to address me. You have to believe whatever I believe in. Like my wife is a teacher, for instance. She's a fifth grade teacher and she's got students that have to be addressed like certain ways, whether it be like by gender or by, you know, whatever, everything they come up with. And if she addresses them differently, it's...

pushed back on by the parents. And I don't like that that's the case now. When these other countries are teaching their kids, you know, how to actually do something when we're teaching our kids how to worry about what gender they are, you know, that kind of thing just, hmm.

I went to a very big university here in Ohio and I grew up in a really small town that was all Republican and it was like mind-blowing. I mean nobody ever pushed you know politics on us in high school and as soon as I went to college it was like everything was like so pushed on us in regards to how we should think and thankfully I never fell into the trap but a lot of my friends did just from hearing their professors and other people talk about what they should believe you know believe in

I think teachers should teach kids to think and not what to think. The indoctrination of you're going to be a little mini me because I'm a teacher and I'm in charge of you for eight hours a day is ridiculous. You know, a teacher is hired to help assist the parent, but the parents should be in full control of what the kid sees, doesn't see. And I just don't like where we're at right now.

So this has become like a very hot button political issue. And I think that with a lot of this stuff, there's a spectrum where people are in a sort of a crazy place like, oh, no, there's litter boxes in schools. And then there's like kind of a more reasonable place that I think got Glenn Youngkin elected in Virginia. So the idea that

parents should have a say in their kids' education, that parents are concerned about some of what's being taught to their kids at young ages in school. I'm sympathetic to the more normal argument on some of this stuff. And I think that for a lot of swing voters that we do, we do a lot of groups of swing voters, this comes up a lot. And I think that DeSantis has decided that

to wage a very particular and aggressive kind of war to win over sort of the crazy side of this debate. I sort of have always thought that it will resonate and play okay with swing voters if he can sound more Yunkin-ish come general election. What do you think?

Perhaps. I think the challenge, though, I was struck by how there was a person who referenced how their wife was a teacher and that if they didn't use the correct pronouns for a child, the kid's parents would push back. And I think that this is less parents versus schools than it's parents versus other parents, which I am not a parent. And I would rather walk into the fires of hell than get in between two parents who have a fight over their kids. I would lie down in front of a bus before I would face that.

And so I think that it is telling to me that there's this idea that

Kids are being indoctrinated, but of course they are. I went to Catholic school. That was the entire point of Catholic school, was to indoctrinate us. That's why you do it. But it's what you're being indoctrinated with, what your parents want you to be indoctrinated by. You are never, ever getting the reading, writing, arithmetic school that apparently people seem to imagine that they went to. They did not.

There was an interesting op-ed in the New York Times about a young girl who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance and was basically assaulted by her principal for doing so. Now, it is not required for you to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It is not a crime. The Supreme Court has ruled in 1943, one of the great decisions of that body, that you don't have to. But this woman received nonstop vitriol because clearly,

saying the Pledge of Allegiance was very important to people. Again, that is a form of indoctrination. We use it as a cudgel, but it does not necessarily mean that something is bad or good. I went to church so that I could be indoctrinated with the ethos of the Catholic Church. I would imbibe the doctrine of Catholicism, which some of that was great and some of it was less great.

But I think that the real battle here is between parents versus parents. And I think that so often, and I think this is where Democrats fail a little bit, Democrats forget that Democrats are also parents and they have kids and that you can talk about how you want your kids to learn these different things. It's not just evil teachers. Teachers are also parents often. I think that we saw in 2022 in a bunch of states in which parents

A lot of democratic parents were like, actually, I want my kids to have these books in schools. Actually, I want my kids to learn these things. I was also interested that schools in other countries are doing things so much better. We still have the best ranked universities in the world. Thousands of people come to the United States to study.

And many of the people's educational experiences in other countries, I think people often use China as an example. China's educational system is based on doing a very specific type of indoctrination with regard to the Chinese party and with regard to kind of Chinese authority over that country. And so it's interesting to me that we don't see the indoctrination that we like as indoctrination. That's just how you should be educated. But we see the indoctrination we don't like as indoctrination.

Well, speaking of kids and things that people object to, the last thing I really want to talk about is the bill out of Tennessee banning drag performances on public property. And DeSantis has also really picked this up. He pulled the liquor license from a Florida hotel for hosting a drag show. It's interesting how the voters in our groups, when we asked about it, jumped right to the protecting kids angle when we asked about it. Let's listen.

Any consenting adult can do whatever they want, wherever, but I would not in a library, not in a school, nothing involving kids. I would stand for those people to have their rights to do those things. And then in exchange, I would expect them to support my rights to be able to, you know, do things that don't hurt them in any way.

That's the thing I just seen too. They, they was doing drag shows in like elementary school. There was a video of like these kids in preschool and they had a drag going in there and doing a dance for them. And it was like a auditorium and everybody was in there. And I just looked at that and I was like, that is crazy. It's like, what are they teaching? But now that they're banning that, I love that. That's the, that's a great that they're banning it. I guess it would depend on whether it's,

If it's a nude or a sexualized show or something like that. But if it's just something you'd see if somebody was transgenders walking down the street, some people are going to see that regardless. So if it's something that's a sexualized show, I'd definitely have an issue with that. But if it's just...

I mean, hell, not to minimize it, but Peter Pan in plays was played by a woman for years. That doesn't necessarily bother me, but something that would be content inappropriate. They have the right to their opinion. They have the right to share their thoughts, but they don't have the right to stand in front of a bunch of kindergartners and have some kind of sexualized show.

What do you make of the drag panic going on? I think it's the stupidest thing in the entire world. I think it is indicative of, again, how a culture war will always seek a new front, especially because, one, it is actually about trans people, but it has somehow decided that yelling about drag queens is a way to yell about trans people in a way that doesn't involve trans people, but we all know it does include trans people. Yeah.

You saw online how there was a very specific effort by Chris Ruffo to talk about how drag queens were trans strippers, which is not what a drag queen is. But also it becomes a thing that we have to discuss when we could be discussing any other number of things. And especially because I think there has long been this idea that

If a kid sees a drag queen, and I think that I have witnessed a drag queen story hour and a drag queen read a story and then that was pretty much it. There was nothing sexualized. I mean, I believe that they were reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which I don't remember being a specifically erotic text, but I'd have to go back and check.

I can confirm. I do have kids. I can confirm. It is, you know, unless you've got a food fetish, maybe. It's true. It's true. And in which case, life must be complicated for you. I think that there is a sense that if you see a drag queen or a trans person, because what actually really gets me about the Tennessee bill, it's incredibly vague. So for one thing, it implies that

It is about both drag queens and drag kings. And it's written in such a way that could possibly, if you were the worst cop in the world, could just include trans people. And it's also written in such a sense, let's see, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest. Boy, I am not looking forward to the first court case in which someone has to argue about what the prurient interest was with regard to

so many things, but I think that it goes back to this idea that I've seen so many times in which people think that if you see an LGBT person, that that will make you LGBT or that LGBT people were totally normal. And then they saw a drag queen or they saw Paris is burning, or I don't know. They saw that, that episode of Ellen where she's reveals that she's gay. And then that, that just does it. And if you just avoid that, they'll grow up to be straight and normal. And,

And so I think it's a distraction of an argument. I think it's an anti-trans argument disguised as an anti-drag argument. But I think it's also about this idea that children are these tabula rasa's. And if they are shown anything, they will immediately become whatever they have seen. Now, again, I went to Catholic school and I can tell you it did not quite work that way.

Yeah. So first of all, I completely agree with the point you just made. But let me go to a place where it's slightly more complicated, which is on like the issue of non-binary and talking to kids about non-binary and the idea that there is no gender. Because you're right. It all kind of like the drag queen stuff and the trans conversation and the sort of gender conversation around language in classrooms. Yeah.

There are different elements of this debate. And that one of the things that I really want to get out of this episode is that the idea by providing these blanket terms really benefits Republicans in the culture war because it allows people to tag Republicans.

things that are on the really crazy side of the spectrum and things that are just, I don't know, we can have like very reasonable differences of opinion on all under one big umbrella term that people can sort of lock into. And that allows Ron DeSantis to essentially appeal to people who don't want to see biracial couples, as well as parents who are a little concerned that their kids are coming home and saying they identify as they when they're six, right? Like they all under exist under the same sort of cultural banner.

Right. Because I think that there's things, I mean, I don't, so we were talking about how old we are. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions that are a little harder or, I don't know, maybe a little personal. Right. And same for me, right? When I was coming out,

there was so little visibility around lesbians that like, there was just like nothing even to look to. And once I was like, okay, I'm a lesbian, I could find a lot of cultural signals. You said I had to go looking for them, but like there was Ellen and then spent my twenties and thirties in a culture for lesbians. Now there's all this non-binary stuff, which didn't exist. Right.

when I was younger. And I do find it like is very new. And I have this sort of like, I want everybody to be happy and I want everybody to be self-actualized. I want everybody to pursue their truth and

And I genuinely believe that. And then there's this other part of me that's like, but I find the language vexing sometimes. I think we are, like, I'm still struggling to understand things that I know, like my kids are coming up in a totally different way. And maybe that's just the way that the world works. And there will always be kids saying to their parents and to their grandparents, like, listen, you old fogies, you don't understand. I know the real truth about the world now. But

But I mean, do you have sympathy for people who are sort of struggling with the newness of a lot of this and trying to figure out what the right speed is for kids to engage with it? Yeah, and especially because I think that this is a generational issue. And for example, one of the great benefits that kids now have, let's say you're 18 years old right now. That means you were born in 2005, which is a wild thing to say.

But that also means that when you were 10 years old, Obergefell went through the Supreme Court. And so when you were about six or seven is when Barack Obama came out in support of marriage equality. For the vast majority of your life, you have not had to experience, in some ways, the overarching homophobia of a society aimed at eliminating you that so many people did. When I talk to older...

older gays and lesbians who are in their 50s or 60s or 70s, there is a real sense of like, they just can't believe it. They can't believe that we got here, that we did this. But I also think that that means there's something bonding about being on the vice of oppression. There's something that brings people together to be like, no matter our differences, we are clearly all being hated by the same people. And so I think that for many LGBT people,

there is a sense now that there's less bringing people together. There's less like, what are we fighting for and what are we fighting as? And I also think that it's worth noting here, like I remember when I asked my mom, in the way you think you're being extremely subtle when you're a kid, like, what would you do if I were gay? I was like six or seven. And my mom said, and I think about this all the time, because my mom's a very liberal woman who loves me very much.

I loved my spouse very much. But she was like, you know, I'd be scared for you because your life would be harder. Now, this would have been this has been 1994. So this is like even just before Don't Ask, Don't Tell. This is a very understandable thing to say. But I got the message of like, don't be that. And I already I already knew I had seen the movie Mannequin with Kim Cattrall. And I was like, I'm going to marry Kim Cattrall. And then I was like, oh, boy, that's a big problem for me. Kim Cattrall. Well.

I don't know if you've ever seen Mannequin. I haven't. It's not a good movie, but she was...

Anyway, I wanted to marry her. I had seen it on television and I wanted to marry her and that was going to be a problem. And I hear this now, it's interesting with regard to trans kids or gender nonconforming kids. Like, oh, I don't want my kid to be that because their life will be harder. Which I'm like, or we could just make life less hard for them in a number of ways. And I think that one thing I keep thinking about, though, about like...

how this generational shift has happened is that there is a sense that yes, it's good. There's been increased acceptance, but I think that there are people who are worried that something has been lost. You were talking about lesbian signifiers and I, I am picking up and you can correct me that you're a little bit worried that the use of the term lesbian, you know, the idea of being a lesbian, that something is being lost is,

If folks are coming out as queer or coming out as non-binary or gender non-conforming. That's well, that's a good question. Actually, can I just say that I feel like I come at these conversations from three perspectives. One is the parent of kids who are being taught things and language that like I sometimes find confounding. Like it just it's.

different and I have them forming my opinions of how I feel about some of it and how they're interacting with it as young people. Then there's me as a lesbian who I wonder how it might have been different for me as a kid if what is available now on the spectrum had been available to me, like how I would have, whether that would have been good or bad for me because I'm uncertain.

And then also as somebody for whom women's sports were quite important and formative for me, I think I grapple with these issues and I feel like I'm mad sort of at everyone all the time. Like I'm really mad with the lack of compassion, the gross way that conservatives have taken on trans issues as a way to wedge people culturally and be despicable to people. And I also find myself tormented.

torn about the ways that we're trying to accommodate these new things. And like, I agree with you. I want to make people's lives easier, but I also don't want to put my pronouns in a zoom. So yeah, that's how I'm thinking about it. Right. And I think that there's room for that. I would say that there's a moment in the movie, um, children of the corn, which is not a good horror movie. I don't like horror movies, but I think about it all the time because there's like the

The kid who's been basically leading this cult that's killing all of the adults. And he's doing it on behalf of this entity, this like evil entity that lives in the cornfields. And I believe his name is Malachi. And there's a moment at which one of the children who has been killed by this evil cult leader dies.

comes back as a zombie. And there's this moment in which he comes and looks and says to this character, "He wants you too, Malachi." And I think about that because we have now seen that the same people who are railing against trans people competing in sports are also saying like, "Hey, we should reconsider Obergefell." Right.

I think a lot about gender nonconforming people because the idea that people are like, what about feminine men and masculine women? And I'm like, do you think that things have been super easy for them anyway? Do you really believe that the folks, one, it's not the same thing as being trans, but also that the idea that we have been so accepting of gender nonconforming people up until now is a fallacy?

And so I am concerned about a increasing slippery slope that takes out all of us, that is aimed at all of us. And so I think that there are a lot of individual issues, especially because

there are ways in which people talk about, say, the sports issue that ignores the experiences of trans men. It's interesting to me that when we talk about trans women and trans girls, we are always talking about, like, evil adults who are gross and bad. And we talk about trans men as sad children where something went horribly wrong. There was an article in National Review about a trans man. It was written very poorly. But one of the comments was,

how will she ever get a man to love her? And I was like, oh boy. I heard your head hit the desk there. Yes, I genuinely hit the desk there. And so I think a lot about how we think it's about just trans kids or non-binary kids, but it's actually about all of us. It's about the ways in which people are shifting how they identify and wishing to be

be themselves in the world and figuring out the right ways to do that and how that changes over time.

And I also think about the ways in which the people who had been keeping quiet about marriage equality found a new issue to rail at. I understand it's complicated. It's incredibly complicated. My answer is currently taking like 10 minutes. But I think that it's worth trying to keep all of this straight because it's a sign of intelligence to be able to keep two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time.

And so I think that the concerns that you're raising are interesting and valid. And I also think that the concerns that I'm thinking about

in which I see the ways in which people are using this as a means to either go after some of the most vulnerable people or attempting to take back rights that they believe we shouldn't have gotten in the first place. That's what concerns me. I also think there is a degree to which

how we talk about these issues, it's so time-based. I think a lot about how gay men who experienced the AIDS crisis, who experienced a time at which they watched their friends and their family die while people didn't seem to care or that they were rejected by their families. I think a lot about how

We have come so far. But I also think that there is a degree to which they are experiencing something that I think that LGBT people have never really gotten to experience before, which is like the younger versions of you annoying you. Ha ha ha ha!

You never really, you know, if you were, imagine that. Like, if you were a gay man in 1955, you never thought about what it would be like to see future gay kids irritating you. Or doing something you don't understand. I think in some ways...

It is a sign of incredible growth that I go to Pride and you see like the lesbian teens in their 20s getting messy and drunk and making out all over the place. And you're like, oh, just not on my shoes, please. Just not.

on my shoes. Well, you know, I could have this particular conversation with you forever, but we're going to have to leave it there. Jane Koston, thank you so much for coming on the Focus Group podcast and talking through this. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It was the best. And thanks to all of you for listening to another week of the Focus Group podcast. We will be back next week when we will be talking about a real war and asking voters about Ukraine. Oh, boy. See you then.