"Today we have the honor of speaking with Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hanson is an expert on postmodernism, its history, and how this progressive way of thinking is slowly but surely working its way into American society. Today he offers tools to spot and combat the lies this destructive philosophy represents."
8:22 Hanson names the problem as postmodernism. Modernism was a reaction to traditional and classical Western civilization, a reaction against the mores of the last 2500 years. Postmodernism: "didn't just reject traditional america they rejected the means of adjudication the whole system so they said to the modernist your problem is you're reacting to traditional we don't believe there are facts we just think a ruling largely white class created a system and called it rational but it was rigged because it's not based on truth because there is no truth truth is what any particular person says and it becomes truth only when they have power so it was a revolutionary but entirely nihilistic uh idea..."
9:55 " and it came from you know frederick nietzsche and hegel and the german nihilists but it also was imported first to france michel foucault in the 1960s and 70s lacan derrida now it's here in the university and this woke culture that we see is a manifestation and how that works out practically as it says to americans you know you think you have a constitution it was basically you've been fooled it was just a bunch of white slave owners who rigged a system and called it truth freedom declaration of independence but it perpetuated their oppressions..."
There are many challenges to what Critical Theory and CRT are but they are complicated topics and one-line definitions will never do. Here I'm interested in more than defining it as rejecting reality and truth but establishing its roots. Hegel was a great influence on Marx. Foucault and Derrida were Marxists who split off from failing purist Marxism to develop Critical Theory. And those are the roots of Woke.
A full map of the development of woke culture would be something like this:
The emergence of various branches of Critical Theory, from postcolonialism to third wave feminism happened over time. Postcolonialism emphasized oppressive white European nations colonizing the world but one of the most important ideas, intersectionality (think identity politics), came from Crenshaw working in Critical Legal Theory. Crenshaw's ideas were discussed here.
A good overview of all this in light reading form can be found in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.