David Reef is a journalist, writer, and policy analyst.

He's one of actually the leading observers of global affairs in the area, certainly of humanitarian projects and international systems.

His many books include at the point of a gun, democratic dreams and armed intervention,

a bed for the night, humanitarianism in crisis, and the reproach of hunger, food, justice,

and money in the 21st century.

His new book has a simple title and subtitle, Desire and Fate.

That's our topic today.

Welcome, Mr. Reef.

Thank you.

We get right to the book. You begin by asserting that we are in the middle of a, quote, cultural revolution, one that differs from previous cultural revolutions, such as that in China, in the mid-20th century, in that it pushes what you call a contradictory synthesis. What are the components

of this current revolutionary synthesis? Well, I think it combines, I mean, the novelty that we have

now is that woke, if you want to call it, identitarianism, the various forms of what we generally, for lack of

a better term, call woke diversity, the DEI stuff, the whole sort of package, is on the one hand

incredibly radical, and in another way doesn't threaten anything,

and that's the big difference. The Maoists destroyed high culture, high Confucian culture,

but they didn't keep the same economic system that the high Confucian culture had flourished under,

whereas the paradox of woke is that there does, at first,

it seemed as if woke were a radical break with the capitalist order, with illiberal order.

And certainly there are plenty of people on college campuses, people who identify themselves

with all these, to my mind, dreadful ideas, who think of themselves as revolutionary and think

they're working inside the belly of the beast. And if you read any of the journals, all of which

have been basically hijacked, the professional journals,, all of which have been basically hijacked,

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