Columnist Bethany Mandel was on Briahna Joy Gray's show Rising to plug her new book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," which she co-wrote with Karol Markowicz.

"Would you mind defining woke? It's come up a couple of times and I just want to make sure we're on the same page," Gray said.

"So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um ....This is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral," she said. (She was right. Here's the last tweet of hers that went viral.)

"Woke is something that's very hard to define and we've spent a whole chapter defining it. It's sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. It's hard to explain in a 15-second soundbite."

Wait, you mean identifying injustices and wanting to fix them? The horror!

Maybe Bethany should not throw around banana Republican talking points without actually thinking about them.

This is a perfect example of what I call "modular thinking," and look, we're all guilty of it at some time or another. When you don't actually choose your words through a process of thoughtful analysis, you simply plug in a label -- someone else's pre-digested thoughts-- and use them as your own with no nuance.

(In Bethany's defense, she does have five kids, one of whom was delivered in her car, and the occasional brain fart is inevitable. My mother had five kids, too, which is probably why she hosted so many late-afternoon cocktail hours with our neighbors.)

She explained it this way:

And the entire interview.