Editor: Justin Trouble. Original formatting is retained in all quotes including boldface and italics. By recounting what sources state, we are not agreeing with them or implying that they are accurate.
Image from the Atlantic, captioned, “Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.”
CONTENTS
Intro
The Fulcrum
Prehistory - ‘Woke Republican’'
May, 2022 - Woke Republican
Tracing the Use & Development of the Term Woke Right
May, 2022 - Kathy Barnette - The Woke Right are Republicans Who are Too Progressive?
September, 2022 - Dan Crenshaw - The Woke Right are Contrarian?
November 2022 - Woke Right & Christian Nationalism
May 7, 2023 - “Right-wing wokeness”
May 10, 2023 - Woke Right Mind Virus?
February 17, 2024 - Konstantin Kisin’s “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right”
April 18, 2024 - Don’t Become That Which You Oppose
May 28, 2024 - Is the ‘Woke Right’ Real?
June 10, 2024 - What is the “Woke Right”?
July 23, 2024 - Bipartisan Wokeness?
September 5, 2024 - Tucker Carlson is the “undisputed spiritual leader” of the Woke Right?
November 28, 2024 - Woke Right as Anti-Woke Authoritarianism
December 8, 2024 - Konstantin Kisin Opines Further
December 12 & 25, 2024 - No Such Thing as the Woke Right?
December 19, 2024 - A Kerfuffle Over What Defines the Woke Right & a Foray Into Identitarianism
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What does woke right mean? It’s too early to say as I write this. At this point it is like moldable clay. The definition takes different shapes in different hands, at least so far. It is likely that it will harden and cure into a more-or-less cut-and-dry form.
It is not for us to decide, only to describe. The term has not been used for more than a few years and as I write this, it has only once been discussed in one of the big newspapers (see the NY Times opinion piece below from January 28, 2025). Because so few news articles have dealt with the woke right, at least so far, we have been able to be somewhat thorough in our chronological look at the use of the term in different ways by different sources through time.
The Fulcrum
Below we will see many different views of what the term woke right means. Some argue that “woke right” is a contradiction in terms. Others give concrete examples of the woke right in accordance with how they define the term, of course.
At this point (January 26, 2025) it seems quite fair to say that James Lindsay has the most to say about the woke right as he sees it, at least. However, it would also seem that not all others agree with him.
Part of the disagreement is due to the fact that the term woke is itself (still) a slang term. To some it means “far left” and to others it is a set of principles or a lack of principles but rather a set of strategies instead. Of course, if “woke” means “far left” then one could say that “woke right” would mean “far left right” which would be nonsense. However, one could say that the term “woke right” would imply that “woke” by itself is short for “woke left” and, therefore, that “woke right” means “far right”.
After all, are not the woke concerned with identity politics? Would not, then, the wokeright be concerned with identitarianism since identitarianism is just identity politics for the right? If being woke means promoting celebration of LGBTQ+ lifestyles and socialism to young school kids then one could argue that the right can’t be woke.
There’s lies the crux, the point of the fulcrum. Is it this or is it that? Teeter, totter. See-saw. Where will it come to rest?
Perhaps by the time you read this, the question will have been settled and the dictionaries will accurately describes what the term means to people. But as I write this, the term “woke right” has yet to crystalize.
In an article published by Politico on May 12, 2022, they report that Kathy Barnette was running against Mehmet Oz and David McCormick in
Pennsylvania’s closely watched GOP Senate primary
in 2022. They report that
USA Freedom Fund, a super PAC that attacked Oz in a digital ad last week, pivoted and is blasting Barnette in a new TV ad as a “woke Republican” and accused her of wanting “to build a statue of Barack Obama.”
Here is a link to that see the add [archive here]. In the video we can see that the campaign ad does indeed accuse her of wanting to erect a statue of Obama next to one of Lincoln on Capitol Hill and states,
Kathy Barnette - woke Republican - out of touch with Pennsylvania
described her opponents as the “woke right” on the grounds that they were too progressive.
in May of 2022.
Tracing the Use & Development of the Term ‘Woke Right’
May, 2022 - Kathy Barnette - The Woke Right are Republicans Who are Too Progressive
Again, in “What is “the woke right”?” Andrew Doyle reports that in May of 2022, Kathy Barnette characterized her political opponents in the GOP Senate primary of as the “woke right” because they were too progressive she said according to Doyle.
September, 2022 - Dan Crenshaw - The Woke Right are Contrarian
To quote earliest use of the term woke right that we could find,
the key principle of the woke right: contrarianism over principle.
This is from U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw (Republican) at the Texas Tribune Festival in September of 2022 in an exchange we can see in the video in the following post on X [archived here].
In the video, Crenshaw says,
“When I say the woke right I’m referring to people, often disaffected liberals who could have been Bernie Bros but in a split second chose a red jersey instead and I see more and more of that and most of them are fine. This is more of an online phenomenon and if we’re being honest we have to wonder what happened - everybody who believed in Qanon what - who were part of the “alt right” - these organizations have sort of been dismantled but the people never left and so where do they go?
One might wonder, at this point, something like, “Wait, Crenshaw, are they Bernie bros coming from the left who are they coming from the “alt right” or both?”
At any rate, he continues,
And I think there’s a lot who want to wear a jersey and just scream at the other side, you know, and they remind me of the far left more than anything so I, you know, and I look at the similarities between these and I’m not going to name names because it’s not beneficial sometimes to name names but you know, I’ll give descriptions, and I think - and I ask my audience and I ask - I certainly ask my base, I mean this is something I talk about at republican events a lot - that you gotta look out for certain things, you gotta look out for certain attributes, the way someone is speaking, the things they’re speaking about.
If the first words out of their mouth, for instance, are ‘RINO’ and ‘establishment’ and ‘globalist’, you can rest assure they’re not very thoughtful and they’re probably about to lie to you.
I mean, really. So, you know, I’m just sick of it because it’s manufactured divisions. Frankly, the conservatives on the right have never been more aligned, ideologically speaking. I think you used to have a lot more truly liberal republicans in the Republican party. And so there’s, but there’s always there’s that 10-20% that is desperate to be contrarian.
So that’s the key principle of the woke right: contrarianism over principle.
If the mainstream is for Ukraine then we’re against it. In fact, we hate Ukraine. It’s nonsense.
Offering a scorching rebuke of what he called the “woke right,” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, continued to distance himself from some firebrand conservatives, accusing them of helping to sow manufactured division in the party.
Also, Neukam reports that Crenshaw said that lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene
continue to be “contrarian,”
and that he implied that “House leadership” should “contain" them such “contrarian” Republicans. Neukam also writes,
“They don’t write any actual legislation, they won’t negotiate anything,” Crenshaw said. “It’s just fire and brimstone all of the time. You’re incentivized by extra clicks, and you get extra clicks by engaging in rank dishonesty and conspiracy.”
To the extent there is genuine division among Republicans, Crenshaw said those differences have bled into how people in the party view former President Donald Trump and his potential bid for election in 2024.
“I think there’s just mixed feelings,” Crenshaw said. “I hear from voters and donors and activists all of the time — they really love Trump. But they won’t necessarily say they want him to run again.”
November 2022 - Woke Right & Christian Nationalism
On November 28, 2022, The Gospel Coalition published a review by Kevin Deyoung1 of the book The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. This review is headlined “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism” and in it, he writes that in his book, Wolfe argues for a form of Christian Nationalism in the USA. Deyoung also writes of Wolfe’s
version of Christian Nationalism as a form of right-wing wokeism.
Here’s more context,
When Wolfe sarcastically thanks those who “woke many from their dogmatic slumber” and rejoices that “more are awakening each day,” one might be forgiven for seeing his version of Christian Nationalism as a form of right-wing wokeism. What does it mean to be woke if not that we’re awakened to the “reality” that oppression is everywhere, extreme measures are necessary, and the regime must be overthrown?
If critical race theory teaches that America has failed, that the existing order is irredeemable, that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning, that the current system is rigged against our tribe, and that we ought to make ethnic consciousness more important—it seems to me that Wolfe’s project is the right-wing version of these same impulses.
Deyoung also writes,
Just as the left has predetermined that any opposition to its ideology must be attributable to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, so some voices on the right have predetermined that anyone unwilling to go all the way in the direction of Christian Nationalism must be sellouts eager to please a nefarious cabal of secular elites. This posture hardly encourages an open and honest exchange of ideas.
Notice that he is talking about demonization and polarization coming from both sides. Note how he says the left demonizes
any opposition to its ideology
as
racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia
and some on the right demonizing
anyone unwilling to go all the way in the direction of Christian Nationalism
as
sellouts eager to please a nefarious cabal of secular elites.
Note also that he is talking about both sides engaging in polarizing “postures”.
Image used in “Toppling Trashworld: A Long Review of Isker’s Boniface Option” by Neil Shenvi for Neil Shenvi - Apologetics
May 7, 2023 - “Right-wing wokeness”
In a review of Isker’s “Boniface Option” for Neil Shenvi - Apologetics (no date, archived May 7, 2024), Neil Shenvi writes under a section he headed “Right-wing wokeness”,
several conservative evangelical commentators have noticed the emergence of a “woke right” with a belief structure that’s eerily similar to that of the “woke left.”
For example, in 2020, I succinctly defined wokeness as:
1) society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc via 2) hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind so 3) we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4) dismantle unjust systems.
1) society is divided into straight White men and their enemies via 2) hegemonic norms (“the Longhouse,” “postwar consensus,” “Judeo-Christianity”) but normies are blind so 3) we need to redpill them to 4) retake the West.
In this review, I don’t have the space to fully unpack these beliefs. However, I will point out two problems that both the “woke left” and “woke right” share when it comes to Christianity.
First, both ideologies assume the blindness of their opponents in a way that makes disagreement difficult if not outright impossible. We recognize this game immediately when the woke left plays it: “do you agree that the United States is a white supremacist nation steeped in systemic racism? If not, that’s only because you’re blinded by your privilege. You’re just trying to protect your power. You’re just defending the status quo.“
Unfortunately, I’ve seen similar kafkatraps from the “woke right”: “do you agree that racism is a made-up, Marxist sin? If not, that’s only because you’re blinded by the postwar consensus. You’re just trying to suck up to elite sensibilities. You’re just defending the status quo.”
Adopting this kind of cynicism towards others’ motivations makes dialogue impossible and will even shut the door to Scriptural correction. “That’s just your straight White male interpretation” easily turns into “That’s just your gay, longhoused, Boomer interpretation.“
Second, both ideologies will necessitate troubling alliances. Those of us who have spent years fighting wokeness in the church can remember how “social-justice-minded” evangelicals reacted to our warnings. When we saw them adopting language like “white privilege” or citing the work of critical theorists or locking arms with theological liberals, we were often rebuffed. They insisted that we were being alarmist. Rather than drawing clear lines between themselves and the secular left, they circled the wagons. That didn’t end well for them.
In the same way, there are undeniably racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic elements on the “woke right.”
some on the right have begun to embrace their own version of what they themselves might have condemned as the “woke mind virus.” The motives might be different, but the actions are the same.
Their virtues are about protecting American and tradition values, children, families, Christianity, and so on. They, too, claim that they are marginalized or discriminated against in society, and there’s some truth to that, so the actions are in some ways, a pushback against that.
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” seems to be the new approach.
Many on the ‘woke right’ who for some time have spoken against cancel culture, have chosen to embrace a version of their own, boycotting companies that support progressive causes, for example. The overwhelming support for DeSantis’ fight against Disney in Florida is one such illustration. The boycott of Bud Light over the company’s paid promotional social media posts using trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney is another.
Brodsky also writes,
Just as those on the ‘woke left’ put symbols in their bios like rainbow flags, BLM, and pronouns, so do the ‘woke right,’ with words like MAGA, religious affiliations, fake pronouns, “Pepe the Frog” memes, American flags, ‘pure blood,’ All Lives Matter, and so on. Some are meant to satirize and push-back, whereas others are meant to signal group identity.
Under “Identity Politics” she writes,
Identity politics is the idea that one's identity as a member of a particular group (such as race, gender, or sexuality) shapes one's experiences and perspectives, and that group-based oppression and discrimination must be addressed through collective action. While identity politics has traditionally been associated with the left—and many old school liberals, centrists, and conservatives have rejected that—the woke right embraces its own version of identity politics. It tends to be centered around the idea of defending the rights and interests of straight, white, Christian, traditional, and conservative Americans. Those outside of that are viewed with increased suspicion and resentment
Katherine Brodsky also writes,
Cancel Culture
Although ‘cancel culture’ is often credited as being associated with the woke left, it is increasingly becoming a tool of the right. The right has used cancel culture to attack companies and institutions that it sees as promoting liberal values or stifling conservative voices. For example, conservative commentators have called for boycotts of companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines for speaking out against Georgia's controversial voting law. Nike was boycotted by the right wing due to their support of Colin Kaepernick and his protests against police brutality. In Florida, DeSantis is actively engaged in a battle with Disney.
Aside from the previously mentioned boycotts, it is not uncommon to demand the firing of certain individuals that have not adhered to the proper orthodoxy or expressed a controversial opinion, whether it’s teachers, workers, media personalities, or others. Sometimes they will even turn on their own tribe members, if they do not politically align with a particular group—for example, if they criticize Trump or the ‘patriots’ of Jan 6.
There’s also a tendency among some right wing wokes to see anyone outside their political allegiance as the “enemy” and immediately attack, silence, and exclude them.
Additionally,
Suppressing Freedom of Expression
While many conservatives are adamant supporters of the First Amendment, FIRE, a foundation for individual rights and expression, is currently suing West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler for violating the First Amendment right of college students to hold a charity drag show on campus. The event was meant to raise money for suicide prevention among LGTBQ+ youth. (FIRE, which is a non-partisan organization, also just sued a Michigan school district for ordering students to remove “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.)
There are also many topics that some want banned from school and college classrooms. Some of these might make sense, especially for certain ages, but critics like The Atlantic’s David French say that the breadth and vagueness of laws is a serious concern.
DeSantis had signed a bill that prohibits even college professors from expressing any view that “espouses, promotes, [or] advances” anything that could make students feel guilty about history—as it might relate to race and gender. Commonly referred to as the ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ it’s actually officially called ‘The Individual Freedom Act,’ which is ironic because while it might have some positive intentions (eg. preventing ‘indoctrination’ or promoting collective guilt), it also no doubt can have a chilling effect on freedom of speech—which is particularly concerning when it comes to interactions with adult students.
The bill seeks to limit the ideals of free inquiry, beliefs, and discourse—ultimately putting a gag on what professors are able to say on certain topics. Without that, there’s no opportunity for these ideas to be debated, examined, amended, or scrutinized.
While colleges as of late have had their issues with the suppression of certain voices, the answer should not be to fight suppression with more suppression.
Further…
In 2018, the Republican National Committee sent out cease-and-desist letters to major television networks demanding that they not air an ad from a Democratic group that criticized then President Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics of these actions argued that this was an attempt to stifle political speech and in violation of the First Amendment.
In March 2021, Republican lawmakers in Georgia passed a voting law that made it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote, and it allowed for the arrest of people who demonstrated within 150 feet of a polling place. Critics argued that these provisions were an attempt to suppress political speech in violation of the First Amendment.
In her section on “Books”, she writes,
On the left, most recently we’ve seen the rewriting of certain words and phrases in Roald Dahl titles so they’d be more acceptable by today’s politically correct social standards, as well as the editing of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels to better conform to the demands of 2023’s version of puritanism. The Catcher in the Rye (profanity and teenage rebellion), Orwell’s 1984 (for its critique of socialism), To Kill a Mockingbird (due to racist language), and The Satanic Verses (for its portrayal of Islam and the prophet Muhammad) have all been previous targets and banned from schools. Some of Dr. Seuss’s books were also being pulled from shelves and six will no longer be published because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
On the right, this practice is just as common.
As angry leftists were filming themselves burning copies of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter due to the “racism,” “fatphobia” and the author’s alleged transphobia, a Global Vision Bible Church head pastor took his Christian followers into the woods to burnHarry Potter, Twilight, and other "occultic materials” that offended their sensibilities.
But this is only where the moral crusade begins. There’s been a surge of book bans in schools—particularly those that might feature LGBTQ characters, such as those in My Two Dads and Me, and George, which features a transgender protagonist.
Books like All American Boys and The Hate U Give were also removed from some libraries and schools due to their themes of police brutality and racial injustice. So was Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You for promoting critical race theory and being seen as divisive.
But amongst the books removed in some jurisdictions are also far more mainstream and surprising titles like John Green’s Looking for Alaska, and James Patterson’s Maximum Ride, a series of sci-fi adventure books for readers ages 10 and up, which were pulled from elementary schools.
Regardless of what one might think of these books in particular, those in favor of removing them will always find a justification, and some will go too far.
Under “Echo Chambers and Intolerance”, she writes,
There has been a growing reluctance to engage with those who hold different beliefs and a heightened level of sensitivity at their views being challenged. Just as the left wokes might block those on the right and call them all sorts of names ranging from Nazi, Trumptard, and white supremacist, so do the right wing wokes. Their chosen names are things like libtard, sheeple, fascist, and, well…lately…Nazi. I guess we’ve found some common ground?
They, too, are reluctant to engage with those outside their bubble. They have block lists, will swarm leftist posts who they deem stupid, and mock without mercy.
There’s a segregation in the consumption of media. The left will only read ‘their’ media and the right wokes will only trust theirs (smart people from either side will follow both—at the very least to understand how each thinks).
In many ways, social media has contributed to the presence of echo chambers. Individuals consume that which consumes their existing beliefs, and spread it further. Sensationalist, clickbait, radical takes do best. This creates an us-versus-them mentality and contribute to ideological polarization and intolerance. If you’re not with us, you’re the enemy. If you’re not with us, you’re in the way. Get out of the way, or we’ll push you out.
Under “Victimhood”, she writes,
The ‘woke left’ is often criticized for their embrace of victim culture—the idea that people are encouraged to view themselves as victims of systems, life circumstances, and society, seeking validation and support through their victimhood.
The ‘woke right’ shares this particular sentiment. They often perceive themselves as being under attack by liberal culture, which they see as dismissive of their own values. They also feel discriminated against on college campuses, in the workplace, and so on. Certain media personalities and ‘influencers’ tend to exploit this to their advantage, encouraging both a sense of victimhood and anger.
Some of this is grounded in reality. For example, it is true that some conservatives have been censored on social media platforms, and that some people have been unfairly targeted for expressing conservative views. Much of cultural output, like movies and TV shows, also tend to be liberal leaning. But there’s validity for those claiming victimhood on the left too—there’s discrimination based on things like race, sex, class, and other aspects.
The problem arises when people begin to view their whole existence from this perspective of victimhood, or exaggerate claims. It can lead to helplessness rather than empowerment, and resentment instead of engagement and dialogue geared towards problem-solving. Those who sink deepest into the victimhood black hole often begin to view those who hold different views as their enemies and blame others for their problems—even those who have nothing to do with the troubles they might be facing and could be potential allies instead.
There tends to be a sense of entitlement in victimhood culture. Since harm was done to them, people feel entitled to special treatment—or worse, to do harm to others. Those who do not share the same victim status are often outcast. “You haven’t experienced this, so you have no right to say anything,” is a sentiment often heard spoken in both the “woke left” and “woke right” circles alike.
It is important to recognize and address real injustice. We shouldn’t minimize it, but framing oneself as victim and indulging in that status to the point that it becomes one’s primary identity marker is also the point at which one begins to display the characteristics of the “woke right (or left).”
Brodsky’s article concludes,
In many ways, some on the right have become just as “woke” and those on the left that they’ve criticized, adopting tactics that were once associated with progressive activism and social justice. In many ways, it is a reaction to an increasingly polarized landscape and what they perceive to be an attack on them and their values. These “woke tools” have become ideological warfare for both segments of the left and right.
It is important to note that this does not represent the vast majority of the population, and many people from both ideological spectrums do not subscribe to these tactics or ideas. But we will need to foster better discourse in overcome the deep divides that have been built and push back against the intolerance on both ends.
We have been watching the rise of some very....odd....posts on Twitter that sound an awful lot like BLM sounded a few years ago. Only they are on the right. We have been very confused about what to make of these posts. Kevin came back on the show to break it all down for us in a way that we (and you!) can understand.
Definitions:
What is meant by “Woke Right”?
Two tweets by Neil Shenvi:
“Wokeness in 1 Tweet:
society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc via 2)hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind so 3)we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4)dismantle unjust systems"
“The ‘Dissident Right’ in 1 Tweet:
Society is divided into straight White men and their enemies via 2)hegemonic norms (the Longhouse, postwar consensus, ‘Judeo-Christianity’) but normies are blind so 3)we need to redpill them to 4)retake the West”
Kevin’s Definition of Woke Right: Everything is seen through the lens of a system, specifically concerned with conspiracies and/or the “deep state”; in other words, an overcorrection of the Woke Left.
Hegemony/Hegemonic Power: the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.
Nick Fuentes quote: “The real America First position is to say, we don’t want Israel controlling our government.”
In other words, the deeper, darker side of the Woke Right (aka Woke Right 2.0) is the understanding that America is controlled by the Jews. This is deeply troubling and anti- semitic.
The phrase “Christ is King” is the Woke Right equivalent of “Black Lives Matter” from the Woke Left.
Reminders:
Every system needs to be evaluated on its own!
We need to focus on Scripture and make sure we have a Biblical Worldview, focused on the Gospel first!
Neither the political left or right can save us or transform our nation, only God, through the Holy Spirit, can do that!
Wise, final words from our friend, Lisa Spencer:
“Be careful who you hold as heroes. We can be so enamored with public figures that we will drift with them if they go off track because we can’t believe they’re wrong.”
Resources:
Article mentioned: "The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism" by Kevin DeYoung:
February 17, 2024 - Konstantin Kisin’s “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right”
In “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right”, written by Konstantin Kisin and published in his blog February 17, 2024, he has a section headed, “Why the Dissident Right is Going Woke” which begins,
In Russia, we have a saying: everything new is something old that has been sufficiently forgotten.
Sadly beyond that, one needs to download an app into a smartphone or some such thing. I never have or will own a smart phone. Sorry, folks. However, you can download the app and read Kisin’s “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right” for free. We will, however, gain some more clues about Kisin’s views on this matter later.
April 18, 2024 - Don’t Become That Which You Oppose
Rigney: “Like, basically the equivalent of the woke left but the Dissident Right guys, is that what you mean?”
DeMars: “Yeah, yeah, think about G. K. Beale’s sort of ‘you become what you behold’, you know, you spend so much time interacting with the woke that you begin to mimic their tactics, you know?”
Wilson: “Well, I would say there’s - I wouldn’t say mimicking their tactics, although there is some of that,”
DeMars: “Yeah.”
Wilson: “I would say that - and this is something I’m actually quite concerned about on the right,”
DeMars: “Yeah.”
Wilson: “ - is that identity politics is very much a danger on the right.”
DeMars: “Yes.”
Wilson: “OK.”
DeMars: “We don’t want to just do it better than them.”
Wilson: “Right.”
They speak over each other for a bit, but we want to note that Wilson says at one point,
these are people who’ve been taunted their entire adult lives for being white, OK, and finally they say “Ok I can’t do anything about it. I might as well be proud of it. I might as well embrace it, and I’ll take a page from your book.”
It is then clarified that by “your book” in this context, he means something like the ‘woke left’ playbook. As an example, he uses Saul Alinsky who wrote Rules for Radicals, a book of political tactics that a political faction can use in the political arena to defeat opposing political factions. These tactics are not about principles or values, but rather tricks, traps and schemes as one can see in the book. Wilson continues saying that certain people would think, furthermore,
“I’m going to be White and proud. I’m going to start hating Jews.” you know? “I’m going to start doing the thing” and that is a big concern of mine and I regard it as almost entirely the creation of the left.”
They proceed thusly:
DeMars: “Oh. Yeah.”
Wilson: “They invented it, they - ”
Demars: “But can you fill out the ‘almost’?”
Wilson: “‘Almost entirely’?”
DeMars: “Yeah.”
Wilson: “Well, I think a bunch of it comes from Adam.”
DeMars: “Right.”
They chuckle.
Wilson: “In other words, everybody’s a sinner, so, basically, vain philosophies often time grease the skids. But we don’t really need help coming up with sin. A lot of this, a lot of the agitation on the right is envy driven and envy is something we get from Adam. The material and the lies and the stories that are told we can get from the propagandists.”
DeMars: “Whenever you spend so much time engaging with people in a particular battle, it’s just so easy for the way that they do battle to become the way that you do battle.”
Wilson: “Yeah, fight fire with fire.”
DeMars: “Yeah. That’s right. And Jesus kind of said to do the opposite of that.”
Wilson: “There’s a guy, there’s a guy on the right Kurt Schlickter who’s got a tagline that he addresses to the liberals. He said, ‘You’re not going to like the new rules. You invented the, you invented these new rules, and we’re coming back at you and we’re going to use your rules to come after you and you’re not going to like - the old blues song is, “ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun” that’s what we’re looking at here I think.”
DeMars: “Many moons ago, Russel Berger and I on Defend and Confirm did a podcast series against critical theory proper and then all the manifestations thereof; queer theory, fat theory, every theory, uh critical pedagogy. But then our last episode in the series was a word to those with whom we agree, “Be careful. Be careful. You can oppose wokeness in a way that is unbecoming of Christ.”
Wilson: “Right.”
DeMars: “We took a lot of heat for that because they were very happy when we were going, ‘Yeah, woke is bad’ and woke is bad and they should be happy when they we that but when we gave that last little bit of warning, you know, we caught a lot of flak for that.”
Wilson: “Yeah.”
DeMars: “Have you had any of that in your ministry where you have - not the flak, excuse me - have you done any of that like, “Don’t fight fire with fire.”?”
Wilson: “Absolutely, absolutely. Man, I’ve said over and over to people, "Don’t take the bait. Don’t take the bait. Don’t take the bait.” on the antisemitism which is starting to manifest itself on”
DeMars: “Yeah.”
Wilson: “on the right. I’ve been fighting that tooth and nail and a lot of people are - have sort of res- a lot of people on the right have responded with an, “OK boomer.” kind of thing; you’re a boomercon, you’re a Reaganite, you’re, you’re that kind of conservative, we’re very greatful to you for the decades of service you’ve put in, it’s time to take grandpa’s car keys.”
They then moved on to other subjects.
May 28, 2024 - Is the ‘Woke Right’ Real?
On May 28, 2024, American Reformer published “Is There a Woke Right?” by C. Jay Engel2 in which he writes that the
true Right
has for a long time opposed
things like individualism, ethnic neutrality when it comes to culture, and America as a nation of universal propositions
that
the postwar liberal consensus would emphasize
and he seems to be saying that this
true Right
is
the New Christian Right
that
continues to blossom and absorb the literature and philosophy of Right-wing thought from over the centuries,
and that
they are taking on a much more self-consciously anti-liberal framework.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind the reader that when we report that a source makes a claim - for example, that the “true Right” has for a long time opposed individualism - we are not implying that their claim is valid and/or true. We are documenting the claim they make and that they make it. At any rate, Engel writes,
As I noted on Twitter, the Right Wing is being called the “woke right” because its detractors cannot think outside the hegemonic presumptions of liberalism, which is grounded in individualism.
Engel also writs,
Liberalism is absolutely a hegemonic norm—what else would be America’s hegemonic norm? It is the standard by which political activity is declared acceptable or “dangerous.”
and
But Liberalism is not in reality the way our institutions function. The fact of the matter is that they now serve the overall leftist agenda. The Right can see this very clearly and understands that power is needed to confront new this Leftist hegemony. Liberalism cannot be defended because liberalism itself was always just a veil—all political societies have their hegemonic aspects.
Liberalism is the Emperor with No Clothes.
The Right Wing is not Woke. It’s also just not Liberal.
The term “woke right” is increasingly used by evangelicals who are broadly critical of “Christian nationalism” (there’s another loaded term!). But what is the “woke right”? Is it just a pejorative? Or does it accurately describe a movement with a particular set of beliefs?
The article features the following image from the Babylon Bee (they are satirical).
Neil Shenvi also writes that some object to the use of the term woke right. He lays out a few types of such objections and then offers refutations of these before stating,
I do think the term “woke right” is reasonable, provided the ideas of the “woke right” are sufficiently similar to those of the “woke left.”
But are they? To answer that question, I’d like to turn to some prominent examples of right-wing wokeness from the last few years.
He then offers some “Examples of the “Woke Right””.
His 1st example
comes from Stephen Wolfe’s cohost on the Ars Politica podcast. In 2021, he published an article under a pseudonym at the website Identity Dixie. In it, he commends an approach he calls “White AntiFragility.” He argues that White people need to explicitly embrace the ideas promoted by critical race educator Robin DiAngelo in her book White Fragility. He writes:
“When White AntiFragility is confronted with critical race theory, it wouldn’t merely not cry or break down, nor would it merely maintain composure. Rather, it would use CRT’s own premises as resources for growth.…For instance, CRT teaches that Whites are guilty of their White ancestors’ sins…White AntiFragility, using the Counter Dilemma, neither concedes the point nor argues against it. Rather, it deduces another, positive conclusion from the same premises: If your White skin and genes confer the guilt of your ancestors, then they also confer the pride of your ancestors, as well as, their accomplishments, victories, virtues, rights, liberties, freedoms, heritages, lands, and more. Further, if skin and genes confer guilt then this implies that race and blood, kinship and ethnicity bind people together in real, social, national ways that cannot be broken by time or circumstance. CRT, by accusing Whites of racial guilt, reinforces and strengthens ethnic bonds between our ancestors, ourselves, and our posterity.”
They go on for some length before,
“I can’t fathom reading this article and not recognizing it as the perfect, mirror image of left-wing wokeness. The author wants Whites to affirm the premises of CRT, but merely wants them to draw a different conclusion, one that strengthens Whites’ racial identity and makes them proud of it rather than ashamed of it.”
“Every step of progress is overcoming you. Ask yourself, “What sort of villain does each event of progress have in common?” The straight white male. That is the chief out-group of New America, the embodiment of regression and oppression.” (p. 436)
“We live under a gynocracy—a rule by women. This may not be apparent on the surface, since men still run many things. But the governing virtues of America are feminine vices, associated with certain feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness, and equality.” (p. 448)
“There is no robust common ground here. There is no credibility we can establish with them. Unavoidably, we are threats to their regime. Christian nationalism is an existential threat to the secularist regime. They are enemies of the church and, as such, enemies of the human race”. (p. 456)
“If you are a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered male, then the world will not offer you any favors. Indeed, your career advancement depends on sacrificing your self-respect by praising and pandering to your inferiors who rule over you.” (p. 464)
Here we see straight White men positioned as a victim group in a society dominated by hegemonic narratives like the gynocracy. Straight White men need to wake up to this reality and fight back.
Lest there be any uncertainty that Wolfe embraces a “critical” analysis of society, he has said so explicitly in his Tweets
For example, he wrote:
“Anti-woke Christians, in their rejection of “power hierarchies” and “privilege,” have rendered themselves incapable of seeing the absurd but real privileges and power hierarchy at work in our world. This is why I will not reject a “critical” approach to social phenomena. There are subtle hierarchies of power, some natural and proper, and others artificial and absurd.” – Mar 31, 2023
and
“I fully admit that if being a “conservative” requires one to reject a “critical” approach to social phenomena, then I’m not a conservative. We live in liberal hegemony, and [Twitter user @Wokal_Distance] reflects precisely its commitments and power structures.” – Jul 7, 2023
and
“Our social world runs on subtle power relations. The problem with the left is they call them all arbitrary and unjust, based on an egalitarian principle (which the anti-woke largely share).” – Jul 15, 2023
His 3rd example is
from the book The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker. Isker is the co-author with Andrew Torba of Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations. In his preface, Isker writes this:
“You live in a dystopia. Every part of historical human existence in our world has been turned on its head…The insane, dystopian and totalitarian world we fear the elites might create is one we already live in…I use the term Trashworld to describe the dystopian society. And the point of The Boniface Option is to make you see it for what it is and to begin the hard work of escaping and overcoming it” (p. ix-xi).
“the globohomo cinematic universe that the modern bugman lives in must be chopped down. All of it is a seamless garment. Trannies, open borders, acceptance and promotion of sodomy and other sexual perversions, feminism, abortion and antinatalism, anti-white race hate (so-called Critical Race Theory), pornography and the entire consumerist lifestyle… must be sent through a woodchipper” (p. 18).
“We believe because modern, liberal, egalitarian society abolished the formal institutions of slavery that slavery qua slavery has been eradicated. But it very clearly has not. Instead, it is wrapped in a thin veneer of consent. If you were a wicked, evil social engineer and were going to design a massive slave state, the very best conditions would be where the masses believed they were totally free and that their own bondage was their choice” (p. 74).
Note the frequent allusions both to oppressive hegemonic ideologies like liberalism, egalitarianism, and feminism and to the blindness of “normies.” His framework is classic Neo-Marxism, albeit from someone on the Right: the proletariat (straight White male normies) are blind and consent to their own oppression due to the hegemonic power of the bourgeoisie (the bugmen overlords of Trashworld).
His 4th and final example is rendered as such,
Finally, C.J. Engel is Andrew Isker’s podcast co-host and a frequent advocate for people he calls “Heritage Americans.” Recently, he defined this term in a long Twitter post. I can’t quote it in full, but he wrote:
“When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II. This therefore includes the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a significant sociopolitical mistake…. It includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation. It affirms however the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants.“
“Once [the] ethos [of Heritage America] was liquidated [after WWII], America was subverted and taken over.“
“Heritage America, of course, is most consistent with anglo Protestantism. But that does not mean that all groups outside of that core are equally dangerous to it. There is a spectrum at play wherein some peoples are less threatening to its ethos than others. There is a high correlation between that spectrum and the broadening circles extending out from Western Europe. Such that peoples like Indians, or South East Asians or Ecuadorians or immigrated Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately. Whereas groups, like Irish or Italians or Catholics may not fit the original core, but were closer on the spectrum, being Europeans. All politics is contextual and situational.”
Engel explicitly denies that he is a “racial essentialist” but his insistence that non-Europeans should be “sent home immediately” means that –functionally– he does want to deport certain individuals based solely on their ethnicity.
Interestingly, Engel also wrote an article explicitly denying my claim that there exists a “woke right.” First, he insists that the term “woke” is inapplicable to the right. Why? His reasoning is fascinating: “the Left wants to deconstruct the West, the Liberal center wants to deny to the state the ability to defend the West, and the Right wants to employ institutional and political resources to reassert the hegemonic character of the pre-World War II socio-political order.“
But then why would people like DeYoung and Wilson and me independently recognize something we call the “woke right”? Engel explains: “the Right Wing is being called the ‘woke right’ because its detractors cannot think outside the hegemonic presumptions of liberalism, which is grounded in individualism.“
But he goes even farther, immediately affirming: “There is indeed a war on Whites.” He argues that my characterization of the “woke right” is incorrect because “a major faction of the power elite is made up of straight White men.” And yet “since the old cultural hegemony of Heritage America was centered around straight White men, it is clear that any revolution against that way of life would need to be directed against the hegemonic cultural base made up of these types of people. It is not woke to recognize this.”
Again, he writes: “The mythos of liberalism… made the political leadership in this country blind to the actual Leftist revolution in our midst. Liberalism is absolutely a hegemonic norm—what else would be America’s hegemonic norm?” He concludes that “The Right can see this very clearly and understands that power is needed to confront new this Leftist hegemony.“
I’m not sure how else to respond to this article other than to point out that, in it, Engel clearly and repeatedly affirms that my characterization of his beliefs is entirely accurate, even if he dislikes the term “woke right.” He believes that 1) straight White men are the cultural center of America and are the target of “The Regime” 2) normies are blinded by Liberalism but 3) we can mobilize Heritage Americans to act in their own group interest and 4) retake America. This is exactly what I identify as “right-wing wokeness”!
Finally, I’d like to point out that I am not unfairly lumping people together who are not part of the same movement. Engel and Isker are podcast co-hosts. Wolfe and the author of the Identity Dixie article were podcast co-hosts. Engel, Isker, and Wolfe have all been interviewed and platformed by prominent Christian nationalists. And next year, Wolfe and Isker will be speakers at a conference with numerous Christian nationalists whose theme is “Christ Is King! How to Defeat Trashworld.” Therefore, to identify ideas common to these men and their fans seems entirely legitimate and even crucial if we want to understand their project.
Under the heading “positives”, he offers,
some suggestions about what we can learn from the movement.
First, some of their claims about disdain towards Whites are accurate. If you’re inclined to scoff at this idea, please consider that you may be part of the problem. Secular progressives can mock and disparage White people with few repercussions. Even professing Christians can write entire books based on the premise that White men are “apex predators” who suffer from “shriveled heart syndrome.”
We’re often told (sometimes explicitly) to overlook bitter, angry, or even abusive statements from people of color because of the racism they’ve suffered. I think this posture can be an appropriate application of biblical forbearance and gentleness. But does it go both ways? If we excuse egregious statements made by people of color, why do we call down fire on a White person who accidentally says something slightly insensitive? Equal weights and measures, friends. If we’re going to exercise charity and patience, let’s exercise it towards everyone.
Hans Fiene of Lutheran Satire recently created a hilarious video entitled “Is This Christian Nationalism?” In it, a disaffected young White teenager with an anime avatar spews insane Dissident Right talking points about “racial suicide” and global Jewish conspiracies. But Fiene (like Doug Wilson) recognizes that there’s a backstory behind the angst of every racist 4chan edgelord. If you value “lived experience,” maybe it’s worth asking more about his before you scream at him.
Second, the “woke right” (and the Christian nationalist movement with which it’s often associated) can help us interrogate the biblical basis for the beliefs we take for granted. They ask “forbidden” questions like “What’s wrong with racism?” or “Why should we support free speech?” or “Why think a theocracy is bad?” Too often, our only answers are spluttering rage followed by vague appeals to “the Imago Dei.” The truth is, we’re often the unreflective product of our environments. We tend to believe what everyone around us believes. Therefore, it’s always healthy for us to return to Scripture and sincerely ask: “What does God say?”
Further on, Shenvi writes,
Third, the “woke right” properly challenges our commitment to “niceness.” The Bible does indeed command us to live at peace with all men (insofar as it depends on us – Rom. 12:18), to not be quarrelsome (2 Tim. 2:24), and to treat others with gentleness and respect (1 Pet. 3:15). However, the Bible also repeatedly commands us to hate sin and promises that if we follow Christ the world will (not may) hate us (Matt. 10:22, John 15:18-25). Too many of us, myself included, feel that we must at all times act as inoffensively as possible towards non-Christians and that if we fail to do so, we are “harming our witness.” This is incorrect.
However, there is another, perhaps worse, indictment of our demeanor. We don’t actually display a uniformly winsome and irenic posture. When we say that abortion or homosexuality is sinful, many of us will walk on eggshells to avoid offending non-Christians who are pro-choice or LGBTQ. But we have no problem boldly proclaiming the evils of racism, and give no thought to offending non-Christians who are racist. What’s going on? Uniform winsomeness and uniform bluntness make sense. What makes much less sense is blasting sins that are culturally unpopular and then stammering uncomfortably when asked about sins that are culturally popular.
Shenvi then offers what he sees as,
The Dangers of the Woke Right
Despite the handful of positive lessons we can learn from the woke right, I see many more dangers. Specifically, I am troubled by the fact that the woke right is embracing the ideas and methods of critical theory, which are fundamentally false and deeply corrosive. That is my position whether critical theory is embraced by the right or the left.
A. Context-less Hegemonic Power
First, critical theory’s conceptualization of hegemonic power (the idea that certain groups impose their values on culture in a way advantages the dominant group) is incorrect because it ignores context. For example, numerous careful sociological studies show that Blacks are discriminated against relative to White candidates in job interviews (see the studies of Pager et al.). Critical theorists take this finding as evidence that we live in a White-supremacist nation. However, it is equally true that Whites are discriminated against relative to Blacks and Hispanics in elite college admissions (see the recent Supreme Court decision). Is that evidence that we live in a Black- and Hispanic-supremacist nation? Or consider a cultural example. What norms are hegemonic in rural Idaho? On a highly progressive college campus? In South Central LA? In San Francisco’s Chinatown? The answer is entirely dependent on your physical (and cultural) location.
Critical theory (on the right or on the left) offers a simplistic and therefore incorrect answer. It has to posit a single, universal hegemonic discourse that drives society and serves as the foil to its radical program of social transformation. And that leads to my second major concern.
B. Adversarial Identities
The woke right and woke left demand that we internalize our status as victim. Progressives want women and people of color and the poor and LGBTQ people to feel like they are besieged, like they constantly face a barrage of marginalization and disdain. How different is the woke right? Even a brief perusal of the sources I quoted above shows that they very much want straight White men not only to recognize that they are victims, strangers in their own country, but to internalize this identity.
Again, my objection to critical theory on the right or on the left is based on the question: what will this do to the church? How can a Christian walk into church on Sunday, look around at his fellow believers, and think to himself “oppressor Christian…oppressor Christian…oppressed Christian”? How can he fail to harbor a secret grievance against his Black (or White) co-worker who he just knows is receiving special treatment? Won’t he come to realize that his Real Community consists of all those Woke (or Based) people online who Really Understand his struggles? How can he not become frustrated with his unwoke (or normie) pastor who fails to see how the deck is stacked against him? I have always warned that wokeness will tear the church apart. And that’s true no matter what flavor of wokeness we embrace.
Also, keep in mind that wokeness admits of no ecclesiocentric (i.e. church-based) solution to the problems it discovers. Wokeness is primarily a political project. According to its proponents, the only solution to the marginalization of straight White men (or LGBTQ Black women) is the radical transformation of our nation’s government and culture. That is why woke churches eventually loosen their hold on the gospel to free up resources for sociopolitical activism. We saw this clearly on the woke left. We will see it on the woke right.
In fact, one notable sign that the woke right –like the woke left– priorizes politics over theology is the ecumenical and even inter-religious nature of the movement. Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and evangelical Protestants will lock arms while strategizing their defeat of Trashworld. The woke right also borrow language and concepts from lapsed-Catholic Nazi jurists like Carl Schmitt (“the friend/enemy distinction”) and Nietszcheans like Bronze Age Pervert (“the longhouse”). Whereas organizations like Together for the Gospel tried to unite people around a shared theology, the woke right unites people around anti-Regime activism.
C. Critical Consciousness
Third, both the “woke right” and the “woke left” appeal to the idea of a critical consciousness.
Neo-Marxists believe that oppressed people are blind; they don’t even realize they have been brainwashed by racist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal discourses. To truly grasp reality, they need to “get woke” so that they can “see through” the narratives that have subjugated them.
In the same way, the “woke right” believes that “normies” (i.e. those who affirm the “acceptable” beliefs of 21st-century American culture) are blind; they don’t even realize they are brainwashed by effeminate, fake-and-gay discourses of the post-war consensus. To truly grasp reality, they need to get based and red-pilled, so that they can “see through” the narratives that have emasculated them.
In practice, these assumptions make appeals to reason or logic or Scripture nearly impossible because they require us to “see through” people’s arguments to discover the “real” reasons that they are making particular claims. We immediately recognize this cynical perspective when it’s deployed by progressives:
“Oh, you don’t think that all racial disparities are the result of systemic racism? How convenient that you won’t need to give up any of your racial power and privilege!”
“Oh, you think that only men should be pastors? How convenient that your interpretation of the Bible just happens to coincide with 19th-century gender politics!”
“Oh, you don’t think that Jesus was a socialist? How convenient that your theology just happens to align with your political views!”
Compare that reasoning to these Tweets from Stephen Wolfe:
“How convenient for us that the Gospel inaugurated a political project so consistent with the unrestricted labor flow preferences of global neo-liberalism.” – Oct 8, 2020
“How convenient for you that the Gospel inaugurated a social project so similar to your early 21st century egalitarian ideology.” – Mar 10, 2021
“How convenient for us that neo-calvinist ‘grace restoring nature’ requires us to affirm early 21st century democratic pluralism.” – Feb 21, 2023
Note that Wolfe is not making arguments here at all. He’s simply implying that all the claims he mentions can be dismissed as excuses to justify or to curry favor with The Regime (e.g. global neo-liberalism, egalitarianism, democratic pluralism). This is an incredibly destructive (and deconstructive) method of non-reasoning. Again, I raised the same criticisms with the woke left: once you accept the idea that all truth claims can be dismissed as mere power plays, no claim will emerge unscathed. In fact, this reasoning devours itself: “Isn’t it convenient that your woke-right political philosophy wants to consolidate power in the hands of straight White men like yourself!”
Moreover, this approach to truth leads to a purity spiral. Once you accept the argument that you are blind to the ways your reasoning itself has been corrupted, there is no easy way to push back against any claim that the woke decide to make. Do you think that the Civil Rights Movement was good? That’s because you’ve been socialized into the postwar consensus. Do you think that you shouldn’t call women “used mattresses” and “whores”? That’s because you’re effeminate. Do you think Christians shouldn’t run around the Internet calling things fake and gay? That’s because you’re fake and gay. Oh, you think the Bible actually supports all your claims? That’s just your postwar consensus, effeminate, fake-and-gay interpretation of the Bible.
In the end, the woke aren’t appealing to reason or to logic or even to the Bible. They’re appealing to vibes. The woke have secret knowledge of the Way Things Actually Work. If you disagree, it’s only because you’re still captive to The Regime. This way of thinking is corrosive anti-knowledge, regardless of whether the left or right makes use of it.
D. Ethnocentrism
Fourth, ethnic identitarianism, meaning the exaltation of your ethnic identity over your identity in Christ, is a major problem on both the woke left and the woke right. On the one hand, having an ethnic identity is not sinful, any more than it’s sinful to have a family identity, a regional identity, or a national identity or to identity with a hobby or with your favorite baseball team. On the other hand, Phil. 2 teaches that all our identities are to be counted as “rubbish” or “dung” compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. Moreover, passages like Gal. 3:28 and Eph. 2:11-22 insist that we are all one in Christ, not in the sense that our other identities do not exist, but in the sense that we are united in Christ to a degree that radically relativizes our ethnic differences or even our familial relationships (Matt. 12:48-50).
He offers more of what he deems to be dangers of the woke right,
My co-author Dr. Pat Sawyer first grew concerned with the evangelical social justice movement when he noticed that some Christians were coming to view their ethnic identity as the primary lens through which they viewed themselves and the world. I have precisely the same concern when it comes to the woke right.
For example, in his Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolfe writes that “People of different ethnic groups can exercise respect for difference, conduct some routine business with each other, join in inter-ethnic alliances for mutual good, and exercise common humanity (e.g., the good Samaritan), but they cannot have a life together that goes beyond mutual alliance” (p. 148). This is completely wrong, not just as a piece of political philosophy, but as a matter of ecclesiology.
The local church is called to have a “life together”; indeed, we are called to have Christ’s life together. We are a family and we are called to see ourselves as a family. We are called to view one another as brothers and sisters bound with spiritual ties even stronger than those that bind our biological family.
The problem of ethnic identitarianism suffuses the “woke right” but is often given a pass because wokeness is viewed as a political project. In other words, because the woke right is concerned with the nature of a “nation,” what constitutes a “people,” and whether the U.S. government ought to center the needs and culture of Anglo-Protestants, it can insist that its views are unrelated to spiritual concerns; they deal only with temporal politics.
However, political speculations will almost unavoidably impact the day-to-day realities of our spiritual life. For example, is it really plausible to think that a woke right Christian who believes that U.S. culture and government ought to center Anglo-Protestant norms will never be tempted to think that his local church culture ought to center Anglo norms as well? Is there really no danger that he will turn his cultural preferences into cultural imperatives?
For example, CJ Engel, who argues that U.S. politics should be oriented towards “Heritage Americans” has repeatedly expressed his dislike (to put it mildly) for rap, hip-hop, and even jazz, making (hopefully) hyperbolic statements like:
“(We’re going to ban rap, hip-hop, and jazz)” – Oct 23, 2023
And:
“Rap is incredibly retarded, culturally subversive, aesthetically debased, and musically degenerate. Jail time”. – Jan 26, 2024
And:
“The anti-Western genres of hip hop and rap, born in the ghettos of urban America, now terrorize and occupy the bourgeois suburbs. This is the true crisis in our midst.” – Aug 16, 2023
And:
“Monthly reminder that Rap and Hip-Hop are subversive of Western Culture and are to be banned and its propagators jailed.” – Apr 4, 2023
How likely is it that Engel and his followers will be able to (or will even want to) draw a sharp boundary between these “political” views and their views toward varied cultural expression within the church?
Speaking more broadly, I see on the “woke right” an overcorrection to the ubiquitous but obviously false mantra “diversity is our strength.” For instance, a diversity of beliefs about the morality of rape is not a strength within a culture. A diversity of athletic ability is not a strength on a professional sports team. A diversity of ethnicities in a business meeting is not a strength if no one speaks a common language. Clearly, diversity can be either good or bad depending on the context.
However, the overcorrection against diversity ignores Scripture’s repeated command to subordinate our personal preferences for the benefit of others (Rom. 14, 1 Cor. 10). Even where diversity is not a strength it can still be embraced as an outworking of Christian love. A knee-jerk revulsion towards diversity also ignores the historical dictum “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.” If this rule applies to non-essential theological differences, how much more should it apply to differences in mere cultural preference?
E. Godless speech and behavior
Finally, anyone who has spent time online has probably noticed a pattern of reprehensible behavior from the woke right. The woke right’s social media posts are suffused with scorn, ridicule, mockery, and sneering, which qualify as “unwholesome talk” and are therefore sinful (Eph. 4:29-32), especially when they’re directed toward fellow believers (Matt. 5:22). Yet many on the woke right exult in calling other Christians (conservative evangelical Christians, for what it’s worth) “fake and gay,” “losers,” “trash,” “garbage,” “limp wristed,” “fags,” etc.
I’d like to be able to say that such comments are only made by laser-eyed anons with names like @ChadTheBasedGroyper17 but, unfortunately, major accounts gleefully participate in this behavior too. If that’s you, remember: you will give an account of every careless word uttered. Repent and receive forgiveness.
Later, Shenvi writes,
Sadly, we witnessed the same dynamics in 2018 on the woke left. Rather than exposing the problems in their midst, woke evangelicals were so confident in the righteousness of their cause that they circled the wagons, put their fingers in their ears, and accused their critics of being racist. Today, we’re watching the woke right follow the same path, circling the wagons, putting their fingers in their ears, and accusing their critics of being fake-and-gay progressives. If you refuse to learn from the mistakes of the left, you will repeat them.
Summary
In this article, I’ve argued that “woke right” is a reasonable label for an actual movement that has embraced the same ideas as the woke left. I’ve then argued that these ideas should be rejected by Christians for precisely the same reasons that we reject them when they’re championed by progressives. That said, the labels we use are far less important than the actual ideas involved. If people find the label “woke right” unhelpful or confusing, it’s fine to substitute another term like the “Dissident Right” or the “New Right.”
Wokeness did not disappear. Wokeness has become bipartisan.
Also,
Arguing that conservatives have become “woke,” given their vocal anti-wokeness, admittedly sounds strange. And if you define wokeness as a set of specific beliefs about anti-racism, gender, public masking, open borders, prison and police abolition, and so on, then Republicans don’t fit the type. But wokeness doesn’t just have readily identifiable content—a set of opinions that leave adherents in good progressive standing. It also has a readily identifiable form.
Furthermore,
As the dust has cleared from the multiyear bout of hysteria that defined political life post-2020, it is now possible to see that wokeness is today the dominant style in American politics.
Harper also wrote (in July of 2023),
Discussions of this trend took off last week when a conservative social-media account got a low-level Home Depot employee fired after she made a joke about Trump's assassination.
Right-wing wokeness is Elon Musk critiquing “heterophobia” and classifying the word cis as a slur on X. It is conservative social media melting down and calling a Navy Seal Facebook post about Pride month “a threat to national security.” It is Florida pushing to prevent teaching slavery in a way that might make white students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other forms of psychological distress.” It is the NYPD deputy commissioner asserting that a widely used textbook about terrorism is actually a terrorist manual, and that common bike locks—sold by Columbia University’s own public-safety department—are evidence that “professional” agitators had infiltrated recent campus protests. It is pretending that ChatGPT refusing to say a racial slur is a literal threat to the human race. It is crying crocodile tears over Jeopardy and Star Wars asking about pronouns. It is fomenting an airline-safety panic around “diversity hiring” of Black pilots. It is “canceling” the New York Times columnist David French, a lifelong Republican until Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene, because he’s not conservative enough. These culture-war installments, and the many others like them, share the same kind of emotional infirmity, hyperbolic invocations of violence, and punishment of wrongthink that characterizes left-wing wokeness at its most unhinged.
He also writes,
There’s nothing new about conservatives adopting left-wing rhetorical fashions. The right in general, and the far right in particular, has long indulged the same kind of crusading fragility—once more commonly called “political correctness”—that they accuse liberals of exhibiting, particularly in regards to race. As the popular Substack writer John Ganz notes in his new counter-history of the 1990s, When the Clock Broke, arguments about reverse racism, affirmative action, and institutionalized bigotry against white Americans were already firmly ensconced in the national discourse by that decade. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK and a onetime closeted neo-Nazi, ran a disturbingly successful campaign during Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election on these very premises.
Additionally,
In the post-Trump era, the right’s age-old appeals to reverse racism have careened headlong into progressive discourse about “systemic racism,” helping create a disturbing bastard child: a woke conservatism that champions anti-racism for whites, or, more precisely, anti–reverse racism. To see this new hybrid ideology at work, one need look no further than the reigning head of the Republican Party. Trump leans into the idea that pervasive structural racism exists against Caucasians, and suggests that Americans need to interrogate their implicit bias against white people. “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” Trump said in a recent interview. “I think the laws are very unfair right now.”
Further on, Tyler concludes,
Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.
September 5, 2024 - Tucker Carlson is the “undisputed spiritual leader” of the Woke Right?
of the woke right. Whether or not Kissin makes a good argument for this claim is unknown to us because to read his entire article requires one to download an app into a smartphone and I refuse own or operate smart phones or download apps.
But we have this…
November 28, 2024 - Anti-Woke Authoritarianism
Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle) whose webpage states that he is
a writer, broadcaster and satirist. He is the author of "Free Speech and Why It Matters" and "The New Puritans". He is the presenter of "Free Speech Nation", a weekly television show on GB News.
have earned themselves the label of “the woke right”.
Who has earned this label? According to him,
those who push back against the identity-obsessed ideology of Critical Social Justice
have earned this label the woke right and he writes that that they are
an “anti-woke” contingent has arisen that seeks to redress the problem by engaging in precisely the same tactics of those they oppose.
Also,
A faction of “anti-woke” campaigners are now embracing their own form of identity politics.
Doyle writes that the woke right is an
inevitable backlash
produced by the
rise of the authoritarian “woke” movement
Doyle also writes,
As the saying has it, they hope to fight fire with fire, and as such have earned themselves the label of “the woke right”.
Doyle characterizes the ““woke” movement” as “authoritarian” and
identity-obsessed ideology of Critical Social Justice
and he says that
While many of those who push back against the identity-obsessed ideology of Critical Social Justice do so through the promotion of liberal values
It seems that Doyle’s use of the term liberal here is in the original sense, what some these days call libertarian, which is anti-authoritarian. See the political compass section of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
He is setting up a dichotomy between an authoritarian woke movement and pushback that is coming from an anti-authoritarian place for the most part. But he is also saying that some of the pushback against what he says is woke authoritarianism is coming from an anti-woke authoritarianism. He writes,
As the saying has it, they hope to fight fire with fire, and as such have earned themselves the label of “the woke right”.
Also, Doyle notes that
Like all entries in the culture war lexicon, the meaning of the term “woke right” has evolved rapidly. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, has adopted the phrase to refer to those who identify as right-wing but whose tactics and perspectives mirror those of the woke left. “Every retardation has an equal and opposite retardation”, he writes. “The deranged worldview of the woke left, along with its disregard for truth, hatred of the West and falsification of history, is now being replicated on the right.”
The author James Lindsay has defined it in similar terms, as “a victimhood-based identity politics” whose “victim groups are whites, Christians, men, and straight people”. He argues that the movement is “roughly intersectional” insofar as it is obsessed with identity politics and a grievance relating to anti-white racism. “Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,” Lindsay writes, “the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading”. In these terms, the “woke right” is a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.
The rest of the article is not accessible without signing up for something and it probably requires a smart phone which I have always refused to own.
December 8, 2024 - Konstantin Kisin Opines Further
On December 8, 2024, Konstantin Kisin posted this [archive here],
I'm glad we started a conversation about the Woke Right. It's not a term I've ever been particularly attached to. As I've said before the Barbarian Right, Nietzschean Right, Dissident Right etc are all useful for highlighting different aspects of the same thing and may be more useful.
In fact, given how many people are upset by it, I hereby withdraw the term “Woke Right”.
On one condition: you provide a better term to describe the fringe of the Right which replicates every key aspect of wokeness:
- thinking the West is bad and siding with its enemies
- playing identity politics on the basis that their group is oppressed by a secret invisible force controlled by another group/groups
- having an obsession with group-based victimhood and grievance
- seeking to revise and pervert history to fit its ideological narrative
- reacting to disagreement with name
-calling, ostracism and bullying
- creating a culture of fear among more centre
-leaning people on their side to prevent criticism (you should see how many people message me privately to say they agree about the Woke Right but don’t want to say anything)
We dealt with the article that post links to as far as we could. Again, it’s called “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right”, it’s by Konstantin Kisin, and you can read here for free. Kisin follows that post with this [archive here],
James Lindsay replied to that with this [archive here],
In response to the last post we see above from Konstantin, Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) responded [archive here],
You’re identifying some bad psychological tendencies that are real and appear on the Left and Right, but I don’t think they’re reducible to “woke,” which, to me, is particular to left-wing racialism. The woke Left is a form of hyper-liberalism, while the movements we’re discussing on the Right are all a form of post-liberalism. They want to break the tree of which woke is a branch.
But to be even more specific, you’re not really talking about the serious Catholic post-liberal scholars or bookish Neoreactionaries, you’re talking about the behavior and psychology you’d find amongst, for example, something like the Groypers. I think the better term for that would be Nihilist Right. You can read Strauss’s essay on German nihilism to understand some of the underlying principles that might be recurring in some of the darker places on the Right.
But “woke Right” is a contradiction. Joel Berry was even making the argument that Hitler was “woke.” That’s absurd. It doesn’t help us understand anything.
How do you feel about "the Awakened Right," or, in the original German reflective of people who made the same turn in the 1920s and 1930s, der Erwacht Recht?
My practical objection is that it draws a false equivalency and reduces the effectiveness of fighting left-wing woke. It’s important to note that woke has an established position in all of the major institutions while right-wing nihilism is still a fringe online phenomenon.
I think @EdmundSmirk's Freak Right is fine, as it identifies a very particular element and separates it from the mainstream Right, without creating a false equivalency to the woke Left.
I shall read more about it and update accordingly.
December 12 & 25, 2024 - No Such Thing as the Woke Right?
In “Is There a Woke Right?” published December 12, 2024 by Chronicles, author Jon Harris writes that though it is is not likely that the use of the term woke to describe right wing movements right will catch on on a to a significant degree,
it does highlight two competing political approaches vying for dominance against the hard left. One seeks to conserve religion, hierarchy, and tradition against the forces of pluralism, egalitarianism, and ideology while the other sees itself as the champion of individual rights, freedom, and equality against collectivism, totalitarianism, and bigotry. In short, it really is a battle between conservatives and liberals happening on the right.
He later writes that those who warn about the woke right, in order to prove their point, draw parallels that are unconvincing because they
also overlook major differences between social justice ideology and the deeply conservative political thought that animates the Christian Right.
He then offers a criticism of Lindsay’s American Reformer affair that is similar to the others we have highlighted. He later writes,
Seth Dillon, the CEO of the comedy website The Babylon Bee, called “the woke right . . . a mirror image of the woke left” since “they use the same rhetoric, the same methods, the same grievance and identity framework.” Neil Shenvi, a chemist who runs a Christian apologetics blog, made similar points and added that “the woke right is embracing the ideas and methods of critical theory,” namely an oversimplification of social dynamics.
At this point, Harris goes a bit into Kisin’s concerns about the possibility of Tucker Carlson and others shifting toward authoritarianism that we went over in a previous section. Then Harris writes that
a false equivalence is drawn between Christian Right thinking and social justice ideology. If acknowledging that powerful forces target certain social groups is seen as appealing to shared rhetoric, then this similarity is irrelevant. The real question is whether the rhetoric is true or is driven by a false ideology. Every political approach seeks to protect preferred groups from perceived threats. Even liberals view themselves as collectively opposing groups that threaten their agenda. Ironically, much of the critique of the “woke right” is written in this defensive spirit.
If engaging in political analysis that identifies general threats from powerful institutions and seeks to preserve the social order equals leftist critical theory, which aims to deconstruct the social order through an ideological framework, then there is a serious conflation at play. Max Horkheimer, the director of the Institute for Social Research responsible for “critical theory,” thought “progress toward utopia [was] blocked” by the “technocracy.” He stated that critical theory was designed to emancipate man from this situation. All political approaches must necessarily analyze threats and provide remedies to them, even liberalism. But, this is not the same as seeking creative ways to destabilize and remake society along egalitarian lines.
If seeking power to defeat power is “woke,” then so is politics itself. It is curious that conservatives are blamed for a strong centralized government they played the least role in creating. While they aim to preserve local and federal arrangements, conservatives must also build institutions strong enough to counter globalist threats or risk losing everything. Ironically, liberalism’s focus on individual autonomy at the expense of society has eroded local ties, fostering decadence that weakens democracy and accelerates centralization. Conservatives, more committed to transcendent principles than to mechanisms like democracy—which only work under certain conditions—understand that other forms of government may be necessary to confront greater threats.
However, their prudence does not mean they neglect efforts to preserve the conditions that make democracy possible, as recent concerns over compromised elections demonstrate.
The main issue with “woke right” rhetoric is the fact that liberals, whether they go by that name or not, are deceiving themselves into thinking they can transcend the political. Liberals view themselves as advocates for human rights, grounded in the ideals of individual autonomy, democracy, and pluralism. They typically position themselves as the antithesis of fascism, Communism, and other totalitarian schemes. However, what they frequently fail to grasp is how their political philosophy undermines the traditional societies that provide the necessary stability for political debate.
Skepticism that there is any such thing as the woke right is also expressed in an other piece published by Chronicles, “There’s No Such Thing As the ‘Woke Right’” by Paul Gottfried (December 25, 2024), we read,
Now that Jeremy Carl, Patrick Casey, Jon Harris and many others have weighed in as opponents of the idea promoted by James Lindsay that there is a woke right, it behooves me as a frequent target of that accusation to say my piece. There is no “woke right” any more than there are Burkean Marxists, black Dixiecrats, or patriarchal feminists. Attempts to create such unlikely fusions of opposites border on the ridiculous. Certain identities necessarily exclude other ones; and in this case we are speaking about diametric opposites.
I can wrap my head around Hegel’s dialectical logic, in which that philosopher joins conceptual actuality and contingency to envisage a future full of what are now mere possibilities. This is an exercise in treating categories of being—what in philosophy is called ontology. History, too, can operate dialectically as certain one-time clashing forces work together in changed circumstances. For example, today’s American right is more favorably disposed to social programs benefiting the working class than it was 50 years ago. And workers now stand mostly with the social right on key cultural issues, while corporate capitalism has moved to the left on the same issues.
But there are obvious opposing positions that are not likely to be resolved in a new historical synthesis. Jews are not likely to be demonstrating in support of Nazis causes, and sincere Christians are not likely to defend Muslim jihads waged against their Christian brethren in Africa or Asia. (Needless to say, I do not consider Christian progressives to be serious members of their confession.) It seems equally unlikely that a paleoconservative or member of the independent right would have any truck with the woke left. A veritable moral and social chasm divides these two sides. The barrage of attacks they keep unleashing on each other indicates mutual hostility based on essentially irreconcilable differences.
More interesting for me is why anyone would argue that wokeness and the hard right have now fused into the “woke right.” Methinks those who are pushing this bizarre, counterfactual idea harbor a political purpose.
To be fair, it seems Paul Gottfried is considering wokeness to be a side, specifically the left side, rather than as strategies (such as using ad hominem arguments such as calling opponents immoral rather than engaging with their arguments), tendencies (such as tribalism over principle) and so on. He then describes what many would consider to be a major aspect of what it means to be woke, which is to agitate one’s own ingroup into a purity spiral. He writes,
That purpose may be isolating even further those on the right who have strayed from the well-funded conservative establishment. For decades that establishment has tried to hasten the disappearance of unwanted right-wing opposition. It has relentlessly excluded right-wing dissenters from its activities and funding and periodically denounced this group as extremists.
But these Deplorables have not gone away and, particularly among younger bloggers and podcasters, they have endured despite meager resources. The real sin of these critics has been their adamant opposition to the cultural left, an embattled response that they are more likely to display than the regular conservative establishment. They have distinguished themselves by furious opposition to wokery in all its disruptive manifestations. If there is a “woke right,” that term may be more fairly applied to the conservative establishment, which has in recent years created a “big tent” that, while offering rhetorical opposition, has in practice embraced formerly progressive causes like gay marriage, transgenderism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
He also writes that those who say that there is a woke right and oppose it
see themselves as standing on one side of an infinite divide; and on the other is wokeness, which comes in two forms, a leftist and a rightist one.
December 19, 2024 - A Kerfuffle Over What Defines the Woke Right & a Foray Into Identitarianism
Jeremy Carl is, according to the American Mind, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute who served under Trump during his first term as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior. On December 19, 2024, the American Mind published his piece headlined “The Specter of the “Woke Right”” in which he writes,
Liberal critics of actual conservatism need to cool it.
A specter is haunting the contemporary Right. This particular ghost goes by the name “woke Right”—a term pushed by admitted non-conservative James Lindsay, and subsequently adopted by others such as Konstantin Kisin.
Let’s pause here just to note that some of the above wording is a wink at Lindsay’s “Woke Right” Hoax which involves paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto that famously begins,
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.
We will return to this in the section below headed The “Woke Right” Hoax from James Lindsay below. Getting back to Jeremy Carl’s piece, he continues,
Part of the term’s attractiveness is its amorphousness. It clearly can mean many things to many people, from targeting alleged racism or anti-Semitism on the Right to simply referring to a person on the Right whom “classical liberals” (hereafter “liberals”) dislike. To the extent that the term has any coherence, it is a critique of the right-wing’s so-called use of identity politics.
That touches upon a point we went into in the section above headed The Definitional Fulcrum. For more information, when he writes that the term woke right
is a critique of the right-wing’s so-called use of identity politics
know that there is a term the use of identity politics by a certain section of the right. It is called identitarianism. We plan to make a section for that as soon as we can. However, for now, know that Collin’s Dictionary defines an identitarian as,
a member of an extremeright-wing political movement in Europe that opposes migration and multiculturalism
Jeremy Carl’s piece goes on at a length and depth that is to much to summarize here. We will say that Carl discusses the disagreement, the kerfuffle, over the woke right, involving what Konstantin Kisin, Connor Tomlinson, Charles Haywood of The Worthy House, Jonathan Keeperman, the founder and editor of Passage Press, Auron MacIntyre of the Blaze, James Lindsay and others have to say about it, at least according to him.
Jeremy Carl concludes his piece by stating that he is happy that Kisin, Lindsay, and people with similar views “get it” (so to speak), at least to some extent and that they
are welcome to join us as allies on the issues we agree on. But liberals do not get to define actual conservatism as the so-called “woke Right,” nor do they get to contain it to suit their own fundamentally liberal pieties.
If wokeness is a framework for viewing society through identity and grievance, are Christian Nationalists woke right? What about closed-border Republicans?
She writes in the body of her piece,
Trump’s decisive victory in November sparked a slew of headlines and prognostications about the death of so-called “wokeness.” Yet anyone who has spent any time online lately has likely witnessed the term’s resurrection in a surprising new guise — the “woke right.”
The use of the label — or more accurately, the epithet — “woke right” has ramped up in recent weeks amidst the intra-MAGA war over H-1B visas for foreign workers. Republicans who support the H-1B visa program, particularly those in the Tech Right, are slamming border-restrictionist MAGA supporters as “woke right.”
Steve Bannon weathered a barrage of woke right accusations after he attacked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, saying there should be more African Americans and American-born Hispanics in tech — as much as 20 percent — before the country imports foreigners for those jobs.
“The woke right is actually a thing,” a tech executive, Garry Tan, posted to X in response, getting more than 2,000 likes.
The biggest proponent of the term woke right is author and podcaster James Lindsay, who made a name for himself opposing wokeness and cultural Marxism. Once a man of the left, he uses the term to target those on the right who he says employ the same grievance politics and cancel-culture tactics as the woke left.
The woke right cling to identity politics just like the left, says Mr. Lindsay, only the bogeyman isn’t white supremacy or systemic racism. Instead, the woke right sees Christians and white heterosexual men as victims of reverse racism, globalism, and “the postwar liberal consensus.”
“There’s this kind of belief that there’s a ruling class that’s erected an ideology to marginalize people like them. That sounds very much like woke,” Mr. Lindsay says. “Same victim mentality. Same identity politics.”
Christian nationalists, white identitarians, and antisemites fit in this category, but the term is also being used online to target those who want closed borders or think a distinctly American culture is worth preserving from an onslaught of third-world immigration. Mr. Lindsay posted to X on Saturday a photo of a drag queen with an elementary school-age girl and the words “woke left” above it next an image of Adolf Hitler with a school-age boy and the words “woke right.” The post’s tagline was, “Watch out for Internet groomers.”
She later writes,
Another major proponent of the term woke right is the political commentator and podcaster, Konstantin Kisin, who calls Tucker Carlson the “undisputed spiritual leader” of the woke right and Candace Owens another top acolyte. Mr. Kisin says revisionist history is a signature characteristic of the woke right, who feel they are awake to the real truth about history and systems of oppression in a similar way as the woke left. If the government lied about Covid and Trump-Russia collusion, woke right logic follows, then it must be lying about everything. One easy tell is how quickly a person labels as “psyop” any official government response to any news story.
“Just as a woke leftist sees a conspiracy against him that he calls ‘systemic racism’ in every workplace, classroom and interaction, so a woke rightist sees a conspiracy against him in every institution, media publication and historical consensus. Importantly, disagreement and criticism only reinforces his belief in the conspiracy,” Mr. Kisin says.
“The one element that is still missing, which is why the ideology has yet to properly take shape, is that the scapegoat group behind the conspiracy is still unclear. … They have experimented with ‘globalists,’ ‘Marxists’ and ‘elites’ but none of them fit the bill because they do not readily conjure an image of the suspect group in the mind of the average viewer,” Mr. Kisin says. “This is where the war in Israel has come in handy.”
Support for Israel in its war at Gaza has created a schism on the right, and now both sides of the debate are calling the other woke right. Since Candace Owens left the conservative news outlet Daily Wire in March, she spends much of her podcast talking about the “Zionist media,” pedophilia, uncovering histories of genocide against Christians, and a sexually deviant sect that split from Judaism called “Frankism.”
“The way I view and understand wokeness is it’s like an operating system, it’s a methodology, it’s a framework through which you view the world,” the owner of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, told Bari Weiss. “They’re using the same framework and methodology that the left used, and they are scapegoating an entire people using these identity and grievance-based politics they supposedly reject, because they see Christianity … as being marginalized and oppressed by the Jews or the elites or the globalists. It’s not necessarily the Jews.”
Prominent members of the Libertarian Party, who supported Trump this cycle, routinely post against American support for Israel. The popular Libertarian podcaster, Dave Smith, says he thinks supporters of Israel are more woke because they see antisemitism everywhere, similar to the way the woke left sees racism as society’s defining power structure.
“There’s so much more of a devastating case that the woke right are the Laura Loomers and Ben Shapiros of the world than that Tucker Carlson and Candace are woke somehow for engaging in historical revisionism,” Mr. Smith said.
Support for Israel and H-1B visas don’t line up neatly across the right, and this poses a problem as to who exactly fits the woke right bill. As the GOP tent expands and the party gets ready to take power this month, intraparty struggles are perhaps expected. A similar jockeying for power happened when President Biden took office between progressives and centrists Democrats.
Mr. Wax says Mr. Lindsay is trying to push woke right hard as a sort of rebranding or “gatekeeping” of the right. Mr. Lindsay made his career battling and explaining wokeness, but as mainstream America seemingly rejects it, perhaps this is a bid to stay relevant and revive his brand.
“It’s a meaningless insult, and there’s no real hard-and-fast definition,” Mr. Wax says of the woke right label. “And that’s why I don’t think it’s ever going to catch on.”
January 28, 2025 - Trump & Right Wing Wokeism?
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, “Trump Is Going Woke”, published January 28, 2025, Thomas L. Friedman writes…well, he writes quite a lot. He also rambles on. I found it excruciatingly hard to focus on from start to finish and I can not claim that I was able to keep the thread.
One thing seems clear enough. It seems he associates Trump’s aversion to electric and solar energy with right wing wokeism. He asks you to
have no illusions: Trump’s right-wing wokeism — impugning electric vehicles and renewable energy because they don’t conform to MAGA ideology and aren’t manly enough — is as devoid of common sense and not remotely in the national interest as any left-wing cultural wokeism.
Later, the author uses the phrase
a right-wing woke energy mess
in reference to Trump
doubling down on fossil fuels, coupled with freezing Biden-era government incentives for wind energy, putting in doubt incentives for solar and boasting of building huge, electricity-guzzling data centers for A.I.
in response to
a “national energy emergency”
he declared upon entering the White House for his 2nd term in 2025
because the leaders of American A.I. companies told him, correctly, that they are not going to have enough power to run their energy-devouring data centers.
The author, the foreign affairs opinion columnist for the New York Times, seems to base his whole opinion piece on the view that Trump’s preference for fossil energy over EV, solar and wind is right wing wokeism.
Updates Forthcoming
We will try our best to add updates here when called for.
Image by RNS (Dec 5, 2024), captioned, “James Lindsay presents a session of "The EVILution of Communism Workshop" for New Discourses, Nov. 4, 2024. (Video screen grab)”
Again, by presenting what a source says, we are not implying that they are right or wrong. If we know them to be accurate or inaccurate, we present the evidence to establish the fact and let the evidence speak for itself.
Here is Lindsay’s announcement on X [archive here],
As many of you know and fewer appreciate, I have been aiming to expose a phenomenon called the “Woke Right” for some time now. This whole matter is an issue of considerable and rather fierce debate.
Is “Woke” the right word for them? Are they really “Right”? Should we call them something else? Is this really even happening? Does it even matter? Is this even important?
Each of these is a worthy enough question and matter for its own debate, but regarding the question of whether “Woke” is the right term for them, I haven’t been fully convinced despite my heavy use of the term. As you’ll see momentarily, I’m now far more convinced.
So far, I have attempted in various X (née Twitter) arenas to explain why I think the term “Woke Right” fits and to identify some examples, and I’ve done a couple of podcasts explaining the phenomenon and making the case more fully. I’ve also done a number of interviews. Still, it remains an open question, are they really Woke, so I decided to do a little experiment. A throwback to an earlier James, if you will.
Here James is referencing and taking sole credit for experimentation conducted with others. Some call it the “Grievance Studies Affair” and some call it “Sokal Squared”. Famously, the affair was carried out by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and Lindsay. It was not carried out by Lindsay alone as his words inevitably imply. At least later in the article he gives some credit for the affair to “et al.” (still not mentioning Pluckrose or Boghossian by name). At any rate, James Lindsay goes on to claim,
To put the conclusion out front before I explain myself, I figured a good way to test the “Woke Right” for Wokeness would be to submit a little hoax essay to what I presume is their flagship publication, American Reformer. To produce this “Woke Right” hoax, I took a couple thousand words straight out of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (better known as the Communist Manifesto), and lightly modified it into a “Woke Right” critique of liberalism, which the so-called “Woke Right” hate. They published it: The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right (It’s archived here in case they take it down).
I figured there’s nothing more definitively Woke than the Communist Manifesto, so I think we can drop with the inverted commas here and get on with calling them the Woke Right after this. They published Karl Marx’s definitive Communist work, dressed up to resemble their own pompous, self-pitying drivel, when it was submitted from a completely unknown author with no internet footprint whatsoever bearing the name “Marcus Carlson” (get it? Haha).
That question answered raises the deeper second question above—which I will not address here—about if they are really on the “Right,” as they consistently claim they are. For them on this, I’ll only say, I have been using the term “Right Hand of the Left.”
So what did I do, and why did I do it? Before explaining myself, I’ll explain the mechanics of this little prank.
I started by taking the preamble and then just short of six continuous pages of text from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. This chapter is titled “Bourgeoisie and Proletarians” and is the part of the manifesto where Marx and Engels make the case that the bourgeoisie (middle class, owners, management, and wealthy) as a class is abusive of the proletariat (workers) as a class in just about every way you could imagine. I then rather crudely swapped out references to the bourgeoisie with something to do with either liberalism, liberals, classical liberalism, or their real and mighty bugbear that they call “the post-war liberal consensus,” which they believe oppresses them. Concurrently, I swapped out references to the proletariat with references to an object they call the “New Christian Right” as a way of referring to themselves. I then massaged some of the specifics for fit, flourish, and flow, cut a bunch and consolidated to fit the word count requirement, attached the document to an email from a made-to-order burner account, and hit “send.” A few days later, they published it on American Reformer with minimal edits.
So far as these terms of art go, meaning “post-war liberal consensus” and “New Christian Right,” I didn’t invent them. I took them from a couplearticles published on American Reformer aiming to describe their own movement, what it’s about, and what it believes oppresses them. While these are technically terms to explain in another time and place, what I noticed (when re-reading The Communist Manifesto to prepare a pair of podcasts about it) is that Marx’s complaints about the bourgeoisie and vision of the proletariat match what I had read on American Reformer itself about the Woke Right with regard to the “liberal consensus” and liberalism along with their vision for a New Christian Right. It required shockingly minimal editing to make Karl Marx’s arguments transform into Woke Right arguments about American liberalism. (In fact, I have the original first step document in its raw form, if anyone wants to see it, revealing just how fast the connection is.)
So, that’s what I did. Why did I do it? And why target American Reformer?
I don’t have any particular animus against American Reformer to speak of, but so far as I know, it’s the flagship publication for what I’ve been calling the Woke Right, or at least the Protestant “Christian Nationalist” (or, “Ecumenical Integralist”) wing of the Woke Right. It makes a good target, though, because American Reformer represents not the cringe-inducing (antisemitic) fringe of the Woke Right but its more respectable, mainstream wing. Beyond that, I know rather little about it because, as I’ve said many times, I mostly find the Woke Right to be an enormously irritating distraction that I don’t actually give much time to and try to avoid thinking about entirely.
I would like to point out that through late 2024 and all through 2025 so far (I write these words on January 17), James posts on X about the woke right often. Do not believe me, however. See for yourself. Also, see how, well, shall we say, accusatory James can be with the term. Also, we are interested in your comments regarding how James conducts himself when interacting with others. At any rate, Lindsay also writes,
Rather famously, I, et al., got a feminist social work academic journal to accept a rewrite of a chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a pathway forward for intersectional feminism as a movement.
Moreover, I learned that if you’re going to target publications for a “hoax-ish” exposé, you should aim at the most significant one you can. That turns out to be American Reformer, which I also featured in one of my podcasts about the Woke Right.
He also writes,
Why did I do it? That’s a lot simpler. I suspected that the so-called Woke Right really is Woke; many people disagreed; and I wanted to test that hypothesis instead of arguing about it to very little effect. Up to now, when I have pointed it out, argued it, explained it, and discussed it, I’ve been vigorously assured I’m completely wrong and this “New Christian Right” is not Woke at all. In fact, I learned I’m the bad guy here: “attacking Christians,” “punching Right,” “punching down” (amusingly), “gatekeeping,” and “being subversive, divisive, or [insert any of many slurs].”
Well, I’ve been here before, and back then a simple test sufficed. I ran this test once in the Grievance Studies Affair to expose the Left in academia.
Notice that he just went back to taking sole credit for that affair. He continues,
It was easily replicated against the so-called Woke Right. The result, though limited in scope, is a positive one. The Woke Right is Woke enough to argue against liberalism in exactly the same pompous and conspiratorial way (literally) Karl Marx argued against his own class enemy. So, if by “Woke” we mean running the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture, the Woke Right is clearly Woke.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that some have criticized Lindsay’s experiment here and we are not ignoring that. Rather, we are saving that for later. Lindsay continues,
So, circumstances relevant to the Woke Right also compel me to ask, is this me attacking Christians or “dividing the right”? Well, no. You are free for yourself to decide if the “New Christian Right” represents Christians or Christianity, but this was little more than a simple test to see if they’re a Woke duck. They walk like a Woke duck. They talk like a Woke duck. They’re a Woke duck.
They considered a lightly modified excerpt from the Communist Manifesto to be a “powerful article” for who they are and what they think (that we can expect they will not stand behind now that they know what it is, of course). If that aligns with Christianity is something for others to decide. If spotting this worrying Woke trend as it permeates the movement to stop Woke is “dividing the right,” maybe using terms like “right” here isn’t what we need to be doing. Maybe we should just be stopping Woke, however it presents itself.
Does this mean I’m saying the Woke Right are Communists? No, not at all. Historically, Fascism was a reaction to Communism that adopted the Communist operating system but not Communism or its specific agendas. In fact, they adopted the operating system of Communism specifically to be “anti-Marxist” (according to Mussolini)—just like the Woke Right. I do not think the Woke Right are Communists—aside from some infiltrators who must certainly be taking advantage of the Woke Right movements. I think they have taken up the Woke operating system, nothing more, nothing less.
Also,
In fact, it’s rather the opposite, in a way. The Woke Right, or at least the nerd-macho “New Christian Right” at American Reformer, etc., positions itself as the only viable solution to Communism in the West. In fact, their niche is something like being the only outfit, broadly construed, that is capable of equipping the American Church of resisting Communism—and certainly they have positioned themselves vigorously against my work as being productive to that particular cause. Well, as is evident, they haven’t done their homework at all. Clearly, my hoax essay only passed editorial muster because, it is now abundantly clear, these particular fellows are unlikely even to have read the Communist Manifesto. If winning a war requires knowing your enemy, as Sun Tzu said, they don’t even recognize him when he shows up on their own front door.
As a final question, you might be wondering how tight this hoax is. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here (pdf), you’ll find a document showing the whole story in four appendices: a comparative back-and-forth text, the final submitted text (American Reformer published a very lightly edited version of this), the relevant sections of the Communist Manifesto, and my initial word and concept–swap so you can see my process before the final editing. A small sample of the back-and-forth text, from beginning and end, are offered here as a taste.
Communist Manifesto:
[p. 27, preamble] A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
American Reformer:
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.
There are two consequences of this unholy alliance. First, the Christian Right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a New Christian Right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on twenty-first century American politics.
The Communist Manifesto:
[pp. 36–37, ch. 1] This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.
American Reformer:
This organization of the New Christian Right into a movement will continually be upset again by the competition between its various factions, but it is rising. We take no enemies to the Right and always redouble our efforts to our Left. In that way, we ever rise up again, stronger, firmer, mightier for all these contests. For this reason, in the end, we will win back our culture and take back our communities, and the liberals can go ahead and thank themselves.
I’ll close here and open the space for discussion. This is my explanation for this little experiment. My conclusion is that I validated my hypothesis in a significant way that will advance the debate. The Woke Right is Woke. They saw themselves in what can only be called a “Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists.”
Lindsay’s mid-wit trolling involve swapping out the critical context while leaving the structure of the arguments untouched (or so he claims).
Fava also writes that Lindsay
is intellectually lazy, which is why his claim to fame was not any profound philosophy he has ever espoused, but his glorified trolling of the Left and calling everything Marxist.
Let’s see more context,
Lindsay made his fame through submitting articles trolling liberal outlets by rewriting portions of Mein Kampf and getting them to be published, and so he has repeated his ways, only this time against American Reformer.
The American Reformer functions as an online magazine that specializes in paleoconservative and Christian thought, often adjacent to Christian Nationalism. Generally, they publish good work, but not this time.
The claim of Lindsay is that because he was able to reformulate excerpts from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, that therefore, the woke right does exist and that it is the same as the Left. This is the same thing as “The Left is the Real Nazis” because some random outlet published an excerpt from Hitler. Both examples of Lindsay’s mid-wit trolling involve swapping out the critical context while leaving the structure of the arguments untouched (or so he claims).
Notably, the opening sentence mirrors Marx verbatim:
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.
One might innocently view the opening line as a parody. However, the rest of the paragraph is rather clunky in how it swaps out Marx for Christian Nationalism. The “Second World War” is functionally replacing “old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies” in what is not really a clear 1:1 ratio. Again, the use of Marx’s stylistic prose is not the same as Marxism. As writer Jim Hanson pointed out, Lindsay did a lot more than swap out a few words and lightly edit Marx, but rather changed the majority of the sentences, keeping a similar structure.
Fava has much more to say and we recommend that you see for yourself. However, we promised more context for the “intellectually lazy” slam. In his closing remarks, Fava writes that American Reformer
handed Lindsay an optical victory, not because it validates the phrase “woke right” but by delegitimizing a Christian platform.
James Lindsay’s goal is to preserve 2015 Liberalism, and he would prefer a progressive government over a New Christian Right government. None of this validates the existence of a “woke right,” but rather that the use of calling everything Marxism is the equivalent of the Left calling everything they hate Fascism. It is oxymoronic for the Right to be both Fascist and Marxist, as they were two juxtaposed ideologies, that while born out of the industrial age, were dissimilar in their respective goals. Like James, it is intellectually lazy, which is why his claim to fame was not any profound philosophy he has ever espoused, but his glorified trolling of the Left and calling everything Marxist.
Joshua Abbotoy (@Byzness), the co-founder and executive director of American Reformer (@AmReformer) posted this on X on December 4, 2024 [archive here],
Well, you have to hand it to James Lindsey - he "got us."
He was playing to get a headline - "American Reformer Publishes Communist Manifesto" and he got it. Never mind that the entire thing was care-takingly rewritten, substantively inverted, and re-packaged into a passable right-wing article. If our enemies keep working at their craft and presenting even more convincing hoaxes, they'll put us out of a job.
The truth is that American Reformer, the little journal that James' calls a "leading publication," the "flagship," and the "more respectable, mainstream wing" of his made-up term the "Woke Right" has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years under the direction of a lean editorial team.
American Reformer's mission is to reinvigorate the Protestant Church for the cultural challenges of our day, rooted in the rich tradition of Protestant social and political thought. James has resented us from the beginning because he knows that we - unlike him - have more satisfying answers than "we just need to return the classical liberalism of the 1990s!" We are re-examining the faulty assumptions that have brought American society to its current state, and recovering wisdom from across millennia that can be a solace and a guide in wild political times.
American Reformer has always prided itself on giving a shot to less established authors. We've published hundreds of these over the last few years, many of whom have grown into leading voices at the nexus of American Christianity and politics/culture. We undeniably have significant energy and growth on our side. And we are almost alone amongst major Christian outlets to unabashedly support Trump's agenda and to have standing in the emerging coalition between MAGA, the rising dissident tech world, and the religious right.
Obviously, our success has made us enemies, and we'll have to adjust our screening process. As a vocal (at times belligerent) atheist, James is not eligible to be published in American Reformer. Yes, James, you "got us" there, but we'll tighten that up.
I was fan of James' early work. It is sad to see him fall to these levels, boxed out of any meaningful political movement, and resorting to dumb tactics that will yield clicks in the short term, but destroy his credibility in the long term.
Those of us who care about the future of this country will keep about our work, fearlessly exploring serious ideas. We don't have time to navel gaze over James' petty resentments. Hey, if he keeps obsessively following us and regurgitating arguments, maybe he'll learn a thing or two - you never know.
James Lindsay is mocking the "Woke Right" (@AmReformer) for publishing 6 pgs of the Communist Manifesto
I've read Marx & I may not have recognized his edited version Judge for yourself
The red shows the edits he made
I have no dog in this fight but you ought to play straight
Original Commie Drivel
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Lindsay Woke Rightifesto
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.
There are two consequences of this unholy alliance. First, the Christian Right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a New Christian Right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on twenty-first century American politics.
Since the end of the Second World War, a liberal “post-war consensus” has established itself in a position of global hegemony. Its primary purpose is given as the development of a world market, for which the hard labor and innovative capacities of America paved the way. This global market system has, to be fair, given an immense development to commerce, to travel, and to communication technologies. As a result, industry and commerce have expanded into a multinational dimension. This development has had many effects. For one thing, in proportion as industry, commerce, and transportation have extended themselves at home and globally, in the same proportion the ruling liberal consensus itself developed, increased its wealth and power, and pushed into the background every traditional idea handed down from the past, even those that allowed it to be built.
We can therefore see that modern liberalism—along with its current post-war world order—is itself the product of a long course of development in society, politics, and economics: a series of revolutions in culture and against tradition, but these all share a common theme. In fact, the post-war liberal consensus owes its very existence to that foundation which it now demands we abandon in the name of its inexorable pursuit of what it calls “progress.” Each step of “progress” in the development of the hegemony of the post-war liberal consensus, however, was more than progress alone; it was also accompanied by a corresponding political advance of liberalism itself.
Before the establishment of this “consensus” to liberalism and “progress,” a true Right, running under the sway of robust Christian values, with an armed and self-governing association of men keeping order and peace in their familiar communities, was operating in more or less independent locales fully aware of both people and place, and they kept their own organized hierarchies and their own customs and traditions. It wasn’t to last. The consensus view was that the Second Great War was not to be repeated under any circumstances.
As a result, this self-gratifying liberal order forced its way into national, then international, “consensus,” and as it went it had to, at last, conquer custom, tradition, faith, and the true Right that kept them. All that was left for the “Right” to do under “consensus” was to serve either the new liberal war machine or its military-industrial complex as a flimsy counterpoise against the older, dying world—because “Never Again.” In so capitulating, the post-war “Right” established for itself the modern “representative” managerial state, even while the Left positioned then built a sprawling liberal civil rights bureaucracy, thus granting liberalism exclusive political sway. Now in each place in America, over each of its peoples, the executive of the modern liberal state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole liberal world order and its global “consensus” against the Right.
Liberalism itself, speaking historically, has therefore played a most “revolutionary” part in its own rise and eventual ironic demise. It saws from beneath its own bottom the limb upon which it sits and provides the necessary impetus for the reemergence of the Right that has always existed to oppose it.
Speaking historically, liberalism, wherever it has the upper hand, puts an end to all previous social and religious relations, however stabilizing and enriching they may be. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley hierarchical ties that bound man to his “natural superiors” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than soulless cash payment and hollow “individual fulfillment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious worship, of chivalrous enthusiasm by men for their women, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of a supremely egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into self-centered atomic individual utility, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms enjoyed by godly men in its predecessors, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—an individualist libertinism shorn of any responsibility to God, community, people, place, hierarchy, or history.
In “James Lindsay Is Wrong About Wokeness” published by Chronicles - A Magazine of American Culture, December 11, 2024, Patrick Casey offers criticisms of Lindsay’s proclamations of victory. At one point, Casey writes,
His ongoing crusade against the so-called woke right has mainly served to expose his own flawed understanding of wokeness, however.
After the American Reformer posted his article, Lindsay took a victory lap on X. “The flagship Christian Nationalist Woke Right publication has published part of the Communist Manifesto,” he wrote.
That post went viral, amassing nearly 2 million views. But Lindsay’s characterization of his textual Trojan Horse is misleading. One is unlikely to read Lindsay’s piece and conclude that it is anything other than a compelling case for Christian nationalism.
One can read his whole piece here, but we’ll skip ahead and note that later Casey writes,
In stripping Marxism from Marx’s words, Lindsay’s essay is no longer Marxism—even if it is using the same rhetorical structure. One could perform a similar exercise and transform the Communist Manifesto into a defense of Lindsay’s so-called classical liberalism. Form and content are two very different things, so this isn’t quite the achievement Lindsay seems to think it is.
Casey references the critique from Jim Hanson that we saw above, agreeing with it. Casey later writes,
Still, Lindsay was convinced of the existence of a woke right long before attempting this stunt. Let us examine why.
Lindsay boils wokeness down to the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. This doesn’t mean that he believes wokeness is only this dichotomy, but he regularly points to it as an essential element. In a post on X, he wrote, “Villain: Oppressor. Victim: Oppressed. Hero: Allies in solidarity. That’s what the woke narrative is.”
Casey later asks,
Was Thomas Paine woke? What about the rest of the Founding Fathers, who viewed the British empire as an oppressive force from which they sought to free themselves?
Casey writes,
Lindsay believes that conservative critiques of liberalism qualify as “Grievance or Woke architecture”—that wokeness is defined by the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, regardless of the oppressor in question.
There is a glaring problem with this lazy attempt at intellectual history. To consistently adhere to this framework, one would have to characterize many groups throughout history as woke. The Founding Fathers, for example, regularly railed against British oppression. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes that “the good people of this country are grievously oppressed” by the British government.
Casey has much to say. Again, you can read it here. We note that it was not necessary for Casey to savage Lindsay personally alongside an otherwise reasonable argument, writing things such as
I wouldn’t expect Lindsay, who received a Ph.D. in mathematics (and subsequently went to work as a massage therapist) to have an academic-level understanding of these various political ideologies.
runs a small manufacturing business, hosts the Chronicles Magazine podcast, and co-hosts the Contra Mundum podcast. You can find him on X @contramordor or on Substack at cjayengel.Substack.com.
