The woke right

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There was a time, not long ago, when freedom of speech was the hill the American right said it would die on. President Trump ran for office painting himself as the antidote to censorship, the man who would rescue the country from the claws of political correctness, and restore open debate in a climate where saying the wrong thing could cost you everything.

To millions of Americans, especially those exhausted by speech codes, campus dogma and corporate HR tyranny, he seemed like a necessary correction.

Fast forward to today, and that very administration is now actively attempting to deport international students for protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza. Hundreds of millions in federal funding are being threatened and withheld from Ivy League universities.

Why? Because young people, many of them Jewish themselves, dared to oppose a war Trump supports. The justification for this is wrapped in the language of “fighting antisemitism” — a noble-sounding cause, if you don’t look too closely. But once you do, the contradictions are impossible to ignore. Even mainstream Jewish organizations have expressed alarm at the sweeping, punitive measures being used to silence students. Groups that have spent years fighting real antisemitism are now warning that what Trump is calling antisemitism is, in many cases, just protest. Dissent. The very thing he once claimed to defend.

There’s a kind of grotesque poetry in that. The same rhetorical contortions once used by the woke left — semantic shape-shifting, moral panic, accusations that shut down argument rather than invite it — are now being used wholesale by Trump’s own administration.

The champion of free speech has become a champion of selective speech, the kind that flatters the regime and shames the rest into silence. I ask readers to imagine if Joe Biden had attempted any of this — if his administration had moved to deport pro-Israel student activists, threatened Harvard over demonstrations, or equated protest signs with hate speech. Right-wing media would have had a collective stroke. They’d be setting up tripods outside every courthouse, shrieking about Marxism, totalitarianism and the end of the First Amendment.

But because it’s Trump, and because the narrative suits the agenda, the outrage evaporates. What would’ve been tyranny last year is now framed as “decisive leadership.” The hypocrisy is blinding. And yet much of the right, especially its media class, continues to cheer it on, not in spite of the absurdity, but because of it.

This is not about being pro-Israel or anti-Israel. Reasonable people can — and do — disagree about the war in Gaza. What matters is that the debate be allowed to happen at all. That students, academics, and yes, even foreign nationals, retain the right to challenge the decisions of powerful governments without being branded as threats and hunted down by immigration agents.

It didn’t have to be this way. There was a moment, a brief one, when the intellectual right seemed genuinely interested in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of Western liberalism — truth-seeking, open debate, the courage to question. But those instincts have been swallowed by tribalism. By the belief that anything goes, as long as it’s your side doing the silencing.

The irony is that some of the very same voices who decried cancel culture are now doing the cancelling. Some of the same pundits who once warned about “snowflakes” are now melting down over protest chants. Some of the same outlets that claimed universities were too fragile for dissent now support stripping those universities of their funding for tolerating the wrong kind of speech.

Freedom of speech was never supposed to be a partisan value. And the method for defeating bad ideas was never intimidation. It was argument. Better speech and better ideas. Sharper reasoning. Public accountability. That’s how people once confronted actual ideological threats — communism, fascism, theocracy. We didn’t gag people. We out-argued them. And when we failed to do that, history was not kind.

Trump’s administration doesn’t appear to grasp this. Or worse, it does and simply doesn’t care. What matters now is control. The narrative must be pure, the critics purged, and the lines of debate drawn so tightly that the only permitted voices are those who praise the master.

"I know you are, but what am I?" It's an insult that has long echoed around school playgrounds, but it is now being heard in political circles, too.

After years of the right insulting what it calls the "woke left" by charging it with cancelling opponents, focusing on identity politics, and imagining the world is rigged against it, a so-called "woke right" is now being accused of much the same tendencies.

An ideological doppelganger
The phrase "woke right" started "appearing with frequency" in 2022, said John McWhorter in the New York Times, and became "especially well entrenched" at the end of last year. This means rather than "applying specifically" to the "concerns" of the left, woke can now refer to any "conspiracy-focused" and "punitive orientation" to social change.

Like its "antithesis on the left", the woke right places "identity grievance, ethnic consciousness" and "tribal striving" at the centre of its "behaviour and thought", said Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. In doing so, it tells white, male right-wing Americans that "they are the country's real victims".

So "woke right" is a "kind of ideological doppelganger", argued Andrew Doyle on his Substack, whose adherents "exhibit the same precisionist" and "absolutist tendencies" of their "leftist counterparts".

No tolerance for opposing views
An election campaign promise of Donald Trump was that he would "free Americans" from "ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again", said Chatterton Williams. Yet, following his return to the White House, we "hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech" or "tolerance for opposing views".

Instead, the newly elected president has done the opposite of what he promised and "banned words" related to "gender and diversity", even employing "the force of the government" to enforce the bans.

Meanwhile, in Britain the "kerfuffle" about the "woke right" is only played out online for now, wrote Gareth Roberts for The Spectator, because here, "for the foreseeable" at least, there's "no chance" of the right "getting anywhere near the actual levers of power".

Still obsessed with identity
Not everyone is thrilled by the new term. Not surprisingly, it has "riled denizens of the internet" with "chiselled jaws" and "flinty conservative opinions", wrote Kathleen Stock for UnHerd, who are "outraged" at the "very idea" of it.

But, "to the extent that there is an anti-woke backlash", said Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph, all signs point to it being as "intolerant, unthinking and collectivist" as the trend it "dislikes". The woke right is "still obsessed with identity", but with the "goodies and baddies" labels "switched".

Trump lives and breathes by means of constant praise and flattery.

The woke left outcast me for being too white.
The woke right want to kill me for not being white enough.

I wish people would stop with the identity politics. We should put our focus on class consciousness because you know the wealthy elite are getting off on it and making money taking advantage of the anger and division.

In 2018, some activists, appalled by woke nonsense being published by academic journals, submitted nonsensical research.

One paper claimed researchers "closely and respectfully examined the genitals of…ten thousand dogs" to learn about "rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks."

Some journals published it!

In my new video, one of the hoaxers, James Lindsay, claims this "woke virus" now has spread to the right:

"There is a radical segment embedded within MAGA…that acts the same way, uses the same tactics, acts like the woke left."

I was skeptical. But to make his point, Lindsay pulled off a new hoax.

He rewrote parts of The Communist Manifesto and, using the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (a play on Karl Marx), submitted it to the conservative magazine American Reformer.

His article criticized classical liberal ideas like free markets, global trade, and individual freedom, like Marx did.

Yet the conservative magazine published it.

Even after a reader pointed out that it was The Communist Manifesto the magazine kept its article up, writing, "It's still a reasonable aggregate of some New Right ideas."

The New Right, says Lindsay, acts like the woke left.

"There's the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions. They bully people online with swarms; they rewrite history."

The New York Times’ 1619 Project rewrote history, claiming America was founded to protect slavery.

Today's woke right say: Hitler "was trying to encourage community…family values," (claims social media influencer Dan Bilzerian).

"I want total Aryan victory….The only way we are going to make America great again is if we make this country Christian again," says white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes' videos have received more than 30 million views. On his show, he says, "Jews better start being nice to people like us because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them."

Influencer Andrew Tate won 10 million followers largely by attacking feminism: "I am absolutely sexist."

"'Men should be in charge, knock the women down,'" sighs Lindsay, "The woke right literally becomes all the caricatures that the woke left said conservatives are: 'racist, sexist, homophobes.'"

"They're fringe," I say to Lindsay. "No real threat."

"That's what everybody said about woke kids on campuses," he replies.

That shut me up. I admit I thought brainwashed college progressives would drop "safe spaces," trigger warnings, speech codes, and other silly ideas once they had to earn a living.

But I was wrong. Most didn't. Those kids brought about lots of change. Their preferences got many companies to mandate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training and led many employees to fear speaking honestly at work.

But today, says Lindsay, the energy is on the right.

"It's great that we're having a conservative revival…but there's also called 'falling off the cliff.'"

Elected officials now say things like, "We should be Christian nationalists!" (Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia) and, "I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk," (Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado).

"Your ability to believe as you will," says Lindsay, "worship as you will without state interference, is a bedrock idea of the American experiment. Woke right, like the woke left, is this litany of bad ideas."

He fears that next election, the woke right will elect the woke left.

"The left is going to say, Hillary Clinton was right to call [people on the right] 'deplorable.' Then the left will sweep back in and dominate."

The woke left outcast me for being too white.
The woke right want to kill me for not being white enough.

I wish people would stop with the identity politics. We should put our focus on class consciousness because you know the wealthy elite are getting off on it and making money taking advantage of the anger and division.

The woke left outcast me for being too white.

You must be the only one, considering whites are well-represented among the so-called woke left.

Come to think of it, that's kinda what makes the woke left so annoying. They're made up of a bunch of entitled white kids who think they're the only ones in the world with the right to pass judgememt over everyone else.

Really? It seems like everyone constantly passes judgment on everyone else for all sorts of reasons.

I'm not sure this is something unique to the "woke left", other than maybe the morality employed when passing those judgments.

As for entitled, it makes them no different from anyone else from nations where freedom of speech and expression exist, because those rights quite literally entitle them to express their views.

What about the hypocrisy of those who complain about "wokeness", when all it amounts to is people condemning sh***y behaviour. How dare they call terrible behaviour and ideological positions terrible?

I dunno, I've seen plenty of sh***y behavior coming from both the right and the left especially online. But if I listed them all to you would you even be open minded enough to listen or shut me down for not conforming to your ideals?

Now that the term is starting to be applied to the right are most of the people who claimed woke is an illegitimate term for a whole host of reasons going to object when it is applied to Trump supporters or zionists? Rhetorical question.

It remains to be seen whether this attempted weaponization of the term "woke" by libertarians and center-right folks against the extreme right turns out to be effective. It could very easily backfire, it seems to me.

I still think it's not a productive term in the context of general political dialogue, at least where mutual understanding is the aim.

The woke left outcast me for being too white.