Second Thoughts On 'Woke Right'

A Clarification: I Didn't Know The Full Meaning Of The Term, And Regret Using It

James Lindsay (source)

We live in news and information silos. Until yesterday, when The Free Press published my essay they titled “The Woke Right Is Coming For Your Sons,” I had no idea that James Lindsay, who appears to be the originator of the term, and his allies use it to attack the National Conservatism movement, of which I am a supporter. If I had, I would not have used the term, or allowed it to be used in the headline. That’s on me.

A conservative journalist friend chuckled over text this morning, “You aren’t online enough, my friend.” Nope, guess not.

I’ve appreciated Lindsay’s work in the past, sussing out the ideological and psychological details of wokeness; I quote him in Live Not By Lies. I follow him on X, but then, I follow over 700 accounts on X, and only a relative handful of tweets from those I follow ever make it into my stream. I don’t know how the algorithm works. Maybe one tends to see the tweets from people whose output one engages with in some way. For example, I see nearly everything Wes Yang and David Rieff tweet, because I often retweet them. I see very little of what James Lindsay tweets. Consequently, I missed that he has been using the “woke right” designation to slam conservatives like … well, conservatives like me.

When I think of the “woke right,” I think of white nationalists, anti-Semites, and sundry racists who have adapted the same harsh identity-politics categories that the woke left uses, and employ them to shape their own thinking and rhetoric. These are people who have no respect for those who disagree, and who give every indication that, should they come to power, they would use it to oppress those who disagree in the same undemocratic and malicious way the woke left does.

As I said in the piece, and repeated on a livestream broadcast last night with Free Press editor Bari Weiss, I don’t care for the term, because it is imprecise. (Mind you, I spoke without knowing much about the intense controversy over the term.) To some, it implies that the Right has the same problem as the Left does with wokeness. Progressives and others who use the term to imply equivalence between woke actors on the Left and their doppelgängers on the right are lying – if only to themselves.

In terms of power, there is no parallel. There is not remotely a parallel. The woke have infiltrated and taken command of nearly all public and private institutions, and have used their power in malignant ways for at least two decades. Nobody on the Right has any power like this, and it’s absurd to say so.

On the other hand, that doesn’t settle the issue. One of the key beliefs of wokeness is that power determines the moral quality of a belief. Back in the 1990s, the black filmmaker Spike Lee denied that black people could be racist because blacks, in his view, are powerless in our society. That’s flat nonsense. Similarly, a white anti-Semite who has been shut out of power is no less bigoted for his powerlessness. He simply can’t use his immoral views to affect society.

His mind, however, remains poisoned. And, as a Christian, I believe his soul is at risk before God. And if he should ever gain power, of any sort, he could do a hell of a lot of damage.

If decent liberals had been brave enough to speak out against leftist identity politics twenty or thirty years ago, and taken strong stands against it, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.

Maybe the liberals of a generation ago were too afraid to offend their own radicals to say anything. We saw this when liberals in power – for example, in university administrations and in media – rolled over for the radicals of the counterculture in the 1960s.

Maybe they feared giving aid and comfort to conservatives. Maybe they thought that the zeal and energy of the woke could be channeled and used to help them gain and increase power.

Maybe they lacked the courage of their own convictions, and wondered if they were out of touch, and didn’t care enough about racism, sexism, transphobia, and the other isms that the woke opposed.

It’s probably some combination of all those things. Whatever the cause, timid liberals allowed their institutions to be conquered by ruthless woke Jacobins who destroyed them, at least morally, and who have left the Democratic Party with no clear way back to sanity.

I don’t want to see my own side, conservatives, corrupted in the same way. As I wrote in the Free Press essay, it’s not hard to see why certain young white men are drawn into radical-right politics. They have grown up in a culture dominated by wokeness, which tells them that everything wrong with the world is their fault – and that has denied them professional and educational opportunities because of their sex, their race, and their politics. And they have not been defended effectively by establishment conservatives, probably because those figures were too afraid of being smeared by the woke as racist, sexists, and what have you.

Radical politics and radical culture speak to alienated people like that. It acknowledges the pain they have suffered from woke injustice. It gives them a sense of community, and solidarity. And it gives them release from the anxiety and oppression of the self-hatred that power holders tell them they ought to be feeling. Finally, it gives them a sense of power, especially by embracing transgressive attacks on those who hate them, and those normies who, out of a misplaced sense of maintaining respectability, would not defend them.

But it is wrong to take up the fight against one form of evil by embracing its mirror image. What concerns me is that some of us on the right may be making the same mistake that those on the left did in the past. In The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt said that totalitarianism triumphed in Germany and Russia in part because too many people who knew better were willing to watch the pillars of civilization crumble because they were having too much fun watching people who had been excluded and oppressed force their way into power.

Are we on the Right who are anti-woke tempted to make the same mistake with the young radicals in our midst? Yeah, I’m afraid we might be. Besides, I personally know people – family members, professors, and others – now grieving that young men they love have been captured by racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of ideology-based hatred. To them, this is not an abstract threat.

That said, I was not aware that the term “woke right” has been weaponized by the activist intellectual Lindsay and others to attack conservatives who are in no way racist, anti-Semitic, totalitarian, or who have any of the other vicious characteristics of the woke left. Maybe that’s my fault. Like I said, I don’t follow that discourse, and quit paying close attention to Lindsay some time ago. (On the other hand, I wonder if those who do pay close attention overestimate his influence. I can’t be sure, but my guess is that normal people who see the term take it in the way I used it in the piece. Notice that I did not attack National Conservatives, Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, or anybody else on or adjacent to the MAGA Right — because I don’t think of them as right-wing wokes. I am one of them; what sense would it have made to denounce myself?)

It was a shock to discover after my essay was published that Lindsay has applied the term to people I admire, and whose politics I share, like the National Conservatism crowd. If they are “woke right,” then I am too. Where could Lindsay possibly be getting this idea?

Reading a sampling late last night of his writing on the topic, it appears that Lindsay believes that any form of conservatism that does not hew unvaryingly to the abstractions of classical liberalism is therefore “woke”. If you believe that nations and peoples exist, and are important to defend, within limits – you’re woke. If you believe that religion is an important fact of human life, and is a necessary part of political thinking and practice (again, within limits) – you’re woke. If you believe that society is anything more than a group of isolated, autonomous, ahistorical individuals – woke, woke, woke.

This is stretching the meaning of wokeness beyond any useful description of reality. By those measures, Edmund Burke would have been a woke right avatar. So would the Founding Fathers. So would just about any actual existing conservative – not just Trump, whose anti-wokeness won him votes from millions of Americans who do not consider themselves to be conservatives, but who wanted to see someone with common sense take power and stop left-wing ideologues.

Lindsay understands as well as anybody why left-wing wokeness is bad, and once again, has done great work illuminating how it works in the psychology of its adherents. But he doesn’t grasp the difference between these left-wing totalitarians and postliberals of the right. Nor does he seem to understand the difference between National Conservatives and white nationalists, or care to understand. If anybody is under the impression that these use of the term “woke right” in my essay implies that I share Lindsay’s critique, let me clear that up now. One more time: I use the term to describe the new racialists and anti-Semites of the right, especially the very online right, who I regard as malicious would-be totalitarians of the same sort I warn against in Live Not By Lies.

It is a term I won’t use again, because I now see that it has been weaponized against people I agree with – people like me. I regret my lack of awareness of how “woke right” has been employed in a discourse I have not followed, and apologize that my use of the phrase brought discredit on people and causes I believe in. A wise friend texted me late last night to say that the problem with “woke right” is that it is used to denounce anyone on the right who disagrees with standard left-liberal and right-liberal views. Contra Lindsay, it is possible to disagree with Francis Fukuyama without being on the side of Nick Fuentes. That same friend informed me that Lindsay used the term to describe J.D. Vance, of all people. J.D. Vance!

This is insane. This is beyond insane: it is vile slander.

What I do not apologize for, and never will apologize for, is denouncing racism, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and crackpot conspiracy theorizing on the right, and the people who are infecting impressionable young minds with it. “Woke Right” is a lousy phrase. We need a better term to describe these people, because they are with us, and gaining a lot of influence among young men.

So far, most institutions and movements of the Right have been good at keeping these bad actors and their influence at bay. Christopher Rufo, the most effective anti-woke activist by far on the right (and, I have just learned, has been a target of Lindsay’s crusade), has shown that we do not need these indecent right-wing extremists to defeat wokeness in power. In fact, the growing strength of the anti-woke, nationalist right is based in large part on its profile as courageous, common-sense conservatives who — unlike their establishment, right-liberal predecessors of the pre-Trump GOP — are not afraid to be smeared as bigots for standing up to the actual bigotries and abuses of power of the woke left.

Twenty years ago, in my writing on various platforms, I began saying to the woke and their liberal fellow travelers that you cannot have identity politics on the Left, valorizing non-white people and granting them special, race-based privileges, without calling up demons on the right. They either didn’t see it – perhaps thinking that all white people were like the milquetoast liberals they knew from campuses and newsrooms – or they were so drunk on the thrill of transgression that they didn’t care. Well, now that demon is here, and it is not the fault of conservatives who warned them.

That said, “we told you so”is not a prayer of exorcism. We on the Right have no choice but to keep battling to cast the evils of wokeness out of our movement and the body politic. But in this new postliberal age, we also have to be active and vigilant against the same evils manifesting quietly, and not so quietly, among us — particularly in the form of Jew-hatred. Because make no mistake: if these people ever gain the kind of power within the right that they have gained within the left, ruin and disaster will follow, and exorcising them and their influence will be next to impossible.

The actual woke right – not the phantoms of James Lindsay’s febrile mind – is small and relatively powerless now. But in a culture as decadent and as unstable as our own, where ideas travel online with the speed of light, we can’t take anything for granted. As I said in the piece, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic teacher in my kids’ school operated under cover of online anonymity, and shielded by the fact that none of his colleagues, or the parents of his students, would ever suspect a nice, respectable man like him of harboring such hatred, to stealthily red-pill his male students. The conservative, and conservative Christian, high school and college teachers I know back in America are beyond shocked by how mainstream anti-Semitism has become among their white male students. They are shocked for the same reason the community at my kids’ school were shocked: none of us are as online as often as young people, and the world of radical-right politics is hidden from us.

Here’s why it matters in the long term for America: Even if we defeat wokeness, the mass atomization, loneliness, contempt for authority (much of it deserved), love of transgression, and disinterest in truth that Arendt said characterized pre-totalitarian society in Russia and Germany – all of it remains with us. And until and unless we can deal meaningfully with those root causes, so does the threat of totalitarianism. It’s well and good to try to figure out how we can stop the hard, racist right. It’s better if we would spend more time trying to discern how we can fix the problems that makes their ideology appealing to young people who are genuinely struggling, and who have been treated badly.

On a more intimate level, we cannot sit back and let our sons be sucked in by this cult. Legions of moms and dads had no idea what bad online actors were doing quietly to their daughters a decade and more ago, when they converted alienated, vulnerable girls to transgenderism. It simply never crossed the parents’ minds that these crazy lions were prowling around online, devouring their daughters — until it was too late. A few years back, here in Eastern Europe, I met a small-town Catholic father who gave his 11-year-old daughter a smartphone for her birthday, so she could be like the other kids in her class. He and the girl’s mother had no idea that their child, browsing online, connected with some trans activists in faraway America. Those activists preyed on this girl’s anxieties, and convinced her she was trans. It had a devastating effect on her mental health, and her parents felt confused and helpless in the face of it.

That mom and dad just didn’t know about the dangers to their child. America, and its cultural pathologies, was very far away from their village. But it was also right there in their daughter’s young hand.

Many of these parents of trans girls got sucked in too, out of fear of losing their daughters. This has a historical parallel. In late Tsarist Russia, many parents shocked by the revolutionary Marxism of their children, who were students, capitulated to Communism out of fear that their kids would reject and abandon them. They did not become Bolsheviks themselves, but they allowed themselves to be neutered in the fight against it, for the sake of keeping the affections of their adult children. It’s worse for parents confronted by a child claiming to be trans, though, because unlike pre-revolutionary Russia, parents confront a culture in which all the institutions have been captured by gender ideology. If the media, corporate America, the state, the military, and everybody else says that transgenderism is good and should be embraced by all decent people, the pressure to conform is difficult to resist.

Could this happen with white nationalism and anti-Semitism on the Right? Yes — and if it does, we will all pay a price. As most of you know, I am from the small-town South, and because I was born three years after the Civil Rights Act, and benefited from having been raised in a broad culture — especially in the media — that strongly rejected racism, I came late to discovering what white supremacy had meant in that place, in an earlier time.

As I have written before, it was a shock to learn, in 2012, about an angry white protest on the courthouse lawn of my own beautiful small town, in 1963, when a black pastor became the first person of color in decades to register to vote. Maybe the most shocking thing about it was the realization that if I had been an adult back then, I would likely have been in that mob, because there was no meaningful cultural pushback against white supremacy outside of the South at that time, and if not, I certainly would not have publicly stood up to it in any way. Why not? Because to have done so would have made any white person an instant pariah.

The Louisiana novelist Walker Percy was a Catholic who denounced segregation in his writing. His daughter Anne told me about the time her father ordered her, her sister, and their mother to hide in the attic one night while he stood in the living room of their house, pistol in hand, watching the Klan burn a cross on their lawn. The ideology of white supremacism was, well, supreme in that place, in that time, and being white did not protect you if you declared yourself an opponent. I have no doubt that if the successors of the Klan in our time came to power, they would treat people — even white Christian conservatives — like me the same way.

The unhinged book The Boniface Option, written by a Christian Nationalist pastor named Andrew Isker, is not a white supremacist text, per se. It correctly identifies and excoriates the insanities of the woke Left. So far, so good. But its tone and content is so rage-filled, combative, and dehumanizing (e.g., calling those who disagree “bugmen,” a term common on the neo-Nietzschean Right) that you cannot finish that book (which I reviewed here) without being deeply unsettled. From my review:

I share Andrew Isker’s disgust with the world as it is. What sets us apart is mostly what to do about it. I say “mostly” because even I, on my angriest days, can’t come close to mustering the rage Isker brings to nearly every page in this book.

Isker is a sharp writer, but an undisciplined one. The choleric contempt suffusing The Boniface Option — henceforth, the Bon Op — is ultimately alienating. For most of the book, I found myself nodding along, saying, “Yeah, he’s right about that.” But over and over, Isker — a young Minnesota pastor who was trained by the ever-combative Douglas Wilson — undermines his case by responding with febrile intensity. Here’s a typical line: "Men with the spirit of holy war within them will be what brings down the idols of this fetid, corpulent, repulsive world."

Gosh. There’s a lot of that in the pages of this short book. The word “disgusting” appears eleven times. The phrase “disgusting world of filth,” three times; the word “hate,” thirty-nine times. You get the feeling that Isker wrote this with trembling fingers, two tics away from a gran mal seizure, and had to summon everything he had to keep himself from agonizing over threats to our precious bodily fluids.

(He kind of does. It is a good thing that Isker expresses concern about the quality of our food supply — I got there in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons — but he suggests in his book that seed oils in our food have sapped testosterone levels, rendering American males into pansy-ass “bugmen.”)

When he published The Boniface Option two years ago, Isker, a burly young Reformed pastor who is part of the Douglas Wilson circle, was more or less on the fringe of right-wing discourse. Not anymore. Two months ago, Tucker Carlson featured Isker on his very popular show. With Isker, you can see a clear parallel to the woke left. The woke left took an evil that ought to concern any decent person — racism — and said that it poses such an overwhelming threat that extremism in fighting it is no vice. If you are a Christian conservative who disagrees with him, either in the entirety of his diagnosis or his plans to fight it, then you are no different than the bugmen of the Left.

(Incidentally, the last time I paid attention to Douglas Wilson, it was when I read his defense of The Boniface Option against my criticism. I was pretty sure that Wilson, who is a very intelligent man, recognized the crudeness of the Isker book for what it was. But I also concluded that he was too worried about fracturing his movement to condemn it. What a joy it was to learn earlier today that Wilson has more recently been courageously outspoken against the creep of anti-Semitism and racism into some churches and organizations in his orbit. This has cost him friends and allies, but he did it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Mad respect to him!)

To a certain kind of person, the rage in Isker’s book can be intoxicating to encounter. He rejects Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s hard-won wisdom — that the line between good and evil passes not between groups, but down the middle of every human heart — and draws the lines of war starkly between Us and Them. That, as Solzhenitsyn learned in the gulag, where he converted to Christianity, is how totalitarianism seizes the minds of its advocates.

Christopher Rufo, a Catholic who is the most effective anti-woke activist by far, has shown that one can score great victories in the fight against this softer form of leftist totalitarianism without losing your mind or your soul. He does so by standing firmly on the principle that Racism Is Wrong, wherever it manifests, and should be confronted and dismantled. He proves that you do not need to embrace white tribalism, anti-Semitism, or any of the pathologies of what I unwisely called the “woke right”. In fact, if he did, it would make him far, far less effective, because ordinary decent people — including morally sane liberals and moderates — would want nothing to do with him.

I understand now why the term “woke right” is so controversial on my side. It’s not just because it is merely imprecise. It is because Lindsay and his allies use it indiscriminately to slander and discredit all people on the Right with whom they disagree. Ironically, this is how the woke Left behaves: making no distinction between actual racists and Jew-haters, and normal people on the Right who do not believe in ideologically abstract liberalism. When I first encountered Lindsay’s writing about the woke Left, I recognized it as truthful and profound. When he warns even today about racial hatred and anti-Semitism on the Right, I am with him.

But that’s not all he does, as I have learned in the last 24 hours. I hate this turn Lindsay has taken, because I respect and value his work, at least in the past. And you know, I don’t really fault a libertarian like him for dissenting from nationalist, postliberal conservatism. But to say that all conservatives like us are no different from the totalitarians of the woke Left is inaccurate, deeply misleading, and malicious. If he were using his analytical framework to lay into prominent radicals of the dissident Right, I would be right there on his side. But to go after NatCon? Matt Walsh? J.D. Vance? Sorry man, but that’s crazy, and slanderous.

Some Lindsay critics have alleged that he is on the autism spectrum, a claim he has not (to my knowledge) addressed. Who knows? And if he is, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a moral fault. But as someone who knows people on the spectrum, I can at least say that the way Lindsay reasons is familiar to me from my interactions with spectrum friends. Autists often have unusual insight into certain problems and phenomena, which allows them to see things that others do not. But they can also get so caught up in the pure logic of their position that they miss important nuances that complicate their black-and-white diagnosis of the problem. And as anyone who has argued with someone on the spectrum knows, the one thing autists rarely if ever say is, “I might be wrong.”

Well, whatever is behind Lindsay’s take on the phenomenon he has labeled the “woke right,” he applies the label in a way that obscures rather than illuminates. Just as it is misleading to label everybody on the Left who opposes racism and the like “woke,” it is misleading to do the same to everybody on the Right who dissents in any way from the doctrines of pure classical liberalism. My friends David Rieff and Tyler Austin Harper are public intellectuals of the non-liberal Left, and they are also strong critics of wokeness. Would Lindsay denounce them as “woke,” in the same way he slams Yoram Hazony, Chris Rufo, and others on the Right as woke? With this reckless strategy, Lindsay and his followers not only slander people who do not deserve their contempt, but also weaken the vital resistance to wokeness in power. I regret having inadvertently aided that campaign through my ignorance of what Lindsay has been up to, and I apologize to people who were hurt and offended by it. If that makes me “woke right” in Lindsay’s judgment, so be it.

For the last time, so it is crystal-clear where I stand: right-wing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and radical identity politics is wrong, and poses a danger to the broader conservative anti-woke movement, in the same way wokeness did and does to ordinary left-liberalism. We on the Right have a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative to stand against it — and we are at times vulnerable to it in the same way that left-liberals were twenty, thirty years ago.

And again, for the last time: all postliberal conservatism is not “woke,” in the way the term is generally understood to apply on the Left. If one makes the mistake of thinking so, one not only smears intellectuals, journalists, and activists who do not deserve it, but one also weakens the fight against the soft totalitarianism that is wokeness. It’s like this: during the Cold War, American anti-communists built strong and effective opposition to Communism in part through alliances with anti-communist liberals and labor leaders. To have called those people on the Left “communist,” as if there were no distinctions to be made among types of left-wing thought, would have been crazy and self-destructive.

It’s like that today in the battle against this new soft totalitarianism, which has marched so destructively through American institutions. Those who, like Lindsay, use the term “woke right” indiscriminately, to label all people on the Right they dislike — to make no real distinction between Nick Fuentes and Matt Walsh, for example — are making the same foolish mistake. I regret that my ignorance of this battle gave aid and comfort to these bad actors. I will never use that term again, and I hope you won’t either.