Who or What Is the ‘Woke Right,’ and Is It Ascendant in American Conservative Circles?

President 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 laborers. 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.” “It’s a term that’s being pushed by people who could probably be described as classically liberal — still within the sort of rightwing framework, rightwing umbrella — but it’s being used sort of as a means to attack and smear any policy positions of conservatives, populists, you name it,” the president of the New York Young Republican Club, Gavin Wax, tells the Sun. “I think it’s very astroturfed,” he says, using a term meant to describe a fake grassroots movement.Many people on the right say the woke right label is nothing more than a rebranded insult for the disreputable fringes of the far right. A Republican congressman from Texas, Dan Crenshaw, first used the term in 2022 to insult MAGA firebrands like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who he said rail against “the establishment” and “RINOs” with no ideological substance to back it up. The label didn’t catch on then.“Woke right is just ‘alt right’ 2.0. It means nothing. It’s just a ‘you’re my enemy label,’” libertarian-leaning political commentator and podcaster, Tim Pool, posted to X.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 Ms. 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.”

Who or What Is the ‘Woke Right,’ and Is It Ascendant in American Conservative Circles?

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