Here Comes The 'Woke Right' And It Looks A Helluva Lot Like The Woke Left
Brand-new management, same as the last! But the bipartisan UnWoke have the recent accumulated observation to help call out the same-old-same-old
Party while you can, Syria. Ding dong, the bastard’s gone, and Russia’s li’l Putie-Pie is further disabled by losing his Big Orange ally (and now having to stick Bashie and his wife in the spare bedroom for God knows how long!) while Syrians do that deposed-dictator thing and storm the palace.
The liberation process for detested dictators is similar to that of the fall of detested dictatorial ideologies, but the end result is the same: New management takes over and looks much like the last.
America is stepping out, breathing air again, and boldly jumping on X and Bluesky to poke the woke folk. Transnutzis are a little muted, sensing that the jig is up for ‘ladydicks’. And what will the right do with the campus Keffiyeh Klanmaids? Embrace them or turn them over to Matt Gaetz?
Yeah, the sheriff’s back in town after a four-year sabbatical and he’s brought a lot of his friends. AOC’s so terrified she’s removed her pronouns. Is this it? we ask ourselves. Finally? The end of the Woke Reign of (T)Error? Can we all live free and pull the First Amendment out of Anne Frank’s bunker?
Party while you can, America. Yes, let’s celebrate the demise of the Woke Left. But just keep in mind the hootenanny ends on January 20th when the Woke Right rises like insufferable, holier-than-thou zombies from the tainted baptismal pool.
The far right is everything we’ve seen in the Loony Left
Never mind the original meaning of wokeness. Today it’s associated with everything it claimed to fight—racism, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism and, as an added bonus, antisemitism.
Progressive wokeness is about to be replaced by the returning personality cult headed by The Oversized Baby. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m happy to wave bye-bye to evidence-free ideologies consciously embraced by Vice President Harris and cluelessly followed by a President I could tell had no understanding of its dangers. I envision a line of dejected losers exiting the White House on January 20th—a pink-haired nose-ringed gender-confused kid; a Black Lives Matter protester dragging his I Stand With Hamas sign behind him and clutching an IRS audit notice; a man pulling off his wig and tossing it away in anger because Rep. Nancy Mace forced him to use the men’s room; a fauxminist in a Handmaid costume, a seig-heiling Montrealer.
Well okay, maybe not that last one.
But this is only winter break, folks. Donald Trump is no friend of freedom, either. Or science. Or reading. Or free speech. Or the law. And neither are his woke-right supporters. Trump says he’ll go after campus antisemites, but will he go after his own? Are you kidding me? Attack his base? He won’t do it any more than Justin Trudeau, you know, the Governor of Canada, the 51st state!
What the jubilants don’t yet understand is now the metaphorical gunsights turn on all of us. The Reds are returning to power. They’ve been given a clear voter mandate to rule America. Those who dance to celebrate the departure of they/them and obsessive ethnic ingredients lists aren’t yet aware of those straining to turn cancel culture and free speech suppression back on the left. Elon Musk has got their backs!
The Woke Right isn’t much different from the Woke Left. Authoritarianism is non-partisan.
What is the ‘woke right’?
Definitions vary. It’s commonly associated with Christian nationalism and I can see its roots now, fifty years ago when I was a young whippersnapper in Ohio grappling with the weird omnipresent ‘I Found It!’ campaign from the mid-’70s, opening conversations with everyone who wasn’t ‘saved’ by a personal commitment to Jesus.
These were the birth pangs of the modern revived Christian fundamentalist movement, drunk on and then disappointed by Baptist Jimmy Carter, followed by Ronald Reagan, who brought geezer dementia to the White House long before it was cool. Reagan professed Christianity and mused about Revelation being nigh. Stories leaked out of the White House about Reagan allegedly speculating that maybe a nuclear war was God’s fulfillment of the prophecy. This concerned those of us who were in the first act of our lives who didn’t want to end it prematurely in a blazing nuclear holocaust.
I fought conservative politics and Biblical literalist dumbfuckery for the twenty years between the birth of my political consciousness and moving to LiberalWorld Canada (part of its appeal, actually). The God Squad never achieved power as pervasively as the woke cultists today. The grand irony is both sides are using the same formal structure: Christianity, the religion most commonly known and practiced in America, although other religions bear a passing-to-close resemblance to it.
John McWhorter was one of the first to identify the Christian model adopted and adapted by antiracists in his book Woke Racism. The essential elements are:
A rigid adherence to dogma and banishment (‘cancellation’) of heretics, questioners and unbelievers;
Self-appointed arbiters of morality and truth whom McWhorter calls ‘The Elect’;
Reliance on faith-based belief (critical race theory) and dismissal or outright hostility to anyone challenging it with reason, rationalism, or critical thought;
Original sin: White skin, for which the sinners (skinners?) must forever atone, for they can never be truly cleansed of their s(k)ins;
A ‘Day of Reckoning’ akin to Revelation’s ‘End Times’ in which white people will be finally held accountable for their collective sins (not sure who does this since the Woke Cult doesn’t have established leaders or a deity). Maybe we’ll have to kowtow before Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole-Hannah Jones;
‘Clergy’ in the form of fashionable influencers for antiracism (or feminism, transactivism, etc.)
The need to ‘tear it all down’ (white, Western society) and rebuild it from scratch (as God will do after all the sturm und drang of Revelation is fulfilled)
Replace key words and concepts in McWhorter’s analysis of ‘woke racism’ and you’ll find equally religious ‘woke feminism’, ‘woke transactivism’, ‘woke queerism’, ‘woke anticolonialism’, etc.
The Woke Right already laid the foundation for a rigid, dogmatic empire half a century ago but became unseated by TV evangelist sex scandals, violent anti-abortion activism and the rise of a sexy new Democratic President with a charming southern accent. Liberalism arose again, hiking over the failures of Christian fundamentalism. And, as political movements are wont to do, went way too far as their right-wing forbears had done, and ‘progressivism’, a label we all proudly wore twenty years ago (in fact, it was adopted after the Reaganauts turned ‘liberal’ into a negative connotation), has since become its own negative marker, not from the right this time but from its own ugly regressive tendencies and hate speech which actually resemble the worst of the far right.
‘And so it goes,’ as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Each iteration of the resurrection (more religiosity!) of either political canon builds upon the successes and failures of the other, but the essential theological structure remains the same.
What the UnWoke can do
This is just a very brief overview of the Woke Right, which most people have probably never heard of. I expect I’ll be writing about it a lot more in the next four years. It doesn’t fit all right-wingers any more than wokeness describes all left-wingers. It does seem to be emerging as a faction of the far right and will likely encounter resistance from conservatives not prone to religious fanaticism. Less extremist Christians are already speaking out against it, I guess while they can, since woke extremists don’t tolerate dissent for long. This Christian Apologetics article deeply explores the similarly racist, antifeminist, and discriminatory path woke rightness is appropriating from the woke left and discusses how other Christians can challenge these people with the Bible.
You don’t need to be a Christian to challenge the new wokeness, because wokeism is essentially secular. The left has never understood its religious roots. Extremist Christians adapt wokeness now to serve their own purposes, and are already well-schooled in faith-based belief. ‘Literalist’ Christians pick and choose what to believe from the Bible’s countless contradictions and counter-arguments that provide a simplistic way to live for those who prefer not to think too hard about the glaringly obvious questions.
Woke rightness will appeal to the bigots on the right just as liberalism was adapted and transformed into wokeness for the left’s bigots. Rational righters, those who don’t hew to more hard-right views, who ‘lean to the right, but not so far their brains fall out’, will find themselves challenged by these people, and perhaps cancelled, censored, fired, and oppressed just as level-headed liberals and other dissenters have been by the woke left.
We’ve spent the last fifteen years observing, critiquing, and dissecting the woke left, so we have a recent foundation of knowledge to understand exactly what the Woke Right is doing. And fight it.
Many conservatives and liberals aren’t as far apart as their respective extremists, the mainstream media and the flame wars of social media would have us believe. Get non-crazy liberals and conservatives in one room, and they’ll disagree, but also agree on other points. For liberals like myself, we’re exploring conservative ideas that, like anything else, can work well on certain levels as long as they don’t go too far, like any other good idea. Maybe two-parent marriage isn’t so bad after all; maybe porn really has become toxic; and frankly, I’m so tired of hearing so-called liberals tear down my mother country that I’m ready for some mild Old Glory-waving national pride.
Neil Shenvi, the Apologetics website owner, found a spot-on quote that really hits home on what’s been wrong with woke antiracism. Uncomfortably, he quotes a pseudonymous writer at a Southern, far-right wing website rife with ‘White pride’, hysterical accusations of ‘genocide’ and a barfable photo at the end of the About section showing pretty white Southern belles with a quote about ‘fair maidens so pretty’ which I guess tells you all you need to know about wimmin’s place in the return to Dixie they envision. But even racists can sometimes cut to the quick, and I have to admit the author has one bastard of a good point as he calls out Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility:
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.
The anonymous wuss may be a racist asshole, but you’ve got to admit, it’s a bastard of a good point. I wish I’d thought of it.
It shows you that even people we would never invite to dinner can still produce occasionally what the French call a bon mot: A witty or trenchant remark. The author notes that the woke left also do their ideological enemies a favor by resurrecting old art and writings of the Hated Old White European dudes, “digging up the gems of our ancestors for us and placing them on platters before our eyes.”
Touché again, Monsieur le Raciste.
As I lamented in my earlier article Is There Any Real Joy In Learning Anymore? today’s students will never be introduced to Voltaire, as I was in college. Maybe that’s how folks will now be introduced to the beauties, and not just the faults, of Western civilization: Through their worst critics, directing our attention to the works they most want us not to read.
So I guess the Woke Left is good for something. So too, however unconsciously, may be the Woke Right.
When I’m not wondering why the political pendulum has to swing so damn far whichever way it’s headed, and why humans can’t seem to settle on a happy medium of compromise somewhere, I help women and others reclaim their power on Grow Some Labia.
I am so with you on this. I fled from the religious right straight into the arms of the left where I was comfortable as a centrist liberal for decades - when they still championed free speech. Only to be faced with the regression of the left into a quasi- totalitarian mess of post-modernist theory over the past decade. And now, possibly, a resurgent conservative moral majority.
My Substack reading has indicated a growing chorus of people advocating for a return to shaming women’s sexuality and proscribing our roles to breeding and homemaking. Even discussions about rolling back suffrage. Even complaints that we are stealing men’s jobs. It’s a horror show.
I have concluded recently that I am not left nor right. I am pro-humanist and anti-authoritarian.
I mostly align these days with heterodox liberals and non-religious conservatives and sometimes libertarians when they aren’t screeching against abortion too loudly - but I have no true political home at present.
I guess we’ll see what happens.
The woke left was always a reaction to the identity politics of the right.