James Lindsay’s Origin Of The “Woke Right”

The label "woke right" has been appearing more and more in political debates, particularly within intra-right circles but also from the center-left looking in. Its rise has coincided with the post-October 7 political landscape in America, where the Israel-Palestinian conflict is no longer viewed monolithically on the right.

So, what does the label mean? And why have prominent figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens been accused of it?

James Lindsay is an author, mathematician, and cultural critic known for his critiques of communism, social justice movements, and postmodernism. He frequently speaks on the influence of ideology in education and culture, and his work can be found at New Discourses.

This interview was edited for clarity.

Ari: I want to talk about the "woke right" label. I know you have theories on where it came from and where we are now. I’ve heard people apply that label to folks like Tucker Carlson. How does that work?

James: There's a lot to unpack. This is a new phenomenon. I didn't come up with the term "woke." I mostly like it because A) it describes them correctly, but B) it's driving them crazy. It's almost like they're branding themselves with the term by overreacting to it with the woke left.

I used to call it the iron law of woke overreaction, which is if they overreact to something, you hit a target, and they're totally overreacting to this term, "woke." They're freaking out about it. Alright, it sticks.

I've heard a couple of other terms that are pretty good: "Family-friendly Socialism" is another one; "Red Conservatism" is good because of the outright flirting with edgy Hitler memes. Some people have suggested the "Woke Reich," which is kind of funny also, but that one's a little more niche.

I don't think the phenomenon is limited to this anti-Israel sentiment, which isn't just anti-Israel sentiment. They often claim that they're anti-Zionist but not necessarily anti-Israel, but we know that those are the same thing.

Many of them are outright anti-Jew, which is not the same thing, and they're using this more benign label of anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or just asking questions or just noticing things to hide the fact that they're engaging in rank antisemitism. I understand that that's one of those terms that they've poisoned — you say "antisemitism," so we won't use it. They're engaging in rank Jew hate.

But that's not what actually defines the woke. Woke is a conspiracy theory about how society works. Woke means "woke up." You woke up to the conspiracy theory of how society works.

It's funny that these people call themselves "red-pilled." We've all used that word kind of positively. We've woken up to the fact that the news was lying — fake news. Donald Trump saying "fake news," that the political machine was saying one thing and doing another.

We have had a major mass awakening over the last four to five years, especially ten years. But Michael Malice says you're supposed to take a red pill, not the whole bottle. Some of these people have taken a lot of red pills, and I think some of them actually were black.

They've actually doomed out, and they've adopted a conspiracy theory that people like me are excluded from the good life by some other group. That's a problem. That frequently takes the form of Jews. It frequently takes the form also of this broad left coalition, which has more truth to it.

Ari: The MAGA movement targets the establishment, the Deep State, and globalists in general. It's not a dissimilar political framing: there is a class of people that is responsible for our ills. Is that part of what morphed into the woke right?

James: So it's one thing to recognize that our governments have become tyrannical, just like the colonists in the 1770s recognized that King George was acting in a tyrannical way. You can say, well, you hear these memes; they put a two percent tax, and the colonists went to war. That's not actually why they went to war.

It wasn't over a two percent tax. It was over the fact that they had a tax and they had no representation. If you remember, taxation without representation was the thing. We don't want the tax. And they were told, you don't have a voice in the tax; you don't have any political recourse.

And fine, we'll be our own country then, where we will have our own political recourse, and the people are going to be able to say a thing or two about what the government does. So, it's one thing to recognize a tyrannical government system. Our governments throughout the West have become tyrannical.

They're operating a model that's derived from the Chinese Communist model that was developed in the '80s by Deng Xiaoping. A lot of people don't know the history there, but it's a hybrid communist and fascist model. That's what China runs today.

We have the ESG and sustainable development goals from the United Nations and World Economic Forum and BlackRock that are doing the same thing to the West, bit by bit, by this kind of public-private partnership thing, right? So awakening to that, realizing that's happening in real-time and is actually the cause of a lot of the dysfunction, does not mean going woke, right?

Woke means believing that this thing is specifically designed to keep people with your particular demographics or philosophy out of the conversation, right?

Ari: Is who is being targeted versus who is doing the targeting the critical part here?

James: It's critical that the point of the apparatus is to silence people. I don't want to say people who look like us, but in a lot of cases, that's what it is. The goal is to make people think in terms of identity groups or groups cobbled together by a common philosophy. And what do I mean by philosophy?

I'm being very generous. I mean fascism. A lot of these guys say, "We've discovered the true conservatives that have been taken off the table." And who are they talking about? Julius Evola — fascist; Carl Schmitt — Crown Jurist of the Third Reich; Thomas Carlyle — the father of fascism, also considered to be the first Maoist before Mao.

So, who are they talking about? They're talking about totalitarians, authoritarians. They're talking about Alasdair MacIntyre. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the big guys that they look to. Alasdair MacIntyre was an anti-Stalinist communist who converted to Catholicism and decided that modernity itself had to be destroyed.

So it's not the bourgeoisie that's the problem; it's the modern era itself. They said that Marx was wrong about wanting to continue the benefits of the modern era.

So these are the kinds of philosophers that they've rediscovered. And they're just noticing that there are Jews in positions of power; therefore, there's apparently “Jewish power,” which is a leap. But they're also just noticing that the Constitution has already failed. They're post-liberty.

They call themselves post-liberal because nobody likes liberalism anymore, due to a lot of confusion and the way that people who call themselves liberals have been acting for the last 100 years.

But the fact of the matter is, they are post-liberty. They believe that if people are allowed to say and think the wrong things, then because they have too much freedom, societal dysfunction will arise.

So they need people like themselves to be put into power to control what people say and think. And then we will have a better Commonwealth or common good that emerges. And so they want to enforce their own vision of virtue, their own vision of society, on society itself. And they want to move beyond liberty.

So this is not the same thing as saying, "Hold on. Our government is tyrannical and we don't have liberty. We want our liberty back."

If I run a corporation, I don't want to fill out all the ESG boxes and be told how I have to use my private property. I want to use my private property, my capital, to do the business that I have, whether it's making cell phones or hamburgers; it doesn't matter.

I want to be able to make what I'm making, to deliver to my customers the best that I can, grow my business, and all the things that go into that, right? And I don't need some stakeholder council, or whatever they call themselves, deciding, "Well, cows fart too much, so your burgers are going to have to be made out of lab-grown meat because, you know, cow farts are going to destroy the planet."

And so these are two different things: people like me need to be in power, and when people like me are in power, everything will be better. That's woke. We need to get back to unleashing liberty.

Ari: Are there any figures spearheading this woke right mindset into mainstream conservatism?

James: It depends on what you call mainstream. Let's say Candace Owens. Is she mainstream? She's very popular and clearly pushes the woke right line.

You asked me specifically about Tucker Carlson a little bit ago. I think he elevates the woke right line. I don't know if he's woke right; I know he's a Pat Buchanan Paleo-conservative. There's a lot of overlap between those.

I'm not 100 percent clear with him, but he pushes an awful lot of this "actually, America's really the problem" kind of mentality. That's the conspiracy theory.

And then you have characters. One of the biggest propagandists for the woke right line, with these philosophers I was naming in particular, is Auron McIntyre. He's not mainstream, but he's very popular in his niche. He's on The Blaze, which is a big channel within conservative politics.

Is he mainstream? I don't know. You have these smaller outlets within these Christian nationalist spheres. Not to be rude, I actually say it as a term of endearment. The Christian world is like a bubble, right? I call it Narnia because it's actually a term of endearment.

Actually, it’s a very big constituency. I mean, there's, what, 40 million evangelicals in the United States? It's a lot of people. You have characters that are significant within that movement who are pushing a very hard line Christian nationalism that is based in ethnonationalism.

Their definition of national is the same definition that Stalin gave in 1913 in Marxism and the National Question, which he derived from German folk nationalism. This is the same definition of national that defined national socialism — nazism — later. A lot of people don't know the history.

We know that Hitler was a National Socialist. Lenin referred to Stalin as a National Socialist because his view of socialism was not this broad internationalist thing. It was about looking at the different nationalities – Georgian, the various nationalities within the Caucasus, the Tartars, and all these different minority nationalities in the Soviet Union, and then into the Eastern Bloc.

How are we going to take all of these different nations of people and put them under one Soviet Federation? He was very interested in that national question, and Lenin let him work on it. Then Lenin died, and Stalin took over with it. He created a program called Korenizatsiya to implement it.

He and Lenin did that together. This national socialism was not trivial in inspiring Hitler's model for how socialism should be done. Hitler studied Marx; Hitler was familiar with Stalin and his ideas and what the Soviet Union had been doing.

Hitler believed he was the executor of the correct view of Marxism. He said he was going to do Marxism but without all of the Talmudic influences that had spoiled it.

Ari: He wanted to get as far away from the cultural elements of progressivism or Marxism — and went as far as possible in the opposite direction.

James: That's right. So the basic difference between communism and fascism, and we could get into a lot of them, is that the communists say there's a system of oppression we need to overthrow for the good of mankind because it's evil, and we'll be the ones who are going to do it right.

And then the fascists come along and say there's a system of oppression that's actually what made society good, so we're going to enforce the system of oppression, and we're going to be the ones who do it.

So they're not the same, but they're the same, right? There's a central group of people who are the only ones who are woke enough, or, as the Nazis called themselves, "Er wachtet." In German, "er wacht" means awake, woke. The Nazis literally called themselves woke.

And so, there's a certain group of people who are "er wacht" enough to be able to guide society to where it's supposed to be, which is either to try to obliterate, through basically magical means that never work, the system of oppression or the hierarchy of society, or to reify and, in fact, deify, the system of oppression and hierarchy that defines society.

That's the difference. It's “oppression bad” on the communist side and “oppression good” on the fascist side, but otherwise, it's the same.

Ari: How do you identify the "woke right?”

James: We're gonna use the woke left as our starting point. You understand them. They're out there. It's all identity politics.

So we've gotta care about racial minorities. We've gotta care above all else, right? If it's a clear two-tiered system — racial minorities, sexual minorities, trans, the whole thing — and we know they act badly.

They do cancel culture, they smear people, they lie; the ends justify the means. Now imagine that you had people who were calling themselves conservatives, who act exactly the same way, and they care about different identity groups, like straight white men who are Christian, right to the exclusion of everybody else.

And then the woke left, they have all these people that they blame — it's white people's fault — and they want to keep black voices out. Or it's heteronormativity, and they want to keep queer voices out. And then we come over to the woke right, and we have the same thing.

There's a “system of Jewish power” or there's a “system of post-liberal consensus”, where the true conservative voices, like ours or the Christian voices, are not allowed to be heard. That which is most true is that which you're not allowed to say because the power says you're not allowed to talk about this.

That's why they're woke, because they act woke. But if we wanted to get deeper, if the conversation continued, we could talk about why they act the same way, which is they've adopted the same awakened, woke air, VOC mindset.

Ari: Is it possible this is also reactionary? The Left is spearheading the white guilt idea, and the woke right is just responding to it.

James: Yeah, so they're just reacting in the same way, absolutely. By using them, they are becoming the thing that the Left wants.

Here's what's funny, though, because reactionary tends to mean radically conservative. Then we’ve got this other term, progressive, that's radically left — both Marxism and this woke right thing, woke left and woke right. In a way, they're both progressive, and they're both reactionary at the same time.

I just talked about the guy Alasdair MacIntyre, right? He was a Stalinist and became an arch-conservative. What does he want to do? What was Marx wrong about? It was that Marx didn't go far enough. His critiques were right, but he didn't go far enough.

He had to obliterate modernity all the way, right? But that means Marx wanted to go back in time. Part of his criticism of liberalism and capitalism was that it deposed the feudal era. So actually, Marxism is a return movement.

We need to return to when we were living in harmony in tribes, where everybody shared, and there was no sense of private property. It's a deep return movement. So Marxism is actually reactionary and twisted around to become progressive.

On the other hand, these people in the woke right are post-liberty or post-liberal. They're saying, well, liberalism had its time in history, and now it's time to move on. It had internal contradictions that have now come to light, just like Marxism says capitalism has internal contradictions that have come to bear.

It has internal contradictions that have now come to the fore, and we're going to progress to the next stage in society, which is going to be post-liberal. So it's progressive. They have a progressive view of society through their reaction.

They're reacting to what's going on. Now, that's the reactionary part, but their view is actually progressive. And you know what they tell me when they argue with me? James, you're just clinging to the past. History is moving forward.

They don't come out and say, "Do you want to be on the right side of history?" But history is moving forward with or without you; that's the same. So it turns out that they're both progressive and reactionary. It sounds contradictory.

They're reacting to what is and saying that it's bad, but they both have a progressive vision for where they want society to go, and it's just under their control versus the other person’s control.

Ari: It's fascinating to see how you described it. On the spectrum of right and left, they merge.

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