The membership criteria of the modern Left is unquestioning conformity to the logic of liberal progressivism. All non-whites are oppressed; gender is a social construct; and human nature is a Blank Slate shaped by education, and economic circumstances. Technology, state power, and consciousness-raising cultural products must be used to usher us into an egalitarian utopia. As a result, the Right has become a refugee camp for heterodox thinkers. 

Yet cracks are showing in this anti-Woke coalition. Charges of Wokeness are now being levelled at various figures by politically homeless liberals. The problem is, the term “Woke Right” is ill-defined, self-contradictory, and a tactical blunder for an anti-Woke coalition to use.

My friend, Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin, was a prominent early adopter of the term “Woke Right”. In February, Kisin accused Tucker Carlson of right-wing wokeness, after Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kisin suggested that Carlson’s career, covering the corruption in the American government, led him to reactively romanticise Putin’s Russia. In an interview with the website UnHerd, Kisin said:

Tucker has an ideological position, which he’s come to after many, many years of criticising Western leaders, which is to see the good in the other and not your own society.

Kisin compared Carlson to George Bernard Shaw: the playwright and infamous apologist for the crimes of Stalinism. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1931, Shaw penned a letter to The Manchester Guardian in 1933, admonishing them for “the revival of the old attempts to represent the condition of Russian workers as one of slavery and starvation, the Five-Year Plan as a failure, the new enterprises as bankrupt and the Communist regime as tottering to its fall.”

We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR.  Some of us travelled throughout the greater part of its civilized territory. We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair of betterment as are accepted as inevitable and ignored by the press as having “no news value” in our own countries.  Everywhere we saw hopeful and enthusiastic working-class, self-respecting free up to the limits imposed on them by nature and a terrible inheritance from tyranny and incompetence of their former rulers, developing public works, increasing health services, extending education, achieving the economics independence of woman and the security of the child and in spite of many grievous difficulties and mistakes which or social experiments involve a first (and which they have never concealed nor denied) setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it.

Shaw wasn’t the only Western socialist enamoured with the version of Soviet Russia that the Stalin regime presented to them. Playwright J.B. Priestly had An Inspector Calls — mandatory on secondary school syllabuses across Britain — performed first in Moscow and Leningrad, in 1945. Walter Duranty, reporting on the Holodomor in 1933, wrote “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” in the New York Times. Duranty and other intellectuals were the “Useful idiots” who helped hide the fact that between four and ten million Ukrainian kulaks were raped, tortured, and starved to death; and many more political prisoners disappeared into the Gulag prison system. 

Being charitable to Carlson, his argument was: if Russia can run a transport network without ugly architecture and violent inebriated vagrants, then the urban decay in American cities is a choice. It is not, as Jon Stewart insisted, the “literal price of freedom”. This decision has been made for us: by socially liberal politicians and institutions like the UN, who advocate decriminalising drug use, homelessness, and the freedom to knowingly give someone AIDS. Yes, his amazement at coin-slots in shopping carts and cheap groceries (more expensive in real terms compared to the average Russian income) undermined his point. But it isn’t “Woke” to suggest that social liberalism leads to shortcomings that non-liberal societies do not suffer from — and, besides, he wasn’t advocating Chekist rule and the invasion of Mexico.

Calling Carlson a “Useful Idiot” is also inaccurate. As Larry Siedentop explained, the etymology of idiot is derived from the ancient Greek for “private person”. City states formed from households, which worshipped ancestors at the hearth, coming together to form tribes and worship the same gods. There was no distinction between private and public. One’s identity was as a member of a family, a faith, a tribe, and a city state. To be stateless was unthinkable — idiotic. Carlson isn’t casting off his identity as an American; nor seeking to import an ideology to reconstitute his society by revolutionary means. He is not aiming at the abolition of faith, family, and flag in the acid of egalitarian Enlightenment ideology. Rather, Carlson’s critique of America’s corrupt ruling class seeks to restart the fire in the hearth of America, and undo the feeling of statelessness imposed upon him by decades of dishonest governance.

But none of this discourse provides a definition of what Woke Right means. Telegraph journalist Michael Murphy has suggested the following: an interest in revising historical facts to depict one’s identity as an aggrieved constituency; and subsequently acting as if in possession of hidden knowledge. This shares elements with Kisin’s definition: “an ideology obsessed with victimhood identity and the falsification of history to suit today’s political agenda” — but in a right-wing way.

Both definitions were inspired by another controversy featuring Carlson: when history podcaster Darryl Cooper claimed Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. While Cooper’s historical errors have been catalogued, both men made fair critiques of the post-War liberal consensus. While Churchill was right to vanquish the Nazis, the institutions he established with the aim of upholding peace in Europe have resulted in, for example, an inability to deport millions of foreign criminals. Is it Woke to reevaluate the merits of the post-War consensus, and urge elements of it be revised? Are we meant to believe that Churchill, if he was somehow resurrected, would welcome the effects of the ECHR?

Perhaps the perceived victimhood is the problem. Mathematician, author and swordsman James Lindsay wrote:

A giveaway trait of the Woke Right is a victimhood-based identity politics, just like the Woke Left. The victim groups are whites, Christians, men, and straight people, and it’s roughly intersectional in how it works. Woke Rights believe in leaning into identity politics.

There is no problem with portraying oneself as disadvantaged if one has in fact been disadvantaged. Laws like Britain’s Equality Act (2010) and America’s affirmative action practices have made it legal to discriminate against straight white males in hiring, college admissions, and in speech online. Pre-Musk Twitter banned “hate speech” against non-whites, and aggressively policed misgendering, but had no such policies for caucasians and cisgender heterosexuals. When the UK’s state-funded broadcaster considers describing imported ethnic minorities as “people of the global majority”, to belittle the host population, is it not pertinent to adopt an identity politics on behalf of the host population in self-defence? If anything, identity politics seems to be the inevitable consequence of ethnically diverse societies; with debates over shared values only possible within the confines of homogenous nations with a shared cultural frame of reference.

Lindsay is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, who values the Constitution’s checks and balances on executive power above all else. However, despite decrying “Carl Schmittians” (including me), Lindsay is happy to exercise sovereignty against his political enemies. He supported Trump when he promised to “remove the Jew haters who do nothing to help our country.” (As do I, by the way.) Lindsay has listed among “telltale signs” of Woke Rightism “blaming things on the Jews or doing edgy Nazi memes”. Tucker Carlson is guilty of neither offence; nor is Auron MacIntrye, an author and podcaster that Lindsay has dubbed “Woke Right Inner School Adept”. 

According to Lindsay, the Woke Right also entails a plot by Theosophists who run the UN via the Fetzer Institute, who have embedded occult practices in schools through Social-Emotional Learning, and have convinced Donald Trump to praise the Archangel Michael in order to summon a Zoroastrian demon named Ahriman to usher us into the Age of Aquarius. If you’re confused, do not be alarmed: it only means that you are still sane. One wonders if Lindsay’s long-standing contempt for organised religion motivates this policing of boundaries of what is acceptable on the Right, rather than studious research and deep thought.

In the absence of a solid definition of Woke Right, what say we return to the definition of Woke proper, and see if it fits? 

Eric Kaufmann defines Woke as making “sacred totems [out] of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.” Literal communist Ash Sarkar agrees: “Woke culture is […] the redistribution of power, wealth, and land along race, gender, and class lines.” (A tautology when Sarkar redefines “working class” to mean “diverse” students.) Intersectionality, oppressor/oppressed, cultural Marxism… All these terms overlap. But Tucker Carlson phrased it most pithily: Woke is “LGBT Race Communism”. This explains the seemingly contradictory coalition “Queers for Palestine”. They are revolutionaries for the abolition of family, faith, and national identity — otherwise known as Idiots.

The challenge for Carlson’s critics is to dispute this working definition of Woke, in order to make the pejorative also stick to him. But doing so only weakens our ability to oppose such a heinous ideology, in order to litigate personality clashes on our side. That seems an imprudent trade to make. 

Woke Right begins to look like an attempt by yesterday’s Left to tone police, gatekeep, and redefine the Right

Altogether, Woke Right seems to mean: adopting contrarian opinions to mainstream narratives, and adopting identity politics in a defensive posture against the progressive attack on the history, culture, and statehood of the peoples of the US and Europe. Both transgress upon liberal principles in different ways. But clickbait and bad takes are neither the monopoly of Woke, nor the Right. And, left to our own devices, nobody would want nor need to play identity politics. However, when the (former) First Minister of Scotland is decrying how white, and therefore evil, all institutions are, it is perfectly legitimate to call this out as an act of anti-white racism. Were he to say such a thing about Jews, then Kisin, Carlson, Lindsay and I would all be appalled in unison. 

Without a clear definition, Woke Right begins to look like an attempt by yesterday’s Left to tone police, gatekeep, and redefine the Right. That way, heterodox liberals position themselves as the sensible centre between two extremes, and maintain their positions of intellectual credibility no matter how far the Overton Window shifts. Antagonism will arise from left-behind-liberals seeking to rearrange the furniture on their new political side, without examining how their first principles rendered them vulnerable to Woke subversion in the first place. 

I understand the phenomenon that some are, in good faith, attempting to distance themselves from. I don’t like anonymous neo-Nazis polluting my “For You” page either. But I encourage my contemporaries to revise their criteria, and come up with a better term next time.