The Boomer Establishment Is Weaponizing “Woke” to Maintain Power

James Lindsay first started pushing “woke right” just before and after the 2024 election. Lindsay did great work attacking communism and “woke” culture, so I wanted to see what he was getting at. I watched his video and did a podcast about “Woke Right” in November 2024 with CB Robertson to discuss it.

I could see what he meant, but concluded that “woke right” was wrong-headed and unhelpful. I figured it would go away.

I expected Lindsay to get shot down by every faction of the right, and he has. He’s lost a ton of credibility, goodwill, and trust by pushing it. No one who knows anything about the right is buying it.

But “woke right” isn’t going away.

I think you’re going to hear a lot more about the “woke right” in the future, so it’s important to understand why it is being promoted.

“Woke right” isn’t based on an argument made in good faith. It was never meant to describe anything accurately or be accepted by anyone legitimately right-of-center.

“Woke right” weaponizes widespread disgust with all things “woke” to chill speech and put anyone who asks questions or advocates ideas that are unfriendly to the socially left-wing neocon establishment or the “post-WWII consensus” in a box together.

“Woke right” is meant to take the place of “Alt-Right” and mean “the bad people who good people don’t want to be associated with.” But instead of linking “the bad people” with Nazis, a link that has lost all of its damning power due to overuse by the left, it aims to connect “the bad people” with the unhinged, tyrannical left that terrorized Americans from 2014 to 2024.

The purpose of “woke right” is essentially conservative in the least ideological way. It’s meant to prevent meaningful change and maintain the status quo by manipulating moderates and MAGA supporters who fled the Democratic Party because of the “woke left” to socially isolate a wide range of incompatible and competing groups on the right as if they were one group with one set of beliefs.

“Woke right” makes a little more sense when you realize that it all started with…

A Sheepdog Named Dan

The phrase “woke right” appears to be the invention of former Navy SEAL and Congressman Dan “Coriolanus” Crenshaw.

He first started using “woke right” in 2021-2022. But Crenshaw wasn’t talking about some Gnostic Marxist awokening the way James Lindsay would explain it. He was just throwing political mud.

Listen here at 12:15…

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/23/dan-crenshaw-texas-tribune-festival/

Crenshaw was clapping back at people who call him a “RINO,” “globalist,” and the “establishment.” Dan was elected in 2018, but he is a Bush-era Republican, not part of the reformist MAGA movement. He hates “populism” and guys like Tucker Carlson. Crenshaw wanted to characterize anyone who criticized what DOGE later clearly revealed to be an obscenely bloated and corrupt Federal bureaucracy as being just as much of an adolescent contrarian crackpot as anyone on the far left. He claimed to be taking aim at the “people who just want to put on a Jersey and scream at the other side,” though his frequent meltdowns on X would seem to place him squarely in that group.

Notably, he did seed the idea that the “woke right” could be made up former members of groups like QAnon and the Alt-Right—groups of people who had already been identified as “dangerous” by the mainstream media and targeted by law enforcement for spreading views that were unacceptable to…the “establishment.”

Many of the military and wannabe/coulda been military types who reflexively pedestalize guys with Crenshaw’s background like to think of themselves as “sheepdogs.” It’s a terrible metaphor for soldiers and policemen popularized by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. Crenshaw has often referred to himself as a “sheepdog” in posts, speeches, and interviews.

The “sheepdog” is supposed to evoke a brave protector, but also shows how these men sometimes like to imagine themselves as being of a different species than the people they have sworn to protect. There’s subtle contempt and disdain built into the metaphor.

These self-proclaimed “sheepdogs” also never seem to ask or explain why the farmer wants them to protect the sheep. I’m no farmer, but it’s my understanding that a farmer wants the sheepdog to protect the sheep so that he can either fleece or slaughter them—not “for their own good.” The sheep are the farmer’s property.

So, perhaps Dan truly is a “sheepdog,” and he is just protecting the farm system and the farmer’s interests.

Good boy.

Features of Wokeness

We didn’t hear much more about eyepatch McCain’s sweet rhetorical confection until the vampiric Konstantin Kisin appropriated it to attack Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin. Then, in October 2024, at the very moment that the political tide had clearly turned and the “woke left” seemed to be on its way out, James Lindsay, who made his career attacking the “woke left,” started sounding the alarm about the “woke right.”

So, let’s explore some of the features of the “wokeness” that Americans rejected and address potential overlaps with movements on the right.

Revealed Truth

Lindsay did a masterful job of presenting “wokeness” as a kind of post-Marxist religious movement that claims to know a secret, revealed truth that only the initiated can receive and understand through proper “education.”

There are, in fact, strong similarities between the “gnostic”/religious elements in woke culture and antisemitic culture, which is one of the elements that “woke right” seeks to contain. Antisemitism is basically a conspiracy theory, and anyone who believes in ANY kind of “conspiracy theory”—whether it eventually turns out to be true or not—could be accused of claiming to know some sort of hidden history or esoteric truth.

There are tons of conspiracy theories on the right and left. Unfortunately, since 2020, too many conspiracy theories on the right have turned out to be conspiracy facts. Alex Jones was right more often than any normie would have liked.

While there are many crazy conspiracy theories—like “flat earth,” for instance—it’s disingenuous to call them all “woke” by default. People can evaluate them individually on their own merits. Otherwise, you’re comparing anyone who questions any popularly accepted truth to a left-wing movement that emerged in 2014.

I guess Galileo was “woke.”

Woke is Gay

People on the left positively self-identified as “woke.” They were proud of being “woke.”

But, in 2024, when Lindsay and Kisin revived “woke right,” it was becoming clear that Americans were done with “woke.” The “woke” were becoming a joke, especially among young people.

Today, to many and possibly most Americans, calling something “woke” is like calling it “gay.” Not in the sexual sense, but in the casual, derogatory way that “gay” means “ridiculous.”

“Woke” means “obnoxious, delusional, melodramatic, spoiled, attention-seeking, and prissy.”

Unlike the “woke” left, no one on the right actually identifies as “woke right.”

In this context, “woke right” is an insult with the intellectual depth of “I know you are, but what am I?” just as Crenshaw originally intended.

Woke is Zealotry

One of the characteristics of wokism was the strong, borderline religious beliefs of the woke.

“Woke” could easily be used to shout down anyone who has a passionate belief about anything.

Anyone who isn’t a lukewarm Nietzschean Last Man—anyone who cares too much about anything—could be described as being “woke” whether they are right or wrong.

Calling someone “woke” is effectively like saying, “you’re no better than a screaming purple-haired lesbian who believes that men can have babies.”

But zealotry didn’t emerge in 2014. The woke weren’t the first people to say a ridiculous thing over and over again until they believed it, and others felt compelled to pretend they believed it too.

Black Lives Matter also wasn’t the first movement to turn terrible human beings into saints for political reasons.

Woke is Manufactured Expertise

The “woke” movement walked hand-in-hand with lying experts and manufactured areas of expertise.

People all over America were forced to listen to “JEDI” (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) and DEI gurus at work and at school. They sat through mandatory videos and participated in little struggle sessions (often referred to as “training”) where “experts” told them when they were supposed to believe about race, gender, and sexuality. These “experts” were just people—often people with a lot of problems of their own and rent-seekers from token groups—who had acquired degrees and certificates in repeating and disseminating Marxist propaganda. These “experts” manipulated goodwill and empathy on one hand, while threatening social ostracism and financial ruin with the other if people didn’t repeat the correct “truths” or use the right pronouns.

This absurdity peaked and was eventually exposed by the excesses of the trans and BLM movements. When the “experts” are telling you that men can get pregnant and some women have penises, what is their “expertise” worth?

The same institutions that pumped out these fake experts also “trained” the health experts who lied to everyone during COVID-19 and the climate change educators who wanted everyone to get in the pods and eat the Impossible Burgers.

People are talking about “black fatigue” right now, but Americans also have “expertise fatigue.”

“Expert” has become, for many, synonymous with “professional liar.” This isn’t fair to people who have legitimate expertise, and we do need experts, but people have legitimate trust issues with anyone who claims to be an expert.

We saw this with reactions to the Douglas Murray vs. Dave Smith debate on Rogan a few months ago. Right now, many people would rather listen to some comedian who is passionate about an issue and did his own research than someone who has been designated as an expert and appears to have been “sent” as a messenger to disseminate the “correct” truths.

I don’t think any groups on the right could currently be accused of having an army of designated “expert” truthsayers comparable to what the “woke” left or DC establishment has at its disposal.

Woke is Totalitarianism

What ultimately broke “woke” is that people were tired of being told what they were allowed to do and say and read and believe. And this is why “woke” collapsed in America first, and anti-woke became part of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Americans are a constitutionally ornery people who are naturally distrustful of authority and historically do not like being told what to do.

And the “woke” movement was full of petty tyrants who wanted to control what you were allowed to say and do and eat and drink and travel and where you were allowed to live and who you had to be friends with. They even wanted to tell you who you were supposed to be attracted to and who you would have sex with if you weren’t such a bigot.

After a decade of being emotionally blackmailed and institutionally controlled by these totalitarians, Americans didn’t necessarily come to any consensus about “woke” issues so much as they collectively said, in truly American fashion: “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.”

The most legitimate concern I see being voiced about what is being called the “woke right” is that there are people and movements within it that do want to control every aspect of our lives. This is essentially an invocation of the “horseshoe theory” of politics, which holds that at the extreme ends, the left and right are more or less the same. This theory predates and has nothing to do with “wokeness.”

The “woke” totalitarians of the left and the potential totalitarians of the right are working from such totally different philosophical foundations and assumptions that anyone even remotely familiar with them should be ashamed of themselves and feel sleazy for trying to portray them as being “essentially” the same. It’s intellectually dishonest, and any “intellectual” who uses “woke right” deserves to have their credibility completely destroyed. Guys like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson understand the nuances of philosophy far too well to get a pass on this kind of sloppiness. They’re both too smart for this, which is why people are correct to treat their “woke right” framing with suspicion.

There may be people on “both” sides who want to control people, but the reasons why they want to control people and their desired ends are completely different. And I used scare quotes for “both” sides here because the reasons, assumptions, and desired ends are where “the right” fragments into warring and incompatible factions. They are not guided, like the left, by religious Marxism disguised as liberalism.

Some Christians, for instance, would also very much like to control every aspect of your life. But American Christianity includes libertarian hippie Christians, Mormons, megachurch grifters, Catholics, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lutherans, Methodists, and so on. I think I’ve seen at least two cowboy-themed churches in my neighborhood. There is no “unified Christianity” in the United States.

Generation X’ers like myself remember the Bush eras when evangelicals came a little too close to power. I was the guy who first called the “social justice warriors” the “new church ladies.” Jim Goad eventually turned that into a book and credited me for it somewhere. I don’t want to be ruled by either set of “church ladies” and I believe many Americans are also wary of that.

That said, Christians Nationalists have a name. It’s specific, many use it to identify themselves, and it already describes what we don’t like about them. They’re not “woke.” They’re good, old-fashioned theocrats. Christian Nationalists can be addressed more effectively on their own terms than as part of some fake coalition of “woke right.”

The same is true of White Nationalists. I’ve spent enough time around them personally to know I don’t want them anywhere close to power. They are essentially neo-Nazis. The smart ones hate the label, but they all have a soft spot for pre-WW2 German literature of a certain flavor. White Nationalists would love to tell you who you’re allowed to be friends with and date and what kind of music you’re allowed to listen to and what kinds of movies you’re allowed to watch (nothing made by the Jews, to start with).

White Nationalists also have a descriptive name that they use to identify themselves and their actual beliefs. They’re not “woke.” They’re White Nationalists and they can be dismissed more effectively on their own terms.

Most White Nationalists are antisemites but not all antisemites are White Nationalists. Some are actually black. Antisemites, separate from white or black nationalisms, aren’t so much totalitarians as they are grumpy Eeyores. But to repeat the point, they have a name that concisely describes their belief system. Calling it “woke” actually obscures it.

The “right” also includes actual fascists, national socialists, monarchists, post-rationalists and all kinds of belief systems that have the potential to become totalitarian, but which are also handily self-descriptive have nothing to do with “woke.”

Being ornery and constitutionally American myself, I also do not want to be ruled by the totalitarians of the left or the right. And if that is the real concern as it is often being presented with the use of “woke” applied to the right, then isolating the potential totalitarians and addressing their belief systems individually and directly is a far more accurate and effective way to keep any one of those very different groups of people from gaining too much control or influence.

“Woke Right” Is A Weapon To Prevent Meaningful Change