To his eternal credit, Mr. James Lindsay did an amazing job of exposing the dark side of woke, awakening many to the wicked specter behind the do-goody veneer of current modern left. But his recent coining of the label “Woke Right”—aimed largely at factions within the American Right, particularly Christian Nationalists—alienated a significant portion of his audience. I count myself among them, as I took issue with both the label and his methods. 

How Mr. Lindsay launched the term was quite the departure from the default manner in which he had been addressing the woke phenomenon. Gone were the well-researched, well-reasoned exposés, instead we witnessed a relentless firestorm of accusations, chaperoned by blunt derision towards anyone who took exception to his online purge of the American Right. The sudden change of demeanor, and the inexplicable reluctance to offer clarification, left many puzzled.

In addressing the Woke Left, obviously Mr. Lindsay was aiming to bring people to reason: He presented his points with much insight and clarity, and indeed succeeded in letting many come to a profound understanding. By contrast, his dealings with the “Woke Right” are characterized by an intense emotionality, taking primarily the form of a campaign of condemnation. Such an enterprise doesn’t allow for a constructive resolution, as its success is only measured by the destruction of its target; It doesn’t allow for a constructive resolution, nor will it bring anyone to reason: It’ll only make people pick a side. And people picked a side (while those who saw through it early, distanced themselves).

Six months and seven days Mr. Lindsay stalled before releasing a video in which he finally explained at length what this “Woke Right” was that he had been so fiercely railing against. Many were hoping that the long-awaited elucidation would satisfy inquiring minds and at least partially redeem his protracted unpleasantness—but it did not. What he presented was built, at its core, upon an ideological fallacy. I had feared as much, for how would such an astoundingly knowledgeable and well-read man as Mr. Lindsay need half a year of preparation to clarify his point unless something was deeply off? 

In his many years of opposing the Far-Left, I never witnessed Mr. Lindsay lose his composure. Nor did he shy away from explaining his views. All this changed the day he witnessed the Christian Nationalists coalescing. His behavior suggests it rattled him to his core, enough to spin him into a state of great alarm—panic if you will. Perhaps the fear partly owes to long-standing stereotypes. The archetypical leftist doesn’t particularly strike fear into people: socially maladjusted, disorganized, lazy, hypersensitive. Thus, the temptation to freak out when deconstructing the woke Left was absent. The far-right stereotypes, on the other hand, tend to provoke more visceral reactions. Picture skinheads without fearing to get beat up. Think of actual WWII Nazis, and your mind unerringly conjures a band of disciplined, well-organized military ghouls, deadly and efficient. Scary indeed. But it must be remarked that these stereotypes don't very well reflect reality when it comes to warning of danger: The Far-Left has murdered way more people than the Far-Right ever did in the 20th century.  

While stereotypes do shape perceptions, it is futile to dispute the Right’s potential to evolve into authoritarianism—after all, respect for order lies at the basis of the right-wing worldview—and we are certainly seeing this evolution take place in right-wing circles nowadays. That is to say, I do not contradict Mr. Lindsay’s observations, I only take issue with his analysis of the phenomenon: There is no such thing as a “Woke Right,” nor could there ever be such a thing. It is important to understand this clearly in order to correctly assess the situation we are in.  

Why did Mr. Lindsay slap the label “Woke Right” on the Christian Nationalists and a great collection of adjacent groups since? Some of these groups had been discussing “systemic oppression” against Christians, white folks in particular. Indeed, for the last several decades now, there has been oppression against whites at work in the United States that is demonstrably institutional—just think of affirmative action, DEI quotas, or ask why any of the many books and opinion pieces that openly demonize white people, white culture, and Western civilization are never legally challenged, while they would mark the end of their author’s career had they been written about any other ethnic group. 

Somewhere early on in his crusade against the “Woke Right,” Mr. Lindsay explained in a brief clip that to be “woke” is to be aware of oppression, or systemic oppression. And so, given that these right-wingers were addressing oppression directed at them, he had decided that they are woke, and woke is, as he has been explaining for years, a bad thing. It was a poor argument because it categorized every struggle against oppression as woke. I hope most people can agree that it is not wrong for human beings to seek justice or liberation from oppressive forces—as besides “woke” there is also such a thing as “just.” Saying that “woke” means “to become aware of oppression” while also condemning it as a bad thing, is hard to reconcile on a moral level, as the only avenue to not be “woke” would then be to endure oppression until death. It is said that Jesus died for our sins so we wouldn’t have to. So whether you are Christian or not, it is a position hard to defend.  

Mr. Lindsay misstepped when he employed the Left’s definition of “woke” to construct the label “the Woke Right.” As he himself taught so many over so many years: To the Left, the issue (in this case “to become aware of oppression”) is never the issue. And so it is with “woke”: Its actual meaning reaches far beyond “being aware of oppression.” Woke is, in fact, the true foundation of the Leftist worldview. And the Left’s worldview is in no way comparable to the Right’s. The Right believes that the world—from the celestial order down to culture and traditions—is inherently good, albeit challenged by evil. The Right aims to honor, nourish, and preserve the order of things. The more authoritarian Rightists seek to make conformity to these matters mandatory, even by force. But the Left is a completely different beast. The Left believes that the entire world is an abomination, a monstrous construct that’s twisted people into alienated beings, existing in a zombie-like state, ready to eat one another alive, enslaved as they are by morals, money, culture, and tradition—the entire order in the world, from the spiritual to the material, all of it is a system of oppression. Therefore, all of it must be done away with. And when all of it will be gone, then, people will no longer exploit one another, or so the promise goes.

Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto that this socialist utopia is “only” attainable by “the forceful abolition of every existing social order,” to use the terminology of the original German text. From state and religion to law and industry … every order, even the nuclear family, must be abolished, as all are alienated and alienating constructs. A century later, the postmodernists answered Marx’s call for “a ruthless criticism of all that exists” to the fullest when they conceived “critical theory”: The vile and lazy intellectual game of reframing everything under the sun as an oppressive construct or an oppressive act. Because in every human interaction there can’t not be a power dynamic at play, that reframing—essentially a demonization—can always be done, regarding every existing order in the world.  

Thus “woke” isn’t so much about countering oppression as it is about “realizing” that every order in the world is bad: All of it is oppression, comes from oppression, and begets only oppression. Tell me then, how could the Right be called “woke” when its worldview asserts that the order in the world is fundamentally just? 

For sure, the Right can become authoritarian, and murderously so if it wants to, but it’ll never hate the order in the world itself—not even when it morphs into a monster to protect said order. The moment it begins to hate the natural order of things, the Right will have become the Left: “woke” to the intolerable injustice of the natural order. Of course, besides the natural order there is also artificial order, so these matters aren’t as simple as night and day.[1]

I’ll reiterate that “woke” is the one foundational, defining aspect of the Left, and the Left alone. Only to a postmodernist, who believes that there is no such thing as a natural order, does logic permit right-wingers can be woke, as their worldview would be just as arbitrary and made up as that of the Left or anyone else. In the postmodernist view, no good and evil exist. As a consequence, all that remains are power and made-up narratives to grab said power. But that is not reality! It is merely a nihilistic worldview. There is a natural order in the universe that exists independent of narratives, and people must abide by that if they hope to enjoy prosperity and peace in the future. 

People will reap what they sow, but they don’t often know what it is that they sow. For instance, they may think they’re sowing wheat but they’ve been sold thistle seeds. The natural order doesn’t care about their delusions: a thistle seed will still grow into a thistle, no matter what the human hopes, proclaims, or hallucinates. What do you do when too many people are sowing thistles believing they will be reaping wheat and society is looking to be annihilated by an engulfing famine? Do you let people destroy themselves and their civilization while they defy the universe with their fancy that their thistle seeds will surely yield wheat, as they insist, or do you save them from destroying civilization by forcing them to sow wheat? 

“Classical liberalism” has brought us to this point, to this fork in the road, where neither option is pleasant or appealing. It was this classical liberalism that espoused the idea that abiding by the natural order was optional—a fence-sitting position dreamed up by people tired of centuries of religious war. Perhaps it looked a practical and sensible solution at the time, but it remained a cop-out: a temporary fix, whose guarantees now seem to have all but expired. Ignoring the natural order is not an option: it is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, even mentioning the existence of a “natural order” is enough to unleash a barrage of fear and rabid opposition, for too many have lost the mental fortitude to contemplate these matters in earnest quiet, so allow me to just phrase it in simple terms: the universe as it truly is, its character, mechanisms, and matter—observed without preconceived notions, political or otherwise.

In circling back, I would encourage Mr. Lindsay to no longer be so terribly stricken by fear, and to label the threat he perceives as what it is: an authoritarian Right. Whether these groups’ views of “the natural order” are accurate or not, and to which degree, is up for debate, but one thing is set in stone: For any movement to succeed in delivering on its promise of well-being and prosperity, its principles and actions must align with the universes’ true natural order, for human beings are simply incapable of forging a working order on a separate basis, as history has shown. The real question then becomes: How do we learn from the natural order how to live, and survive? 

Once we’ve more or less found out what ways we should adopt, the success or failure of our movement will still depend upon the virtue of the people that lead it and those that follow, for even the best principles can be violated, or twisted into their opposite, by those unfit to lead or unable to love.  

Godspeed, Mr. Lindsay.

— Filip Demunsereeuw

[1] As a side note, the spiritual implications of “woke” are psychologically terrifying. When you’ve adopted the idea that all of creation is an oppressive plot, then you’ll begin to think that you are right and creation is wrong, that only by abolishing all of it, you can build your own Paradise, according to your fancy, and you’ll assume that’ll be a blissful success (How could it not, since you believe everything society has built is fundamentally bad?). Essentially, to be “woke” is to cosplay Satan, who despised creation because it didn’t obey him, but then constructed only hell instead. Cue the history of communism (the author is aware that that “wasn’t real communism,” much like hell “isn’t a real paradise”). The Bible deserves credit for providing such a striking warning against utopianist ambitions: The tale’s proven an inevitable script, an inescapable blueprint for all that history has shown.

#christiannationalism#communism#jameslindsay#woke#wokemindvirus#wokeright
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