The Woke Right: What It is and Why It’s Growing (with James Lindsay) | The Brief | PragerU

But what they're actually after is power and punish their enemies and to reward their friends. This is typical of reactionaries. Everything was going fine until we were too tolerant. What you have is a woke right. This has been a huge issue since Charlie's murder. How much of this movement is confined within social media and how much of it is actually seeping into real world political discourse? >> Online's very fake, but political people are very online. We have a bigger problem with it than than a lot of people want to admit. And I don't think that this is going to just go away quickly either. And welcome back to the brief. We are joined today by James Lindseay. James is a conservative activist. He's an author and perhaps most importantly, he is a Twitter provocator. James, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So before we get into the who's and the wise, let's just talk about definitions. So before we get into our conversation, can you just define for us what do we mean when we say the woke right? >> Well, there's two words. Not to oversimplify for everybody, but the words are woke and right. Okay, so I'm taking the word right here to mean people who identify as being on the right, who profess to have right-wing values as opposed to left-wing values. They prefer hierarchy. They prefer tradition or at least pseudo tradition. you know, kind of a pretense at pretending they have tradition. Whereas the left is is radically egalitarian. They want radical equity, redistribution, and they're vividly anti-traditionalist, as we all see. So there's this distinction between left and right there. Uh so people who qualify themselves on the right, they tend to be socially conservative, as a matter of fact, or at least publicly they're socially conservative. And then the word woke. And woke to be as short as possible about it means using critical theory or if you want a Marxist style analysis to uh make your points. And so you have this fundamental belief that the world is intrinsically separated into a conflict that drives history that is oppressor versus oppressed. And the alienated oppressed faction is being withheld from the center of society by a power structure that is designed to keep them out for crooked purposes. So they're going to awaken to a consciousness that that's how the world works. It's called a critical consciousness. It it envisions an ideal world with their socopolitical uh arrangement running everything and criticizes the real world for not being the same as that real world. That's what critical theory means. So when you have people who act like that, who adopt Machavelian tactics, who worship power and pursue it, who have no qualms lying or presenting themselves falsely, who engage in a kind of a selective cancel culture, they're against cancelling of themselves, but they're in favor of cancer cancelceing anybody who disagrees with them. Uh then what you have is a woke right when they're pursuing these so-called right-wing values. So how much of the woke right then is a reaction to the wokeism on the far left and the cancel culture that we have seen being dominant in political discourse and within our American institutions for the last 10 20 years. Is this an independent movement outside of that or is this just reactionary? >> I think uh it's it's not fair to just say it's just reactionary but it is reactionary. So um it's a little bit too much to kind of like dismiss it under a reactionary label. It is continuous with a bunch of reactionary or counterrevolutionary movements going back to say Joseph de Maestroy uh reacting he was a Catholic thinker in France reacting to the French revolution believed that there was a divine ordinance to the uh arrangement of the state and through whether we look at the 1900s you know the 1920s 1930s we see the fascist movement we see the uh Nazi movement arising as a reaction to Marxism they're explicit that that's what they are that in fact they are forms of socialism that are nationalistic in their arrangement. Hitler and Mussolini didn't agree on what defines the nation. For Hitler it was a racial definition of folk and for Mussolini it was just a kind of traditional political national entity. But the idea was that this internationalist Marxist socialist movement was the wrong kind of socialism. Mousolini explicitly says in the doctrine of fascism that it takes its inspiration from socialism but refocuses it around the idea of the nation. This is kind of the same ideas uh in a different form that Dashre had. This is so there's a long continuous line of counterrevolutionary and reactionary thought into which this is embedded and the current form just like fascism took its inspiration from Marxism and kind of reacted to it and sort of reversed it and relocated the uh authentic citizen in this national identity or nationalist identity. What we have now is this sort what Jordan Peterson called woke postmodern neoarxism and that's a lot of words right you got postmodernism you have to understand that that's the this constructivist view of the world everything's a little bit pastiche truth doesn't really matter it's all local your truth my truth and then you have the critical part of that the the the post the neoarxist part is critical theory and so you have a critical constructivist view of reality that is now being reacted to so we have something like a postmodern neofascism in answer, but it still dips into that older line of counterrevolutionary, reactionary, and fascist thought for its inspiration. So, it's not just reactionary, but it is reactionary. It takes the overwhelming amount of its inspiration, almost all of its energy from bouncing off of the left and turning things kind of backwards. >> Conceptually, this makes sense to me on an ideological level why we're seeing this wokeism on the right. On a practical level though, and this is where again I sort of struggle with what the movement is, what are the specific legislative or political accomplishments or goals this movement has? It sort of just seems like it's a rupture. They don't like this system. They don't like the main political actor certainly within the right. So what exactly are they are they hoping to achieve on a pragmatic political level within our democratic framework? >> Power. It's just like on the left. You can't actually nail down what the policy prescriptions of the left are. uh the radical woke left either. And 10 years ago, we were all having this conversation. Nobody could quite nail down what they wanted. And I used to joke that it's kind of like the trust me bro of politics. Look, we don't have specific policy prescriptions. We just know that the thing we're dealing with is wrong. Give us power and we'll fix it. Trust me, bro. And that's sort of the logic. And so what they're actually after is power. the power particularly to identify and punish their enemies and to reward their friends to create a two-tiered system around their particular ideological bent which is the same totalitarian impulse you see in example after example stretching back at least to the French Revolution. So what they're actually after is power in order to be able it's not just a rupture from the continuity of today. This is what the critical theory is about. You can't envision the better world. You don't know what the policy necessarily has to look like. But what you do know is that when you have power to reward your ideological friends, to advance the ideological vision, and to punish its enemies, then you'll be able to instantiate this new regime that will somehow be better or more close to the utopian or ideal uh vision. So this is the primary ve vehicle that they're after is their own empowerment in uh institutional settings and government. But I mean, they do talk about wanting to have a Christian, specifically theocratic Christian nation, or at least one that's civically uh Christian under civil authorities and magistrates. Sometimes, not always, they seem to want to create something that works a little bit like a uh preference to what they call heritage Americans, which seems to be an ambiguous term that has something to do with how far back your heritage in America goes. Um, but seems also to be a proxy for white or male. They seem to have strong patriarchal ambitions that they think are going to set the world a right. And this is typical of reactionaries. They say everything was going fine. Just to kind of like give a big picture paint a big picture of what the reactionary mind is. Everything was going fine until we were too tolerant. So we're going to go back to the point where the tolerance created a rupture from our inheritance. And we're going to reclaim it. So we're going to be if we're not supposed to be patriarchal now, things were better when we were. So, we're going to be patriarchal again. If we're not supposed to be theocratic now, things were better when we were theocratic. So, we're going to go back to that. Racist, anti-semitic, you name it. Same stuff. So, we're going to take we're going to undo the tolerance that has allowed society to slip into degeneracy under our own tyrannical thumb. But their their entire program is actually a means to an end. And the end is getting their own positions in power. >> There's so much there to to unpack. I I want to start with this. I'm glad you mentioned the sort of trust me bro movement of of political discourse here because when I think of the woke right, I'm almost exclusively thinking of the online sphere, the the bro verse, the podcast verse, and in particular the the cesspool now known as as X. How much of this movement is confined within social media and the online verse? And how much of it is actually seeping into real world political discourse or even actually electing policy makers with that mindset? I mean, there's a little bit of electing policy makers. Dusty Divers, for example, in Oklahoma at the state level, state legislature level being kind of the most prominent example, and it's hard to think of another one, but you will start to see them leaking into local and state level positions. Maybe they're going to get a congressman or two. You could argue that Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massie are in alignment with them already, for example, in the House. Uh, so it's leaking. The problem is that it is predominantly online and the online is predominantly fake and there are good data showing that this is a very online phenomenon. There are data from the network contagion research institute uh the NCRI that have showed in the past that it is primarily young people young men in particular who spend four or more hours per week greater than their peers online on average who tend to skew this way. So there are good data showing that this is a very online phenomenon. But the problem is, as I keep talking to people on the Hill, um, in the Capitol Hill, is that the majority of the congressional staffers in both parties are under 25 years old right now and they all disproportionately are, you know, rapid rapidly political and they're frequently online. They spend more time than their than than most of their peers online and they're extremely interested in political content. So, what you're seeing is that into the halls of power through congressional staffers and interns, this kind of stuff is leaking onto the hill. congressmen are busy. We all understand that. We're also seeing it taking over media apparatuses. Uh we saw the debacle at Heritage Foundation, which Kevin Roberts, you know, came to the defense of Tucker Carlson after he interviews Nick Fuentes. And then he tries to say, well, we've got a bunch of these young people basically that we've let in that, you know, believe this stuff. And by the way, we have to reach these young people. And so there's a lot of leak into the real world. And a lot of people have suddenly noticed that this thing that seemed like an online uh phenomenon almost exclusively is having a real world world impact. And I think the problem to put it more succinctly is that online's very fake, but political people are very online. So it leaks into the political universe pretty readily. And I think that we have a bigger problem with it than uh than than a lot of people want to admit. I'm just curious because Charlie Kirk was was so influential and so impactful for millions of Gen Z American men and I guess I'm curious with the absence of Charlie Kirk has this movement um accelerated has it actually exacerbated the problems because you have an absence of a strong male presence so those young Gen Z men are looking for alternatives. Yeah, I mean I do think there is a bit I mean Charlie left a gigantic vacuum and uh the thing is is that the young men around Charlie this is one of Charlie's biggest issues that he was facing in the last year of his life was that a lot of the men in his audience were already being pulled in those directions and he you know frequently spoke to this he actually was very afraid that if uh he couldn't get his messaging right on key issues including the role of Israel in the world the relationship of America to Israel uh and some other issues that if he couldn't strike that tone right? That what would happen is you would see a metriculation of a lot of young politically active conservatives toward the Nick Fuentes type crowd or toward a lot of these other influencers who are pedalling these kinds of conspiracy theories and other things. And so he was very concerned about it and then he's gone. So all of a sudden he was acting as a restraining force and that gets pulled out of the picture. Simultaneously, all of those other forces didn't go away and they sense the vacuum and are happy and ready and eager to capitalize. And so they dive into that space pretty readily and start using in fact even Charlie's death and the circumstances around it to spin a variety of theories that you know drive the wedge deeper about Israel. Did Israel have an involvement in his death? For example, was a big narrative that's still being pushed and that feeds into these kinds of things. So people that want to say, "No, no, no, leave that alone. That's ridiculous." Sound like they're just scolding or that they don't want to touch, you know, a secret truth nobody's allowed to have. And then the the conspiracy theorists are very able to play in that field and recruit in that field on that third rail. Um so this has been a huge issue since Charlie's murder. Um and I don't think that this is going to just go away quickly either. this is um this is going to be a defining vacuum to fill and it's going to be a challenge because Charlie was a singular talent one in three generations at best to have a man like him. So it's going to be a rough ride in this wake of his murder. >> I actually just want to piggyback on something you had just said which is Israel. So I see Zorani for example as a perfect example of this. Someone whose supporters would say well he won because he focused on affordability. He didn't really care about foreign policy and mean meanwhile he literally stated numerous times that Palestine was the center of his political identity. >> I was somebody who began my journey in organizing and in politics by co-founding my school's first students for justice in Palestine. The the struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be. >> He very much won on the grievance culture that those on the left had using Israel as this flash rod for it. When you look at the woke right, as much as they say America first, we only care about America just on a quantitative measurement, they talk about Israel way more than any other podcast, way more than than pro-Israel Jewish influencers. What is it about Israel that is animating so much of this groper woke trust me bro verse? What is it? >> Well, I'll tell you that there's a fun um coincidence. There's not a lot of coincidences in the world, but there's a fun coincidence here, which is the shape of Israel on the map. If you look at it, as you'd be very familiar, you got the Golan Heights up at the top and it looks kind of like a little bit of a handle and you have this big knife-shaped country, right? And it's, you know, all the way down to that point, uh, I guess on the Red Sea. So, you have this very wedge-shaped object being driven into the MAGA coalition. And metaphors aside, that's what it is. Israel is a very, very, very fruitful wedge for them. you can get people worked up on, you know, you have a ton of very ironically libertarian anti-war sentiment. Trump really ran as being an anti-war peace president twice. He was very successful in that regard. It's one of the things he's most lauded for in his first term. It's one of the things he's pursued most aggressively in his second term, bragging that he's ended eight wars already. Um, some of which are to Israel's detriment, and they did kind of they kind of did him a favor to do that. But you have a ton of ignorance in the US. You have a ton of sentiment that aligns with, you know, this America first agenda. We're not going to worry about foreign countries anymore. And you have a ton of kind of downward mobility and resentment you can tap into. So, it's become very easy to turn Israel into this wedge that's either they're going to cause us to get involved in wars or they're dragging us into wars or they're wasting our money or whatever resentments that, you know, these propagandists can attach to the lived experience of our young people and use the excuse of Israel in a very lowresolution way to carve apart coalitions. People who used to get along can't get along anymore because they disagree about the role of Israel and the relationship that it has with the United States. But for my money, Israel is primarily a proxy in this. It is not the issue. It is the tool that is being used to drive the issue. And the issue is the fragmentation of MAGA. Let me play devil's advocate just for a moment. Unlike the left, the conservative movement does not have ideological uniformity. Right? We encourage debate, discourse, dialogue. So, how would you respond to critics who would say that the only way to combat bad ideas is with better ideas? And in fact, President Trump himself was asked about this recently and he basically said, "Let the American people listen to who they want and they will be the ones to decide which ideas are good and which ideas are not good." So, how would you respond to those critics? And why are you against the platforming of individuals who you don't consider to be MAGA Republicans and who are being honest they don't consider themselves to be MAGA Republicans either? >> Yeah. Well, it's fun here because um I agree with President Trump. There's this giant straw man. You correctly you didn't straw man anything. Um you correctly articulated the straw man which is that the opponents of what happened with the critics I should say of what happened with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, etc. um are not calling for censorship. They generally agree with President Trump. They almost to a person agree with the ideas the way that that we would rather have these ideas in the light. We would rather counter them with good ideas. We would rather see that that bad speech is countered with more speech or good speech, however those phrases go. I know that Seth Dylan's made that argument again and again. I know that Ben Shapiro's made that argument again. I've made that argument again and again. And I've seen some people call for, you know, cancelling, like Mark Levin got mad and said something about cancelling, but for the most part, nobody's really saying that. And it's not clear what's meant by that. Deplatforming is this other kind of fun issue because it's like, I've been deplatformed. Nobody's entitled to a platform, right? So, it's like because Tucker Carlson's been on the Turning Point USA stage before, he's automatically like grandfathered in to always be on the Turning Point USA stage, or else Turning Point cancelled him. Well, by that logic, Turning Point cancelled me, and you don't see me whining and crying about it. Charlie and I remained friends even as he saw it as uh unfit to have me continue to speak at Turning Point events because of the complication he saw around me making the woke argument. That's just the nature of this thing. So Tucker's not entitled to a platform. There's this weird entitlement complex that's happening that's passing as like, oh, you're trying to censor me. It's like, no, Tucker, first of all, has his own gigantic platform. Says whatever he wants every day. Sometimes he gets blowback, but nobody's trying to take his show off the air. I don't even want his show off the air. I think he's doing a great service to um the United States by allowing us to see that lots of people agree with horrible ideas that we've got to clean up so that they're not festering under the surface and filling offices quietly and doing the long march to the institutions invisibly. So, um it's a straw man that's being presented. I'm in favor of these people sharing their ideas, but I'm also in favor of people being responsible enough to say, you know what, the reputation of my organization matters. And if we're associating with ideas like that, then it damages the mission that we have. It damages the trust that our donors have in us. It damages possibly the prospects of uh the country to win an election going forward. and what that means, I should say the party and then that what that means for the country and to take that responsibility and say, you know what, Tucker Carlson did a very softball interview with Nick Fuentes. The issue isn't that he had an interview. The issue is not even that it was a softball interview. The issue is that it's we're being passed off like this is just totally normal. That Nick Fuentes can sit there and say, "Oh yeah, Stalin's one of my favorite people." And Tucker's like, "Oh my god, what do I do?" we'll circle back to that, you know, and it just kind of slides on by and then every other organization is like, well, Tucker's been my friend for a long time, so I'm just going to say that this is fine. And it's not just this, by the way. Tucker's had a pattern of doing this. At some point, you know, you're like, well, maybe this guy's gone crazy and he's bad for what we're doing in our mission and we don't have to keep having him at every single thing. And it's not cancellation to do that any more than I was cancelled from Turning Point USA or whatever because I started speaking about the woke right and Charlie thought that that was a bag of drama he didn't want to get into. Every organization has the right to decide who it wants on there and who it doesn't. Nobody's entitled to that platform. And because I'm actually in that position, I can say this with some authority. So, I think it's a straw man. I think it's a it's a weaponized line. It's not realistic, but it's very effective. So, we've got to kind of cut through that more speech. I'm still a free speech absolutist. I don't want President Trump in particular. I don't really even want like X coming in and laying this thumb on the scales. If it's not incitement, if it's not uh direct calls to violence, threats, defamation, you know, all the nonprotected speech, let it fly. Let's have the debate. And let's also be able to draw clear lines and say, "Look, if Tucker wants to say stuff like that, that's fine. But he doesn't represent what the Republican party represents, then that's fine. may go his own way. >> A lot of important points there. I think chief among them being on a practical pragmatic level. If a political party seeks to win elections in the future, the overwhelming majority of the American people reject extremism on both sides. I was on the far left and I left the far left because they just became a a a party allergic to reality. And I think the Republican party and the conservative movement as a whole, if they allow the woke right to grow unabated, is in danger of doing the exact same thing. You've given us a lot to think about. I want to thank you not just for your efforts in restoring sanity to the conservative movement, but also restoring sanity to the greater American political discourse. I definitely learned a lot. Thank you so much again. >> Yeah. Well, thank you for the opportunity.