Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right

Few people now remember what the word “woke” meant before it became an insult. These days it is used by those of us who believe in reality to mock the lunatic fringe of the Left but it was not always thus. While the word has come to mean an ideology obsessed with victimhood, identity and the falsification of history to suit today’s political agenda, those who once proudly called themselves “woke” intended something else. It was, at that time, a self-congratulatory label which meant, first and foremost, being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially in relation to racial and social justice”. As has been discussed ad nauseam, in practice, what this awareness of “facts” pertaining to various forms of “justice” meant was a framework in which certain groups were victims and other groups were victimisers. Some groups were suffering and their suffering was the responsibility of other groups which conspired to mistreat and take advantage of them.

But a conspiratorial worldview of this nature cannot be maintained on faith alone. Explanations had to be given for why this false narrative was, in fact, not false at all.

First, and highly relevant to our imminent discussion of the Woke Right, the Woke Left never claimed that the arguments they were making were true. Instead, rather than attempting to prove the impossible, they wisely made an entirely different claim: truth, they argued, is merely a linguistic projection of power. The powerful brainwash the rest of us into seeing the things they want us to believe as the truth. To claim that something is true is to abuse the power you have over others: it is an act of linguistic violence. This is why if you were to assert that you know how many genders there are or quote facts about contentious societal issues such as police violence against minorities that would be used as evidence of your poor character and nefarious intent. All it showed was your “bias”, “fragility” and so on.

If this sounds a little abstract, a more concrete and even more relevant example is what the wokesters did to history. They attempted to destroy, both physically and reputationally, anything about the past that served as a reminder of the achievements of our society. Statues were torn down or defaced. Historical figures on whom we had looked with pride and to whom we looked for inspiration were attacked.

Why? Because history (and the truth more broadly) is to humans what roots are to trees. It is a way of knowing which way is up and which way is down. Strip a people of their history, destroy the concept of truth itself, and they are left unmoored, floating in limbo, pushed and pulled in random directions by every new seductive force that comes along.

As Hannah Arendt powerfully explained “the constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want”.

The woke logic operates like this:

1)     There are good and bad identity groups

2)     You can’t trust anything you’ve been taught about history or anything you’re being told today because your beliefs are based on lies spread by people who are in control of society

3)     There is a select group of people (us) who understand what’s really going on and we are bravely raising awareness of the issue

4)     Anyone who disagrees with us or criticises us is doing so because they are a bad person and their criticism and disagreement just proves that we are right and they are bad

The woke revolution which occurred over the last 10 years was bad enough. But the iron law of reality is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Having lived through a decade of this race Marxism which spread through our elite institutions like an aggressive cancer, I believe we are now witnessing the emergence of an equivalent phenomenon on the fringes of the Right.

Tucker Carlson has just hosted a man called Darryl Cooper, on his show, describing him as “maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Cooper, who goes by the online moniker Martyr Made, is indeed incredibly honest.

In addition to thinking that Adolf Hitler, a genocidal mass murderer, strolling through the Paris he had just conquered is highly preferable to drag queens, Cooper also explained that Churchill was the “chief villain of WW2”. The thread he posted on X following his interview with Carlson is so historically illiterate that every major claim he made was debunked on X itself within hours with Community Notes and in articles published by prominent historians.

But this article is not about Cooper. I do not find him remotely interesting. There are and have always been lying charlatans and overconfident fools. What is interesting is the warm welcome he received on Tucker Carlson’s show and what it represents.

The Woke Right for which Carlson is the undisputed spiritual leader is feeling its way to a logic of its own. It is far from being fully formed but it goes something like this: