Don't Be Woke About the "Woke Right": Part I
How James Lindsay Has A Point But Could Become a "Woke Centrist"
This will be a multi-part series as the whole James Lindsay saga is massive, and he, as well as his opponents, are crazily prolific. He has for example published 272,000+ X posts (tweets). Part I details the background of James Lindsay as well as arguments for what he is right about. Part II will focus on where he is wrong, or at least where he is much more paranoid than he should be, as well as how he is falling into the same sort of mimetic dialectical trap that he critiques. Part III will evaluate a realistic path forward for the political and religious right that avoids the mimetic traps leading to wokeness in all its forms while discussing how one should relate to the work of complex and controversial intellectuals like Lindsay.
Listen to the audio version of this post here:
Social media technology is such a potent accelerant to discourse that we don’t stop frequently enough to ponder how crazy its effects really are.
On X one little off-hand comment can make a new topic into the primary focus of discourse for a week at a time whilst the public gains an unbelievably up close and personal “access” to, or, if you don’t like it, being spammed with, the debates and disagreements between public figures. The internal emotions and monologues of everyone from nobodies to presidents and the richest men in the world are all capable of affecting everybody. In past eras, technology put limits. Only the most well-formed, crafted, and long-formed ideas would gain traction, with debates within movements carefully excised, whitewashed, or hidden most of the time. But today, every little detail matters and is out in the spotlight, and little comments can, due to the omnipresence of the internet, not just take over the online media, but seemingly take over the entire day—or week—or month, taking over everyone’s minds to the degree that everyone feels like they have to have a take on everything.
The past few weeks have been no exception when self-described “author, mathematician, and professional troublemaker” James Lindsay began beating the drum that there exists something called the “woke right”, a movement of members of the far-right whose thoughts and principles are actually progressive rather than conservative and share more with the “woke left”, Marxism, and leftism than with anything else.
But the background first. For James Lindsay carries a great degree of cache on the right, meaning that his act of defining “woke right” has caused a frenzy of debate, accusations, and counter-accusations, a potential that seems more and more real for a major schism within the right, and which will, ultimately, I believe, will lead to lots of trouble but be a net positive as it forces conservatives to fully stop and think, evaluating who they really are and what their goals for society are.
Lindsay became famous in 2018 through a prank, or hoaxing, or exposé (your choice as to what call it) project where he and two fellow authors demonstrated the levels of woke silliness to which academia had descended by getting numerous absurd prank papers on feminism, sexuality, transgenderism, etc. to pass peer review and get accepted in academic journals including getting parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf accepted for publication by switching references in the work to Jews for “white men”, a paper on experiencing the phases of the moon and its relationship to poetic portrayals of lived feminist spirituality, another on overcoming anthropometry and how to support fat bodybuilding, another on strategies for dealing with cisnormative discursive aggression in the workplace as well as few others I don’t care to read or mention.1
Lindsay has since become a prominent lecturer and frequent podcast guest investigating, explaining, and warning about the dangers of the Marxist-derived ideologies of communism, wokeness, and their latest iterations such as Critical Race Theory, DEI, ESG, and woke capitalism.
I learned of Lindsay in a general sense about a year ago and saw him as just a generic right-wing commentator, someone with takes pretty generally acceptable for anyone who isn’t a leftist ideologue. He seemed particularly focused on explaining Marxism/communism/wokeness as religions, or cults,2 and in this, I definitely continued to agree with him—and, generally, at least, liked and followed his work.
But then in September of this year, something odd happened when Donald Trump posted the St. Michael Prayer on X and Truth Social on the feast of St. Michael the Archangel:
While Trump’s post was itself odd, because I am dubious of his faith, unsure how seriously he meant the prayer, the immediate, ballistic, and well, there’s no other word but paranoid reaction of James Lindsay put that man fully in the center of my mind.
Lindsay posted—and posted—and kept on posting for days about how Trump’s posting of the circa-1890 Pope Leo XIII prayer to St. Michael the Archangel was not what it seemed to be, but a grand theosophist idolatrous conspiracy. According to him:
Operation Michael is designed to undermine the anti-Woke Right. It's a damn shame Trump has been pulled into this, probably on deliberately bad advice. It's already a live active measure now and mostly unstoppable.
Here's how it works:
Most Americans, even Catholics, don't know anything about Archangel Michael except in a very vague sense. I grew up Catholic. Michaelmas was not a thing, ever, with any Catholic I knew.
So now Michael idolatry will be a big thing for our side, and the Theosophists will fill in the details of what it means for most broadly ignorant Americans to mislead Christians further, particularly toward war and violence.
Meanwhile, since it's a dialectical attack, the Left will use it to characterize Trump as a religious warlord type, fitting the worst of the Operation Christian Nationalism motifs. Because of the Left/Right dialectic in play in the op, we'll all be forced to take a side or dip out into irrelevance (with respect to the op).
Theosophists have a very particular and evil interpretation of Michael as the bringer of the new age and the driver of human evolution, which they explicitly seek to control. He is the bridge and mediator, for them, between the figures of Christ, Lucifer, and the Zoroastrian demon of chaos and division, Ahriman, whom they regard as equally sacred parts of a triune whole.
The spiritualism of this occult religion is already completely infused in your children's schools through Social-Emotional Learning, which came from the Fetzer Institute. The Fetzer Institute is an occult Theosophical nonprofit based upon channeling and summoning Michael in order to bring in the next spiritual age of humanity (Aquarius). They say so explicitly.
Elements of this view will be sprinkled in in various subtle ways, never openly invoking Lucifer or Ahriman but only their "positive"-seeming attributes, to ensnare good believing Christians and new Christians who lack the needed discernment to avoid being taken astray. […] This is serious. The cult that controls the world and the Left believes in this occult religion and will certainly co-opt the Right into a dialectical foil version and partial spiritual contamination. It's also covered over with the fingerprints of a counterintelligence operation we should be very slow to trust. We must be more careful. We must also find out who fed this idea to Trump and expose the bad actors and dangerous fools in his circle. This is no coincidence.3
Lindsay, now an atheist, even though he says he grew up Catholic, claimed here and in dozens of response posts over the weeks that followed that Trump’s post was a psy-op he had been tricked into perpetuating by the left to persuade the right to adopt Theosophical, Luciferic, and Zoroastrian (or in general, gnostic) ideas by way of the facade of St. Michael, and thereby turn the right into an idolatrous and militaristic religious cult under a “warlord-like” Trump or something of the kind.
Maybe this makes me a part of the cult, but I’m not convinced of the paranoid take even if I think Trump’s posting of the prayer was opportunistic and self-interested. For a low-hanging objection, the reason Lindsay probably never heard of Michaelmas even though he “grew up Catholic” was because he was born in 1979, and, well, he probably wasn’t exposed to much of any pre-Vatican II tradition. But that’s an aside.
The point is, I, and lots of people, Catholics in particular, began to quickly judge Lindsay as a paranoid freak from the moment we saw his first post on St. Michael. Seemingly, his work against the “woke left” had now extended into a larger paranoia about all other movements in which he claimed to see similar gnostic elements.
It was in this context then, that Lindsay’s October (and every day hence) concerns about the “woke right” expressed themselves.
Now what is the “woke right”? Well, even though in his denunciations, Lindsay has offered a detailed definition, of which I have one 2,000-word thread of his here, it’s rather complicated to understand even alongside the other shorter definition he provides:
As far as I gather, however, the “woke right” is to Lindsay the burgeoning movement of seeming members of the far right who would prefer to use woke ideas and institutions for their own benefit and for that of their preferred classes and race groups rather than just eliminating and opposing these tactics. The “woke right” for Lindsay is composed of rightists who don’t actually dislike leftist tactics and means but merely dislike that it is leftists who have the reins of cultural and institutional power and want that power for themselves. They are actually, in his view, progressives rather than conservatives, and share with the left a desire for revolutionary overthrow of the status quo.
Lindsay’s ally (and collaborator with him on several books) Logan Lancing gives helpful clarifications of the position. To him and Lindsay, both the “woke left” and “woke right” are gnostic movements that claim that the current constitutional order is oppressive and unjust, with each side claiming that they, and only they have the gnosis needed to free the particularly oppressed portion of mankind that they stand for:
Both sides are destructive first, but their visions for rebuilding differ. The Woke Left wants to dismantle Liberalism to create a future of "equity." The Woke Right wants to dismantle Liberalism to restore an idealized past of rigid order.
The Woke Right’s critiques of Liberalism parallel those of the Woke Left. Both accuse Liberalism of failing to deliver " social justice." Both see individual rights and constitutional principles as obstacles to their goals.
The Woke Left critiques Liberalism for perpetuating systemic oppression. It uses frameworks like Critical Race Theory to argue that Liberal neutrality disguises power hierarchies and imbalances.
The Woke Right mirrors this by arguing that Liberalism enables "cultural decay." Instead of systemic racism, they focus on systemic "anti-traditionalism," claiming Liberalism promotes moral and cultural decline.
Both use gnostic reasoning. The Woke Left claims hidden systems of oppression guide the world. The Woke Right claims hidden Liberal conspiracies have corrupted the world. Both offer secret insights into how "power really works."
Liberalism and the Constitution become scapegoats for both sides. The Woke Left dismisses them as insufficient for "social justice." The Woke Right dismisses them as obstacles to their vision of cultural restoration.
The Woke Right’s fixation on Liberalism and The Constitution's as failures mirrors the Woke Left’s critique of the same. Both see constitutional governance as unable to deliver their ideal society. Both seek to destroy it to achieve their aims.
The Woke Left wants equity. The Woke Right wants hierarchy. But their methods are nearly identical: systemic critique, rejection of individual agency, and destruction of Liberal principles to impose their visions. They both embrace PoMo, Critical Theory, and Constructivism.
Their shared intellectual tradition - most notably Hegel - makes this mirroring possible. The Woke Right is the dialectical antagonist of the Woke Left, using the same tools to pursue opposing goals. The WR fell out of the Woke Left as its negation.
Recognizing this reveals the true target: Liberalism and The Constitution. Both sides aim to destroy them. Both reject universal truths, shared reality, and individual freedom in favor of power and domination.
The Woke Left said, "It's all about power." The Woke Right says, "You're right." The Woke Left said, "The person is political." The Woke Right says, "You're right."
The Woke Left said, "Critical Theory (Hegel's dialectical method) grants us an emancipatory source of authority because it reveals the true workings of power." The Woke Right says, "You're right."
The Woke Left said, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." The Woke Right said, "You're right." The Woke Left said, "History evolves through class conflicts; oppressor vs oppressed." The Woke Right says, "You're right."4
Lindsay thus stands as a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, focused on individual liberties, limited ends of government, and unease about any type of political or moral dogmatism that proclaims absolute moral ideals held by faith. On this basis, he is also skeptical of anyone who critiques the constitutional order and its philosophical underpinnings too much in any direction. In this, his longstanding critiques of Marxism and wokeness make sense as well as his new angst about the “woke right” as both of these movements offer major critiques of liberalism by claiming that the current liberal (or postliberal) order is oppressive to their chosen/preferred classes or groups.
Now Lindsay critiques all of these anti-liberal movements as woke, arguing that they have a shared epistemology and thus pose similar dangers. I am slightly dubious of this, mostly due to the fact that classical liberalism has a hard time standing on its own as the British thinker who goes by Sargon of Akkad covers here. By Sargon’s thinking, liberalism needs orienting principles held by faith that go beyond it in order to survive, and, currently, does not look to be doing that well, so opposition is not necessarily radical rebellion against tradition. More on that in Part II.
But by Lindsay’s definition, many friends/acquaintances of mine and other figures that I like including
, , , and Tucker Carlson are “woke right.” Charles in particular has become a major adversary to Lindsay by his advocacy that the current constitutional order and the Enlightenment project upon which it is based ought to have an expiration date. By advocating for “something new” to come, and to come soon, such as Caesarism, as well as his beliefs there are “No Enemies to the Right”, and that there should be an unrestrained executive under a “new dispensation”, Charles is most definitely not a happy participant in the Lockean Enlightenment status quo that James loves. I’m more dubious about the others fitting this definition, but we’ll also cover that in Part II.5
But does this fit the definition of “woke.” Well, of course, philosophy is often bemoaned as just the mass manufacture of definitions, so in some way, it’s just up to how Lindsay defines “woke.” Many detractors split hairs and define “woke” on the basis of the many denials of objective reality observed in the “woke left” and its embrace of transgenderism, for example. In this view, “woke” is necessarily left-wing, and even the most extreme and absurd right-wingers are epistemologically on surer footing, even if their actions and advocacies can fail in other ways.
But looking at the statements and beliefs of people like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes through the lens of Lindsay’s and Lancing’s more detailed definitions makes it seem far more plausible that there is a faction of the right ideologically mirroring the left. Fuentes, for example, definitely has a “class conflicts; oppressor vs oppressed” view of the world, but places white men on the bottom of the hierarchy, and the most oppressed, the opposite of course of the “woke left’s” classification of them as top oppressors. Fuentes blames non-whites in general as well as Jews/Zionists for problems galore, mirroring the “woke left’s” blaming of oppressive white male power structures for every problem imaginable. He claims, as do many other figures like him that the so-called post-war-consensus of international multilateral organizations, the domestic managerial state, as well as that the limited Overton Window of discussions socially permitted about World War II form a nearly all-powerful social power structure oppressing people like him. He claims further, that he and only he, through a mix of bravery, crass honesty, and well, being open to the hidden gnosis of how bad everything really is, can restore a utopian past that we have falsely, and unnaturally been imprisoned away from. Again, a mirroring of leftist utopianism, albeit worship of an idealized past rather than of an imaginary future.
And others go even further and more radical than Fuentes and his so-called “groyper” clan of followers. A great example within the “Catholic”6 world, is the “monastery” led by the Dimond brothers and the long tail of similar (but squabbling hard with each other) schismatic movements. While claiming a desire to return to tradition, morality, and faith, just listen to them, just look at the fruit, and their reality does not live up to their surface-level avowed marketing. Just read or listen to even a little of Nick Fuentes or any of his followers or of what life was really like within the Dimond brothers’ monastery and while we can’t of course judge the heart, it just doesn’t look like Christ is really working there. Rather what one sees is a sad but comedic repetition of what has occurred dozens of times before in history: someone gathers followers around himself and a radical hidden knowledge of how the world really is, and then the “prophet” gets more and more radical, isolating his followers more and more from the outside world, his ideas becoming more and more detached and contradictory to common sense reality, then purges begin within the movement, then, usually, polygamy somehow finds a way in, then there’s dissent and divisions, and more schisms, and counter schisms, and on, and on. I’m speaking vaguely, but the exact same sequence of events, a revolution based on a gnostic reinterpretation of the world followed by a purity spiral,7 amongst the so-called elect was borne out in the Protestant reformation in general and the Anabaptists of Munster in particular,8 the French Revolution9, the Russian Revolution, and 60s leftism in America10 and the exact same pattern repeats itself, and may, in lesser form, be judged to be happening amongst the factions that have split off from the SSPX or the rebel “Mary’s Little Remnant” movement that counters and opposes the Dimond brothers as not radical enough. And many other places.
By Lindsay’s and Lancing’s definitions, I’d say these groups definitely count as woke, as they mirror the “woke left” in behavior, epistemology, victimhood identity status-seeking, and pose a similar risk to society should they come to gain cultural traction. Not of course in the same way as woke leftism, which immediately opposes a stable political order, a solvent epistemology, and Christianity in toto, but by leading Catholics and other Christians off into a radical crazy land unmoored from reality, unmoored from charity, and into similar nasty behaviors and into similarly self-destructive in-group infighting and purity spirals as that of the leftists they are supposedly fighting. For Lindsay, this is, in the long run, ultimately destructive to the right. For as the right descends into its own form of woke craziness, it becomes splintered and ineffectual, and in the long run, the left, and the “woke left” ultimately win, making the “woke right” self-defeating to the right as whole.11
And yet the origin of this “woke right” is simple, mimetic, and dialectical. If leftists tell a white man that he’s the ultimate oppressor, and stack the deck against him with DEI and ESG, the man is not likely to respond with the humble charity of turning the other cheek, nor even with nuanced practical prudence. Rather, he will snap back by assuming the leftist framework for himself and inverting it. That’s how it starts. When simple blind imitation substitutes for charity, you’re not going to solve a problem that you fight but will actually make it worse. The existence of the woke right is the fault of the woke left. But, as we will see in Part II, the existence of the woke left is itself the fault of classical liberalism’s insufficiency to stand on its own.
I’ve met radical far-right or “woke right” members in real life, who (if only in speech) are plotting and hoping for a war or revolution where as one told me “We and my buddies I’ve been training with will clean up America”12 by “eliminating” this, that, and the other race, group, person, or people. It was a long list. But how serious was he? Well, I can’t know for sure, but the experience, and the willingness of the guy to openly brag about his admiration for and tattoos about the Nazis, violence, and revolution, forced me to admit to myself that there was such a thing as right-wing extremism. Now, left-wing media warns about the far right all the time whilst right-wing media and influencers laugh and point back at the left, arguing that these concerns are even greater evidence of woke insanity, lies, and paranoia. In this paradigm, I had long laughed and disbelieved such left-wing propaganda, but after having met one, and then, later, some more, I had to change my mind. They exist. James Lindsay at least has a point.
But how big of a point? Lindsay places Christian nationalists within his “woke right.” He puts many of my friends explicitly and implicitly within this category. While he’s replied, liked, and reposted several of my X posts, he’d probably categorize me as “woke right” if he actually saw everything I’ve said and written.
So what part of Lindsay’s broad and vast “woke right” is a real problem? Are there ways to properly react to leftism without taking on its assumptions? Can you thread the needle and be anti-classical liberal without falling into wokeness? And why is James Lindsay so zealous about the current status quo? Hmm, isn’t it also his belief that all-powerful and dangerous "woke left" and "woke right" movements exist and are hidden power structures that secretly control the world and are actively conspiring to destroy the liberal order and oppress classical liberals such as himself? Does he not constantly decry how few people besides himself can see this terrible reality?
And does this not make him the very type of thing he has criticized so much over his entire career, but in a “woke centrist" or "woke-establishmentarian” type of way?
James Lindsay is a “woke centrist” but it’s not really his fault.
We’ll cover all that and more in Part II, hopefully out next weekend.
As a satirist myself, although nowhere as wild as Lindsay, I find this hilarious. Similarly, I have also written fake/satire papers in the past. Check out my wildest ideas for papers here (unlike Lindsay I didn’t write these but only came up with titles:
or a satirical paper on Dawkins here that I did write and which technically did answer a serious prompt. There are also many others in the irkutskice.substack.com archive.
James Lindsay, X. https://x.com/ConceptualJames/status/1840510556056195340/photo/1
Logan Lancing, X. https://x.com/LoganLancing/status/1865818448237912471
Dave Smith responds to Lindsay about Tucker and Cooper being “woke right” here:
This is why I put Catholic in quotes when it is used regarding the Dimond brothers’ Most Holy Family Monastery:
A constant war of all against all for higher social standing within the movement by everyone each trying to be the most “pure”, that is having taken the ideas to the furthest possible extreme than the others.
Dan Carlin gave this topic the ultimate treatment on his Hardcore History podcast. Like all of Dan’s work, it is really really good: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophets-of-doom/comment-page-6/
Check out Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast for the ultimate, even if a little too sympathetic to leftism, treatment: http://www.sal.wisc.edu/~jwp/revolutions-episode-index.html
Darryl Cooper’s 30-hour Jonestown saga is great, but Episodes 4-6 cover the leftist radicals of the 1960s and their terrorist turn in the 1970s the best of anything I’ve heard other than Brian Burrough’s Days of Rage, a book much-used itself by Cooper’s treatment.
Trailer for the podcast series:
The episodes themselves: https://www.martyrmade.com/featured-podcasts/gods-socialist-the-rise-and-fall-of-peoples-temple
According to Lindsay:
I was camping, the guy was drunk, he had wandered into my campsite, and I just had a certain feeling that I couldn’t trust him, and as he started getting obviously more and more heated and angry, I felt my best bet was to keep him talking. I ended up not sleeping at all that night after a wild several-hour-long conversation where I tried to “talk him down” from his riled-up and angry disposition.