I forget if I mentioned this here before, but I think the phrase "woke right" is similar to "fundamentalist atheist". Both of those phrases sound intentionally oxymoronic (and sometimes are explicitly meant to be so), and they both imply that one is mirroring the errors of their opponents.
Someone characterized as "fundamentalist atheist" is supposed to be someone who engages in the same kind of sloppy thinking habits that fundamentalists do. Someone described as "woke right" similarly adopts the kind of slipshod reasoning and other related negative attributes seen on the "woke" left.
Yes, and I think that's a problem because then it looks like you're just doing a childish "I know you are but what am I?" thing, but the parallels are there and people cannot miss them and help relating them.
I’m going to be nitpicky about this, but bear with me: I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept that criticism of someone’s claim is not the same as criticizing who they are (I’m going off of the tweet that accused Helen of attacking their character when she was actually trying to get them to change their mind) As someone who tends to get triggered by criticism of my seemingly illogical ideas, I believe that if someone strongly believes in a claim they are making, it originates from a part of their natural, immutable personality, and if they truly want to make a mind shift, they have to change a fundamentally flawed part of themselves first before they can stop making baseless claims. I think it is actually quite logical that people would get upset when writers like you, Helen, point out why they are wrong, because it is an indication that a flaw inside them has been publicly noticed, and needs correction so that truth can prevail and liberalism can be preserved. I argue that this is a core belief that motivates the outrage of both left and right radicals. They are deeply self- conscious and need some compassion handed to them.
I asked this question in the comments for your original article. It would help me to understand your argument if you answered it:
Can you give me an example of a contemporary thinker who you believe is clearly a member of the Woke Right (i.e. they fulfill all the bullet points in your original article). I don’t mean just random posters on social media, but someone who writes books or long essays.
The only real example that I saw in the linked articles (in your original article) was Pat Buchanan, who ended his political career before Woke ever existed.
Well, it depends where they are socially as to which criteria they fulfil. The woke on either side tend to operate within their own register. DiAngelo hits the social construction bit very strongly but does not engage in social media dogpiles to get people cancelled. Online activists do all the insane nastiness but don't write books. The Woke Right don't tend to write books or long essays but operate mostly online, but here's an analysis of one.
I've also mentioned Chris Rufo's new book several times. He hits the identitarian stuff much less strongly. Karlyn Borysenko's tribe hits the conspiratorial identitarian stuff strongly
For the post-truth phenomenon generally, you should look to the Trump Administration. Trump and Kennedy engage in outsized denial of objective reality. Musk is the consummate narrative builder. Loomer yelling "Woke Marxist Pope" at the new pope was a good example of the "everybody who disagrees with me is evil" mentality.
"Among the responses to the unveiling of the first American pope this month, there was one that really stood out to me. It came from Laura Loomer, a prominent rightwing activist, conspiracy theorist and unofficial adviser to Donald Trump, in the form of a three-word reply to a 10-year-old post on Pope Leo XIV’s now deleted personal X account: “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.
Loomer was far from the only one to immediately denounce Leo — a man who has voted in Republican primaries, who in 2012 described “a homosexual lifestyle” as “at odds with the gospel” and who in 2016 said that “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist” — as too woke to be the pope. Ryan Selkis, former CEO of crypto research company Messari and fellow Trump fanatic, posted a whole thread on the “new woke pope”, digging up old posts and reposts such as one on carbon emissions (“climate alarmist”!) and another that prayed for George Floyd and his family (“suicidal empathy”!).
This is by now a familiar ritual — trawling through someone’s online history the second they become prominent for evidence of wrongthink; conveniently leaving out any counter-evidence of the thing you are shunning them for; using hyperbole and exaggeration for maximum traction; encouraging pile-ons. Cancel culture, we might call it. Identity politics, perhaps. Or maybe . . . woke?"
Marjorie Taylor Greene doing a good combination of the identitarian determination of who is allowed to speak and the DARVO move here particularly strongly.
Helen, the 'red pill' is not just the guys posting daily YouTube videos of slop to fuel the algorithm. We'll give you an easy one. How do sexual strategies of large and small gamete havers differ in the animal kingdom? Do you think humans are blank slates with control of their own minds? Are these questions 'red pill' and 'woke right'?
Lindsay used to claim he was using traditional theories to take apart the critical theories. Can you sincerely claim that you're doing that?
No, recognising biological reality is neither red-pilled nor woke. The latter refers to beliefs about hidden systems of power like gynocracy vs patriarchy, not material facts about sex differences.
I'm using evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles. I suppose the latter could be seen as a theory.
Ok good, so we then have our first couple of problems:
- There seems to be nothing wrong with analyzing power differentials and how this manifests in society (intersectionality clearly just makes assertions). The claim doesn't tend to be that gynocracy secretly rules, it's that society simply is gynocentric because it would have been more likely to survive in Darwinian selection conditions.
The possessors of large gametes have more value for obvious reasons. Humans are also a tournament species, where men compete for women displaying signifiers of genetic health and fertility. The female being the main chooser when left to her own devices in most cases. Kneel down and stick a month's worth of salary on it! Being evolved primates, we are primed to give deference to women and their children. Women...and.
There is a famine, so surely we need to make sacrifices so the children survive. Well, the future hypothetical value of a child may well be less than someone with large gametes who can simply reproduce in future if she survives. Shall we look for Holodomor stories? I reckon my Mother would have eaten me and not felt a single pang of guilt. She didn't eat anything that didn't come from Marks & Spencer typically.
- It then seems rather difficult to imagine a world where this could be seriously studied in a university. The saying about the MGTOW guys was this is "gender studies when men do it" (i.e, Discussions about evolutionary biology, simple observations and literary analysis, that can take place anonymously. Where people simply hurling pejoratives can be ignored.). You're still unlikely to see a male gender studies department, because the women will complain and the majority of men will comply. To argue back is to risk the end of your genetic line and appeasement is simply a good strategy. Your response should presumably be 'well the women should stop being illiberal and make arguments!'
We then end up with the problem that liberalism vs biology is a rather difficult problem for liberalism to solve. It's ok to rely on liberal ethics when you lose an argument and need to withdraw, but how likely is it going to work when the loss involves the hinderance of gene expression, via a permanent loss of status at the biological level? As a thought experiment, let's imagine a world where the 'male gender studies' people win the argument so handily that women lose the automatic right to study at a university (we imagine a world where gynocentrism is viewed as such a threat to male creativity and success that men are allowed to freely associate and withhold resources). This is why Marcuse's project has been so successful right? Stir up resentment at the genetic level because it defeats any argument.
The argument then just devolves into (usually sexual) shaming language, in lieu of an argument. What is 'incel' other than 'genetically unfit male', as a pejorative designed to lower a man's prospects for mate selection if he disagrees with women? Pre-hormonal birth control and pre-mass communications technology, all those guys would have been married.
None of this involves any kind of hidden system of power that I need to uncover as a critical theorist. These are all observable phenomena that cannot really be talked about in public for the most part, for the reasons I have outlined. I don't write like this because I have an 'awakened critical consciousness', I just look at humans as animals and observe their behavior.
In a workplace dispute over the matter, I'd presumably need to rely on a belief that you may consider to be a 'hidden system of power', except I neither view it has hidden or as a consciously human-made system. I also suspect that a reliance on liberal ethics would not impress an employment tribunal.
To give the feminists some credit 'patriarchy' plainly exists and isn't a hidden system of power either. Just look at Islamic theocracies (NB: religion has historically resolved this problem, because 'god says so' is probably the only way to resolve the problem of competing sexual selection strategies on the societal scale). I'm sure we'll return to some form of patriarchy once birth rates collapse, probably a Western Islamic one.
Another positive development. We await the John Stewartess Mill approach of actually investigating the claims of men interested in Darwinian selection and not simply asserting that this is in any real sense comparable to a neo-Marxist approach designed to stir up trouble.
Your 'woke right' taxonomy is as follows from the article: "1) society is divided into straight White men and their enemies via 2) hegemonic norms (“the Longhouse,” “postwar consensus,” “Judeo-Christianity”) but normies are blind so 3) we need to redpill them to 4) retake the West."
1) Is plainly simply true. We are evolved apes competing for gene expression. We're plainly engaged in low-level tribal warfare globally. We simply grew up without being exposed to the reality of it, as the West was until recently both relatively homogenous and overwhelmingly 'white'. 2) Again simply observably true, but it's biology not a 'hegemonic norm'. Men can't even do the sheds thing without being bothered and the workplace is heavily run based on female sensibilities (care/harm via Haidt). The postwar consensus has plainly led to an invasion of Western nations, with hostile groups (large number of Pakistanis in particular) unable to be removed, despite being openly hostile in many cases. 3) & 4) then naturally follow.
I'm afraid some of the solutions I would propose would be illiberal, however as stated, biology is illiberal. It's why men go to war with each other.
I'm sorry, but you write longhouse articles Helen!
(I still appreciate the help with defeating the tiresome HR department identity communists.)
Edit: Having thought about it, I cannot be innocent if I fail to make any effort to provide my opponent with part of the trident.
The 'manosphere' has historically had three main components:
- Men who use evolutionary psychology to succeed in a sexual strategy of low investment and multiple partners.
- The political arm that advocated for men.
- The philosophers who simply observe and comment on this phenomena because the subject is interesting. The progenitor was possibly a chap who went by Man Woman Myth and made BBC style documentaries with his flat mates in London. He suffered a brain injury in an accident many years later.
If you want to be a liberal and value evidence based arguments, then you'll need to contend with a few you may not have addressed previously. Just calling these guys 'woke right' simply isn't going to work.
That is a helpful analysis. I have come to some conclusions similar to yours about the roots of the postmodern right. The pragmatism connection is key as an umbrella epistemology that tends to erode intellectual standards across the board. Specifically, I would point to (see link) its impact on Rothbard, who has been a key theoretical source behind some prominent ethno-nationalists. I also think this whole strand has been fused with figures like RFK Jr, Greenwald, and the Weinsteins who are best understood as Frankfurtian, New Left relics.
Good post, needs more Matt McManus:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Post-Modern-Conservatism-Neoliberalism-Reactionary/dp/3030246817
I forget if I mentioned this here before, but I think the phrase "woke right" is similar to "fundamentalist atheist". Both of those phrases sound intentionally oxymoronic (and sometimes are explicitly meant to be so), and they both imply that one is mirroring the errors of their opponents.
Someone characterized as "fundamentalist atheist" is supposed to be someone who engages in the same kind of sloppy thinking habits that fundamentalists do. Someone described as "woke right" similarly adopts the kind of slipshod reasoning and other related negative attributes seen on the "woke" left.
Both phrases imply a sort of hypocrisy.
Yes, and I think that's a problem because then it looks like you're just doing a childish "I know you are but what am I?" thing, but the parallels are there and people cannot miss them and help relating them.
I’m going to be nitpicky about this, but bear with me: I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept that criticism of someone’s claim is not the same as criticizing who they are (I’m going off of the tweet that accused Helen of attacking their character when she was actually trying to get them to change their mind) As someone who tends to get triggered by criticism of my seemingly illogical ideas, I believe that if someone strongly believes in a claim they are making, it originates from a part of their natural, immutable personality, and if they truly want to make a mind shift, they have to change a fundamentally flawed part of themselves first before they can stop making baseless claims. I think it is actually quite logical that people would get upset when writers like you, Helen, point out why they are wrong, because it is an indication that a flaw inside them has been publicly noticed, and needs correction so that truth can prevail and liberalism can be preserved. I argue that this is a core belief that motivates the outrage of both left and right radicals. They are deeply self- conscious and need some compassion handed to them.
I asked this question in the comments for your original article. It would help me to understand your argument if you answered it:
Can you give me an example of a contemporary thinker who you believe is clearly a member of the Woke Right (i.e. they fulfill all the bullet points in your original article). I don’t mean just random posters on social media, but someone who writes books or long essays.
The only real example that I saw in the linked articles (in your original article) was Pat Buchanan, who ended his political career before Woke ever existed.
Well, it depends where they are socially as to which criteria they fulfil. The woke on either side tend to operate within their own register. DiAngelo hits the social construction bit very strongly but does not engage in social media dogpiles to get people cancelled. Online activists do all the insane nastiness but don't write books. The Woke Right don't tend to write books or long essays but operate mostly online, but here's an analysis of one.
https://shenviapologetics.com/what-is-the-woke-right/
I've also mentioned Chris Rufo's new book several times. He hits the identitarian stuff much less strongly. Karlyn Borysenko's tribe hits the conspiratorial identitarian stuff strongly
For the post-truth phenomenon generally, you should look to the Trump Administration. Trump and Kennedy engage in outsized denial of objective reality. Musk is the consummate narrative builder. Loomer yelling "Woke Marxist Pope" at the new pope was a good example of the "everybody who disagrees with me is evil" mentality.
"Among the responses to the unveiling of the first American pope this month, there was one that really stood out to me. It came from Laura Loomer, a prominent rightwing activist, conspiracy theorist and unofficial adviser to Donald Trump, in the form of a three-word reply to a 10-year-old post on Pope Leo XIV’s now deleted personal X account: “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.
Loomer was far from the only one to immediately denounce Leo — a man who has voted in Republican primaries, who in 2012 described “a homosexual lifestyle” as “at odds with the gospel” and who in 2016 said that “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist” — as too woke to be the pope. Ryan Selkis, former CEO of crypto research company Messari and fellow Trump fanatic, posted a whole thread on the “new woke pope”, digging up old posts and reposts such as one on carbon emissions (“climate alarmist”!) and another that prayed for George Floyd and his family (“suicidal empathy”!).
This is by now a familiar ritual — trawling through someone’s online history the second they become prominent for evidence of wrongthink; conveniently leaving out any counter-evidence of the thing you are shunning them for; using hyperbole and exaggeration for maximum traction; encouraging pile-ons. Cancel culture, we might call it. Identity politics, perhaps. Or maybe . . . woke?"
https://www.ft.com/content/546040d5-91b6-46e9-9479-2ce463d76cb8
Marjorie Taylor Greene doing a good combination of the identitarian determination of who is allowed to speak and the DARVO move here particularly strongly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/27/politics/video/marjorie-taylor-greene-signal-group-chat-sky-news-reporter-digvid
Libs of TikTok trying to get people fired for making off-colour jokes?
This is a good piece which addresses various of the elements in a US context.
https://ricksint.substack.com/p/its-alive-the-new-right-fusionism
Well argued. Thanks for doing the drudgery work drilling down into this. This is a lot of very clear thinking and I bet good coffee was involved.
You had to ruin it at the end there, didn’t you?
Sorry so sorry
-_-
Helen, the 'red pill' is not just the guys posting daily YouTube videos of slop to fuel the algorithm. We'll give you an easy one. How do sexual strategies of large and small gamete havers differ in the animal kingdom? Do you think humans are blank slates with control of their own minds? Are these questions 'red pill' and 'woke right'?
Lindsay used to claim he was using traditional theories to take apart the critical theories. Can you sincerely claim that you're doing that?
No, recognising biological reality is neither red-pilled nor woke. The latter refers to beliefs about hidden systems of power like gynocracy vs patriarchy, not material facts about sex differences.
I'm using evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles. I suppose the latter could be seen as a theory.
Ok good, so we then have our first couple of problems:
- There seems to be nothing wrong with analyzing power differentials and how this manifests in society (intersectionality clearly just makes assertions). The claim doesn't tend to be that gynocracy secretly rules, it's that society simply is gynocentric because it would have been more likely to survive in Darwinian selection conditions.
The possessors of large gametes have more value for obvious reasons. Humans are also a tournament species, where men compete for women displaying signifiers of genetic health and fertility. The female being the main chooser when left to her own devices in most cases. Kneel down and stick a month's worth of salary on it! Being evolved primates, we are primed to give deference to women and their children. Women...and.
There is a famine, so surely we need to make sacrifices so the children survive. Well, the future hypothetical value of a child may well be less than someone with large gametes who can simply reproduce in future if she survives. Shall we look for Holodomor stories? I reckon my Mother would have eaten me and not felt a single pang of guilt. She didn't eat anything that didn't come from Marks & Spencer typically.
- It then seems rather difficult to imagine a world where this could be seriously studied in a university. The saying about the MGTOW guys was this is "gender studies when men do it" (i.e, Discussions about evolutionary biology, simple observations and literary analysis, that can take place anonymously. Where people simply hurling pejoratives can be ignored.). You're still unlikely to see a male gender studies department, because the women will complain and the majority of men will comply. To argue back is to risk the end of your genetic line and appeasement is simply a good strategy. Your response should presumably be 'well the women should stop being illiberal and make arguments!'
We then end up with the problem that liberalism vs biology is a rather difficult problem for liberalism to solve. It's ok to rely on liberal ethics when you lose an argument and need to withdraw, but how likely is it going to work when the loss involves the hinderance of gene expression, via a permanent loss of status at the biological level? As a thought experiment, let's imagine a world where the 'male gender studies' people win the argument so handily that women lose the automatic right to study at a university (we imagine a world where gynocentrism is viewed as such a threat to male creativity and success that men are allowed to freely associate and withhold resources). This is why Marcuse's project has been so successful right? Stir up resentment at the genetic level because it defeats any argument.
The argument then just devolves into (usually sexual) shaming language, in lieu of an argument. What is 'incel' other than 'genetically unfit male', as a pejorative designed to lower a man's prospects for mate selection if he disagrees with women? Pre-hormonal birth control and pre-mass communications technology, all those guys would have been married.
None of this involves any kind of hidden system of power that I need to uncover as a critical theorist. These are all observable phenomena that cannot really be talked about in public for the most part, for the reasons I have outlined. I don't write like this because I have an 'awakened critical consciousness', I just look at humans as animals and observe their behavior.
In a workplace dispute over the matter, I'd presumably need to rely on a belief that you may consider to be a 'hidden system of power', except I neither view it has hidden or as a consciously human-made system. I also suspect that a reliance on liberal ethics would not impress an employment tribunal.
To give the feminists some credit 'patriarchy' plainly exists and isn't a hidden system of power either. Just look at Islamic theocracies (NB: religion has historically resolved this problem, because 'god says so' is probably the only way to resolve the problem of competing sexual selection strategies on the societal scale). I'm sure we'll return to some form of patriarchy once birth rates collapse, probably a Western Islamic one.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Another positive development. We await the John Stewartess Mill approach of actually investigating the claims of men interested in Darwinian selection and not simply asserting that this is in any real sense comparable to a neo-Marxist approach designed to stir up trouble.
Your 'woke right' taxonomy is as follows from the article: "1) society is divided into straight White men and their enemies via 2) hegemonic norms (“the Longhouse,” “postwar consensus,” “Judeo-Christianity”) but normies are blind so 3) we need to redpill them to 4) retake the West."
1) Is plainly simply true. We are evolved apes competing for gene expression. We're plainly engaged in low-level tribal warfare globally. We simply grew up without being exposed to the reality of it, as the West was until recently both relatively homogenous and overwhelmingly 'white'. 2) Again simply observably true, but it's biology not a 'hegemonic norm'. Men can't even do the sheds thing without being bothered and the workplace is heavily run based on female sensibilities (care/harm via Haidt). The postwar consensus has plainly led to an invasion of Western nations, with hostile groups (large number of Pakistanis in particular) unable to be removed, despite being openly hostile in many cases. 3) & 4) then naturally follow.
I'm afraid some of the solutions I would propose would be illiberal, however as stated, biology is illiberal. It's why men go to war with each other.
I'm sorry, but you write longhouse articles Helen!
(I still appreciate the help with defeating the tiresome HR department identity communists.)
Edit: Having thought about it, I cannot be innocent if I fail to make any effort to provide my opponent with part of the trident.
The 'manosphere' has historically had three main components:
- Men who use evolutionary psychology to succeed in a sexual strategy of low investment and multiple partners.
- The political arm that advocated for men.
- The philosophers who simply observe and comment on this phenomena because the subject is interesting. The progenitor was possibly a chap who went by Man Woman Myth and made BBC style documentaries with his flat mates in London. He suffered a brain injury in an accident many years later.
Spetznaz died in an accident some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ZuPf-i54l0Gonur0bBb6vhg2nHGSle2
Barbarossa said what he had to say and left the internet many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/@barbarossaaaa
Stardusk is somehow still going as our favorite internet Diogenes of Sinope: https://www.youtube.com/@thinking-ape6483
If you want to be a liberal and value evidence based arguments, then you'll need to contend with a few you may not have addressed previously. Just calling these guys 'woke right' simply isn't going to work.
That is a helpful analysis. I have come to some conclusions similar to yours about the roots of the postmodern right. The pragmatism connection is key as an umbrella epistemology that tends to erode intellectual standards across the board. Specifically, I would point to (see link) its impact on Rothbard, who has been a key theoretical source behind some prominent ethno-nationalists. I also think this whole strand has been fused with figures like RFK Jr, Greenwald, and the Weinsteins who are best understood as Frankfurtian, New Left relics.
https://ricksint.substack.com/p/its-alive-the-new-right-fusionism