James Lindsay versus MAGA

The 'woke right' crusade comes for the only effective reform movement of my lifetime. They can get bent.

Something intensely strange is happening over on the old Internet, which, if you are not as online as I am, you may have missed. There is a concerted effort to frame large swaths of right-wing and conservative people as ‘woke right.’

For a while it seemed to just be masturbatory online discourse by male public intellectuals jockeying for clout. And so I thought long and hard about whether or not it really mattered enough to share my thoughts on it. However, it now looks to me like a deliberate attempt to sabotage an ascendent MAGA movement that is actually achieving real world reforms that are desperately needed. And so, I will dive in.

I have been following the anti-woke movement closely since at least 2016. And when I say closely, I mean closely, like my sanity depended on it. Because it did. I was at the time extremely alienated from my peers by my horror at the left, of which I considered myself vaguely a part, adopting wholesale the extremely toxic, racist, and resentment driven ideology that is woke. So it was with great relief that I found brave people willing to speak out against the orthodoxy of the day.

One of them was James Lindsay. I first heard of Lindsay after the 2018 grievance studies affair, the hilarious trick he, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose played on woke academic journals. I started following Lindsay closely, even becoming a paid subscriber at one point, around 2021. There have been numerous things he has said that I have found exceptionally helpful and insightful. He’s been skewering and attacking the madness of the left for years.

In the last year, Lindsay has been strenuously pushing a new concept — ‘woke right.’

In an explainer podcast he made six months ago, Lindsay presented his argument about what woke right is and why we should care. The tone is calm, reasoned, even exploratory. This would change, as I will go into later. But the substance does not pass muster. Basically, it is anyone who expresses scepticism of classical liberalism. So included in ‘woke right’ is Tucker Carlson, who Lindsay describes as the contemporary version of paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan, and open fascist and Nazi sympathisers.

I don’t see how a definition of a political philosophy can include such oppositional forces — you may not love paleo-conservatives, but I don’t think anyone claims their hatred of big government and isolationist tendencies are in line with fascism and Nazism, which are all about concentration of state power and expansionism.

Another feature of the woke right, Lindsay claims, is the use of joking references and not taking anything seriously. Which could define about 60 percent of all online activity.

It was also surprising that someone as knowledgeable as Lindsay would fail to come up with another term, one that wasn’t so tightly associated with the left, as the word woke is. To me, woke is an ideology that posits that society is a system of power at the centre of which sits the white man. And the white man uses that power to oppress everyone else. Therefore wokeness seeks to dismantle the power of the white man, to give to the oppressed. This is in no way right-wing. Lindsay himself has done a huge amount of work to show the clear and demonstrable line to be drawn from the 1960’s student radicals and academic leftists, to the woke cultural takeover that we all experience today. To try to shoehorn in a very amorphous hodgepodge of contemporary right wing thinkers is to blur that clear line — which is not just a disservice, it is a danger.

A definition as broad as this fails to be a definition at all. It fails as a category, and therefore, it’s useless. Instead, it’s become an accusation.

For a while, Lindsay’s attempts to make woke right happen didn’t really take. In fact, it was widely mocked. Until, in the last few weeks, some very influential anti-woke liberal luminaries joined him in using the ‘woke right’ nomenclature. As a result, it has taken root among the fans of those luminaries just enough to have a somewhat hypnotic effect, with a tribe coalescing around the phrase, mynah birds chirping ‘woke right’ at all and sundry. It’s starting to remind me of the corporate media’s use of the phrase ‘election denier’ to instantly besmirch a target and send others fleeing from them.

Then, Lindsay came for MAGA.

He wrote on X “woke right is nullifying Trump and MAGA from within.” And, responding to a self-proclaimed Nazi anon account with even fewer followers then I have, Lindsay wrote: “MAGA has sold its soul and went into the darkness.” Then he wrote a ridiculously long “short letter” to “MAGA youth” warning them not to become Maoist. He wrote that a particularly irrelevant Internet subculture, the Groypers, are going to “take down MAGA because MAGA conservatives were too chicken to draw hard lines.”

To make his case that this is a real and present danger, Lindsay is taking the most insignificant subgroups and outliers and holding them up as the paradigm, somehow, of right-wing content creators, to justify and propagate his ‘woke right’ obsession.

And what is MAGA leadership up to, anyway? They are busy enacting a huge swath of incredibly difficult policy changes while the most powerful forces on earth are arrayed against them. And by MAGA leadership I don’t mean people who run their mouths on the Internet. I men the men and women currently running the government, and a handful of truly indispensable field generals — people like Mike Benz and Bannon — who are providing the analysis and information terrain that is required to get the job done. What does ‘woke right’ do for these people?

MAGA represents the only true and effective reform movement of my lifetime, tackling the permanent government, seizing territory from the progressive-left elites, and going nuclear on unaccountable power in law firms and Ivy Leagues. They could give two shits about some basement dwelling malcontents on X.

Anyone who pays close attention to the publicly stated, oft repeated MAGA agenda knows that it considers its source code to be the American Revolution, 1776 and the US constitution. In Lindsay’s haranguing of MAGA — which also sounds very much like bullying blue collar normies — I have never seen him acknowledge that. Does he not realise that it was the MAGA base that kept pushing for Trump despite all the calumny, law fare and violence the woke-adjacent establishment could throw at them? So they are probably well able to swerve all these influential Nazis he’s always banging on about.

Lindsay has utterly failed to notice that the vast majority of Americans do not live and die by what people say on X. He has simply dismissed MAGA as a bunch of rubes who, unless they sit at his feet and absorb his brilliance, will be mesmerised by some obscure rightoids on social media into goose-stepping and Hail Hitlering, because they are too stupid to do otherwise. He seems to think that this is a genuine emergency and is being quite emotional about the fact that people are openly mocking the ridiculousness of this take.

MAGA is THE reform movement, the only one, and it is winning some major battles. This needs to be supported and protected above all else, because if the reform project fails — and it has so many powerful enemies it could absolutely fail — history shows that the concept of reform is abandoned for the concept of revolution. And I don’t mean revolution in some literary, descriptive sense. I mean the guillotine kind.

Populist lawyer and commentator Robert Barnes had a very interesting insight into Lindsay’s ‘woke right’ crusade last week. He compared Lindsay to William F. Buckley, who Barnes said, played a key role in casting out the Buchanan-ite Republican populists out and boosting the Neo-cons. This, Barnes said, was done in service of Buckley’s deep state ties.

I am not saying that is the case with Lindsay. If anything, his public statements on this have been volatile, messy, and scattershot, far from a smooth PR rollout scripted and bankrolled by shadowy spooks. But it is drawing a line in the sand between the MAGA wing who want nothing to do with any more wars in the Middle East, and those of a more expeditionary bent.

‘Woke right’ and anti-semitism

The woke right moment gets much of its energy from the very real problem of anti-semitism and the deep divisions in the commentariat over Israel’s war in Gaza.

Supporters of the term point to how much criticism of Israel is a fig leaf for anti-semitism. While I don’t agree with them on ‘woke right,’ I undoubtedly agree with that. I write about it with some regularity.

And social media is in fact awash in Jew hatred, and a lot of it is from the right.

But the fact that this anti-semitism should surprise someone like Lindsay is odd, given that hatred of Jews is an ancient and prevalent problem.

There has always been a hard-right, or a far-right, they have always been authoritarian, racist, and anti-semitic. They don’t need a rebrand as ‘woke right.’

October 7 has caused an eruption of anti-Semitism on the left and far-left on the streets across the west, surprisingly to everyone who is familiar with the violent history of the far-right, this time around their Jew hatred has stayed online. So while I understand and share a protective instinct toward Jews and the Jewish nation, it still doesn’t make ‘woke right’ a thing.

Whatever happened to the marketplace of ideas?

Lindsay and the big names taking up his nomenclature are also all liberals. They clearly have a vested interest in advancing the principles of liberalism, especially because they are all part of a liberal professional managerial class which has clearly benefited them. And that’s fine, because they are all talented and have contributed hugely to the discussion.

But their stamp of approval still doesn’t make ‘woke right’ make sense.

You don’t have to be a philosopher to notice that there exists a spectrum of political thought that manifests itself in people, from left to right. For the sake of simplicity let’s put Stalin and Pol Pot on the far left end, and Hitler on the far right.

The current fight is for the centre, which used to be the undisputed terrain of liberalism and its twin, soft conservatism.

But now the centre is up for grabs due to the spectacular failures of liberalism-conservatism, which in the last five years has managed to wholly discredit hundreds of years of political and civic successes. This has caused left-leaning people to reconsider hard-left communism — Lenin is making a comeback — and right-leaning people to consider things like getting rid of the separation of church and state. (For the record, I favour neither.)

Everything is up for grabs and so there is everything to fight for. It’s kind of the wild west out there, with a lot of very disparate right-wing content creators putting forth all kinds of ideas, most of them critical of liberalism.

Disagreement between them is to be expected. Aren’t we all operating in that marketplace of ideas that liberals are so fond of? But instead of showing even the tiniest amount of message discipline in the face of gay race communism — which literally threatens western civilisation right this very second— Lindsay is gatekeeping, ostracising, and monstering. It’s a breathtaking exercise in demoralisation.

Public intellectuals should guard themselves with unwavering vigilance against the mistaken impression that they really, truly, matter in the real world. Only a handful ever do. The rest jockey for position and influence and spend a lot of time embittered about the fact that they aren’t taken seriously by the plebes.