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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   35094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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You may remember racism being declared a public health emergency during the height of Covid. So now the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy is declaring antisemitism a "spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues". Since it's a malady and he promised to Make America Healthy Again Health and Human Services will be working with other departments to fight this sick sick wrongthing.

I'm thinking that Trump administration isn't so much "defeating wokeness" as just updating it to their funhouse mirror version.

Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.

The funniest part is that this is the opposite of what the people who came up with it meant.

What did the people who came up with it mean?

There's a lot of motte and bailey around it, but they meant it as a catchall term for the illiberal right, and/or factions of the right that stray too far from the (lowercase "l") liberal consensus. I think "anti-semitism" / skepticism of Israel would put you firmly in that category, given that the term's owner went on some bizarre "imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke"-esque rant about Epstein.

I think the term "woke right" has value to describe rightists who make arguments that sound like they've come straight from an ardent progressive but just with certain groups swapped. For example, people who believe in HBD when it comes to explaining the black/white achievement gap on most metrics, but who come up with elaborate non-IQ related explanations for why Jews and east Asians do better than white people i.e. "group evolutionary strategy".

I agree that there is a useful version of the term, but I consider it part of the motte-and-bailey game. I keep seeing people use it to describe Joopoasters and advanced racists so it soaks up their vibes, and than slapping it on relatively mild dissident figures who are not so hot on liberalism anymore. I don't know if he's still doing it, but that was essentially the entirety of James Lindsay's timeline for a while.

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