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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Glen Greenwald on Tucker Carlson's show shits all over the CIA and puts in a succinct way the ties between Israeli intelligence and Epstein, lo and behold suddenly on the same day his private sex tape with his husband gets leaked.

My favorite part of this is the anti-woke-right brigade suddenly deciding they don't like gay sexual degeneracy.

Suddenly? Acknowledging that it is a dangerous disease spreading subculture has been part of the anti-woke right from the beginning.

Yeah looks like parentheses are in order. I meant anti-(woke-right), not (anti-woke)-right.

Following Trump's recent victory, some anti-woke centrists decided they need to make sure the pendulum does not swing back too far in the other direction, and started attacking people to their right. They coined the term "Woke Right" to show that their actions are justified by the more extreme elements on the right being functionally the same as the woke left.

It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.

woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.

woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.

James Lindsay uses it on Twitter as a derogatory term for anti-Jewish right wingers, who then all abuse, ratio, and fart on him in his threads. That's all I know it as.

The dunking came after, he started the use of the term trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world. His terms, not mine.

In practice it's just a rethorical trick to try and paint any opposition to liberalism from the right with the same brush as opposition from the left.

Which frankly is a transparently losing tactic in world where most people (and an even larger proportion of serious political philosophers) have long given up on the sort of logical positivism that underlies Lindsey's worldview.

trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world

Well dang, this is the kind of bait that grabs my interest. Any details? I'm sort of accustomed to hearing about immanentizing the eschaton, but I've never heard of involving the Archangel Michael before, though yeah okay maybe I can see it... in his role as the Weigher of Souls, if you're gonna bring about the end of the world, you need him to appear first.

Not sure on the specific context that led to Lindsay making such an unhinged sounding tweet but here it is: https://x.com/ConceptualJames/status/1840510556056195340

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As I understand it, “woke right” doesn’t just mean “hardcore right-winger”; it means, roughly, co-opting the tactics and analytical methods of wokeism to advance a right-wing political agenda.

For example, hiring quotas for conservatives in academia to boost “viewpoint diversity”, or affirmative action for flyover-country whites, would be “woke right” policies, while Ramaswamy/Musk-style “green cards stapled to STEM degrees” would be “tech right”.

Is trying to associate people, who's views you don't like, with nazis a woke tactic? Do you know who'd qualify as "woke right" if the answer to that question was "yes"?

Frankly both pro-Israel and anti-Israel right-wingers are guilty of this, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Even aside from Israel/Palestine stuff, I’ve heard NRA types go on about how the Nazis confiscated firearms and Ron Paul libertarians draw comparisons between the PATRIOT Act and the Nuremberg laws. If we relax the reference class to include communists as well as Nazis, then basically every strand of the conservative movement from the 1980s onward has had adherents who make such comparisons to their ideological enemies.

On the topic of anti-Israel right-wingers: they come in at least three different varieties, none of which is per se what I would consider “woke right”, exactly:

  1. Paleoconservatives of Pat Buchanan’s ilk, who are skeptical of foreign entanglements in general and often support for Israel in particular. These types may harbor some negative opinions about Jewish influence in American politics, but don’t make it the center of their political worldview, nor do they generally harbor any animus towards individual Jews or to their religion.

This group may have some overlap with the “woke right” in the sense that they view preserving the historic American “national character”, and perhaps even the specific “founding stock” ethnicity, as an important political goal; as such, they are, for example, opposed to mass immigration. But the overall vibe of paleocons is very different: more patrician, more old-school Ivy League WASP (at least in bearing, if not actual ancestry) rather than Ellis Islander/white ethnic.

  1. Right(-ish)-of-center contrarians in the vein of Theo Von and Joe Rogan. While open to “questioning the narrative” and “doing their own research” and, indeed, being somewhat prone to conspiracy theorizing in general (e.g. Covid-19 origins, QAnon, 9/11 truth, etc.), these folks mostly seem to have soured on Israel due to (what they perceive as) atrocities committed in the current Gaza conflict. They do not deny the historicity of the Holocaust, though they are increasingly immune to its use as a mystical talisman that renders any criticism of Israel null and void. They likewise do not deny Israel’s right to exist, and, like the paleocons, do not personally hate Jews or Judaism.

These types are furthest from the “woke right” in my view: they genuinely want to go back to 90s-style colorblind meritocracy, with no handouts or special treatment for anyone, white or not.

  1. Out-and-out Holocaust deniers, who invariably do hate Jews and Judaism. Even when they hide behind “just asking questions” or “look at how much influence AIPAC has” or “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism”—all of which are in theory positions within the ordinary bounds of political discourse or academic inquiry, _when posed in good faith_—I have literally never once known a Holocaust denier not to loathe Jews on a personal level. IME, Holocaust denial in actual practice is, without exception, an argument-as-soldier, and behind the claims of “the Holocaust never happened”, the undercurrent of “but wouldn’t it be great if it had?” is always palpable.

This view is strictly orthogonal to “woke right”-ism, though I would hazard a guess that it’s more common on the “woke right” than on the “tech right”, if only because the latter (correctly, in my opinion) usually attribute Ashkenazi over-representation mostly to IQ, which rather tends to immunize them against crude conspiracies about Jewish subversion and the attendant animosity towards Jews.

EDIT: perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”

My claim, on the other hand, is that Nazi comparisons are so ubiquitous (cf. Godwin’s law) that it doesn’t make sense to call it a “woke tactic”; indeed, it precedes wokeism by decades.

In practice, lots of paleoconservatives are mildly antisemitic on a religious if not necessarily ethnic level; my filter bubble is ground zero for paleoconservatism-as-more-than-an-intellectual-movement and while antisemitism is not universal, it's by no means rare either. Part of this is surely that Jewish activists do not like paleoconservatives, but suspicion of non-Christian religion is also very core to paleoconservative conceptions of purity testing on 'heritage American-ness', indeed moreso than race.

There's also plenty of paleoconservatives who, although they do not center their ideology around race, are unwilling to disavow white nationalism, either due to genuine though usually limited sympathy or because they see it as a soldier argument, and pattern match Jews to 'not-white and stubbornly unwilling to become white'.

perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”

No, I'm gesturing at the exact people who are using the term "woke right" and insisting it's meaningful, using the most hamfisted equivocation between their opponents and Nazis.

I get that you could, in theory, define it in such a way that it actually makes sense, and points at similarities between the woke left and specific factions of the right, but in practice it's just a tactic to avoid discussing ideas liberalism knows it will lose against.

The more obvious contradiction is that the very rhetorical trick of "woke right" is equivocation to refuse to address the arguments from Lindsey's right and instead denounce people by association.

Which if you recall the last decades is exactly what the cultural marxist playbook has been all about all this time. Lindsey ought to know, he's studied it more than anybody.

He's therefore denounced by his own choice of tactics. He desperately wants people to keep participating in debate and the marketplace of ideas, but only if he's able to control the outcome. Some open society!

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