President Donald Trump‘s first term witnessed the rapid rise of the “woke left” — a progressive movement known for its identity politics, historical revisionism and ideological orthodoxy.
The question now dividing the biggest names in conservative media is whether the second Trump term will unleash a “woke right,” driven by a similar focus on power, grievance and aggressive online attacks.
Confrontations erupted in recent weeks between influencers on the right, including Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro — previously united in their support for Trump — debating where to draw the line within MAGA around topics like Israel and tactics like social media mobbing.
Some independent media personalities, including Matt Walsh, Tim Pool and Jack Posobiec, framed the schism as just another move by the Republican establishment to box out independent populist thinkers.
But some of the biggest conservative critics of “wokeness,” including Peterson and James Lindsay, insisted that without guardrails American conservatism could be hijacked by those with its worst impulses, leading the anti-woke right to fall prey to the same vices it once condemned.
What is the ‘woke right‘?
Few have made a career so focused on combatting “wokeism” as James Lindsay, “author, mathematician and online troublemaker.”
A self-described “veteran of the first woke wars,” Lindsay gained conservative celebrity status in 2018 when he successfully published hoax articles in high-profile journals to show that an oppressor-versus-oppressed worldview dominated parts of academia.
His relentless criticism of gender ideology and his provocative style earned Lindsay a wave of pushback, including “cancellation” when he was banned from what was then known as Twitter in 2022.
But after Elon Musk reopened his account later that year, Lindsay said he began to notice a new “woke war” stirring on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
“I lived through this once on the left, and I‘m living through it again on the right, and it‘s identical,” Lindsay told the Deseret News. “It‘s not similar; it‘s the same.”
What Lindsay saw was growing momentum among Trump supporters who he believed were mimicking wokeism‘s emphasis on systemic inequality, race-based victimhood and in-group policing.
Whereas the “woke left” framed the West as an intrinsically racist place where minority groups are subject to obstacles created by a white ruling class, the “woke right” decried an America in decline where white Christians are targeted by a globalist conspiracy that threatens traditional values.
These opposing worldviews are structurally indistinguishable from each other because they both rely on critical theory’s focus on group identity and power dynamics, Lindsay said. He pointed to his most recent stunt as proof.
In 2018, Lindsay succeeded in getting a journal of feminist social work to publish a rewrite of a section of Adolf Hitler‘s “Mein Kampf,” updated with some intersectional vocabulary. In December, Lindsay did the mirror opposite on the right.
Using the pseudonym “Marcus Carlson,” Lindsay submitted an edited portion of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” to American Reformer, a Protestant political website, swapping proletariat with “the Christian Right” and replacing bourgeoisie with “liberalism.”
American Reformer published the piece, describing it as “a powerful article.” And after its true authorship and similarities to Marx were discovered, the publication’s editors kept it on their website because it was a “reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas(.)”
This experiment confirmed Lindsay’s perception of the “woke right” as a collection of “post-liberal” commentators who view the current system as irredeemably rigged against their preferred groups and who consider the stakes of “winning” so high that it justifies using the tools of the left.
“Anybody on the right who‘s basically pushing for Machiavellian power plays is probably woke right,” Lindsay said. “You have to covet power to be woke.”
Is there a ‘woke right‘?
Over the past year, Lindsay’s concept of the “woke right” has gained momentum of its own, spawning supportive essays from a slew of pundits. Last month, the phrase exploded.
The fuse was lit on one of the world‘s largest media platforms, the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where Jordan Peterson, a psychologist—turned-public-intellectual-superstar — said the “woke right” phenomenon isn’t political at all.
It‘s the product of social media algorithms empowering “psychopathic pretenders” to “invade the idea space” and “use those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage,” Peterson said.
“I‘ve been watching these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain and a lot of that is cloaked in antisemitic guise,” Peterson said.
The reaction from some of the most-followed right-wing accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, was immediate, and grew larger following Peterson’s subsequent appearance on Fox News where he outlined “10 markers of political psychopathology,” which include public claims of ideological purity, false cries of victimization and militant calls for vengeance.
Candace Owens likened Peterson’s comments to “schoolgirl, ad-hominem attacks against people he dislikes.”
The conservative comedy duo, the Hodgetwins, speculated about “a psyop going on to divide Trumps (sic) base.”
And Dave Smith, a libertarian critic of Israel, called it “sloppy for a clinical psychologist to just throw out a mass diagnosis like this.”
If you ask the founder of paleo-conservatism, and the godfather of the variously named “alternative” “dissident” or “non-aligned” right, the phrase “the woke right” has no basis in reality at all.
“It does not make any sense because the so-called ‘woke right’ have been the most relentless critics of wokeness,” Paul Gottfried told the Deseret News. “As a matter of fact, they’re much more radical in their criticism than the conservative establishment, which cut them off decades ago.”
Gottfried claims that the “real right” — noted for its emphasis on decentralized government, America’s European heritage and non-interventionist foreign policy — shares almost nothing in common with the woke left.
Lumping together individuals with divergent views like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Candace Owens, Gottfried said, shows that the origin of Lindsay’s “woke right” campaign is likely a desire to further “marginalize” factions of conservatism which already lack the influence to “cancel” anyone.
And if this is the intention, Gottfried believes it is bound to backfire.
“There is a very, very large number of younger conservatives, ... they’ve sort of surfaced with Trump‘s victory, they now identify with the populist right,” Gottfried said. “At some point the conservative establishment is going to have to deal with this; you can’t keep pushing people out.”
Leaning into identity
However, Gottfried concedes there may be one place where some might see overlap between the “independent right” and the “wokesters.”
For those to the right of mainstream conservatism, there is a greater willingness to emphasize ethnic and gender distinctions, according to Gottfried.
In these circles, affirming group identity and capturing cultural institutions for conservative ends are seen as skills of the left that should be replicated on the right.
Gottfried himself was mentored during his doctoral days by influential Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School who advocated for social justice through selective intolerance of ideas.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has led out on countering wokeness in universities, cites Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci as an inspiration for how to control politics by shaping culture.
But many of the individuals Lindsay has placed in the woke-right camp often stray from these theoretical grounds into race-based applications.
Tucker Carlson — labeled by one observer as the “undisputed spiritual leader” of the woke right — stated in a recent interview with Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire that he thinks “everything is rigged against white men.”
In September, Carlson, one of the most-followed conservative accounts on X, hosted podcaster Darryl Cooper who falsely claimed that millions of Jews “ended up dead” in Nazi concentration camps because the Nazis lacked the resources to take care of them.
Carlson later said that “Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
Candace Owens, also one of the most-followed influencers on the right, who was fired by the Daily Wire last year, has falsely and consistently framed Jewish groups at the center of secret plots to hurt Christians, perpetrate pedophilia and exploit the United States.
In a 15-page letter sent to Owens in September, radio host Dennis Prager — the founder of PragerU, Owens’ former boss and a Jew — walked through each of Owens’ claims about Jews, Zionism and Israel and refuted each of them with historical evidence.
This kind of rhetoric, while typically shunned, is not new on the right, according to George Hawley, associate professor of political science at the University of Alabama, and author of several books, including “Divided America: The Right and Identity Politics.”
“There was always an element of American conservatism that leaned into identity-based grievance politics,” Hawley told the Deseret News. “Over the last decade, however, the taboo against right-wing identity politics seems to have weakened, and the identitarian right appears to be gaining ground.”
Before social media, it was more straightforward for a political movement to banish certain factions, Hawley said. But now, boosting “based” opinions outside of the status quo is the quickest way to success.
Views that promote a “vision of society as a zero-sum struggle between different groups” tend to trigger more engagement in an algorithm-centric news cycle, Hawley said. And pursuing consensus is often seen as bending the knee.
“There is little benefit to expressing moderate, nuanced opinions, or to ever suggest that their ideological opponents are operating in good faith,” Hawley said. “In fact, doing so might even cost them viewers.”
Why draw a line?
The temptation to adopt simple explanations that place victim groups at the center of a corrupt system run by a cabal of elites is “part of human nature,” according to Neil Shenvi, a theoretical chemist and conservative Evangelical blogger known for his Christian apologetics and critiques of critical theory.
Shenvi has written extensively about fellow Evangelical voices that espouse various forms of Christian Nationalism and post-liberalism. What he has found is that while the left and the right have totally opposing political goals, the extremes on both ends have wound up relying on identical theories of power.
“They’re openly embracing the very same ideas and the same authors,” Shenvi said. “It‘s weird people are denying this is happening because they say it themselves in published works.”
This “horseshoe” phenomenon uniting the fringes of U.S. politics was exacerbated by the left‘s “Great Awokening,” Shenvi said, leading to a “backlash” from the right.
From the mid 2010s to wokeism’s highpoint in 2020, “anti-white animus” was permitted and promoted by mainstream liberal media, according to Shenvi, with the two preeminent gurus of the woke left directly targeting white Americans.
Robin DiAngelo, in her No. 1 bestseller “White Fragility,” wrote that, “all white people are racist.” Ibram Kendi, in his No. 1 bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” wrote that, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”
“It‘s natural that people would react against that,” Shenvi said. “I think a lot of it is simply people basically saying, ‘It‘s my turn.’”
But Shenvi believes this approach has revealed itself to be toxic for conservatives and Christianity because an emphasis on worldly identity displaces unity in Christ, a priority of “winning” blocks out the pursuit of holiness, and an attitude of “no enemies to the right” eliminates the possibility of civil dialogue.
“If you embrace just transgression of all boundaries, ‘We‘re not going to listen to any experts, no authorities, no gatekeeping,’ you’ve unleashed a monster,” Shenvi said.
For this reason, Lindsay thinks it is important for conservatives to draw a line excluding some conduct and viewpoints as unacceptable. If this doesn’t happen, wokeness could become the dominant force on the right as it was temporarily on the left, Lindsay said.
Many conservative influencers are already self-censoring from fear of being “canceled” and made subject to an online dogpile, Lindsay said, pointing out that antisemitic content has started to inundate comments to conservative accounts on X.
While much of this social media response is “hazardously fake,” driven by “bot farms” and unrepresentative of most conservatives, Lindsay said, it still creates incentives for rightwing personalities to push the envelope further and further.
“We should be skeptical of the establishment, but we shouldn’t be so open minded about every possible hypothesis or conspiracy theory that our brains fall out,” Lindsay said.
Gottfried agrees that even his vision for a more conservative America must have its boundaries.
Gottfried remains committed to the view that “national groups have a right to preserve themselves” and remains firmly opposed to mass immigration.
Over the decades, Gottfried has often been on the receiving end of what he said appears like a coordinated effort from conservative elites to restrict conservative viewpoints.
He has repeatedly criticized this effort to silence alternative opinions. But Gottfried, who is Jewish, said he is “quite willing to censor people who say dumb things” on his side about race, power and global conspiracies.
“This may shock you, and shock many of my followers, but I think you have to create filters in the end,” Gottfried said. “It‘s just where you place them.”