The Emergence Of The Woke Right

By Canadian Beaver

For those who prefer to listen to the article, the author has also recorded an audio version

A new ideology has slowly taken a hold over much of “the right” during at least the past two or three years, though it has a familiar underlying operating system to one that most of us have come to at least partially understand. That familiar operating system is “wokeness”, and thus, its “right wing” flavour has become known as the “woke right”.

It has often been asked “what does that term mean?”, “define woke right?”, “isn’t that an oxymoron because Woke means “Left?”, and, so on. While these are sometimes genuine questions, often times it is instead a deflection or a deception, whether consciously or not by the person asking. There are likely at least a few reasons these deflections and deceptions occur, one of course being its a Woke tactic to confuse and obfuscate matters, as pointed out by both Cody Libolt and David Robinson.

Those who are Woke Right do not like the term “woke right”, and they instead desire to define it themselves, to discredit it, or to eliminate it altogether. For those whom are not consciously being manipulative, there is likely some degree of cognitive dissonance occurring for such people. For the manipulative ones, many of them seem to know whom we are referring to when we use the term “woke right”, despite their claims of “the Woke Right term doesn’t make sense” or “the Woke Right doesn’t exist”.

With all of that said, let’s get to the matter of actually defining what we mean by the term “woke right”. For this, we will begin by deferring to one of James Lindsay’s working definitions, which generally captures the essence of what “woke right” is.

James has defined the Woke Right as:

People who push “trad” values and right-wing ends using Woke Leftist means – including postmodernism, Critical Theory, and Marxist conflict Theories. They’re activists who use Woke tactics (desire for unlimited power, victimhood narratives, identity politics, subjectivism, et al.) yet claim to be the only “true conservatives”.

This only differs from his analogous definition for the Woke Left by a few words, specifically, that Woke Leftists push “progressive values and left-wing ends”, and Woke Leftists claim to be the only “true liberals”.

Let’s elaborate a bit more on whom the Woke Right are, using a few broad categories they tend to fall within, and these categories are sometimes self-identified by Woke Rightists, and sometimes not. There are presently many factions within the Woke Right, and people in the Woke Right could also have a varied set of beliefs which do not fit one of the factions well. The different factions of the Woke Right have differing beliefs, specifically about how society ought to be structured. Some of the factions are: (1) the ethno-nationalists, and a subset of that faction are legit neo-nazis, (2) the traditionalists, (3) the Christian Nationalists, whom share some overarching values with both the traditionalists and ethno-nationalists, and, (4) the Nietzschians, whom are also known as “right wing” pagans.

What these factions do share in common is the goal to reach their own version of “Utopia” by any means necessary, including adopting Woke Left tactics. It follows that anyone who oppose them are “in the way of progress towards [Woke Right] Utopia”, and so the people whom oppose them are seen as “enemies” whom need to be assimilated or eliminated.

An easily recognizable feature of the Woke Right is that many of them have embraced identity politics, and especially racial identity politics. They are “woke” to a grand conspiracy of oppression against their identity group, and hence take on a role of victimhood, just like the Woke Left do. However, their value system is often inverted with respect to the Woke Left, specifically for the “goodness” and “badness” regarding the identity groups of men, women, gay, straight, immigrant, black, white, and so forth.

Twelve Contributing Factors

Now that we have defined what we mean by “woke right”, let’s move onto discussing how the Woke Right came to be, and, how they have grown significantly in numbers during the past few years. There are multiple layers to this, and the degree for which each factor matters, for explaining why they have emerged and how they grew, can certainly be a topic of debate.

Here are a dozen contributing factors which have allowed the Woke Right to become what it is has today: The Black Pill, Nihilism, A Looming Threat, A Postponed Peril, Contrarianism, Woke Osmosis, Political Immunity Collapse, Quick Fix Syndrome, Subversion, Psy-Ops, Propaganda, and, The Bandwagon Effect. We will later elaborate on what we mean by all of these terms. A few of these contributing factors are similar, though there are distinctions in the way which we mean them, and a few of the factors certainly play into each other.

The first and second contributing factors we’ll examine are how The Black Pill and Nihilism have facilitated the emergence and steady growth of the Woke Right. These two factors are related, yet, someone can be black pilled, politically, without also being in a nihilistic state of mind, at least with respect to how we will define these two terms. The Black Pill represents demoralization, or in other words, people whom have swallowed the black pill exist in a state of hopelessness and despair regarding how they perceive the future is likely to unfold politically. Being black pilled can lead into being nihilistic, which is at least in part a sense of lack of meaning in life. It’s worth noting that the idea that nihilism can drive radicalism dates back to at least the 1860’s, as evidenced by Eugene Rose’s book on the topic titled “Nihilism: The Root Of The Revolution Of The Modern Age”.

Both The Black Pill and Nihilism can result in free-floating anxiety or free-floating anger and frustration, as Mattais Desmet describes it. Free-floating emotions are emotions which you cannot easily pinpoint the cause of, or said differently, emotions which have no obvious cause that recently proceeded them. For example, if you have free-floating anxiety, this would be anxiety that you cannot quickly think back to a recent event that triggered it. As such, when someone has free-floating negative emotions, it is much easier to radicalize them, because whatever “explanation” and “solutions” provided can give the person: a sense of life purpose, a sense of hope, and, a strategy to try to rid themselves of their free-floating negative emotions.

The third and fourth contributing factors we’ll explore are how a Looming Threat posed by the Woke Left, coupled with the Postponed Peril of COVID-era government tyranny, also played a role in the Woke Right’s emergence. These two factors are similar in that they both required a version of the same existential threat, yet, they function in differing manners. The main reason for this is timescales, more specifically, the Woke Left currently represents an existential threat on longer timescales (e.g., years to a few decades from now), whereas the power that the Woke Left wielded against everyone has diminished since the COVID-related tyranny of 2020-2022, or put differently, the pressure against us is no longer on shorter timescales (e.g., weeks-to-months from now), and thus there was a Postponed Peril.

However, both factors still contributed to the emergence of the Woke Right. In the case of the Looming Threat, this not only feeds into The Black Pill, but it also gives everyone whom the Woke Left threaten a target to unite against. Facing against a force of evil can easily be weaponized to radicalize people, in part because it gives people a sense that they ought to accept “solutions” which sound quick and simple to defeat the evil. In the case of the Postponed Peril, we should first consider how “the right” generally operated during the COVID-era tyranny. We on “the right” were facing an immediate existential threat, which meant that we needed to co-operate more with others on “the right” to stop it, and that included setting aside most differences and being particularly careful about giving the Woke Left any additional ammunition against us. Many sentiments which we would now identify as “woke right” were largely rejected by people on “the right” at the time, such as views stemming from racial identity politics, but, the easing of the COVID-era tyranny in part meant that it became safer for people to “explore” these more radical ideas.

The fifth contributing factor we will consider that brought us to this point is Contrarianism. Contrarianism represents a reactionary aspect to the Woke Right, which presents itself as the Woke Right automatically assuming that anything that the Woke Left says is “true” must be “false”, and vice versa for anything the Woke Left says is “false”. For example, when the Woke Left degrade “whiteness”, the reaction of the Woke Right was to elevate “whiteness”. Consequently, the Woke Left directly influences the belief system of the Woke Right, since the contrarian nature of the Woke Right simply inverts many of the Woke Left’s supposed values.

Furthermore, it can be argued that the Woke Left fostered this contrarianism in the Woke Right, for at least two different reasons. Firstly, it is indeed true that the Woke Left usually lie, which has been constantly exposed for years now, and thus assuming the Woke Left are lying about an issue is typically a decent starting point. However, the Woke Right often abandon discernment based on this, and instead often walk down the easy but not always correct path of simply inverting the truth value of any claim of the Woke Left. Secondly, many on “the right” whom were originally centre-left or apolitical came to be on “the right” in part due to their individual contrarian personalities. In other words, there was a selection mechanism which helped grow “the right” in recent years, because people whom were contrarian by nature were more likely to resist being coerced into going along with Leftist positions on gender ideology, COVID-related restrictions, and so on.

A consequence of Contrarianism, as well as two additional contributing factors which we will discuss more later on, namely, Subversion and Psy-Ops, is that the “[Woke Left have] summoned their antithesis”, as James Lindsay previously put it. That is, the Woke Left helped bring into being the very thing that they wanted to exist, for the sake of advancing their own political goals.

The emergence of the Woke Right likely hinged on Woke Osmosis to occur at all, and this our sixth contributing factor. By “woke osmosis” we mean that many people on “the right” learned Woke ways of thinking and Woke tactics simply “by osmosis”. To elaborate, our Western culture has been immersed in Wokeness for at least a decade or two now, and so even those whom were against “wokeness” can have had “wokeness” seep into their unconscious. To put it another way, “wokeness” is in the waters which we all swim, and hence has had varying degrees of impact on our psyches. This is particularly true for young adults, whom are generally more impressionable than older people, and have lived the majority of their lives during this era of “wokeness”. The Woke Left took advantage of the fact that young people make useful revolutionaries, and had largely targeted young women to join their cause, and the Woke Right took a page out of the Woke Left’s playbook in this respect, except the Woke Right instead mainly targeted disillusioned young men to build up their ranks.

Woke Osmosis has likely influenced the thinking of many people whom joined the ranks of the Woke Right, even if unknowingly. Perhaps more importantly though, some people in the Woke Right have consciously chosen to embrace Wokeness, which we know because they have explicitly made the case for using Woke tactics for their own ends, justifying it as “these tactics work, they were just used with the wrong goals in mind”. While it’s true that some on “the right” could have come to these Woke ideas on their own had the Woke Left never existed, however, it is unlikely it would have gained near the traction that the Woke Right currently have if that had been the case.

One impact of the Woke Right taking up Woke tactics for themselves is that they overtook many “right wing” online spaces. The reason for this is multi-factored, and to first order we can turn to one of Robert Conquest’s laws of politics, in particular, “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. It turns out to be the case that an updated version of this law could very well be, “any organization not explicitly anti-Woke sooner or later become Woke”. This law describes a real phenomena in part because the Woke use a variety of carrot-and-stick tactics to assimilate or eliminate people from various spaces, organizations, and, institutions. James Lindsay has noted that the cause of this effect is due to the intolerance of the more radical sub-group, which in this case is the Woke. He also argued that it matters that “right wing” online spaces, such as X (i.e., formerly Twitter), have been overtaken by the Woke Right, because, X is analogous to a “right wing” version of California, in the sense that crazy ideas mainstreamed there eventually bleed out into other places.

The seventh and eighth contributing factors to the Woke Right’s emergence have been Political Immunity Collapse and Quick Fix Syndrome. These two factors do have some relation, albeit there are differences. Political Immunity Collapse refers to a decreased capacity of the average person, and of the overall group, to defend against poor ideas. This has perhaps been a consequence of: our society becoming more politically complacent, our degrading education system, our lives becoming increasingly busy, and, the rapidly increasing news cycle which is difficult to keep up with. Whereas Quick Fix Syndrome refers to a decreased capacity for long-term hard work and for delayed gratification, which have been replaced with the tenancy towards quick fixes and with the seeking of instant gratification. Quick Fix Syndrome likely has in common with Political Immunity Collapse a cause of our lives becoming increasingly busy, though, Quick Fix Syndrome likely has a few different causes than Political Immunity Collapse, such as the gradual lowering of standards, as well as, the mass adoption of digital devices and social media.

Let’s begin by elaborating further on Political Immunity Collapse. It requires a significant amount of time and effort to become well versed in politics, and, to become well informed for each particular political issue that arises. This type of formal or informal education in politics serves to boost our political “immune system”. However, the relatively short videos, articles, and social media posts about a particular topic can give us a false sense of confidence, since people do not actually become semi-experts in the given issue after engaging with such a limited amount of content. That effect is a subset of the widely known phenomena by the name of The Dunning-Kruger Effect. Further to this, propagandists and ill-informed people often marry truths to a lie when “educating” other people about issues, which makes it significantly more difficult to discern what is true and what is false.

An implication of all of this is that it can be relatively easy to be misled about an issue, while also simultaneously having a false sense of confidence with respect to the issue at hand. It is our contention that this is what has happened with many on the Woke Right, or to elaborate, that these people have a false sense of confidence that they know “the truth”, without having put in plenty of time and effort to verify the truth values of many pieces of “evidence” that they have to “justify” their world views.

As an example of this, let’s briefly consider an issue that is not tied to the Woke Right, specifically, the claim of “bad batches” of COVID mRNA “vaccines”. Many on “the right” spread this narrative around 2021-2022, though, under greater scrutiny of the available information at the time, our own digging into the issue revealed that it was rather unclear whether “bad batches” were a real issue, or at the very least, to what degree they were an issue. With that said, the “bad batches” narrative was often spread by people on “the right”, and many people didn’t sufficiently investigate for themselves, rather, they took the low effort approach of deferring to “experts” from “our side”. This same dynamic plays out for many issues to varying degrees, and taps into the tribalistic nature of people to “defer to the group” for the sake of saving time and effort.

Political Immunity Collapse does not only impact how easily the average person’s mind has become susceptible to poor ideas, rather, it also impacts our ability to defend “right wing” thought spaces as a whole from poor ideas. People only have so much time during a day, and this is also true of politically active people, whom can only devote so much time to learning the ins and outs of political issues, which as alluded to earlier is a first step towards acting as an “immune system” against poor ideas. Further to this, people whom are relatively well informed can also simply lack the time or will to defend good ideas in “right wing” spaces, especially when others present in these spaces are using Woke tactics to counteract them.

Next, let’s get to the issue of Quick Fix Syndrome. Our attention spans and our capacity for delayed gratification have both been eroded over time as a society. We have been fighting the Culture War against the Woke Left for many years now, and, many are unsatisfied with what they perceive to be slow progress on that front, or no real progress at all. Overcoming the Woke Left to save our society requires hard work, sacrifice, and patience. Many seem to lack this understanding, or, simply desire for the Woke Left to be defeated more quickly than is realistic. As such, the Woke Right’s “offer” of a quicker and easier “solution” has a degree of temptation to it for many, or to put it another way, the “offer” is a seductive false-shortcut.

We will now delve into the ninth and tenth contributing factors to the Woke Right’s emergence, namely, Subversion and Psy-Ops. The Woke Right has had an organic component to its growth, however, plenty of the growth has likely been inorganic, or in other words, it is a mirage, it is a psy-ops, and so forth. It is in the Woke Left’s own best interests for the Woke Right to become a temporary entity of significant size, because that would “justify” the various contrived “narrative arcs” they have been building over the past decade or two about the “racist”, “fascist”, “homophobic”, “islamophobic”, and “antisemitic” people supposedly on “the right”, as previously argued by James Lindsay.

To that end, it follows that the Woke Left would actively subvert “the right”, and, that they would deploy Psy-Ops for this. This Subversion can take the form of radical Leftist infiltration, being perpetrated by people such as Antifa members, federal agents, and, so forth, as well as, these same people using bots for these ends. One of their goals would be to nudge people among “the right” towards more and more radical positions. These subversives presumably have some idea of what they are doing, and how to do it relatively effectively and efficiently, which would likely involve slowly and steadily nudging people up the radicalization ladder, as James had speculated about before. A few other goals of the subversives would be: to use their fake radicalized “right wing” online posts for hoaxes, as well as, to give the false impression that there are many more people in the Woke Right than there actually are, which would facilitate normalize this radicalization.

Additionally, Psy-Ops are not out of the question for the Woke Left to use to accomplish their goals, this is obvious because we’ve seen them successfully use Psy-Ops for the past several years against many on “the left”, and to a lesser degree of success against those of us on “the right”. As an example, anti-Jewish sentiments were steadily rising on “the right” during the months leading up to the Hamas attack of October 7^th, 2023. Once the Hamas attack occurred, antisemitism sky rocketed, both among the Woke Left and Woke Right, and so a circumstantial case can be made that the reaction to October 7^th in The West was part of a psy-op to stoke these tensions and drive radicalization.

The eleventh contributing factor to the Woke Right’s growth has been Propaganda. Many “right wing” online spaces have been propagandized heavily over the past few years, following after the loosening and end of most of the COVID-related restrictions. In hindsight, this propaganda formed the basis of many present-day Woke Right beliefs, ranging from racial identity politics, to anti-Jewish sentiments, to pro-authoritarian messaging, and so on. This propaganda has become more radical with time, as the Woke Right began growing and became increasingly radicalized, and the propaganda had the effect of drawing many people into varying degrees of the Woke Right ideology, as well as, drawing many people into the various factions of the Woke Right.

Propaganda which we agree with, or mostly agree with, is much more difficult to detect and identify than propaganda that clearly conflicts with our present beliefs and values, as noted by Mark Crispin Miller during the COVID madness. This is used against us, to propagandize us with positions not too different from our own current positions, and to slowly breadcrumb us towards positions that radically diverge from our own old beliefs and values of just a few years prior.

On top of that, people also have a “stopping point” for which they believe they have learned enough information to be sure that a certain belief, choice, or world view is correct. As such, loosely paraphrasing an observation recently made by David Robinson, once a sufficient amount of “evidence” for a world view has been provided by propagandists to a person, then that person can be pulled fully into “the cult”. This follows from a concept in cognitive psychology known as “stopping strategies”, which has previously been discussed by Gad Saad in another context.

Mark Crispin Miller also argued during the COVID madness that a strong indicator of propaganda is when it is inescapable, which definitely was the case during COVID with Leftist talking points on masks, “vaccines”, and issues of this nature. This has certainly been the case in many “right wing” online spaces as well, with regards to many of the favorite talking points of the Woke Right for the past few years. The destabilization resulting from mass immigration to The West was used as fuel for early Woke Rightists to push racial identity politics, which then became inescapable in these “right wing” online spaces. Eventually, the Woke Right talking points heavily branched out to anti-Jewish sentiments, and these too then became inescapable in “right wing” online spaces. In other words, these types of talking points are propaganda, as strongly suggested by the fact that these talking points have been inescapable.

The twelfth and hence final factor we will discuss that has been important for the relatively recent rapid growth of the Woke Right is The Bandwagon Effect. This concept is one from marketing, and it can be used to understand an aspect of politics, specifically, that a small but not insignificant fraction of a population can greatly influence the dominant ideology of the entire population. In this case, the population being influenced is the whole “right wing”, and, the small but not insignificant sub-group is the Woke Right. This also relates to the shifting of The Overton Window, though there is more depth to it than just that.

In the context of politics, The Bandwagon Effect can roughly be described as the following. An ideology or spin-off ideology is introduced to a group, and at first there are only a small fraction of people whom are drawn to it. These are the first group of “true believers” or “fanatics”, and they tend to be very vocal about their beliefs whenever they feel it is safe for them to do so. Once this fraction of fanatics have grown large enough in size to reach a critical mass, likely in the range of ∼10-30%, they then have enough “social proof” to mainstream their ideas, that is, for their ideas to become more “socially acceptable” to discuss among the original whole population. At this point, rapid adoption of the new ideology occurs, with many new converts, and many whom are simply too confused or too afraid to speak against it. This second sub-group, of new converts and quiet people, can have a size of ∼50-70% of the original population. There will however always be an outside group of “dissidents” to the new dominant ideology, whom will strongly resist it or never adopt the new dominant ideology, and this group of “dissidents” will have a size of ∼10-30% of the original population.

For the Woke Right, they slowly grew in size both through organic and inorganic means, at least since ∼2016, and probably for several years prior to that as well. As of ~2022-2024, they have seemingly reached the critical point for rapid adoption to occur. James Lindsay has pointed out that many of their beliefs have been “taboo breaking”, and building off of that idea, the “taboo breaking” nature of these beliefs likely slowed the initial growth of the Woke Right, however, it has also likely contributed to increasing the rate at which the Woke Right grew once rapid adoption began. The reason for this is the following, being taboos, these ideas were very much not “socially acceptable” to discuss, but, as James noted, once they have been accepted by someone joining the Woke Right, they then have a strong psychological pressure to double down because they likely feel they have no other viable options at this point.

To give a specific example from James, if someone becomes pro-Hitler and begins expressing such sentiments publicly, it will be difficult for them to come back from that. Becoming public about such beliefs could very well negatively effect their personal and professional lives, and so they likely feel that they have no other option but to double down, to try to make their Woke Right ideology become the dominant ideology for the entire society, and thus their pro-Hitler sentiments would become “acceptable” publicly.

Concluding Thoughts

We will briefly consider another big picture aspect to the emergence of the Woke Right. Many of these factors that we previously explored also overlap with the concept of Mass Formation, which was first described by Mattias Desmet during the COVID-era tyranny. The free-floating negative emotions resulting from The Black Pill and Nihilism helped create the fertile grounds for Mass Formation. Having a big bad boogeyman, namely the Woke Left, gave a natural target for these free-floating negative emotions to initially be aimed towards by propagandists and opportunists. Woke Osmosis gave a set of Woke tactics for the new Woke Right revolutionaries to arm themselves with, or in other words, these Woke tactics served as the foundation of a strategy for Woke Rightists to attack their initial targets with, that is, the Woke Left, whom had helped create the free-floating negative emotions to begin with. Subversion, Psy-Ops, Propaganda, and, The Bandwagon Effect certainly helped facilitate the growth and sustained existence of the Woke Right. Hence, all of the necessary ingredients to create a Mass Formation, as well as additional ingredients, were all available for the emergence and growth of the Woke Right.

In summary, we have explored: who the Woke Right are, what they generally believe, a bit about how they generally behave, a dozen factors contributing to their emergence and sustained growth, as well as, we briefly considered how the Woke Right qualify as a Mass Formation which is in at the very least the early stages of forming. Understanding who the Woke Right are, and how we got to this place, is our first step towards counteracting them, and hence towards preserving Western Civilization.

We would like to thank Correspondence Theory for inviting us to write this article, and 'Russell' for introducing us and handling the audio processing. We would also like to thank James Lindsay, all of the people of a like mind to him whom we’ve been learning from (e.g., Michael O’Fallon, Cody Libolt, David Robinson, “Classic Liberal”, “Liberty Belle”, “A”, Logan Lancing, “GummiBear”, “Rob”, “Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost”, Courtenay Turner, etc.), as well as, a few fellow Canadian friends whom will go unnamed. All of these people have helped us develop many of the ideas we discussed in this article with regards to the Woke Right.

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Most recently, Canadian Beaver has been posting on X about the Woke Right, which is his current main area of interest. He is also interested in issues regarding Woke Left indoctrination, "Climate Change", and, so forth. Follow him on X https://x.com/TheHonkMustGoOn.