The Worthless Weapon of ‘Woke Right’

Mark and Avoid

Conservatism’s Problem

For the last few years, many traditionalist Christians have been hunted and berated by conservative¹ evangelical influencers and pastors for being too far to the right. This resulted from the inability of these conservatives to counter various memes that were floating around which can be generally summarized as asking the following:

• Why is it that conservatives have weakly sat and watched as their institutions have been generationally subverted and dragged leftward, but they suddenly muster the ability and will to purge those to their right?

• Why are various minority groups (usually Jews and Blacks) allowed to have extreme preference for their own to the point of having ethnostates or ethnic churches and segregated institutions — while demanding foreign aid and dedicated attention to their history from the United States — but Whites are strictly prohibited from having any preference for their own people or, in certain cases, even their families?

• Why are conservatives more concerned with upholding a strict dogma regarding one war in human history while the wider population and its institutions descend, by coercion or incentive, into increasingly frequent public blasphemy?

• Why have conservatives in religious institutions over the last few decades prioritized proselytization of everywhere except the West, and specifically their own nation and localities?

• Western Christianity seemed to be far more strict regarding homosexuality, modesty, blasphemy, the establishment of Christian laws, and duty to one’s locality and family in the past, so why do conservatives so radically oppose those things now?

• Why do conservatives always side with the Left whenever push comes to shove?

• Why do conservatives defend leftists, the government, corporations, churches, universities, and every other major institution pushing for societal disintegration?

• Why are the churches and other supposedly conservative institutions aiding in the importation of entirely foreign and oftentimes violent populations? Why do they continue to subsidize them once they have been imported, while neglecting the native population?

• Why do various conservatives advocate for voluntarily releasing any chance of securing power and stopping societal decline to advocate (performatively) for entirely new and unfeasible policies such as a federal abortion ban?

• Why do conservatives otherwise condemn Christians for wanting to implement Christian laws?

• Why do conservatives support American students having guilt thrust upon them throughout their education in the school system — guilt for systems and historical events that they were not involved in, and for which their country lost or maimed millions of men in order to end?

There are many more such memes that float around and are entirely unrefuted by conservatives, but this covers the majority of the sentiment.

Unsurprisingly, the lack of an answer, let alone action, to fix these problems, has led many Americans between the ages of 16 and 45 to abandon American conservatism entirely for different groups and schools of thought. While there are many differing schools of thought and groups on the Right, the common theme is that they have a backbone and are not utterly pitiful and inept. These alternative groups have developed literary traditions surrounding their thoughts. They have thoroughly grounded themselves in a love for history. They all, with very few exceptions, take matters of faith very seriously and value being consistent. They also take pride in heritage and universally decry guilting young men for the world’s racial grievances.

First Adopters of ‘Woke Right’

After ignoring or utterly failing to counter or correct for these memes which have irreversibly damaged conservatism’s legitimacy in the minds of many, the last couple of years has seen various conservatives, most vociferously the conservative clergy, trying to attack this threat to their legitimacy. We most clearly saw this in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s botched and targeted excommunications² of several men to the right of the conservatives in 2023 and early 2024. Instead of the conservatives making concessions as they would to any group on their Left, they decided to exhume, finally, the last vestiges of their spine, to make a heroic lone stand against the evil, scary Far Right — unheard of in our modern society. Other conservative church bodies followed suit to a lesser degree.

Brute force did not remain the tactic of choice, however, and many conservative clergy began resorting to words and phrases as weapons. We all know of Nazi, supremacist, racist, misogynist, pagan, and heretic. All of these have lost their original meaning. Nazi has no connection to the NSDAP or any mass party movement for that matter, and its definition has become so detached from its original meaning that even bringing up these matters of history may seem strange and pedantic to some. All sides either implicitly or explicitly understand that Nazi means, and is exclusively used to signify, that the speaker hates the accused. The same applies to the other words.

As of early 2024, a new smear was adopted: woke right. I distinctly remember this phrase first popping up in Christian circles in April, and the first place I saw it in those circles was from conservative Lutherans on Twitter. The earliest is Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee, who posted the phrase on April 19th. At the time, he was quite annoyed with “groyper occultism,” specifically that they tied culture to race. Thus he accused them of being the “woke right.”

Neil Shenvi then began to use it often, which spread it to more in the religious sphere. Next was a conservative Lutheran pastor from Oklahoma who had jumped on the term:

That same day, conservative Lutheran pastor Jordan Cooper jumped onto this but stuck with the phrase “dissident right”:

Cooper would go on to explain a month later that he disagreed with the phrase “woke right” on semantic grounds:

A month later, another conservative Lutheran pastor, Don Stein, started using the phrase:

And these were the people mainly using “woke right” in Christian circles — the same people who swear up and down that they are really true conservatives — the same people who swear that the Left isn’t really that scary compared to the far right, which might be hiding in the shadows, around the corner, waiting to get you if you don’t purge them first.

Where Did It Come From?

None of these people originated the term. That “honor” goes to James Lindsay, who has been constantly using the phrase since at least 2022 against really anyone on the Right who believes that something must be done to halt civilizational decline:

Why are conservative Lutherans declaring the very same public enemies as an atheist New Liberal? Why are they so readily adopting his ideas while excommunicating anyone who so much as listens to the scary far right, whose ideas and priors are supposedly impure? Asking these questions looks at the problem from the wrong angle. This is assuming that the actions of everyone mentioned follow from strong and simple conviction. Instead, we should look at actions and then infer the conviction. What are they doing? Why are they doing it?

A Real Analysis of ‘Woke Right’

The phrase is a weapon. It is that simple. Woke Right is not a descriptive term, as Cooper pointed out above. A simple look at the people using it and promoting it shows that there is a target of the phrase, and the goal is to ensure that other people, upon hearing the phrase, adopt a negative opinion of the target.³ Who is this meant to appeal to, exactly? Well, not the far right, and not anyone who has a positive association with woke. This leaves disparate groups in the center. Who in the center does this appeal to? There is an ever-greater portion of the center who find the Left to be the greatest civilizational threat, so it is unlikely that they are the target. Rather, this works on conservatives and anti-woke leftists who find anything under the category of “Right” or “Woke” to be unrespectable, scary, or threatening.

Understanding this, “woke right” is a unifier of conservatives and the people immediately to their left. Or, put directly, “woke right” is another expression of conservatives preferring the respectable Left to anything even slightly to their right.

Another element of a real analysis is asking, “Is this a good weapon?” or “Will this stick around?” I think the answer to both is “No.” The reasoning is simple. The reason that people started using woke was to signify gross, antisocial, envious, leftist ideologues who were implanting themselves in every aspect of life from entertainment to the universities and schools to the government. That is the understanding of everyone who uses the term. Attaching it to the “far right” because their consistency and radicalism scares you does not carry over the same meaning. Time and again, whenever men on the “far right” are doxxed, they are pillars of their communities. They look normal or even good. They tend to have families. They hold high positions in their congregations. They are productive and positively contribute to their communities, usually as businessmen. In other words, they are the exact opposite of everything that the word woke is used to signify. For this reason, combined with the fact that online conservatism lacks dynamism and energy, I don’t see this being used for long, outside of James Lindsay. The only caveat is if others outside of this conservative and anti-woke Left coalition begin using the phrase — an extreme tactical blunder for anyone against further leftist influence in society.

Eventually, of course, this will leave James Lindsay once again on his own shouting about some imminent apocalypse wherein the far right, now the “woke right,” causes some hardcore leftist backlash.⁴ Lindsay says this because he is afraid of a Right that is active. Same with the clergy listed above.

Why might that be?

1. And moderates and classical liberals and whatnot else. Regardless of their declared ideologies, these moderates and liberals all share the same goals as the conservatives, which is shutting down the Right. Since their function is the same, I will continue to refer to these groups as “conservatives.”

2. Beyond the poor excuses for excommunications, several men were also pressured out of their congregations without any pretense of due process.

3. As the media has proven this election cycle, the negative opinion brought about by weapon words can range from dislike to violent rage.

4. For anyone who remembers his predictions of this for the last two summers, the phrase “woke right” is his rebranding of that idea. It’s another way of further neutralizing any action from the Right out of apocalyptic fear of a Leftist reprisal.