A new metaphor is stalking the internet. It is promoted by the writer James Lindsay and by Konstantin Kissin of the popular anti-Woke podcast “Triggernometry.” It is called the “Woke Right.”
By implication, those who are to the right of these people – those who are intellectually consistent and are consequently prepared to explore such issues as the ethnic and genetic foundations of culture, genetic racial differences in key psychological traits, dysgenics, and other crucial issues that attempt to understand the causes of our current situation – are the “Woke Right.” If you go beyond merely stating that Wokeness is bad for civilization and you attempt to examine how a civilization is maintained (because this might offend current mores, and your sources of income, slightly too much) then you are “like the Woke, but right wing.”
There’s a very clear sign that a person is losing an intellectual battle: the fallacies of “appeal to insult,” appeal ad hominem and “connotation fallacy.”
If you cannot successfully logically argue with the less intelligent or more emotional, you may yet win them to your cause by emotively insulting your opponents or attempting to connect them to something viscerally wicked. If you – the one subject to this tactic – point this out, your opponent may accuse you being “hyper-sensitive” or “pearl clutching,” but this is just further appeal to insult and further emotional manipulation. They are employing these methods to manipulate the feelings of others and, hopefully, to shut you down, because you fear being ostracised.
Why are they so emotional? Very possibly because they are experiencing “cognitive dissonance.” The “Woke Right” confronts them with the fact that they are mere “Bravery Signallers.” They present themselves as fearless fighters, against Woke ideology, for the truth . . . but they’ll only take this battle so far, because they also desire a certain degree of comfort and respectability. Thus certain areas of discourse – those that the Woke Right explore – are forbidden. The Woke Right, therefore, confronts them with their own intellectual cowardice: a highly emotional reaction is the result.
Konstantin Kissin deploys not only the term “Woke Right” for these people but also, just as emotively, the “Barbarian Right,” though, more sensibly, also the “Dissident Right.” In effect, his argument is that “Woke Right” is an appropriate term because there are a number of superficial points which the “Woke” and the “Dissident Right” share. These are, he avers, as follows:
(1) Thinking the West is bad and siding with its enemies; by implication Russia.(2) Playing identity politics on the basis that their group is oppressed by a secret invisible force controlled by another group/groups; by implication the Jews.
(3) Having an obsession with group-based victimhood and grievance; in other words two-tier policing and other examples of discrimination in favour of minorities.
(4) Seeking to revise and pervert history to fit its ideological narrative. I assume this is a reference to Holocaust Revisionism.
(5) Reacting to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying.
(6) “Creating a culture of fear among more centre-leaning people on their side to prevent criticism (you should see how many people message me privately to say they agree about the Woke Right but don’t want to say anything).”
Kissin is correct that, very broadly, there are some superficial points of commonality between the Woke and the Dissident Right. For example, as I have discussed in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, being Alt Right is associated with psychopathy whereas being Woke is predicted by Narcissism and Machiavellianism. These three personality disorders have much in common – they intercorrelate at about 0.5 – so we can conceive of the “Dark Triad.” Most of Kissin’s criticisms of the Woke Right – name-calling, intimidation and so on – reflect the behaviour of people like this; not of those who are simply “red pilled” on assorted important social and scientific issues.
Overall, these people – the “red-pilled” – are completely different from the Woke. They are high in mental and physical health, low in mutational load, high in pro-social traits and strongly desirous to have children and to pass on their genes. They are, in evolutionary terms, adaptive, where the Woke are the opposite. We have, then, a completely hollow metaphor at a crucial level; like comparing a hover-fly to a wasp.
Indeed, as a metaphor, it quickly falls apart on many other levels as well. Firstly, Kissin seems to characterise here the absolute extreme of the Dissident Right; the kind of people who, whenever I publish anything on any subject, respond, “Why don’t you name the Jew, Ed?! Why don’t you name the Jew?!” Clearly, this is a straw man argument; a completely unfair characterisation of those whom he opposes.
Secondly, the Dissident Right think the West is bad because it is dysgenic, maladaptive and decadent. The Woke think it is bad because it isn’t dysgenic, maladaptive and decadent enough. They have in common the fact that are both critiquing the kind of traditional liberal conservatism for which Kissin stands, but their critique is completely different. You might as well argue that Kissin is “Woke” because, like the Woke, he criticises the Dissident Right.
Thirdly, the grievance of the Dissident Right is adaptive in an evolutionary sense; it is looking out for the interests of their group. The grievance of the Woke is maladaptive; it is looking out for the interests of other groups, though it is adaptive in the selfish, individualistic sense that so-doing is a way of virtue signalling your way to power.
James Lindsay has effectively argued that “Woke Right” is a synonym for Fascist, which makes even less sense than Kissin’s idea. As I noted in Woke Eugenics, the left are concerned with the moral foundations of harm avoidance and equality whereas the extreme right are highly group-oriented: concerned with obedience to authority, traditional sanctity and in-group loyalty. They are fundamentally different.
Also, “Fascist” tends to have a fairly clear meaning, beyond being a political insult. In his essay “On Defining the ‘Fascist Minimum,’” political scientist Roger Eatwell maintains that Fascism is “‘an ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on a holistic‐national radical Third Way, though in practice fascism has tended to stress style, especially action and the charismatic leader, more than detailed programme, and to engage in a Manichaean demonization of its enemies.” Is this what all those to the right of Lindsay are doing? Clearly it is not.
People like Lindsay have eked out a specific niche as the edgy critics of Wokeness; but not so edgy that they are ostracised from many of the good things in life. Those who are prepared to go beyond bravery-signalling and to seriously logically critique current taboos, taking their analysis to its logical conclusion, threaten those in this semi-comfortable niche and confront them with what they are. This explains their attempt to shut them down with the very emotional and very unpersuasive metaphor of “Woke Right.”
