Following a months-long campaign, James Lindsay has found a new excuse for redoubling his distressed efforts to legitimize the term “Woke Right.”
Last week, Joe Rogan hosted a viral podcast between author Douglas Murray and comedian Dave Smith, who debated for and against Israeli policy, respectively. Though the debate divided many X users into two opposing camps, Lindsay used the discourse to quintuple down on attempts to label Smith and others as Woke Right.
When tasked with defining “Woke Right,” Lindsay, who is not an unintelligent person, typically prefaces his argument by saying it’s not a good term.
“It’s not necessarily the best term, um, it’s more accurate to … I don’t use the word ‘woke’ too … I use it a little too casually still, generally speaking,” he told the hosts of Triggernometry when asked for a definition in late 2024.
He went on to describe it as “a species of Marxist thought” and said “another term that might work … is Woke Fascism.”
A cursory search through Lindsay’s posts turns up a wide-ranging variety of definitions, including “Modern-day Fascists,” “calling everything you want to control Jewish or neocon until you control it,” and “people who claim to be right-wing who use Critical Theory.”
Though a fixed definition appears to elude him, Lindsay’s online barnstorming persists.
“For people who wonder why I call people like Dave Smith and Tucker Carlson ‘Woke Right,’ it's more this than that they have any particular views,” he wrote in an April 11 X post, accusing Smith of acting “like knowing what you’re talking about is less important than ‘asking questions.’”
“Their epistemology is the Woke epistemology: ‘that which is being hidden from us to disempower us is more likely to be true,’” Lindsay added.
The next day, Lindsay fired off another series of posts, describing the “debate” (his quotes) as an attempt by Murray “to try to bring [Rogan] back from a nasty ledge.”
“Even Dave Smith kept saying ‘Woke Left,’” he continued. “If Woke Left, then Woke Right. You don’t have to specify unless there’s another. I have already won.”
Lindsay’s entire X feed presents itself as the premiere home for rantings, observations, and outbursts that are hyper-focused on the so-called Woke Right. In fact, during the writing of this paragraph, he posted a chart explaining Woke Right.
“If you wouldn't eat dog shit then you understand why you don't let the Woke Right have power,” he wrote. “Gatekeeping is important for health!”
His insistent proclamations are myriad and increasingly raving: “The term ‘Woke Right’ is really strong bc it short circuits the dialectic. The Woke Left needs a reactionary faction it can point to and say ‘see?!’ and demonize/play off (‘Proud Boys,’ ‘Alt Right,’ ‘Fascists,’ ‘Nazis’), but they can't with ‘Woke Right’ because they're both Woke.”
Though some users have accused Lindsay of having a “crashout,” one must wonder: can his round-the-clock insistence that the Woke Right exists and poses an existential threat carry on like this permanently?
Perhaps it can because it must. Perhaps Lindsay has found his personal eternal return.
The Woke Expert
Lindsay, a mathematics major with a PhD in philosophy, initially emerged from academia as a liberal atheist author who wrote books with subtitles like Only Humans Can Solve Human Challenges and Infinity Plus God Equals Folly. Then, in a rather impressive anticipation of Peak Wokeness, he collaborated with two other academics on the Grievance Affairs Project in 2017 and 2018.
In a bid to expose various academic journals’ fraudulent peer review process, the team submitted a feminist rewriting of Mein Kampf, a paper examining the rape culture exhibited by canines at a dog park, and another paper claiming that men who “self-penetrate using sex toys” could undergo a decline in “transphobia and increase in feminist values” — all of which were published.
These hijinks earned Lindsay an enormous amount of cultural credit among the increasingly incensed anti-Woke Right. He capitalized on the attention with appearances on independent media programs, reams of trolling Twitter posts, and a series of books that took aim at critical theory, Marxism, and education.
Lindsay’s popularity rose alongside the broader awakening that occurred under the COVID regime, during which he became a sort of expert on how Wokeness had invaded Christian churches. His headline appearance at TPUSA’s Pastors Summit in 2023 sparked criticism from evangelicals who were puzzled by an atheist’s preoccupation with threats to their faith.
The problem Lindsay faces now is that post-2023 America is statistically becoming less Woke.
“Wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since,” The Economist reports, citing an analysis of public opinion, the media, higher eduction, and business.
Trump’s decisive 2024 win, others suggest, signaled the beginning of the end of woke culture in the U.S. County-by-county data from the election indicated Gen Z has moved decisively to the right since 2020.
This is why Lindsay’s ceaseless harping on Woke Right has a sheen of desperate rebranding; a slothful repackaging of an empty box.
He’s admitted to the rebranding, agreeing that the “Woke Right itself is [astroturfed], but the term ‘Woke Right’ exposing it and locking it in a toxic brand isn’t.” (Italics added.)
Lindsay’s Eternal Return
“Woke Right” is not a very good term anyway, Lindsay concedes, so no need to get bogged down by all the hazy, trollish definitions. Rather, just take his word for it because he’s the authority on Woke in any form. If he labels (or libels) a person Woke Left or Woke Right, one might be better off simply abiding by his guidance.
This tactic, separated from logic and accountability, might seem unsustainable in the long term, but it’s possible that Lindsay has discovered the unbearable lightness of being.
Nietzsche pioneered a thought experiment known as eternal return wherein a demon tells you that your entire life will repeat just as it is for eternity: “there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”
Is this proclamation from the demon evil or divine? Does the burden of reality weigh so heavily that it gives you purpose or is it so unbearable that you abandon that reality and drift off into fantasy?
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera formulated this insightful analysis of Nietzsche’s concept in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfilment. The heavier the burden, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
For the time being, and for a while now, Lindsay appears to have chosen lightness; a ferociously crying wojak with a smirking mask who has rendered his posts as free from recognizable reality as they are insignificant. The rabid, nonstop insistence has become only half real. He has taken leave of this earth, and his earthly being, in pursuit of a new sense of relevance amid a cultural landscape that is changing very rapidly.
But it’s not too late. Lindsay could shrug off the unbearable lightness of being in favor of reality’s burden.
