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By necessity, we begin here: Most of MAGA is not Woke Right. Few conservatives even lean Woke Right. Only some people claiming to be Christians (rightly or wrongly) are Woke Right.
So who is, and who isn’t, Woke Right, and what its relationship to MAGA and conservatism? What is Woke? How is the Woke Right waging a revolution against MAGA and conservatism? And how is that revolution proceeding so far? At what stage in the revolution is the Woke Right at present?
In other words, as everyone is asking, what the hell is going on?!
My objective in this very long piece is to lay out the case about Woke in detail in such a way that allows me to explain what’s going on with the Woke Right in both MAGA and the broader conservative movement right now, which is nothing short of a revolutionary coup by radicals for control over this half of American politics, if not American and all of Western life.
My essential claim is that the radical Woke Right is enacting a political coup of MAGA and the conservative movement in roughly three or four stages. These stages are:
(1) the consolidation of elite power to direct the Party;
(2) consolidation of MAGA under their rule and organization;
(3) seizing control of American and Western conservative politics from that Party base; and
(4) seizing control of American and Western political and economic power through that Party base.
My contention is that Phase 1 of this structured coup attempt has already been completed, and Phase 2 is well underway. The “MAGA Civil War” we’re presently experiencing is the result of the main body of MAGA having become aware of the problem as Phase 2 proceeds.
The main mechanism of conquest I present in this essay is something called “elitist capture,” which roughly follows a (Culturally Marxist) Gramscian model, based off the Western Marxist theory and practice of the Italian Antonio Gramsci in the early 20th century, which many elements of the Woke Right have explicitly embraced.
I apologize to the reader for the length of the following presentation, but the component pieces must be explained to make the crucial argument in the last section of the essay. For those already familiar with Woke and its nature as a cult, feel free to skip to Section 4 to read the key argument about the Woke Right coup against MAGA, which is the ultimate point of this essay.
Table of Contents
1. Understanding the Definition of Woke
2. The Woke, the Wokish, and the Structure of Woke Cults
4. The Current Phase of the Woke Right MAGA Revolution
1. Understanding the Definition of Woke
Once again, we start by explaining that Woke means something very specific. The correct name for Woke is critical consciousness. It means nothing more and nothing less than this, and the controversial proposition I have made is rather obvious point that critical consciousness can exist on the Right as well as on the Left.
Woke Is a Worldview
Woke is a worldview, namely an activist worldview. Every architect of “Woke” on the Left understands it as such, whether they use the word directly, use sophisticated terminology like “critical constructivism” or “critical hermeneutics” (as does Kincheloe), or use gentler terms like (theoretical) “lenses” (as have the identity politicians on the Woke Left for years). Kincheloe is, for example, specific and literal in calling it a “worldview” (Weltanschauung), and Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux are specific and literal in calling it “a permanent prophetic vision.”
Kincheloe makes it particularly clear, writing in Critical Constructivism: A Primer, a text I have referred to as “The Book of Woke” for as long as I’ve known about it. He writes from the beginning, “In this unified context critical constructivism becomes a weltanschauung, a worldview that creates meaning on the nature of human existence.” Woke means having “Woke up” to a “critical system of meaning” (Kincheloe’s words) for one’s life. This is why Woke is so religious and fanatical.
That Woke is a worldview means Woke is a way of seeing the world and behaving in it. That “Woke” worldview means adopting a conflict-based (us-versus-the-world, or friend/enemy distinction) oppressor-versus-oppressed explanation for the total operation of society, one in which everyone is necessarily a participant. The oppressors are the enemy. The oppressed are virtuous victims by definition because they are victims. The conflict is totalizing and society-defining, not something that’s merely happening or partly true.
“Waking up” to believing the world is organized this way is called having a “critical consciousness.” That is what it means to be Woke. Nothing more; nothing less; nothing different.
True and False Consciousness
In the Woke view, most people in society are “asleep” in that they lack the necessary “consciousness” to understand the Woke (allegedly hidden “true”) view of the world. Many oppressors are asleep and do not realize their complicity in the evil system. Most oppressed are asleep and do not realize they are oppressed. Both have a kind of “false consciousness.” That allegedly dim-witted view of the world is, in the Woke worldview, created and maintained by the oppressors both knowingly and at unawares through complicity, all to maintain their advantage over society, from which the oppressors alone benefit.
A key job of the few who are “awake” is to “awaken” others, which means to help them adopt the Woke conflict-based worldview. They are “Woke” because they are “awake” (Erwache in German—as in the Nazi slogan Deutschland Erwache!, Germany Awake!) while most are still “asleep.” Speaking of the Nazis, weltanshauung is the same German word the Ford translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf renders as “World-Concept,” specifically referring to the Nazi Party’s “racialist World-Concept.” The Nazi mission included waking people up (Erwache) to this particular worldview, which we can conclude is Woke.
Because almost everyone is asleep in the Woke view of the world, something called “consciousness raising” is therefore a first and primary job of Wokes. They have to install the critical consciousness in others, who will then join him in “solidarity” in a bid to claim power and centrality in society, culture, politics, and economics to run the world from their “Woke” view.
Woke as Critical Consciousness
The allegedly hidden but “true” consciousness one might “Woke” up to can take many forms, but it is always of the sort described above. That is, Woke people can blame many groups or “systems” for (usually their own) “oppression,” and this variety of targets for blame gives rise to various species of a broader Woke genus. It might be class consciousness, race consciousness, feminist consciousness, or others. It can also take forms of nationalist or reactionary identitarian consciousnesses normally associated with politics on the political Right, including a “racialist World-Concept”; hence “Woke Right.”
In general, the “awakened” Woke consciousness is always a critical consciousness, which I reiterate is a very specific thing. Unambiguously Woke authors on the Left describe it this way: “Critical consciousness, the core of social justice teaching, is a heightened awareness of the world and the power structures that shape it.” Their Leftism makes it about “social justice,” which is a kind of radical egalitarianism, but what makes it Woke is the consciousness—“a heightened awareness of the world and the power structures that shape it.”
The Woke Right would have that sort of awareness but would not bend it toward “social justice.” They would direct it instead to their own hierarchical ambitions and values, but they’re still Woke by virtue of having a critical consciousness behind how they see the world and act within it. Paulo Freire calls it “seeing the reasons behind facts.” Of course, the “reasons behind facts” are given by the Woke worldview, revealing them to be a “lens” or “interpretive framing” of facts (or hermeneutic or eisegetical program) that support that worldview. One might say it is seeking “understanding” rather than truth, just on captured terms for how one should—or must—understand the world.
Another writer who is unambiguously Woke Left explains critical consciousness this way: “Critical consciousness describes how oppressed or marginalized people learn to critically analyze their social conditions and act to change them.” The crux of a critical consciousness is being or feeling oppressed about their sociopolitical conditions and acting to change them. This disposition is not limited to actors on the political Left (see Section 3, or Hitler’s “World-Concept”).
How Woke (Critical Consciousness) Acts in the World
Critical consciousness means believing the world is organized in the Woke way as described above and also believing that there are only three things that can be done about it. As Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire had it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “For someone to achieve critical consciousness of his status as an oppressed man requires recognition of his reality as an oppressive reality.” That is, acting Woke makes you Woke. This articulation accords with everything above and is the motivation for Woke activity.
Where this vicious, dualistic foundational perspective comes from is Karl Marx, who opened the Communist Manifesto’s main body this way:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master, and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (bold added)
Marx also famously said the point of studying the world isn’t to understand it but to change it. Woke is intrinsically activist, from oppressed against oppressor, aiming for “revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large, or,” failing in their revolutionary ambitions, settling for “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Being an activist accordingly—to transform it or to damn it entirely—is considered an intrinsic part of having critical consciousness, so it is also an intrinsic part of being Woke.
Woke worldviews always mix theory and practice, so it isn’t enough to believe; you also have duties of conscience to advance Woke belief and Woke agendas. Again turning to Freire, this time in The Politics of Education, “Critical consciousness is brought about, not through an intellectual effort alone, but through praxis—through the authentic union of action and reflection.” Again, acting Woke makes you Woke, and the way it happens is that you’re supposed to think about what you’re doing in Woke ways as you do it and afterwards so what you do next will be more Woke.
Therefore, first, more people have to be “Woke up” to the “right way” to think and act, which comes from the “right” interpretation of the world—the Woke one (“seeing the reasons behind facts”). Thus, their primary activity (“praxis”) is to attempt by any means possible to spread the “Woke” critical consciousness to others. That is, Woke must always recruit.
Second, enemies of the Woke have to be identified and destroyed. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the three primary ways Wokes destroy their enemies (before they have the power to do so physically and literally) are (a) intellectual destruction, (b) moral destruction, and (c) psychological destruction.
The Woke worldview and much psychopathic abuse is used to position enemies as intellectually deficient (usually by showing they don’t understand the Woke doctrine), morally deficient (usually by using Woke beliefs to claim they are complicit in the Great Evil of society or paid off by it), or psychologically deficient (usually by saying they must be crazy or have had a break with reality for not going along with the Woke doctrine and its bullying crowd).
Third, Wokes have to participate as activists against the unjust system in which they are a part. The entire point of the Woke “permanent prophetic vision” is, as Henry Giroux explained in the introduction to Paulo Freire’s The Politics of Education (1985), is to “transform the world” in alignment with its own maniacal views. Woke acts “in that it views the kingdom of God as something to be created on earth but only through a faith in both other human beings and the necessity of permanent struggle,” Giroux tells us.
Woke activism is therefore always intrinsically collectivist and religiously fanatical, and it believes its charge is to build a perfect world (utopia) that would result if only the world and everyone in it were in line with its doctrine. Freire referred to having this awakened awareness as having “critical consciousness,” which may be a term of his coinage. The purpose of critical consciousness, Freire told us, is “permanent cultural revolution.” Woke does not build. It stages revolutions to seize power or, failing that, destroy.
Woke therefore only means “having a critical consciousness and acting upon it.” It does not mean anything else, and it does not apply to anyone who does not have such a thing.
Critical Consciousness and Critical Theory
Critical consciousness means having adopted Critical Theory. That’s all it means. Therefore, Woke means seeing the world through some Critical Theory. That’s all it means. It doesn’t mean anything else.
What is Critical Theory? Kincheloe tells us, “Critical theory is concerned with extending a human’s consciousness of himself or herself as a social being in light of the way dominant power operates and manages knowledge.” That is, Critical Theory is the tool by which one acquires a critical consciousness. Critical Theory is how one becomes Woke.
Critical Theory means believing power is at the bottom of everything in society and that dominant power is corrupt. It means knowing you cannot change the world on the existing terms, though you must change the world, so you must ruthlessly (that is, mostly unfairly) criticize those aspects of the world that you wish to change. Notice the emphasis both expressions give on how power “manages knowledge.”
This definition is consistent across many decades of literature, tracking back to 1937 in specific when Max Horkheimer, then director of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, coined the term. It is the same term and idea used to describe everything we call “Woke” on the Left to this day, including in their own literature. Here’s Horkheimer’s description from 1969:
The Critical Theory, which I conceived later, is based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good, what a good society, a free society would look like from within the society in which we now live. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society which we want to change.
Critical Theory, we’re told by Alison Bailey in 2017 in an unambiguously “Woke” education paper means interrogating power’s relevance to how we understand and know the world. She specifically contrasts it against the “critical thinking tradition,” which she says is concerned instead with “epistemic adequacy,” which is a fancy academic term that means “knowing what you’re talking about.” She tells us about two academic traditions that diverge over two different meanings of the word “critical,” and writes,
The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life… the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.
This view she contrasts directly with Critical Theory, which she describes this way,
Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices. By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy.
What she is saying is that critical thinking is itself corrupt and corrupting because the most relevant factor for understanding ideas and questioning them is asking how they are shaped by power, not whether or not they are true, accurate, sound, or valid. Her focus is on inequalities and “social justice” because she is a Leftist, but it is believing the interrogation of power is at the root of knowing that makes her Woke.
For Woke thinking, anything that disagrees with Woke thinking is an unjust application of the corrupt power ruling society. No one is seeking truth; everyone is reinscribing power. There is no neutral territory. Kincheloe tells us this too: “Critical constructivism is grounded on the notion of constructivism. Constructivism asserts that nothing represents a neutral perspective—nothing exists before consciousness shapes it into something perceptible.” Where he says the “critical” meets the “constructivist” is in understanding that perception is shaped by systemic power.
Thinking this way is having a critical consciousness. Thinking this way is what it means to be Woke. Like it or not, the Woke Right has widely and thoroughly accepted that there is no neutral ground or perspective, so the perspectives that will dominate are those asserted with more power.” Again, thinking this way is what it means to be Woke.
Woke and Other Ways of Knowing
Because Critical Theory believes power shapes everything in society, that means Critical Theory is criticizing existing power in the hopes of replacing it with its own abusive power (on the underlying hidden assumption that’s sometimes stated that everything is always power and all power is ultimately abusive). Doing this means being Woke. People who do not do this are not Woke, even when they engage in criticism, including of genuinely oppressive structures.
Critical consciousness is particularly concerned with how power shapes our abilities to know and communicate ideas. It is a Marxist approach to knowing (“[power] managing knowledge”) before it is anything else—unless we just accept that the whole enterprise of “Woke” is a gnostic way of thinking before its even Marxist (which it is).
Critical consciousness partly means believing the ability to know and communicate ideas is completely captured by an illegitimate elite who use their status as elites to keep everyone in false consciousness for the benefit of the oppressive elite. Critical consciousness is therefore a conspiracy theory. Woke is therefore a conspiracy theory.
As a result, Woke favors “other ways of knowing” and “marginalized knowledges” over “established knowledges,” which they believe are corrupt by the systemic power they blame everything on. Kincheloe is explicitly clear here: “Critical constructivists value subjugated knowledge.” This means believing what “they” allegedly “don’t want you to know” is more likely to be valid than what “they” would be fine with you knowing. Woke is a conspiracy theory about knowing in addition to the structure of society.
Again, Wokes believe this because the fundamental Woke belief is that political power contours everything (“manages knowledge”) and all political power is currently held by an illegitimate elite who is abusing knowledge and communication to keep everyone else asleep (to spread “false consciousness”).
The Woke view is “that which the allegedly powerful elites allegedly don’t want you to know because they want you to stay asleep to their power and corruption” is more likely to be true and superior to other claims, not because it is true but simply because it is “subjugated knowledge.” Favoring “marginalized knowledges”—usually called “other ways of knowing”—believed to be marginalized because of the Woke conspiracy theory is therefore a big part of what it means to be Woke. Holding dissident viewpoints and expressing them is not Woke on its own.
Woke as Illegitimate Consensus
Woke is not concerned with truth; only power. Therefore, Woke cannot define its status, or the “garbage” status of their enemies through truth or goodness. They can only do so through constructivist means, as Kincheloe told us. What this means is that the Woke assert right and wrong through popular belief and the appearance of popular belief that doesn’t even exist.
What Wokes regard as “true,” “valid,” or “good” is what agrees with their Woke worldview and that which advances its spread and praxis. What Wokes regard as “false,” “invalid,” or “evil” (or, as the slang goes today, “cooked”) is that which does not agree with their Woke worldview and that which hinders its spread and praxis. Part of having a critical consciousness is adopting this socially constructed, contorted view of reality, which the postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “legitimation by paralogy” (and also Woke paramorality).
Woke therefore sets up a highly artificial field using its cult activation and many Machiavellian techniques (including swarms and social media bot manipulations) to make its own views appear very popular and that which disagrees or hinders it appear very unpopular. Popularity with the Woke cult (on terms defined by its paralogy and paramorality) define “validity.” Truth is irrelevant. What it looks like “all the right people” believe (and who they like and hate) is all that is relevant. This fact is why Woke is so powerful on social media.
Woke will therefore operate on social media in particular to create a highly artificial view of what is and is not popular through artificial and manipulated (one might say “cooked”) means of amplification and group denunciation. These artificial features, including rampant bullying and deflection campaigns, are then advertised as indicative of how correct, popular, trendy, and forward the cult is (cf. Mussolini’s magazine, Avanti!, which means “forward” in Italian). It’s all corrupt and bogus, but it appears real and is disorienting and demoralizing by design.
Woke really is this psychopathological and deranging.
Woke as the Outsider Elite
The people who are already “Woke” in the above sense therefore automatically represent a new “elite” who “know what time it is” and recognize “the right side of History” because they allegedly broke free of the “false consciousness” and adopted a critical consciousness. Being Woke means adopting a kind of intellectual, moral, and psychological elitism based on having “Woke” up.
This state could refer to the Woke Left who know what “the right side of History” is. It could also refer to Woke Right people who “know what time it is” regarding Marxist infiltration of our society allegedly being terminal (“black pill” logic), thus requiring a fully radical and revolutionary response. It could also be Herbert Marcuse talking about the “emergency” and “clear and present danger” of the “entire existing society” in his 1965 Woke Leftist essay “Repressive Tolerance.”
It’s the same all three ways. Society is believed to be on the cusp of ruin, and only these (Woke) radicals can save us, and only by throwing out the existing order and replacing it with their own Woke one—while blaming the other side’s radicals for the necessity of their radical action.
Here is how Marcuse said it, and without knowing it’s Marcuse, it cannot be distinguished from identical sentiments from the Woke Right aside from a few Leftist keywords:
The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology,’ the false consciousness has become the general consciousness—from the government down to its last objects.
What Marcuse is describing above is considered ridiculous, totalitarian, and histrionic by most people. He is calling for tyranny in the name of the permanent threat of “fascism” arising again now that it had. The Woke Right believes that most of society actually agrees with him, and calls the abhorrent tyranny he’s calling for the “postwar consensus.”
They would say when Marcuse says “the whole post-fascist period,” what he means is the postwar environment in which Fascism has to be controlled. They believe society at large, not merely the histrionic Left, intentionally operates to this day exactly as Marcuse articulates. They believe the world set up a pervasive system of power called the “postwar consensus” along these lines to exclude them as the lost “true Right,” and that they’re merely reemerging from this Marcusian oppression now.
As you can see, what Marcuse is calling for is the revocation of freedoms, including the freedom of speech and assembly, to stop an alleged existential emergency. The Woke Right expresses the identical idea for the identical reasons against the Woke Left but by invoking Carl Schmitt, the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich, and his concepts of the “unbound executive” and “the state of exception,” wherein an emergency state in society necessitates the “sovereign” leader to be completely unbound from law and any other form of restriction on his action.
While this is the Woke Right justification for needing power to end the Woke Left in our society, it was also the justification the Woke Left used to perpetrate Covid–19 on us—down to the “vaccine” being pushed through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Schmitt fleshed these ideas out most fully in a 1933 book written for the Nazis titled The Legal Basis for the Total State, wherein he explained why the Nazi government had a moral and legal justification for being totalitarian. Obviously, the Nazi Experiment failed miserably, indicating it might not be a good way to go in our present circumstances.
This attitude defines an inherent elitism in all Woke. Since allegedly they alone understand how dire the circumstances are and what its “true” root causes are, they are elite and must lead. Since they alone know which “knowledges” are “valid” through “subjugation” and which are “propaganda,” they alone must instruct—and lead. Those with critical consciousness are “awake” and must lead those with “false consciousness” who cannot possibly understand what is happening around them. Everyone in the way “doesn’t get it” and must be destroyed.
Woke is intrinsically elitist, though it always pretends it isn’t and represents the “common man,” be that worker, minority, displaced majority, or the nation’s “true” Volk.
Woke Elite Theory
If realizing you’re being lied to by legitimately corrupt influences and stepping out of the “Matrix” is taking a “red pill,” adopting a critical consciousness is like taking a handful of pills, some red and at least some black, as the metaphor goes.
The “red pill” alludes to seeing reality as it really is outside of a systemic power structure and its lies, which can actually exist. The “black pill” refers to seeing the situation as hopeless outside of extreme, radical, and revolutionary measures. One red pill might indicate awakening; several represents becoming a conspiracy theorist; and the black pill is just demoralization. While taking one red pill might be a necessary corrective; many are deranging; and the black pill is simply poison.
Woke is always the result of taking a handful of “red pills” with at least a few “black” ones.
The people who have already done this “awakening” may come to regard themselves as superior to the sleeping others in their awakened (or, historically, Elect, and not in the Calvinist sense) status and deem themselves worthy to lead—or rule. This is the backbone of the Woke prescriptive elite theory, which follows from their acceptance and endorsement of a descriptive elite theory. I have explained these elsewhere but will summarize briefly.
Elite theory is the belief that elites are who rule society. Obviously, this is not some stunning insight but something of a tautology. The people in charge are the elites, whoever they are. In general, though it is not obligated to, elite theory goes on to try to figure out who the elites are, by heredity, genetics, loyalty, enlightenment, purity, or whatever else. That means a descriptive elite theory (“elites rule”) gives way to an elitist concept that certain people are themselves elite and therefore rightfully rule (“the cream rises to the top”). This view can then develop into a prescriptive elite theory by deriving an ought from a contorted is: “the elites should rule.”
Conveniently, most elite theorists regard themselves as the elites who should end up ruling. Woke is an elaborate scam for making false elites out of losers and outsiders, usually led by “feds” who will co-opt the whole thing at the right moment (this is called a “color revolution”). While the Woke Left tries to pretend it isn’t using elitism (think: “it’s hierarchy, not hypocrisy”), the Woke Right enthusiastically and openly embraces and pushes it.
“Common Good” Woke Tyranny
Wokes tend to adopt elite theory to justify the idea that elites—meaning themselves—must always rule for the “common good,” which they alone truly understand because they are “Woke” to it (to the alleged “structural realities” of society). Believing in elite theory alone does not make them Woke, though the enlightenment aspects do.
Wokes extend their elitism by then combining a fuzzy elite theory and elitism blend with the two key beliefs in the Woke conspiracy theory: the elites who rule now are illegitimate and corrupt because the system is illegitimate and corrupt, and they, themselves, are an awakened elite who should replace them in the name of everyone’s benefit.
Speaking historically, Vladimir Lenin called this model the Vanguard model. The way he said it works is that the most theoretically literate Marxists would lead the revolution. In What Is to Be Done? (1902), he explained, “At this point, we wish to state only that the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.” The Vanguard, he explained in State and Revolution (1917), would lead the proletariat (echoing Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto):
By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.
The party he established around this belief was called the Bolshevik Party and later became the Communist Party, which established the USSR.
For Lenin, the purpose of the Vanguard was to educate and lead the proletariat to establish a dictatorship, which the Party would run on its behalf as a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” That is, it would “Woke” up the people and lead them. The purpose of the Party apparatus itself was mostly to destroy the Party’s enemies, as he explains in State and Revolution repeatedly, for example:
The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic system. The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians—in the work of organizing a socialist economy.
Hitler used the same concept in creating the Nazi Party, believing the masses of the Volk to be too stupid to govern themselves and needing absolute tyrannical authority from the awakened Nazis to rule and lead them (specifically into war). Mussolini was different only in the particulars, rising out of the Italian School of Elitism. Franco did it in the name of saving Spain. Woke elitism run amok can appear on both Left and Right.
Summary of Woke
What I have described above is Woke. It may or may not describe someone’s way of believing or acting in the world. Most people are not Woke and do not think or act that way. Some people do. They are Woke.
Woke means having a critical consciousness. Woke doesn’t mean anything more or anything less than this. Period. Full stop. Stop pretending it does. Woke bleeds over into believing the critically conscious have a unique right to rule and are the dispossessed Elect who must reclaim society under their power allegedly for the “common good.” It’s a ruse. The structure of Woke is as a cult with themselves at or near the top, as I will explain in the next chapter.
Woke and Wokish
Making things more difficult, however, is that people adopt this way of seeing and acting in the world by degrees. They can be “a little Woke.” It’s best not to think of people as being Woke since it can vary how much critical consciousness they have adopted, but we all agree that when there’s enough there, the person is “Woke.” Why? Because they “Woke up.” Simple as that.
People can be Woke for intellectual reasons by adopting the Woke doctrine and theory, but much more commonly they are “Wokish” for social and emotional reasons. Most Wokish people don’t accept the worldview, or wouldn’t if it were laid out clearly to them, but they participate in it because their social standing depends up on it. They may not even realize there’s a doctrine but are going along with the crowd and engaging in its practices (Woke praxis), which they don’t have to understand deeply to participate in. This sometimes causes them to get very upset when identified for being “Woke” when they are, in fact, only Wokish.
Generally, I think it is best to reserve the term “Woke” for people who are not just socially and emotionally caught up in Wokeness but to reserve it for people who are intellectually committed and pushing it. Well, that and Woke ways of seeing and acting in the world. That is, to be “Woke,” I think, or to merit that label on a person, they have to be self-aware in having adopted a critical consciousness, even if they don’t recognize it by the term “critical consciousness.” They have to know they Woke up to a fundamentally different organizing principle of society based in collectivism and in coveting power they believe they wrongfully don’t have. Marx said as much about being a Communist, repeatedly.
If that’s not you, you’re likely not Woke. You might be Wokish, though. If it is you, I have bad news for you. You’re Woke, and being a ‘Winger doesn’t save you from it.
So this defines Woke. In subsequent chapters below, I will explain how this organizes the Woke cults including on the Woke Right as well as how it pans out within the conservative movement and MAGA. The most important concept will be “elitist capture,” which astute readers can already anticipate from the discussion of Woke Elitism above.
2. The Woke, the Wokish, and the Structure of Woke Cults
As I have discussed in the past, a lot, Woke operates like a cult. It does so around the central conspiracy theory and elitism described in the previous chapter.
Woke operates like a cult because it is a cult. Cults operate in predictable ways, as I’ve described many times so far, and they are structured in roughly the same way every time, whether formally or loosely.
The general structure of cults is that there are three main tiers within every cult, formally or informally. These may be graduated further (as with Freemasonry into 33 specific levels) or not (as with Woke). There is an inner circle who knows what’s going on (operators and agitators). Below them is an “inner school” of “adepts” who have become intellectually (or financially) invested and committed to the cult and know and push its doctrines (Wokes). Below them is an “outer school” of “initiates” who have some degree of social and emotional (status and identity) investment in the cult but who might not be deeply invested or even aware of the doctrines (Wokish).
The Wokish
By far most of the people in a cult are “outer school,” or “Wokish” in Woke cults. Wokish people have taken on some of the Woke cult lenses, meaning they sometimes and partly see the world in Woke ways (with some critical consciousness) and act within it as such (transgression, social enforcement, virtue signaling, victimhood identification, polarized splitting, etc.). Mostly, they think the Woke trend is “what’s happening” and are going along with it. It’s pretty literally a “party of vibes.”
For people who are Wokish, Woke is mostly a social fashion with certain perks. It’s an in-crowd they want to be in and go along with. It’s mostly “just how all their friends act” or “how we see things,” and it often takes the form of liking and hating certain things—and especially the people who are set up as villains by the tiers above them. They’re sometimes referred to as “fellow travelers,” “sympathizers,” “water-carriers,” “useful idiots,” or even “footsoldiers,” all of which are terms of abuse projected onto various people “with false consciousness” outside the Woke cult. The Wokish are the primary victims of the Woke cult, which is abusing them from above for their support and allegiance.
Wokish people will also frequently be very vague on why they think and feel the way they do about matters of critical consciousness, though they are filled with talking points, examples, cliches, and especially virtue signals from the tiers above them that help define social membership in the broad “movement” (that is, cult, in this case). Because their social environment is heavily influenced by and eventually totally dominated by the Woke worldview, they become increasingly isolated within the cult and become codependent upon it in terms of understanding themselves (status and identity). They seek to please the cult even at their own detriment.
Being Wokish effectively means being codependent upon the Woke cult in disposition and practice.
The Woke
Above the bottom tier (or outer halo) of the cult—which is Wokish people who have become socially and emotionally committed to the Woke cult—there is a more definite group who is intellectually committed or otherwise invested as well. They are either grifters or awash in Woke, and they push it. They usually know the theories defining cult doctrine and often care about them. They push Woke theories and practices, including the abuse of outsiders and defectors, and explain the world in terms of them. They’re basically the teachers and cops of the Woke cult. They are also victims of the Woke cult who have become active abusers (rather than merely passive abusers, as are the codependent Wokish below them, who take their cues).
The Wokes, in this model, are seen as leaders in thought and theory as with Lenin’s “Vanguard” model, and they set and spread most of the trends, cliches, talking points, virtue signals, etc., that capture the Wokish below them. In fact, they are more akin to Mao’s Red Guard, which he used and disposed of, than they are to the Bolshevik Vanguard, but they will define the majority of the ranks in the Party, should the Woke establish one effectively. At any rate, the Woke are “the Party” for all intents and purposes.
The Woke are not merely Wokish; they are Woke (or grifters). Moreover, it’s not just that they are ore deeply or intellectually committed in addition to being socially and emotionally committed. They are actually Woke—like “woke up,” except when grifters, who are legion in this tier.
Wokes believe the Woke worldview is the correct worldview and that everyone who doesn’t get it is actually asleep (the Wokish merely intuit or feel this). They understand the Woke conspiracy theory to be the true but hidden operation of society. They can and do articulate it as such. They facilitate (but only sometimes establish) the incentive structures both positive and negative the Woke cult offers to attract recruits and punish enemies and defectors. They name the enemies of the Woke cult movement and put targets on them. They set the terms upon which the boundaries will be policed to keep the Wokish in and too afraid to reject the cult or side with any “enemies.”
The mid-tier Woke are the primary perpetrators of the Woke cult. They, themselves, may not genuinely be psychopathological, but they have adopted a psychopathological worldview (Woke) so thoroughly that they are functionally psychopathological. The Wokish, by contrast, are only lightly functionally psychopathological for social reasons (tribe over truth, fitting in, cult-captured psychosocial valuation, getting invites, etc.) and are often still normal, particularly when interacting with normal people outside the Woke cult.
This adoption of Woke functional psychopathology as a primary mode of engaging the world is the primary distinguishing feature between Woke and Wokish.
Woke and Grifters
One caveat here is that the “Woke” tier is shot through with grifters who do not really believe the Woke worldview but who can articulate it so as to collect the Woke cult rewards and mete out the punishments for themselves. This actually creates two types of Woke perpetrators: genuine (Wokes) and false (Woke grifters). These are often indistinguishable even to people within the cult. Also, some Wokish people, or even normal people, can be some mixture of partly earnest and partly grifting by promoting Woke views because the incentive structure is real and can be lucrative (e.g., getting paid to post certain things on social media).
The reason Woke is so susceptible to grifter occupation and domination is that the Woke worldview is ultimately very simple, though it’s dressed up in complicated theories, so it’s very easy for unscrupulous grifters to mimic, and the reward structures are often generous when the Woke cult movement gets off the ground. The Woke cult sets up a simple reward/punishment, or carrot/stick, incentive structure that anyone can easily copy, especially when it comes to promoting certain ideas and people while denouncing others. The elites of the Woke cult set this incentive structure while the Wokes and Wokish tend to enforce it, and this defines the elitist capture at the center of my argument.
In particular, the mode of Woke is critique of the existing structure, which any grifter or demagogue can easily do for clout, regardless of whether they believe what they’re saying. It’s also very easy to engage in or initiate vicious piles-on of “enemies,” which is a primary Woke activity and signifier. This massive incentive structure attracts a different kind of psychopathology, then: unscrupulous and Machiavellian grifters—and it does so in large numbers and without much capacity for identifying or filtering them from its ranks.
The Woke are happy to use the grifters, of course, because being Woke is not concerned with truth or integrity; only “operational success.” The grifters enable operational success, so they’re not just welcomed but celebrated in the ranks of the Woke, at least earlier in the revolution. They will be the basis for many nasty purges later in the development of the Woke power structure, but just as often, legitimate Wokes will be purged by the grifters who are more Machiavellian and more savvy in playing the nasty Woke game than their earnest but broken compatriots. True psychopaths almost always rise to the top of the Woke cult hierarchy as a result.
The Inner Circle (“Feds”)
The real operators behind the Woke cults are the kinds of amoral operators, assets, psychopaths, cluster-B personality disordered, and Dark Tetrad people Jordan Peterson has described as diagnostic of “Woke.”
This intrinsic corruption is partly because people of this kind will arrange cults, and the “Woke” motif for a cult is a very simple and attractive model under certain circumstances (mass grievance, alienation, or displacement) for mass recruitment. It is also partly because ruthless grifters and psychopaths will rise to the top of the Woke hierarchies naturally since the Woke hierarchy is always based on playing effectively by Woke rules and not based on genuine competence.
The inner circle of any cult is tightly guarded and highly elite, at least locally within the cult hierarchy. Very few people are allowed into or near it, though its members interface significantly with people throughout the cult and are sometimes quite prominent as agitators for the cult. Some in the inner circle believe in the cult (its ideology); some merely see it as a useful tool to exercise power (its tactics, which they view as amoral and available to anyone).
That is, the fuzzy line between true and false members here is just as relevant as in the Woke tier below but with one crucial difference. At this level, only operators are allowed. You cannot merely be devoted or useful. You must be an operator, a “fed,” in the broadest construal of the word. This tier directs the operation that the Woke cult operates within—which always amounts to a revolution or a coup for its own benefit. The inner circle of the cult will benefit the most from this coup, and the entire structure will be arranged to ensure that. Many in the lower tiers will be discarded or destroyed after the revolution succeeds far enough.
Take the example of the Communist Party as described by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. In the first chapter of the Manifesto, Marx makes the case that there’s an intrinsic, society- and history-defining conflict between classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, or more generally oppressor versus oppressed. That is, he’s Woke because he’s expressing a critical consciousness. He says (Chapter 1) the proletariat (oppressed) is naturally on the right side of this conflict and has the right to achieve a “revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large” or the “common ruin of the contending classes.” In the second chapter, he then explains that the Communists are the natural advanced segment of the proletariat who must lead them to consciousness and revolution. Naturally, Karl Marx and his cronies led the Communist Party. So Marx’s Woke cult structure was the proletariat as the “outer school” activated halo of Wokishes, the Communist Party as the “inner school” Wokes, and Marx himself and his cronies as the “inner circle” leadership class. Naturally. Hitler’s infamous Führerprinzip (leader principle) worked the same way with himself as the ultimate Führer.
Woke Elitist Capture Through “Inclusion and Belonging”
In Woke cults, the inner circle sets most of the reward and punishment structures and hands them down to their operatives in the Woke tier below to impose upon four specific target groups: the Woke below them, the Wokish entirely “to keep them on the plantation,” the declared enemies (who get punishments only), and the general population (who are offered rewards only to recruit them).
They usually have or are connected to ample means to make reward structures attractive: galas, cocktail parties, exclusive invites, parties, paid opportunities, professional opportunities, power, funding, networks, exclusive access, etc., by the time the Woke cult movement gets off the ground, and sometimes from the outset. This explains recruitment. There is a model for Woke “inclusion and belonging,” and if you play ball with that model, you’re included and you belong. If not, you’re excluded and punished.
The punishment structure is mostly directed at declared enemies plus any defectors who have waded into and then back away from the Woke cult’s worldview or reward structure. They are scapegoats and traitors and are treated as such. Punishing enemies is rewarded in the reward structure.
Enemies are viciously made examples of primarily as a show for existing cult recruits. The cult takes a risk to punish an enemy because it risks damaging recruitment by looking horrible or evil, even with all those reward incentives dangling out there. It readily takes that risk in key cases, however, because it is much more valuable to have all members and people in its halo or potential recruitment territory terrified to speak out against the cult at all for fear of loss of rewards or direct punishment. Remember, Lenin said repeatedly that the Communist dictatorship exists primarily to punish and destroy the enemies of the Bolshevik Communist cult.
The punishment of enemies is therefore geared mostly to signal to the people already captured by the cult that if they deviate, they will lose status and all hope of accessing the rewards incentive structures. The same threat is a message sent to the recruitment field around the cult (in the case of Woke Left, all “liberals” in the bad American usage of the world; in the case of the Woke Right, all “conservatives”).
The Process of Woke Elitist Capture
Many within the Wokish outer circle and most within the Woke middle ring of the cult strongly desire or covet access to the Woke cult reward structure and will compromise themselves tremendously to get at it. “Everyone has a price,” they say, and not necessarily just in terms of money.
It is very hard to resist this carrot-stick, access-threat, inclusion-exclusion incentive structure once it is clearly laid out to you—even more in terms of social status than money for many people. Therefore, the inner circle arranges it such that there is no access possible except to people who bend the knee to the Woke cult in some degree, at least by outwardly supporting it (social capture, thus making you a Wokish initiate). Certainly, no one who opposes or exposes the Woke cult can have any access to its reward structure and must be punished publicly as well as privately.
The Woke Left, we all recognize, operated with this structure, whether with fancy cocktail parties, elite invitations, opportunities to write and publish with prestigious outlets, access to academic circles that got increasingly tight over the years, and through sprawling professional standards. Heaps of money and fancy opportunities were open to those who participated, and severe punishments including personal and professional destruction (including many induced suicides) rained down on “enemies.” Trump Derangement Syndrome operated as a psychological operation specifically through this dynamic and its built-up reservoir of belief in false values.
The Woke Right does not control society overall but only the MAGA ecosystem within it, so their power is not as absolute but operates identically within a large, wealthy, and powerful subdomain of society.
In addition to much else specifically within the MAGA ecosystem, the Woke Right currently sets access to the President of the United States and all associated glamour and opportunity as the crown jewel of its incentive structure. They also control most of the “elite” tier of MAGA and its opportunity structure, including media appearances, network, (paid) speaking spots, invitations to exclusive parties and events, and a huge and influential social circle of “it” people. The Woke Right effectively control the elite tiers of the MAGA ecosystem already, indicating the first phase of their structured revolutionary coup is already complete.
Summary
In language that is more familiar but less comfortable for the Right, what this means is that the Inner Circle of any cult sets an “inclusion and belonging” paradigm that is laced with desirable rewards and policed with terrible punishments (particularly in terms of status, standing, opportunity, and access) for being at least “Wokish” (initiated). The Wokish get to play in that field, and the Woke who are more effective get genuine but mostly lower-level big opportunities within it.
The whole thing is corrupt. The way you can tell the whole thing is corrupt even on a casual glance is by noticing that the conditions for access and the triggers for punishment are all based in what the Left boldly called “inclusion and belonging” in the cult on narrowly set ideological and social terms with strict gatekeeping and guilt even extending to gatekeeping by association. (Whatever you do, don’t be associated with James Lindsay!)
Everyone at least intuitively also understands the opposite, thus the punishment structure, is exclusion and ostracization, which is psychologically and professionally almost impossible to bear. Woke cults are evil.
Conclusion
If you don’t understand this structure, you will badly misunderstand what’s going on with Woke cults overall. You will think people who are merely Wokish are Woke, or vice-versa, that the movement is much more organic than it is, and that it’s actually all motivated and stimulated by genuine concerns and natural social needs and dynamics. None of this is true, and it can be very difficult for normal people to understand this fundamentally psycho- and socio-pathological state because normal people by definition don’t have those states. In fact, much of it is manufactured and false by a variety of deliberately misleading mechanisms.
Remember, Woke is a way of seeing the world and acting within it. It is having a critical consciousness. One of the ways Woke acts in the world, then, is to erect a cult-like structure as described above, based on the critical consciousness the cult holds, and to enforce it both with rich worldly rewards and strict demonic punishments.
We will next turn our attention to understanding the similarities and differences between Woke Left and Woke Right—not that these are the only two ways Woke can manifest.
3. Woke Left and Woke Right
A Woke cult can manifest itself through virtually anything. What that means is, almost any view or movement can adopt a critical consciousness–based way of seeing the world.
Whether or not “Woke” is an intrinsically “left-wing” phenomenon boils down to a real and unsettled debate about what “Left” means and is unproductive. I will adopt the prevailing nomenclature here and will take for granted that people who self-identify as on the Left are on the Left, and likewise I will take for granted that people who self-identify as on the Right are on the Right. While I know there are plants and operatives embedded in every movement, there is almost nothing productive to be gained by disputing their own self-identifying political status as “Left” or “Right,” though I sympathize and understand why one might do so—both for good and bad reasons.
More specifically, the people I identify on the “Woke Left” all describe themselves as “on the Left.” The people I identify as on the “Woke Right” all describe themselves as “on the Right”—indeed, they indicate vigorously that they are “NOT conservatives” but “radical right-wing revolutionaries.” I have no reason to dispute their claim that their views are “Left” or “Right” and, rather than trying to argue that the “Woke Right” is really “on the Left” (as I have repeatedly in the past, calling the Woke Right the “Right hand of the Left,” for example). I say this fully aware that at least some agitators on the Woke Right are almost certainly Leftist plants or otherwise (Bernie Bros who adopted a veneer of MAGA conservatism but never left their Leftism behind, for example).
For this reason, I will offer a particular organizational description of “Left” and “Right” in alignment with how their radicals engage with idealistic societal organizational forms: anti-hierarchy (Left) and enforced hierarchy (Right).
Woke means having a critical consciousness. Again, that’s all it means. Nothing more; nothing less. People who have a critical consciousness and advocate for Leftism are Woke Left. People who have a critical consciousness and advocate for Rightism are Woke Right. I don’t mean anything other than this by the terms, and I don’t think you should either.
What Is Woke Leftism?
As noted above, the “Woke Left” (previously, just “Woke”) refers to people who self-identify as Leftists, advance Leftist causes, and have critical consciousness (are Woke or Wokish). They are Woke for “social justice.” Understanding the Woke Left therefore requires understanding Leftism. There’s a variety of ways to do that, but in the contexts we’re all most familiar with, Leftism pushes a kind of radical egalitarianism as a societal ideal.
Radical egalitarianism refers to a deeply radical view of “equality” that seeks to generate total social, economic, cultural, and political equality. Its extreme is what the Soviets called “actual equality” (Фактическое равенство) and we call “equity” or “social equity.”
Leftism does not merely seek to establish radical equality in many cases but also to make up for historical inequality. This is not truly a Leftist goal but is merely a mechanism to achieving radical egalitarianism. Note that the reparations component of “equity,” then, is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. In a real sense, the ideal of Leftism can therefore be described as a radically anti-hierarchical worldview that rejects all hierarchies, both legitimate and illegitimate.
This idealistic rejection of hierarchies—which is impossible in practice because hierarchies always result from any set of ground rules that define the operation of society—explains why Marxist Communism believes that at the end of its period of enforcement (“Socialism”), the result will be a “stateless, classless society” in which there is plenty and everyone is a complete equal.
The Woke Left believes this end is only possible by training people to be radically egalitarian, brutally in direct proportion to their unwillingness to accept this anti-human and anti-reality model voluntarily. People must literally be transformed or disposed of until everyone believes fully and religiously in radical egalitarianism sufficiently for it to magically work. The result is, of course, extremely hierarchical (with the Party on top, favored “people” next, and “enemies” last and rejected) in the name of being anti-hierarchical. Radical equity is enforced on the middle tier of “people” most. The Party rewards itself, and enemies are destroyed in the meantime.
The Leftist eye is on the idealized state of affairs, though, which is radically egalitarian and perfectly and voluntarily equalized in all ways. Marx believed History itself is a teleological project that exists to return mankind to this state, but in plenty instead of as primitives. Thus, we can understand Leftism—no matter how unrealistic it is—as alignment with radical egalitarianism as a societal ideal. This view is not necessarily Woke until it adopts a critical consciousness for why society is not already radically egalitarian. Then it becomes Woke Leftism.
This fact about Woke Leftism gives it a marketing advantage that helps it survive even after it causes a society to spiral into destruction. It appears (superficially) to have good intentions. In fact, its real intentions are to take power for itself and to attempt to radically transform all human beings and society into something that it neither is nor can ever be, but “at least” it’s because they care about “equality,” people think. Eventually, that it is radically unrealistic becomes a marketing hindrance once it is exposed.
Because it is radically egalitarian, the Woke Leftist worldview is therefore a critical consciousness about “hidden” embedded, structural, and systemic inequalities in society. They believe that these inequalities are intrinsically due to injustices in the organization of the system itself and that the system itself is therefore unjust and needs to be replaced by one that is radically egalitarian. They believe they have “Woke up” to a critical understanding of why the society generates inequities and that they alone can remedy those to achieve their radically anti-hierarchical perfect vision for society. Their “Woke” elitists will shepherd (read: force) society into that state in the name of abolishing elitism forever.
The Woke Left worldview is that people in power illegitimately have rigged the system to exclude the real voices who would make it radically egalitarian. They are alleged to have done this both wittingly and unwittingly to keep society unequal in ways that benefit themselves, so they are evil or complicit in evil, even if only through negligence. Therefore, they, the Woke Leftists, have to be forced from “the margins” into the center, while people who support the existing system have to be ejected and marginalized—because they aren’t “Woke” to how the “system” is said to “really work.”
All Woke thinking is ultimately class-based (collectivist) as we discussed earlier, so the Woke Left organizes its class structures among the less successful members of the given society who it can convince are structurally disadvantaged by the existing system. It “awakens” them to a Woke critical consciousness of their conditions by teaching them Marxist class-conflict explanations for why they aren’t doing better than they are in society. Paulo Freire calls this process “conscientization,” or awakening.
Outsider classes can be defined in a wide variety of ways: economic class (Marxism), race (Critical Race Theory), sex (feminism), sexuality (Queer Theory), immigration or citizen status (postcolonial theory), body size (fat studies), mental health (madness studies, a la Foucault), criminal status (prison abolition), etc. Each defines a class that must act in solidarity, but in the Woke Leftist model, they have to be regarded as outsider classes positioned against the dominant power structure as set up by “dominant” classes of people who allegedly exploit them and alienate them from their true human nature. That is the Woke Left class conflict model that Marx said defines and moves History.
The theoretical model called “Intersectionality” (which is described as a practice, not a theory) welds these outsider groups together in solidarity against the alleged dominant power structure that is designed to maintain inequality, which is the only way they believe they can obtain power against prevailing power. Thus, Woke is collectivist (including Woke Leftism).
The Woke view is always that the outsider classes (the “Others”) are alienated by the system of power erected and maintained by the groups who benefit from it, so-called “dominant groups.” The dominant alienate them from their rightful heritage in a perfectly egalitarian society—which they believe represents our true but lost human nature—they have come to believe could and would exist if it wasn’t for the dominant groups’ selfishness and lack of self-awareness. Marx described it as “the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being” and said it can be accomplished by a single command: “abolish [bourgeois] private property,” i.e., enforce “transformed” radical egalitarianism.
The Woke Left uses various Critical Theories according to its radical egalitarian worldview, which it calls “social justice.” Since a Critical Theory is defined (by its creator, Max Horkheimer) as being unable to describe an ideal society on the terms of the existing society, and proceeds instead by criticizing those aspects of the existing society that fail to be ideal and that they wish to change (a negative gnostic social theology), this means Woke Leftism looks for inequities and blames them on social injustice that it claims is baked intrinsically into the system.
Since only they can see it, and only they can understand it (by being Woke to it), only they can be allowed to fix it. That defines their elitism and power grab, which is done in the name of radical egalitarianism, or “equity,” or “social justice,” all of which refer to the same thing.
What Is Woke Rightism?
Woke Right is a term that refers to people who self-identify as right-wing and who push for nominally or genuinely right-wing causes from a critical consciousness of their circumstances (Woke or Wokish).
Understanding the Woke Right is slightly more complicated than understanding the Woke Left because the Right is not typically Woke until it is sufficiently provoked. It tends toward traditionalism outside of provocation by the Woke Left, though it is entirely plausible that it can be Woke independently of provocation because Woke just means having adopted a critical consciousness. Being a traditionalist does not make someone Woke, even if that puts them outside of the classically liberal tradition.
This means we have two things to explain to understand the Woke Right: Rightism and Reaction. They’re not quite the same thing.
Rightism as Enforced Hierarchalism
Rightism should be defined here in a sense in the opposite way as Leftism, as would stand to reason. As there are many ways we could have defined Leftism, for better or for worse, Rightism could be defined in opposition in many ways as well. For good reasons, however, we have characterized Leftism as radical egalitarianism, which is to say a radical view against a hierarchical society. This allows us to understand radical Rightism—and there’s an important caveat here I’ll explain momentarily—as a radical preference for strictly enforced hierarchies as the basis for social organization.
In some sense, this means Woke Right lends itself more strongly to elitism and elite theories than does Woke Left, although in practice the Woke Left adopts these and is just lying about it in idealistic hope that they can be totally overcome.
Two points bear elaboration here before continuing. One is the meaning of the word “radical” itself. The other is the notion of radical Rightism as favoring strict and rigid hierarchies and how that differs from favoring natural hierarchies.
Radical means “roots.” So a radical political position refers to pulling up the existing system by the roots and putting down new roots for a new system. It doesn’t just mean being zealous or a fanatic or caring a lot or being mad. It means wanting to have a revolution of some kind against the current system.
As for hierarchies, reality is simply this: given any set of base rules for a system or society, a hierarchy will form around those rules. The thing is, a system’s hierarchy can be defined explicitly or not by the system. When it is not defined, it will emerge naturally through competence in the given system. These could be called “natural hierarchies.” Most systems present some explicit hierarchy (e.g., the President will be the chief executive).
The American system aims to minimize explicit hierarchy as much as possible to allow the maximum amount of natural hierarchy to arise in the context of what it calls “just powers” of government. The Founders understood that the ideal would be natural hierarchy but that Nature tends to be brutal enough to make that state a cartel-driven and faction-driven hellscape in practice without some rigid order. On the other hand, they understood that a rigid and absolute hierarchy explicitly defined without checks and balances to power would simply be a government-run tyranny.
Because (a) the Woke Left is radically anti-hierarchy, (b) natural hierarchies will always emerge, (c) some explicit hierarchy is called for to maintain order, and (d) the Woke Right is (radically) pro-hierarchy, the Woke Right (as well as Fascism) has a better marketing program to people in that it’s more realistic than the Leftist alternative, even though it’s still wrong. Leftism calls for something most understand to be idealistic, utopian nonsense while Rightism calls for an extension of something that naturally occurs, just in a bad way. What Woke Rightism doesn’t benefit from, in contrast to Woke Leftism, is any benefit of the doubt. Their program is rabidly in favor of enforced hierarchies that are quite brutal and often nakedly malicious and arbitrary. The public does not forgive them for this like they do Woke Leftist idealists, and so a failure of Woke Rightism always hands tremendous moral, social, and political authority back to the Left, usually for the duration of living memory.
This unfortunate marketing fact—that Woke Rightism is more realistic than Woke Leftism—is doubly true when Leftism has been on the march and making a society completely disordered. Hierarchy seems to be in desperate enough need to justify doing it radically. (This is where we find ourselves now, by the way.)
So, (radical) Rightism can be understood as the desire to pull up the existing system and install and enforce a rigid hierarchy in its place, usually in the name of some notion of a better time in the past before things went sideways. The natural hierarchy under a light-touch central government is considered too weak and enabling of too many freedoms and must be replaced with an enforced (artificial) hierarchy. Woke Right is therefore intrinsically statist—and in a way the Woke Left can deny. (The Woke Left lies to its followers about an ideal of a stateless society and so claims to be anti-statist by statist means; the Woke Right is simply vigorously and permanently statist.)
Woke Right as Reaction
By comparison to Leftism, radical Rightism is a radical cry for (too much) order in response to Leftist chaos (anti-hierarchy). This brings us to the other dimension of radical Rightism, which is not necessarily traditionalist or pre-Modern at all: namely, Reaction.
Reaction is often taken to mean “far Right,” but it is in fact radical (or Woke) Rightism in defiant and often angry reaction against Leftism (including Woke Leftism). The attitude motivating Reaction is that things have already gone too far for too long, and enough is enough—which may well be true in some ways. The goal of Reaction continues that energy to “so we’re going to take control and put things right, maybe by any means necessary.” That’s less wholesome.
Generally, Reaction blames tolerance for the rot in society, so the purpose of both its Reaction and the strictly enforced hierarchy it will establish is to overcorrect for perceived excesses of tolerance. Things were allowed to be let go too far, or too many of the wrong sorts were tolerated in their beliefs, behaviors, or intermixing (or interbreeding) in society. Being too tolerant was the problem, so being rabidly intolerant is the solution to restore the people to a state from a time when we didn’t have all these problems.
The thing is, they might actually have a point about excessive tolerance. As the so-called Paradox of Tolerance of Karl Popper demonstrates, for example, tolerance is actually always a delicate balance between what should and shouldn’t be tolerated by a healthy, free society. Tolerating intolerant, subversive movements like Marxism will, in fact, erode and destroy your society. Reaction usually does not stop at revoking tolerance from dangerous radicalism and subversion, though, and extends it into other sociocultural and political domains to which it assigns the blame for the Marxist infiltration in the first place. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “The Democracy of the West today is a forerunner of Marxism, and without it, Marxism would be unthinkable. It alone gives this plague the surface on which to grow.”
Radical and Reactionary Rightism is often, though not always, a radical reaction to radical Leftism. The Left comes along and causes problems, and the Right responds by overreacting in the opposite direction. Historically, Reaction has tended to take the form of “same energy, opposite direction” in its approach. That is, it recognizes the tactics and modes of Leftist agitation and, in response, adopts them itself to “fight fire with fire.” For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “Gradually I became an expert in the doctrine of the Marxists and used this knowledge as an instrument to drive home my own firm convictions. I was successful in nearly every case.”
More generally, it isn’t just seeing the tactics of Marxism and picking them up to push Reactionary agendas—as does the Woke Right intentionally. Historically speaking this energy is Fascism responding to Communism. Mussolini, a former Communist, made the case in The Doctrine of Fascism and characterized Fascism as being intrinsically organized anti-Marxism.
In essence, when Jordan Peterson famously called Woke Leftism “postmodern neo-Marxism,” he was correct. Woke Rightism, then, is best understood as a Reactionary postmodern neo-Fascism. This requires us to say a words about Fascism.
Fascism as a Reaction to Communism
Fascism is not well-enough understood in what it is, which is Woke totalitarian anti-Communist Reaction, and it will help us understand the Woke Right to understand Fascism as anti-Communist Reaction and as prototypical of Woke Right.
In essence, when Communism (Woke Left) comes on the scene and demands radical egalitarianism and equity and uses destructive critical methods to go about getting it, society goes into a crisis (pre-revolutionary state). There are three ways the society can go from there. It can firmly reject radical egalitarianism in favor of its founding principles; it can fall to Woke Leftism; or it can React with radical Rightism. (Weakly standing for the founding principles or just carrying on will certainly lose to the Woke Left and are therefore rightly considered part of that second possibility.) The first of these prevents a revolution but requires resolute commitment to the founding principles and the willingness to consistently begin to defend and execute them. The second gives us a Red (Marxist) Revolution. The third gives us a White (Fascist) Revolution.
Fascism in essence is adopting the Woke (critical consciousness) model of Communism while rejecting completely its radical egalitarianism and, in fact, reversing it for radical hierarchalism. Put otherwise, where the Woke Left sees inequity and hierarchy and says it is “injustice that ruins society” the Reactionary Woke Right sees inequity and hierarchy and says it is “justice that runs society.” In other words, the Woke Left (or Communist) view is that inequity and hierarchy are bad for society and the Woke Right view is that inequity and strictly enforced hierarchy are what make society work—and they always were.
Therefore, Fascism presents itself as both “anti-Communist” (which it is) and the only way to be anti-Communist (which it is not). As Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini (father of Italian Fascism) put it in The Doctrine of Fascism,
Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.
That may sound good, but it is not all Mussolini said. Mussolini’s Fascism is Reactionary, not just anti-Marxist. He quickly continues,
After socialism, Fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.
Under Fascism, as Reaction, there will be no natural hierarchies because natural hierarchies cannot be trusted. This also means the people themselves cannot be trusted, only used. There will be no government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. The Fascists are too elitist to require that assent, and conversely they regard the governed to be too stupid, incompetent, and degenerate to give consent to the right things anyway.
In the Fascist State, there will be a rigid enforced hierarchy instead, and it will be “totalitarian,” Mussolini tells us. It “rejects the individual” (is collectivist) and relocates all values in the state (is statist):
The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people. No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State.
Fascism, ultimately, is a Woke Right, Reactionary doctrine that arises as an overreaction to Marxist incursion.
Woke Right Historical Romanticism
Both Woke Left and Woke Right are historicists. What this means is that they write historically based stories that make their present revolutionary ambitions seem correct, inevitable, righteous, necessary, etc. The Woke Left tells a mythology about how some decisive moment of self-justifying injustice erected a permanent system of injustice that produces inequities. The Woke Right tells a mythology about how everything was great—if not Golden—up to a certain decisive movement when some enforced-but-“natural” hierarchy was disrupted and caused society to go into the toilet.
The Woke Left therefore tells a historical Fall of Man story where we cast ourselves out of Eden by introducing some terrible social injustice into History (thus initiating the conflict that defines History and its great retvrn to a reconstituted but original state). In Marxism, it’s the advent of private property. In Critical Race Theory, it’s the introduction of racism. In feminism, it’s the “apartheid” of the sexes with women as “the second sex.” In Queer Theory, it’s the acceptance of norms, legitimacy, and normalcy.
By contrast, the Woke Right tells a romantic tale of past sociocultural glory that was interrupted by the attempt to make things too fair for people who never deserved it. Tolerance is the essential problem, so intolerance is the cure.
The Woke Left wants us to return to Eden on our own terms in defiance of God. The Woke Right wants to assume the mantle of the Lord of Hosts and drive man forward into the inheritance it would have had if they hadn’t been displaced from their rightful historical trajectory by undesirables and degenerates.
Thus, the Woke Right historicism tells a romantic story of a rightful, but local (e.g., to the nation or the race), elitist hierarchy whose members have been unfairly displaced from their inheritance by alien interlopers who came in and broke the system by claiming it wasn’t fair enough (demanding tolerance for what should have been intolerable). The Woke Right see themselves as the alienated rightful inheritors of a society that wasn’t allowed to be because it deviated from the rightful elitist hierarchy they have rediscovered and aim to reinstall. Oppression was making the system work in the past, they figure, and it will make the system work again now once it is embraced and enforced. Tolerance is out the window in the extreme.
Whereas Marx and the Woke Left believes the system of power has negated who we are as human beings, as in dislocated our humanity, the Woke Right beliefs a system of power has negated who we are as a people who deserved better than we actually get. The Woke Left believes people are intrinsically socialists, “antiracists,” and “queer” and have been alienated by the unjust imposition of a system of power that creates inequalities and hierarchy. Their goal is liberation through enforcement and ideological remolding. The Woke Right believes people are intrinsically a nation, a race, a “people,” or a culture that used to be glorious but has been polluted and who are thereby alienated by the unjust imposition of a system that refuses to recognize their intrinsic and inalienable claim on the fruits of their own society. Their goal is restoration through enforcement and intolerance.
Woke Right Elitism and the Führerprinzip
The Woke Right vision for society, then, is a “retvrn” to the organizational principles of an earlier instance of their society in which the rightful heirs to their society (themselves and people “like” them) were dominant and not displaced, and this hierarchy will be rigidly and brutally enforced since the people no longer accept it naturally. It is a story, then, of a dispossessed and alienated but rightful elite returning into their own and setting things right after they have eroded or fallen apart.
Rather than cobbling together the less-successful members of a given hierarchy and installing resentment in them for how the system was created to fail them (Woke Left), the Woke Right cobbles together people less-successful members of a given hierarchy and installing resentment in them for how the system was supposed to work for them all along but was stolen from them illegitimately. Resentment is at the bottom of both Woke models and defines the critical consciousness both Woke models adopt.
This means in practice the Woke Right will create class-based (collectivist) identities around not just factors that are meaningful to right-wing people, like kin, tradition, and national identity, but around the sense of resentment of being a dispossessed natural societal elite whose inheritance has been robbed from them. Nationalist sentiment gives way to hypernationalism or ultranationalism, for example, where the identity group becomes the “true Scotsman” who was always meant to inherit the fruits of the lost Golden system (Mussolini’s Italian Fascism). Identity politics located in nationalism or “kin” (usually majority races) erupt and arise (Hitler’s National Socialism). Cultural identity politics arise in national and religious identities, as with Franco’s attempted reunification of Spain (nationalist) through Catholic identity (cultural/religious).
Because of the Rightist bent toward rigid and enforced (rather than merely natural) hierarchies, the Woke Right will establish a rigid and enforced hierarchical structure that they believe will return them to glory and their lost inheritance. Because it blames tolerance, this hierarchy will be rabidly intolerant and will punish all elements believed to corrupt the society.
In its extreme, this model was named the Führerprinzip (leader principle) by Adolf Hitler, though he derived it at least in significant part from Mussolini’s model of the Fascist state. The Führerprinzip describes an absolute pyramid-shaped hierarchy of top-down control with total obedience at every subordinate level all based on enforcing and serving the Party and its ruling (Woke) ideology. Thus, where the Woke Left ideal is absolutely no hierarchy, or radical egalitarianism, the Woke Right ideal is total hierarchy—what Carl Schmitt (and “Auron MacIntyre” at The Blaze) called the total state. As Mussolini said about this model explicitly: it is totalitarian and it is spiritual.
The Woke Right has accepted that the “total state” is an inevitability, so it might as well be their own total state. This is similar to the Woke Left belief that the total state is an inevitability, so it might as well be their own total state. The Woke Left believes the state exists to enforce class division and that it takes the oppressors’ side in the resulting class conflict, so they have to “seize the means of production” and establish what Lenin called a “semi-state” that will force everyone into socialism so it can “wither away of its own accord.” The Woke Right believes the state exists to enforce class division and needs to take the oppressors’ side in the resulting class conflict so that the state and its society and its people will endure and advance forever.
The belief in inevitability of something terrible so it needs to be the “right” something terrible is a Woke belief. It’s also incredibly mystifying. Not only does it feel like that must be the case and thus bring people into existential fear and madness, it also removes anything but the radical extremes from consideration. If everything really is brainwashing, then of course we must brainwash correctly. If every state really is a total state, then of course we must have the right total state. If every society automatically will have a state religion, then of course we need it to be the right state religion.
The thing is, not everything is brainwashing; not every state is a total state; and a state will not always have a state religion, even in the de facto sense, much less de jure.
Natural Versus Artificial Hierarchies
As a final note, it is crucial to distinguish the rigid and enforced hierarchy of the Woke Right from the natural and fluid hierarchy of a free society. In a free society, there is hierarchy, and that hierarchy is precisely as legitimate as it is based on competence not only in the system but to the degree that the system itself is aligned with (or in correspondence with) reality.
As discussed in the previous chapter, a Woke cult produces a system in which one can become falsely “competent” in the power games of the cult without ever gaining competence in reality. Thus, it is possible to rise through the ranks of the cult hierarchy merely through Machiavellianism and other power games, by grifting, or by being a really good cultist rather than through demonstrated competency in matters applicable to the real world. This fact not only enables the elitist capture mechanism we have been discussing in Woke cults but also guarantees their failure. It is as though they operationalize an evil version of the Peter Principle—everyone will rise well beyond the level of their incompetence and will get there through evil and abusive means.
Competence in a psychopathic Woke sociopolitical game defines the hierarchies in practice on both Woke Right and Woke Left, but it is not genuine competence in alignment with achieving real goals in reality. It is in both cases, instead, competence in a suite of artificial, pathological, forced, and Machiavellian power games that a healthy free society aims to minimize in their impact on its natural hierarchies. On the Woke Left, it is achieved by playing the victim in the name of radical egalitarianism; on the Woke Right, it is achieved by ruthless power games (also rooted in a sense of victimhood), Machiavellianism, and savage intolerance.
What Makes The Woke Right Woke?
What makes the Woke Right “Woke” is having adopted a critical consciousness of their circumstance, including the identity class–based thinking that comes along with it.
These dispossessed, alienated would-be elites, like their Woke Left counterparts but differently, have a form of enlightenment based on who they are and how they suffer. They see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the society, so they understand it on a deeper level than others. They are also alienated from it, so they “know what time it is” in terms of having been dispossessed and alienated—thus full of resentment. This is little different from what’s going on the Woke Left but for different reasons. Both have adopted a system of social authority based in their identities (“standpoint epistemology”). Both derive an unquestionable right to rule from their belief in their own awakening.
On the Woke Left, the belief is that having been alienated from society by the dominant powers that erected that system gives true insight into a second dimension of human experience: alienation. Thus, they have special authority and insight into the true nature of society and gain right to rule through it. Their rule is meant to “liberate” mankind to his true perfectly and radically egalitarian state, which they refer to as “human nature.”
On the Woke Right, by comparison, the belief is that having been alienated from society by an illegitimate interloping alien force that has erected an illegitimate system gives true insight into a second dimension of human experience: alienation. Thus, they have a special authority and insight into the true nature of society and gain right to rule through it. Furthermore, on the Woke Right, however, there is the added belief that the identity factors (national, “kin,” or cultural) they hold were the rightful ones not for humanity at large but for their specific people, and therefore they have an even greater (standpoint-based) authority and right to rule. They also refer to this as “human nature.”
This self-serving belief structure is one of the factors that makes the Woke “Woke.” It applies, as you can see, on both Woke Left and Woke Right, though slightly differently.
A second crucial factor is the belief that insider knowledge is part of the corrupt system and therefore outsider knowledge that is specifically critical of the existing (“corrupt”) system is superior. This belief is the basis of the special authority that is described above in both cases. If the system is corrupted, as they maintain, then that which is outside the corruption is more likely to be true—so goes the Woke logic—especially if it criticizes or challenges the existing allegedly corrupt system. This is a Woke attitude toward “subjugated” knowledge (too many red pills, so to speak).
Summary of the Woke Right
The Woke Right has adopted a critical consciousness of its standing in society, regarding itself as the dispossessed and alienated “true right-wing” and rightful inheritors of a system that was corrupted by a wicked alien power they alone fully understand and can resist. They are Woke by dint of having “Woke up” to this belief system. Again, Woke means having a critical consciousness. Nothing more; nothing less.
The most important factor in understanding the Woke Right is that they view themselves dispossessed and alienated as a people (nation, “kin,” and/or culture—Mussolini, Hitler, and/or Franco, respectively), not as being dispossessed and alienated from their very humanity (as do the Woke Left, who locate humanity itself in radical egalitarianism). Of course, the Right tends to locate its humanity in its received identity as a people, so there isn’t much daylight here between the two except in the particulars. Put otherwise, the Woke Right doesn’t care about so-called humanity (overall); it cares about inheritance. That is, the location and rationale for resentment is fundamentally different between Woke Left and Woke Right. What is not different is being Woke about it.
This fact means that the expressions of the Woke Right will be (ultra)-nationalistic, “racialist” (as Hitler had it, but it means “racist”), and culturally chauvinistic and supremacist based on a belief that establishing a rigid, intolerant enforced hierarchy to mandate a particular view of these factors is the only way to return the rightful heirs of a society to their inheritance.
Now we can turn our attention to how this worldview and cult structure interfaces with MAGA and drags it into a “Woke Right” calamity.
4. The Current Phase of the Woke Right MAGA Revolution
We begin with reiteration.
MAGA is not “Woke Right” and is not a Woke cult.
Again, MAGA is NOT a Woke Cult.
MAGA is, however, significantly captured by a Woke cult that has gained the name “Woke Right.”
This section will explain the idea of cult capture in the specific context of MAGA and the broader conservative movement in the United States (though it applies analogously, though imperfectly, abroad as well).
To remind you of my specific claim, it is that the Woke Right exists as a Woke movement in right-wing modes that is every bit as revolutionary and radical as the Woke Left. It uses the same critical consciousness operating system, though differently and for its own particular ends and societal structure (highly ordered versus comically “egalitarian”).
As a radical right-wing movement, the Woke Right is doing a revolutionary coup of MAGA, then conservatism, then society in stages. The first stage of that coup has been capturing the elite stratum of MAGA, which it has completed. It will then use that capture to take over MAGA, conservatism overall, and then society, if it can and is not stopped.
That is, the current stage of the revolution is leveraging the MAGA elite against MAGA itself. The previous stage of the revolution was capturing the MAGA elite, which it did mostly quietly over the last several years.
Of course, in parallel, the Woke Left spent the last half a century (or longer) slowly doing its coup in similar fashion. First the elite circles were captured, at least by Obama’s second term in office; then the coup of the Democratic Party proceeded in 2015–16 as led by the Justice Democrats and “the Squad”; then all of left-leaning America was conquered during the 2020–21 riots and pandemic; and they very nearly took the United States in total. That is, they were well into Stage 4 of their coup, where as the Woke Right is only in Stage 2 of its own coup.
The trajectories of these two revolutions will be similar, though it is my belief that the Woke Right has no hope of completing its own revolution and is ultimately a foil to allow the Left to complete its revolution instead. In short, the Left set their table for decades and did it well, and Reaction has the energy but not the broad support to accomplish its ostensible aims. It can, however, sink the MAGA ship. (Recall Marx: “revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”)
This section is devoted to explaining the mechanism of the Woke Right coup, which is the most important part of the essay and its actual purpose.
Elitist Capture
The incentive structure I described in Section 2 emanating from the “inner circle” (“feds”) and through the Wokes (“adepts” and aligned grifters) down to the Wokish (“initiates” and fellow-travelers) generates a phenomenon we must understand called elitist capture.
Elitist capture is the name for when an elite group within a movement defines the cultural, aesthetic, linguistic, and behavioral norms that are considered both superior within that group and indicative of group belonging. They therefore also set up a set of signals one can make (“virtue signals”) that indicate inclusion or a kind of bid or application for inclusion into the “cool-kids’ club,” or inner clique and its halo, and its opportunity structure.
The way elitist capture proceeds among the elite is by getting the “elites” to adhere to these norms as a matter of an aesthetic and a praxis (Stage 1). The “in-crowd” will increasingly be defined by liking the same things and people, promoting the same things and people, having similar takes on things, etc., which also includes disliking the same things and people and shunning the same things and people. This is usually done partly organically and partly through co-optation by arranging the rewards and punishments more and more in line with what some portion of the elite favors most.
The way elitist capture proceeds from the elite is by getting everyone else to follow the trends set by the elites, first through esteem and then later through an increasingly rigid and visible rewards and punishment structure (“inclusion and belonging” paired with exclusion and ostracization and outright punishment). While the first of these processes runs from elite trend-setters within the elites’ circles, this second process run from the totality of the elite tier to everyone else (Stages 2, 3, and 4, progressively).
The most prominent and familiar example of elitist capture to everyone in our society today is how every university, professional association, HR department, and major institution all signal Woke (Left) alignment. Being Woke Left (specifically intersectional, enviro-Communist, socialist, etc.) is a necessary component of belonging and inclusion in those captured social and professional spaces, and so regardless of one’s beliefs, most in them conform or signal conformity. The Woke Left managed over decades to extend this elitist capture to much of “polite” or “educated” society (completing Stage 3 of their revolution and moving into Stage 4), thus defining the current Woke problem we generally all recognize and are trying to fight.
As you can see, there are two forms of elitist capture happening in Woke movements, then: internal within the high-status cliques and “elites” and then external within the movement below and around them, bleeding out into all of society eventually if possible. Both of these forms of elitist capture operate together, though in earlier phases of the revolution it is crucial to focus on the inward-facing capture which then turns more and more outward as the revolution progresses to later stages. Progress from one stage to another is generally referred to, by the way, as power consolidation.
Elitist Capture Runs Through a Set Table
Part of the insidious nature of elitist capture is that by adopting the modes and mores expected for inclusion and belonging into the elitist-defined structure, people slowly capture themselves into the underlying worldview defining that structure. By using the captured language, captured motifs, captured aesthetic, captured social cues (including likes and dislikes of people, ideas, and things), etc., whether by adopting them or as mere virtue signals, they do work on both a person’s (social and individual) psychology as well as their capacity to articulate the world outside of the elitist-defined structure and its worldview.
Elitist capture doesn’t work (just) through paying people off or compromising them with blackmail or threats; it works through setting trends, styles, and brands, including for what it means to be “cool” (or, here, “based”) and included as well as for who to avoid and hate as a signal of not being “uncool” (here, “cringe”) or contaminated.
It’s easy to understand how social, emotional, and linguistic cues can conquer someone’s psychology—people want to fit in, often desperately—but an example of capturing worldview is in order because that’s more difficult.
By adopting the elitist-defined framing and language for a phenomenon, it becomes increasingly hard to talk about that phenomenon, which might be very relevant or important, outside of elite-defined captured terms and framing. Eventually, the terms (language) and framing (underlying worldview “lens”) become the way you understand those concepts themselves, making it very difficult to articulate the associated phenomena outside of captured framing and terminology, which you then spread to others. You have experienced this if you have tried to explain a Woke Leftist position, say like transgenderism, without using Leftist language for the phenomena you’re attempting to talk about. It’s frustrating, and it completely disempowers you while eroding your discernment.
It’s also subtly transformational. Wokes often get you with captured language first, which lures and leads you, and eventually traps you, in their worldview. In looking into ways to talk about the phenomena of interest, which many people are likely talking about if they’re engaged at all, you find yourself stuck having to study, read, hear, and re-articulate captured terminology, even if you’re trying to learn about the topic in a detached way. This slowly contours how you think about the issue itself.
On the Woke Right, for example, it is very popular to blame a lot of what’s going wrong in the world today on a fairly nebulous concept known as the “postwar consensus,” referring to the various ways we approach national and international politics and economics since WWII, speaking generally. It is captured terminology, which means it has more than one thing it can refer to, one of them ideological and based on the Woke worldview and the other more general and quotidian.
By accepting that the problem is something called the “postwar consensus,” which is Woke Right captured terminology, even if you don’t agree with them, a person slowly loses the capacity to talk about the geopolitical considerations of the world since WWII outside of those terms. Much of what you will read about the now-unveiled problem will be on captured terms written with ideological commitments woven in. Slowly, the points raised by the Woke Right, some of which are good points with bad interpretation (common with all Woke), start to be the points you also make as you engage with the term that mainly they talk about (because it’s their terminology and therefore captured linguistics). Eventually, the worldview that informs their use of the world impresses itself upon you, and you adopt pieces of it.
Congratulations, you’re now a Wokish initiate, even though you probably don’t recognize it about yourself. Now you’re vulnerable to the full suite of Woke elitist capture techniques.
The Temptation of MAGA by Woke in the Desert
Once Wokish or even adjacent, as discussed, the “inclusion and belonging” reward structure opens up to you. The elites behind the elitist structure at hand, or the Wokes below them with means, can and will make more and more offers to you within their growing institutional frame of influence and opportunity (or sometimes just cold, hard cash). All of it is contingent. There are some things you should or must do or say and much you also must not do or say if you want these rewards, so you learn performativity, self-censorship, and self-criticism to enable these opportunities. This is the first step of selling your soul to the Woke cult, which is ultimately Luciferian down to the last jot.
Along with these opportunities, you’ll increasingly be made or become aware of people who are being punished for speaking against it or even just differently and/or against the elitist framing of the world (or cult). You can’t get too close to them, or everything you’re being offered will be at risk. Now you’re no longer freely associating because you’re associating on cult terms, which carry guilt by association.
Now the various incentives and social and emotional binding mechanisms are available to you and visible to you: status, opportunities, (new) friends, esteem, praise—and the constant threat of loss of all of these for trivialities. This process is elitist capture. The Woke cult dynamic creates a false elitism through its false elite and expands it through this diabolical machinery, using it to capture more and more people, most of whom never will be elite in the cult at all.
People who are generally regarded as elite potential recruits are vigorously targeted, and both the rewards profile and threat profiles presented to them are stark and overwhelming. It’s not just love-bombing. It’s great jobs, network access, access to the President (in this case), tons of mover-and-shaker opportunities, amplification (and monetization) opportunities on social media, and so on. The threat is the absolute destruction of “elite” status in the broader movement if you don’t go along with it. Put plainly, stars within MAGA who are not Woke Right are heavily recruited and heavily (if only tacitly) threatened to join in, with rich reward, or else. We all see it happening. I bet you can name a few people you’re worried about right now.
If we’re talking about the Woke cults, this is how they make you Wokish (initiate you) and lure you further in. Once you’re at the gateway, the incentives look marvelous, and turning back looks barren by comparison (cf. Matthew 4). Once you come in, if you come in, the world opens up to you. (The catch is that your soul can’t come with you, for that way is narrow.)
MAGA and Elitist Capture
Most of MAGA is not Woke Right, but MAGA is powerfully captured by the Woke Right worldview and “inclusion and belonging” structure. The elite tier of MAGA is more or less controlled by this structure now. That phase of their revolution (Phase 1) is complete.
The next phase is using the MAGA elite to capture MAGA overall or, if that’s not possible, as Karl Marx had it, to achieve “common ruin of the contending classes.” That is, they’ll take over MAGA or destroy it entirely. That’s the current Woke Right mission, and it comes from Karl Marx and his demonic inspiration. Destruction is the wages of Woke. As President Trump said, “everything Woke turns to shit.”
As noted, elitist capture of MAGA is at work in two ways at once to have made this happen and to continue making it happen. These two modes are inward, among the “elites” themselves, and outward, from the “elites” to everyone else. In order to begin describing both, let me explain two things.
First, this is how power consolidation works in practice in general. Understanding this and its application to MAGA will lead to clarity on why a common talking point against criticizing the Woke Right phenomenon is utter, if not malicious, nonsense.
Power consolidation works from the inside out. First you capture the elites (with elite capture in the first sense, inward-facing), then you capture the party (with elite capture in the second sense, outward-facing), and only then do you capture the general population. This is what Mao Zedong did in China between 1923 and 1949, which is when he finally assumed power.
First, he consolidated power within his central cadres. This was done via the Long March and at Yan’an from 1934–1935. Yan’an became one of the most famous and sacred places in Maoist China as a result. Second, he consolidated power through the entirety of the CCP in the early 1940s, driving out what he referred to as the Left factions and the Right factions. Only in 1946—against a war-crippled China—did he then launch his bid to take over China at large, which succeeded finally in 1949. Of course, Hitler did the same thing through the early 1920s and then in the late 1920s before taking power in January 1933.
The Current Stage of the MAGA Revolution
My argument here is that MAGA is progressing from the first of these phases, which is now complete, through the second one, which explains most of the crazy last few months. It has established elitist capture of what I’ll term “Elite MAGA,” and now it is seeking elitist capture of all of MAGA. Only after that will it seek to capture all of conservatism or all of America, if it gets that far.
Therefore, it is irrelevant in the extreme that the Woke Right doesn’t hold any significant institutional power in the US ecosystem at large. It doesn’t matter that they don’t control the bigger-picture Leftist institutions. They’re not going for those yet at all. They’re staging an insurgency to capture MAGA itself, which they claim they will then weaponize against those broader societal targets. Their argument is that this counter-insurgency model is the only way to stop the Left, which is fraught at best and a ruse at worst.
At the current stage of the Woke Right revolution, they control almost all institutional power in the MAGA ecosystem, which is their current target. What they have outside of it is currently irrelevant. This is why their main target for activism at present is the Daily Wire, which represents the largest and strongest media institution in the MAGA ecosystem that’s still outside of their control.
When someone says that the Woke Right doesn’t control any major institutions or that it’s “fringe,” they’re missing the point entirely (often very much on purpose, by the way). Its entire sphere of relevance is only within the sub-ecosystem of MAGA, not the super-ecosystem of the American sociopolitical landscape and economy. Woke Right is currently rapidly doing a coup of MAGA only, which will lead it toward its ultimate ambition of a full revolution or coup against the United States.
Second, not all MAGA suffers elitist capture (yet). In fact, we need a more refined and discerning view of MAGA overall to understand how it works. The current objective is for all of MAGA to be captured, and it hasn’t been captured yet. In fact, a large and increasingly influential sector of MAGA is fighting back against the Woke Right, hopefully just in time and hopefully effectively.
Tiers of MAGA
To make easier sense of this, I need to split MAGA into three spheres of influence that I’ll call “Elite MAGA,” “Middle MAGA,” and “Normie MAGA.”
Normie MAGA represents most of the people in the movement, and they’re almost all good, decent Americans who are passionate patriots who want to Make America Great Again. They’re not generally activists, however.
Middle MAGA is made up primarily of the people doing the heavy work within the MAGA ecosystem. They’re showing up to hearings, writing, teaching, reading, organizing, running for offices, etc. What they aren’t is influencers or celebrities. Some of them are “not quite famous,” but most are less visible though no less important (and more important than almost all influencers). They’re the massively unsung heroes of the MAGA movement and its ambitions to Make America Great Again.
Elite MAGA is its celebrities and influencers, and I purposefully exclude Trump from this group because Trump is Trump and singular in his everything. They may not be American elites, but they’re MAGA elites. Big fish in a now pretty big pond. They set the trends, deliver the talking points, participate in the pageantry, and all that celebrity stuff. Most of them have very low-risk, soft jobs such as in “alt media” and politics, and sometimes think tanks (but most think-tankers are relegated to the upper and middle rungs of Middle MAGA). Their world is niche-elite and ephemeral; it is heavily aesthetic; it’s a cool-kids’ club; and it’s both subject to elitist capture inwardly and capable of engaging in elitist capture outwardly.
My contention, again but in these new words, is that Elite MAGA is almost entirely captured by the Woke Right and is working to capture the rest of MAGA, as above. Middle MAGA is mixed but is increasingly becoming aware of them and rejecting them. Normie MAGA lands all over the place and mostly isn’t aware of the fight except that it’s an ugly fight that “hurts MAGA” and that will have to see people take sides, which is what makes them “Normie” MAGA. They are also largely and significantly demoralized and rely heavily on favored MAGA influencers to make sense of the world around them.
How Elitist Capture Works in MAGA and Elite MAGA
As for the two forms of elitist capture of MAGA, both work generally the same way. The key dynamic of the entire process is the “inclusion and belonging” elitist capture mechanism controlled by the Woke Right through Elite MAGA.
Your ticket into Elite MAGA (“inclusion and belonging”) or its broad neighborhood depends upon at least staying silent if not positively signaling or supporting Woke Right people and initiatives, using their language, shunning their enemies, etc. Of course, you also have to be useful to them—in the coarsest sense of the word (“History uses people and then discards them,” as Hegel said). On the other hand, your boot in the ass out of Elite MAGA and its faux-glitzy halo is defection from Woke Right, of which I’ve personally been made a stunning example (but not only me).
This is why so many influencers who should “know better” about the Woke Right are dead silent or playing dumb. The Woke Right may not butter their bread, but they control access to MAGA’s butter and increasingly its bread too.
On Status Games and Elite MAGA Self-Censorship
The biggest threat to Elite MAGA is the revocation of “elite” status. If you are or aspire to be Elite MAGA with all its captured perks or to stay there, you have to support Woke Right things, or, at the very least, keep your mouth shut. You also have to be useful to them, and you have to distance yourself from their enemies, if not join in the attack against them. Otherwise, you will be ostracized and cast out of “elite” status (status loss).
Status loss is very difficult to bear psychologically and socially. Look at how many who “left the Left” talk about the horrors of the “great unfriending,” “cancellation,” and the experience of ostracization. It’s much more than losing professional opportunities, though that’s very important too. On the Woke Left, it eventually led to unbelievable personal tragedies, including suicides. (These were common in Mao’s China as well, for similar reasons.)
Everyone, to a person, in Elite MAGA fully understands that if they deviate too far, regardless of their principles or values, they’ll be cast down into Middle MAGA (where some of them might have to do real work), and there will never be an other big opportunity or point of access ever again. Most of their current “friends” and professional networks will shun them by necessity for the same exact reason: to avoid going down with them or after them. They will not be going to any more galas or official “cool” things at the White House. They won’t be speaking much, especially on big stages with big fees, or going on big shows. They’ll be “cringe,” and they will be “over,” “cooked,” without credibility or acceptance.
This, by the way, is called “cancel culture” or “cancellation.” It’s the vicious exclusion side of the “inclusion and belonging” mechanism of elitist capture. Woke Right MAGA cancellation may not destroy you in society overall, but within the niche ecosystem in question, it damn well can and will. The result is simple: even the people who know its wrong keep their mouths shut and play in the reward structure playground as long as they can.
The Woke Right doesn’t yet control society or even conservatism. They control Elite MAGA circles and are using them to engage in Woke Right elitist capture, just like the Woke Left did on the Left a decade ago. Again, everyone in Elite MAGA knows it, too.
Elitist Capture of Middle MAGA
This is why I say Elite MAGA is already captured. Phase 1 of the Woke Right revolution against MAGA is complete. Elite MAGA is already “cooked.” Elitist capture by the Woke Right perspectives is already complete in Elite MAGA (and there are a few that overlap, all of which are Woke with different conspiracies about how society works, interacting roughly intersectionally and in modest solidarity). Phase 1 isn’t currently progressing. It’s already past tense. Elite MAGA has fallen to the Woke Right by the mechanisms of elitist capture.
Many are familiar now with the paradoxical construction “it’s not happening, but it’s good that it’s happening” associated with Woke behavior. This self-contradictory expression refers to the tendency for outright denial of the radical movement to enthusiastically embracing it and to the fact that for a time you will see both arguments deployed simultaneously. What this phrase is actually describing is a phase shift in the revolution, which explains why some will persist in denial while others progress to enthusiastic embrace.
That means the phrase signals a point of shifting power. Before they obtain the power to execute mass elitist capture, radical movements must use disguises or, as it’s said now, “hide their power levels.” That gives us “it’s not happening” until after Phase 1 of the coup is complete. Once the elites are under radical control and can thereby usher elitist capture to the masses, “it’s not happening” shifts to “this is what’s happening, and it’s a good thing” in the attempt to bring the captured elitist enthusiasm to the whole movement. That is, this phrase is indicative of the early portions of Phase 2 of the revolution.
While the Woke Right is not embracing the label now, they are certainly embracing clear outward expressions of radicalism as “what’s happening.” They’ve embraced elements of Marx, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, and characterize themselves clearly as “NOT conservatives” and “radical right-wing revolutionaries.” They’re declaring victory as they march forward. This has been undeniable to any alert observer with its overt “Woke” elements plainly visible—like open expressions of radicalism, open use of Marxist analysis, open embrace of Critical Theory and postmodernism, and enthusiastic application of slave morality and cancel culture—since December 2024.
Now, many within Middle MAGA do not understand this “inclusion and belonging” mechanism yet (because it hasn’t and won’t make them any exclusive offers) but intuit that their access point requires being “politic” (that is, “politically correct” on Woke Right terms). Their intuition keeps them silent on the issue because it’s absolutely crucial to the other objectives they’re trying to accomplish, not necessarily because of potential bigger opportunities in the elitist-captured rewards structure. They’re trapped by a corrupt elitist capture of the broader structure they need to make their work effective, which is MAGA overall.
These people in Middle MAGA, the unsung heroes of the movement, need certain influencers and politicians on board with their work. They need support and connections, opportunities, amplification, and everything, and they have some of that, sometimes. They cannot destroy their reputations within MAGA by bringing down the ire of the cancel mobs and smear campaigns. They cannot be branded “not real conservatives” or “a problem” by the influencer “elites” their colleagues listen to. They have to avoid the drama—all to get real things done. They’re trapped by the same elitist capture mechanisms and sometimes know it, but they’re too small to have any real options in most cases.
This is how elite capture is extending from Elite MAGA into Middle MAGA, although Middle MAGA is becoming aware of the corruption and starting to fight back. This fight back against the Woke Right and its elitist capture of MAGA is the current “MAGA Civil War,” as some are calling it.
Elitist Capture of Normie MAGA from the Bottom Up
Normie MAGA, for its part, is being pulled in through their institutions and fandom, and they’re being played through their demoralization. On the one hand, they support their stars, and, on the other, they are demoralized—they are not easily able to tell what is true and what is false and instead must rely upon other factors including popularity, MAGA consensus (“paralogy”), and personality to make those decisions. They have seen how lied to and subverted our institutions are, and being unable to believe in them anymore will believe almost anything—so long as it’s rightly oriented outsider knowledge. Even when they are not Wokish to the Right, they’re disposed toward Woke Rightism. That is, they’re well within the Woke Right recruitment field.
Elitist capture of Normie MAGA proceeds similarly but differently to how it operates in Middle MAGA. Where Middle MAGA has objectives to accomplish and aspires to possibly gain access to the Elite MAGA tier, Normie MAGA has no such aspirations. They need to know what to believe, and they’re searching for voices they can trust to tell them what that should be. Where Middle MAGA can be elitist captured by the grip of the movement on its reins in the hands of Elite MAGA, Normie MAGA can be elite captured by the winds of the movement as they blow from Elite MAGA.
Normie MAGA knows it has lost its backbone societal institutions like mainstream media, academia, most big government and professional institutions, and so on. What’s worse, their key remaining trusted institutions are being infiltrated right in front of their eyes, especially their “alt” media and their churches. Again, Woke Right is not yet making a bid for America at large but for MAGA specifically and the conservative movement generally, and the main institutions they can infect are the MAGA (“alt”) media and political institutions and churches. This dynamic is the top-down-but-bottom-up dynamic of counterinsurgency movements and color revolutions.
Thus we understand the much less-visible Christian Nationalism movement, which actually has mostly hidden deep ties into Elite MAGA (e.g., through Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism, which isn’t just directly and strongly supportive but also which includes Albert Mohler and others who know how to play this game very well). The Christian Nationalist movement is a purposed attempt to bring the American Christian conservative into Woke Right elitist capture through their most trusted, valuable, and sacred institution through its deliberate manipulation: a political movement disguising itself as a theological movement.
MAGA Elitist Capture Summary
To summarize, the Woke Right cult has a fully developed “inclusion and belonging” (elitist capture) mechanism with rich rewards (including access to the President of the United States) and brutal punishments for enemies and defectors. This has already achieved them a nearly complete elitist capture of what I have termed here “Elite MAGA.” The first phase of the Woke Right coup is complete. Power is consolidated in the elite tier of its target ecosystem, and they can now turn that elitist capture outward to capture the rest of MAGA.
The Woke Right objective for now is to expand this elitist capture of Elite MAGA to the rest of MAGA, which is the second phase of the Woke Right revolution. The mechanisms are described above, clear, and simple. They’re also being executed at blinding speed.
My rough estimates would be that Elite MAGA is at least 90% internally captured by Woke Right in one of a few typical ways: rent and opportunity seeking, going with the flow and momentum, or simply silenced. The remaining 10% represent grifters and active perpetrators (“feds” in the broad construal, assets, or plants). Only a few dare to speak out, and not all of them can hold on to their “Elite MAGA” status once they do. This is an extremely bad and dangerous situation.
The MAGA Civil War
Middle MAGA is starting to realize what’s happening and fight back, which is ugly now—the “MAGA Civil War” or “War for the Right.” Normie MAGA is less clear and more detached and confused.
A few members of “Elite MAGA,” including yours truly, have spoken up and paid the price as examples to the rest. We have mostly been cast down. Meanwhile, the pot of incentives Elite MAGA has access to offer on captured terms continues to grow for those willing to play the game as the movement advances in an increasingly Woke Right direction. People far enough outside the “elite” bubble all wonder the same thing: what the hell is going on?!
What About Trump?
Trump remains the wildcard. The Woke Right will take him but see him generally as just a vessel to accomplish some things until they can get their true “Right-Wing” radical (tyrant) in power. That’s what they did to me, so I understand. It is their method. It is “History uses people and then discards them,” just like we see on the Left.
This circumstance puts Trump in a precarious situation. If he goes along with them, then he goes Woke, and “everything Woke turns to shit.” If he stays silent, they sink him by the Midterms and break his base apart more and more while subverting his administration to the greatest degree possible. If he openly resists them, then he initiates a full-scale Civil War in MAGA and splintering of his base coalition. As the Midterms approach, this only gets more poignant and difficult. The Woke Right is holding MAGA hostage with Trump left in the lurch.
During this stage of the revolution, as Phase 1 tightens its grip and Phase 2 progresses, the Woke Right will try to do as much as they can through Trump without him realizing it, attempt to turn him to their side (probably), and eventually turn on him completely in the effort to get their radical tyrant in power. They’re so desperate to “win” in the long run that they don’t mind destroying MAGA or even Trump such that we end up under the thumbs of the Woke Left Democrats again. Their view is that another slog through Leftist tyranny to further “awaken” the people to the “need” for a “truly right-wing” leader (tyrant).
The Woke Right therefore want MAGA to turn fully to their control or to be destroyed, which is how all Wokes operate within the movement they attempt to parasitize. This is where we are. This is the state of the Woke Right revolution against MAGA.
2 comments
“and eventually turn on him completely in the effort to get their radical tyrant in power.”
??
Someone who will percolate for 2 years, then rise for the 1 1/2 – 2 years before the election?
“Copperhead said to the rattlesnake
“If you ever wanna make it rain
We could team up, be twice as tough
Fear will be our game”
Rattlesnake said to the copperhead
“Y’know we were the original sin
And I bet you my rattle against your copper
That the bitch takes the apple again”
~Eric Church lyrics from “The Snake”
Woke Left and Woke Right catching crawdads…