Same disease, different wrapper

Both sides should reject the crazy people, grifters and liars

One recent chart (of many that look just like this) in the FT tells a clear story: one party radicalized, moderates and the other mostly didn’t, and the country has been paying the price for this rift ever since. We’ve spent time here examining what went wrong on the progressive left: the managerial class that turned institutions into ideological enforcement zones, the DEI regimes that replaced merit with a stack ranking of groups, the classrooms plastered in slogans instead of equations. That critique stands, and if you are still actually liberal you would encourage that critique. You also don’t get to ignore that it’s a real phenomenon, because at this point it genuinely threatens liberalism, and it’s also unpopular. I don’t even care about people disagreeing, they’ll eventually catch up, but something you’ve not seen is I’ve even received personal threats for the sin of simply noticing any of this which is just so strange and honestly kind of telling. At least I understand now better how things like the Salem Witch trials happened (where social pressure silenced moderates) and how it took nearly two decades for people to admit a hysteria had taken place.

I mostly talk about the left because as someone in a creative sector I have to deal with the consequences of this shift professionally all the time. Leftist ideologs are embedded in everything from pop culture to academia to media (just watch any awards show). Still, a complete picture demands we look at what’s rising on the other side, because the pathology is not unique to the left. The same virus can infect different hosts, including the right. I’ve mentioned this in passing in previous stories, but several readers asked me to talk about it in its own post, so today we’ll do that.

Venn Diagram of woke left / woke right

The concept of the “woke right” is not a contradiction in terms, though it sounds like one. As James Lindsay and his collaborators at New Discourses have argued, “woke” at its core is not fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon but a worldview, specifically the belief that society is organized around an irreconcilable conflict between oppressor and oppressed, and that this conflict justifies any tactic in the service of the aggrieved group. The content of the grievance changes but the core structure does not. When right-wing actors adopt the same oppressor/oppressed framing, the pattern is familiar. They position themselves as a dispossessed majority, wrongfully displaced by corrupt elites, globalists, or some shadowy enemy. Then they reach for the exact same tools: moral grandstanding, purity tests, cancel culture, and mob harassment. This is functionally woke, whatever they call themselves.

We’ve seen what this looks like in practice. The New Discourses piece opens with a real-world example: a conservative watchmaker speaks out against the antisemitism flooding his social media replies and is immediately subjected to a coordinated online pile-on from self-described “New Right” accounts. Not for any policy failure, but for the sin of insufficient extremism. A principled conservative questions whether a maximalist position is electorally viable and is branded a “cuck,” a “RINO,” a shill. We watched the left do this for a decade to anyone who stepped off the approved script. The woke right has simply retargeted the same apparatus. Jew hatred and conspiracy theories are a clear example of the horseshoe I’ve personally experienced many times, post October 7th they’ve been everywhere.

Cohorts on both the left and the right have lost their minds about Jews, for entirely different (but both insane) reasons

This matters for reasons beyond aesthetics. As I’ve written about before, the way out of our current crisis is not to replace one orthodoxy with another. There is a physics to culture that the zealots on both sides refuse to acknowledge: every overcorrection generates a backlash, and doubling down on the extreme version of your team’s position doesn’t break the cycle, it perpetuates it. The woke left created the conditions for the woke right by making so many people feel excluded, humiliated, and lied to. If the woke right manages to take the wheel in a serious manner, it will do the same thing in the other direction, and we will have learned nothing.

Fueling all of this is a podcast-industrial complex that has turned outrage into attention. Figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes aren't serious political commenters, they're performers optimizing for clicks and shares by constantly escalating to the most extreme position available. The algorithm rewards unhinged takes, so they deliver them, every time, consequence-free. They traffic in conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and manufactured grievance not because they've thought carefully about the world but because it gets attention. Every pile-on they orchestrate, every "enemy" they identify for their audience, every outrage cycle they spin up is just content. The tragedy is that some of the people drawn to this grift have real and legitimate grievances: they were failed by institutions, lied to by media, and condescended to for years. They deserved something better than a new class of grifters willing to monetize their anger while making everything worse.

The Lindsay framework offers a useful diagnostic for the problem. Woke, in any form, is identifiable by four traits: moral absolutism that frames disagreement as betrayal, group identity politics that demands collective loyalty over individual judgment, victimhood consciousness that sees systemic oppression as the organizing fact of society, and social control through shame and mob enforcement. You don’t need pronouns or a DEI statement to check all four boxes. The “New Right” influencer calling everyone a a “Jew shill” or “goyim” checks all four. The online ecosystem running what Lindsay aptly calls struggle sessions against conservatives deemed insufficiently radical checks all four.

I mentioned this already but it’s worth repeating, what’s tragic is that the woke right draws recruits from the very people the woke left failed most conspicuously: young men who were told their instincts were suspect, who graduated into a world of loyalty oaths and ideological audits, who eventually concluded that the institutions had been captured and could not be trusted. Their anger is legitimate. Their diagnosis is often correct. But the answer being offered to people failed by the woke left is essentially: adopt the same structure, reverse the targets. It’s the same disease in a different wrapper.

The standard I apply to the left applies here too. I don’t want ideological enforcement from the right any more than I want it from the left. I don’t want purity spirals, struggle sessions, or the policing of acceptable thought, regardless of which direction the orthodoxy runs. A society organized around competing tribes of the aggrieved, each convinced they are the righteous victims and their enemies are the oppressors, is a society consuming itself.

The actual way forward, the only way forward, is to insist on individual over collective, merit over identity, open debate over enforced consensus, and principle over tribal loyalty. These aren’t “moderate” positions in the sense of being weak or unprincipled. They are, in fact, the most demanding positions available, because they require you to apply the same standard to your own side that you apply to the other. That’s harder than joining a mob. It’s also the only thing that actually works.

Reject the woke left. Reject the woke right. Hold the line on the actual Western tradition: rigorous, honest, and genuinely open and self-critical, which built the world worth preserving. You could be an honorable person who leans either left or right on specific issues who rejects the mob and holds these ideals. And again, please don’t pretend like both these things aren’t happening and aren’t real. You might live in a filter bubble without such extremists (good for you, honestly, be free) or perhaps you swim in the waters of one of these extreme groups telling you it’s normal. It’s not. And I get the urge of some conservatives to not wish to self-critique after seeing what happened during the great awokening. But I don’t even think these people are genuinely conservative in any meaningful sense. They’re just crazy. And if you don’t like the “woke right” label and want to reply with a different descriptor, I’m open to hearing it.