Why the ‘Right’ Now Cancels Its Own
The phrase “Woke Right” arrived almost overnight. Cultural critic James Lindsay helped popularize the term to describe a segment of the Right that he says imitates the tactics of the Woke Left. Yet it is quickly becoming a weapon used to silence anyone who questions Israeli or American foreign policy. Crisis Magazine editor Eric Sammons notes that those using it often act like “the woke police” themselves.
What Lindsay Gets Right
In his long conversation with Ami Kozak on Ami’s House, James Lindsay traces the history of “woke” as a mindset rather than a policy list. For him, “woke” is a way of seeing the world through a single lens of power and grievance. It falsely elevates politics to a pseudo-theology—that of a cosmic struggle between oppressors and oppressed. It is inspired by resentment, which inevitably fosters online mobs, practices cancel culture, and treats ideological opponents as heretics who must be hunted down rather than debated.
Lindsay argues that a similar pattern has emerged on parts of the Right. He points to Groypers and white identitarians who imitate the Left’s tactics through inverted identity politics and online transgression. The posture they call “based” often amounts, in his view, to boundary pushing for its own sake, a similar defiance that mirrors the Woke Left’s obsession with taboo-breaking.
Lindsay is not wrong. Some young men on the Right have slid from dark humor to outright hostility. They swarm critics online, demand ideological purity, and treat any challenge to their idols as betrayal. Such behavior is a real problem.
Lindsay’s analysis becomes especially valuable in his distinction between types of speech about Israel and Jews. He differentiates criticism of Israel as a state, criticism of individual Jews, debates about Zionism as a political project, and the far more serious phenomenon he calls true anti-Semitism, which he defines as the conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control world events. “Anti-Israel criticism,” he notes, is legitimate since “everybody should be critical of every state,” while “anti-Jew” refers to personal prejudice. Only the conspiratorial claim that “the Jews control everything,” as he puts it, belongs under the label anti-Semitism.
Still, Lindsay’s framework is not without its problems. He often speaks as though certain questions are suspicious by definition, as if asking about Israeli policy, lobbying networks, or foreign entanglements somehow puts a person on the road to Nazi thinking. That kind of reaction mistakes honest prudential concerns for something sinister that is simply not there. People ask hard questions for various reasons. When we treat every uncomfortable query as morally suspect, we only imitate the reaction of the Woke Left, which treats disagreement, albeit incoherently, as intolerance (tolerance already implies disagreement). Ironically, refusing to engage reasonable concerns is what drives some people toward true extremists who promise to discuss the forbidden subjects without fear.
Lindsay also warns that the term “anti-Semitism” is now used so broadly that it is losing its meaning. That, he argues, pushes legitimate questions into what he calls the “third rail” (a topic considered too dangerous or taboo to touch) of public discourse, a “verboten” zone where actual extremists recruit.
Lindsay discusses these points in more depth with Jordan Peterson, where they examined the psychological traits that animate both the Woke Left and its imitators on the Right. They noted that the problem is not ideological disagreement but a style of engagement rooted in resentment, purity spirals, and an inability to tolerate ambiguity. He stresses that ordinary conservative critics of foreign policy are not “Woke Right” but that the label applies to those who weaponize identity and engage in mob tactics.
Where the Label Becomes a Weapon
Once the term “Woke Right” circulated beyond Lindsay’s analysis, it quickly widened. In his interview with Kozak, Lindsay mentions a range of personalities, from Candace Owens to Andrew Tate to Groyper-adjacent influencers. Whatever one thinks of those personalities, the more troubling aspect is the fact that the term is now applied well beyond its intended scope.
Recent commentary has inflated the label even further. A Times of Israel piece titled “How the Woke Right Joined the Left’s War on Israel” treats nearly any conservative criticism of Israeli policy as evidence of ideological deviation. Seth Mandel’s essay in Commentary makes a similar move, casting mainstream foreign-policy skepticism as a form of resentful “wokeness.” These analyses misfire. They brush aside legitimate concerns about war, foreign aid, and American interests, and they cast every dissenting view as a symptom of ideological disorder.
There are indeed subcultures on the Right that play with identity politics and online provocation, but the term “Woke Right” is now being used as a catchall against those whose only offense is asking uncomfortable questions. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith have all been treated as suspect simply for interviewing controversial guests or refusing to accept pro-Israel orthodoxy without qualification. Such descriptors function more as a method of stifling debate than any diagnosis.
Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee
How can one possibly ignore this hypocrisy? Commentators who built careers defending free speech and warning about cancel culture now retreat to the very corporate outlets they once condemned when a rival challenges their taboos. Ben Shapiro spent years attacking CNN as propaganda, yet he ran to Jake Tapper to denounce Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes. Mark Levin and Florida politician Randy Fine likewise urge that critics of Israel be shunned as anti-Semites or traitors. This is not an argument but an attempt to use institutional power to punish dissent, the same practice conservatives once criticized on the Left.
Donald Trump reacted quite differently. Asked about Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, he answered that no one can dictate who Carlson may interview and that people can judge for themselves.
The instinctive defense of free speech stands in clear contrast to those who now reach for accusations as political weapons. If woke behavior involves policing speech, enlisting institutions to shut down opponents, and branding every form of dissent as bigotry, then it is hard to deny that some pro-Israel conservatives are mirroring the very Left they say they stand against, even as they accuse other factions on the Right of being complicit.
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