What is the Woke Right? | James Lindsay

[Music]

woke ideology has been spreading among conservatives

and it could destroy the Republican Party

welcome to American covered I'm Chris Chapel

more than half a century ago the Soviets had a plan to destroy America

not with bombs or guns

but by subverting American culture

by taking the existing movement for racial

and gender equality and subverting it using the ideology of class struggle

eventually this gave way to what we call woke

some who is woke has supposedly

woken up to the truth

that all of history is about victims and oppressors

and America is a fundamentally racist patriarchy designed

to suppress minorities

that might sound like the progressive left to you

and it is but some of this woke ideology

has also become popular

among some groups on the far right

and it could rip the conservative movement apart

Matt Shelly and I sat down to talk about this

with Dr James Lindsay

he's an author political commentator and founder of the website

and podcast new discourses

and he's joined us on our latest China unscripted podcast

so why did I start caring about this woke right all of a sudden

and like you said uh we've just

had this big victory right and um

what is it well the what is it is easil easy

to answer it's

people on the right that have adop adopted the woke left tactics

they think like the woke left they act like the woke left

in other words they

walk like a duck and they talk like a duck

so they're a duck in other words

they have different values different conclusions

they want to push so-called Trad values

sometimes they call themselves postmodern Trad

or postmodern traditionalists so not real Traditional Values

you know this kind of like hipster Pastiche of of Traditional Values

but they're going to try to push that and force everybody into it

they use cancel culture they use smears

they use you know all the all the nasty woke tricks

that you're used to

they believe that power is the be all that ends all

they think that pursuing and grabbing

and wielding power is absolutely necessary

and despite the fact

one of their biggest claims for the last several years

because these have been around for several years

has been we're not going to be able to vote our way out

of this what are you going to do vote harder

and then allegedly we just had this Victory where we actually did vote harder

and got our way out of it like um

so their their prediction about how things work

didn't seem to work out exactly right

but uh so that's what they

are but like I said they've been around

for a few years um what they've done is

they've taken up with the sort of they consider them

forbidden right-wing philosophers

not necessarily traditional conservatives

largely people like Thomas Carlile who's considered the father of both maoism

and the father of uh fascism

they take up with people like Carl Schmidt

who was the crown jurist of the Third Reich

um who came up with a very variety of political philosophies

about the absolute sovereignty of the executive

and um the idea that all politics comes down to a violent conflict

between friend and enemy

and if that sounds a lot like how the Chinese use it

that's because the Chinese adopted all of Schmidt in the 1980s or

earlier and have been explicitly

schmidan for a long time

uh I mean they actually you can look that up ccp's

actual political philosophy is is

Schmidt attached to um what was either

ma dong or Duna ping thought

so like that's that's their guy they've got like

I said Alistair McIntyre who's like Marx

is right except about his conclusions

because Marx wanted to maintain the

fruits of modernity but the fact is that

modernism itself is the problem

so Marx's critique is can be salvaged

and retooled to destroy modernism

and Classical liberalism completely

but Marx was essentially right this is one of their core philosopher

s um they've taken up with the fascist philosopher Julius aola

uh so these are the kind of guys

that they're talking they're big fans of

Hans Herman hop who was also very keen

on Marxist thought and Marxist methods

although to different conclusions some

of them flirt with Hitler who explicitly

said that he was using Marxist methods

and intended to complete them

although for his own methodologies

they're they're a lot of them are nationalists

but their definition of nation is

ethnonationalist and it matches exactly

Stalin's definition of nationalism

from Marxism and the national question in 1913

which he adopted in Vienna after going

and seeing he bringing his Bolshevik ideology

and witnessing the way that uh German folk uh

nationalism kind of interacted in the Austrian Malo

before um World War I

and so it's like this is just a hot mess of bad ideas

that have kind of come together in this

uh pursuit of power for these guys so

yeah I started to use the term a few

months ago I didn't coin the term I've I

think popularized it and put it on a map

um as I tend to do I've tried to expose these guys

but the problem is frankly nobody cares

uh what people are doing is you know

as my friend said to me the other day

the boys just want 5 days in the sun to celebrate

and here you are saying this thing

but I'm going to point out you know you know

you asked we just had this Victory there's kind of this tone

like do we have to do this now

and I think we do have to do this now

and in fact I started before the election

we had not done this Victory I decided at

the beginning of October

this year so a full month before the election

I'd been holding my tongue and holding my tongue

is like it's strategically unwise

let the election happen then we can tackle the woke right

so for you know better part of a year

I've been sitting here waiting for this freaking election

so I can just be Unleashed to talk about this problem

that I've been watching build

but in October I was like holy crap

they're positioning themselves to fill

Trump's Administration if he wins or to

spark a civil war if he loses

so better speak up now

and so I started to speak up ahead of the election very concerned

that these people like all wokes

who are obsessed with gaining power

and multiplying their own power are going to insinuate themselves

into every single possible thing that they can

following this Trump win

and even though most of them were like vigorously Pro disantis

during the uh nasty primary and then

they were some of them were outright

anti-trump in the leadup to the election

they've all now claimed the mantle of

Trump trump Trump trump we're Trump and

we're you know we're the true inheritors

of trump this was a big rejection of woke left racism

and that's what this is all about um

and so they are claiming to

be the only true conservatives and the

only true people who understand the problem people

like me don't know what

the problem really is we don't have

Solutions blah blah blah

and we're troublemakers so we all have to be excluded

from access to Trump World I get told daily

you will have no access

to Trump World anymore at all no chance

because we're going to keep you boxed out

by these lunatics so my goal has been to think

you know what are these guys are going to do if they get in positions of power

they're going to do what woke people always do

they're going to use their position of power to hire more people exactly like them to

consolidate their power

until we have a problem that we can't freaking manage

and um I don't even think that's their main purpose

but I felt like it was important to speak up

I think they have a totally different main purpose was

what what do you think their main purpose is

I think their main purpose is

to split the Coalition that delivered

Trump into pieces it's to get rid of the

Jews get rid of the disaffected Democrats

get rid of all these people

who just came over for the first time

voted for Trump maybe the first time

they ever voted for Republican first of

all that's a broad broad Coalition of

people who voted for Trump first we got

to get rid of them

so Trump loses his gigantic uh cross-dimensional

or what cross political base of support probably

does not have enough vote power to carry

in 26 or 28

then there are some deep fault lines actually in the conservative movement

are we pro-israel or anti-israel

let's drive a it's never

about the CCP they don't talk about the

CCP for a minute

because everybody should be on the same side of that one

what they talk about is Israel

why because they know that they can drive a wedge

into the conservative movement itself

while scaring off all the Jews

if they can just Hammer that wedge down on

yes Israel know Israel

we can make it very simple we don't have to get into

their fancy terminology of Zionism or

Jewish power or any of these other

conspiracies or whatever else

we don't have to get it or is it is it

anti-Semitism is it's not no

the goal is um pro-israel anti-israel and to split

the conservative movement around that

and to make it as messy and nasty as

possible so that again we're not unified

we're not pouring our resources into

fixing the country in the time that we

have to do that right now

and that we're not um we're not likely to win in 26 or 28

and then finally there's another deep fault line in the conservative movement

which is the uh Freedom versus virtue

if you will line are we Americans

who believe in individual liberties

and freedom or are we people who are going

to take an image of virtue and impose it

upon the population

and their argument is that their vision of virtue is

necessary to correct the cultural

excesses that the left has visited upon

us and the subversion of the Soviets and

the the Chinese have brought upon us um

I mean the CP there of course uh and

therefore we have to impose a vision of

virtue on the society in order to renew

it from within so um that's going to

actually be that's a deep fault line in

conservatism so again you have two deep

fault lines within the conservative

movement that you want to split and keep

us fighting and ununified weaken the

Electoral potential in 26 weaken the

Electoral potential in 28

while generating massive amounts of stuff that

the left can then just come out with and say look they're anti-semitic look

they hate black people look they hate gay people look

they hate women

because that's all they ever talk about is how much they hate all these groups that

they feel have been oppressing them

and so you are you're creating the conditions to massively lose in 26

so Trump becomes ineffective for his last two years in office

and massively lose in 28

where all the Democrats have to do and it's to be fair not entirely clear

that they can do it

but all the Democrats have to do is start being very

reasonable on issues of race

and talk about economic class

which is exactly what they're pivoting to after the

murder of that uh CEO the healthcare CEO

that's all class class class now it's

billionaire billionaire billionaire if

they shut up about race and sex and

sexuality they drag the drag queens off

the stages stop pushing that everywhere

they look reasonable the radical right

looks insane and we lose hard in 26 and

we lose hard again in 28

when I say we I mean I mean people who care about

getting the Communist threat out of this country

and so they're their their objective their purpose some most of the people in it

probably don't realize this

and are just beating their chest and

thinking you know as they spell it lfg

but the fact of the matter

is what the purpose of this movement is is to

Splinter and destroy all the Electoral

potential going forward of the right uh

RIT large this Trump Coalition this pro-america magga Coalition

that is the literally Beacon of Hope For The World

their job is to toxify and split that in half

and if you don't believe that's the case

just look at the alleged tenant media Sting the doj published

what was its purpose why did it allegedly receive $10 million of Russian money

to give to conservative influencers

it was specifically to seow Discord and dis and

and emnity within the conservative

movement to split the conservative movement from within

and that's what I think the true purpose of this movement

is is to split apart the humongous to

scatter it like billiard balls the

humongous Coalition that delivered Trump

a historic win and frankly allowed us to

vote our way maybe vote our way out of Communism

they are they are a spoiler to all of that

that's what they're for well

what's the what's the end game there

because if you so the the woke you're saying that

the woke rights end game is for the woke left to succeed

yeah well you got to understand how these movements work

most of the woke right people like if you had a woke right guy debating me

he'd say none of us want that

no you're wrong you so you're infiltrated

you have a KGB Handler or an FSB Handler somewhere in your hierarchy you don't know about

you have deep State actors in your hierarchy

you don't know about you have

billionaires on the left laundering money through NOS

to come to you to make sure that you do the wrong thing so

their guys win in two years

and so you guys are all totally organic

but you're not organic in the fact

that you're getting propped up by Bad actors with lots of money

and so I would I would this sounds totally conspiratory

that's exactly how it works I hate to tell you

that's exactly how it works

I mean this is a show about China right about CCP

that's how the CCP does it it's called dripping it's a technique

you find people that are doing activism

productive to your goals and you drip

money on them in a way that they don't

know that they're getting money given to

them it's what they did in the the

thought reform prisons in China

when when prisoners would do the things that

they were supposed to do in line with

their thought reform they would be randomly rewarded with cigarettes

or food or snacks or candy or treats

and never told why they were rewarded

and it was actually just oper conditioning to

get them to do it so yeah you've got

influencers all throughout this network

of conservatives who are on the take or

on the dime who are working for the

other side who are leading these poor fools

into supporting something that's going to be their own destruction

so where everywhere they can what they do

is they take power and then what they do

is try to get their friends in power with them

and so that is the model for institutional capture

and they can get a relatively sizable amount

relatively quickly

but again I don't think that's their purpose

I think their purpose is to uh shatter the conservative movement

and provide and I don't mean the purpose

from the people on the ground don't

think they're doing this purpose they

are the foot soldiers of of of of a strategy that's written for them

um this to shatter the conservative movement

and to create basically the basis for

propaganda from the left to say we're

the reasonable ones we told you not to

vote for the fascist right we told you not to vote for Trump

that was just one piece of our almost two 2 hourong interview with Dr James Lindsay

we've made the whole thing available to our premium subscribers on China censored.tv

this new website has fulllength

interviews premium episodes of China uncensored

live streams and much more

so click the link below to check it out

once again I'm Chris Chapel see you next time