The scourge of the ‘woke right’
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Among the responses to the unveiling of the first American pope this month, there was one that really stood out to me. It came from Laura Loomer, a prominent rightwing activist, conspiracy theorist and unofficial adviser to Donald Trump, in the form of a three-word reply to a 10-year-old post on Pope Leo XIV’s now deleted personal X account: “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.
Loomer was far from the only one to immediately denounce Leo — a man who has voted in Republican primaries, who in 2012 described “a homosexual lifestyle” as “at odds with the gospel” and who in 2016 said that “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist” — as too woke to be the pope. Ryan Selkis, former CEO of crypto research company Messari and fellow Trump fanatic, posted a whole thread on the “new woke pope”, digging up old posts and reposts such as one on carbon emissions (“climate alarmist”!) and another that prayed for George Floyd and his family (“suicidal empathy”!).
This is by now a familiar ritual — trawling through someone’s online history the second they become prominent for evidence of wrongthink; conveniently leaving out any counter-evidence of the thing you are shunning them for; using hyperbole and exaggeration for maximum traction; encouraging pile-ons. Cancel culture, we might call it. Identity politics, perhaps. Or maybe . . . woke?
Bear with me. The first time I heard the term “the woke right”, I thought it was a bit of culture war clickbait that probably didn’t mean very much. How could a word we normally use to describe what Trump might call “the radical left” be associated with the very people who back him? But the more I listened to those making the case that such a tribe had sprung up on the right, the more it made sense. This is not about having the same politics, it’s about having the same radical way of looking at the world, and using the same methods to achieve your ends.
I have had many arguments over the years about whether the term “woke” actually means anything. Those who claim it doesn’t point out that it no longer has any bearing on its original meaning of being “awake” to social injustice — racial injustice in particular — and that it has become distorted and weaponised. I would agree with them on all of this, but I would also point out that language changes. In our online age, that can happen rapidly.
And the speech-policing, virtue-signalling and intolerance of the loudest and most illiberal factions of the online left meant that a word that was originally positive underwent a “pejoration” and became negative. As the linguist and author of Woke Racism, John McWhorter, has written: “It went from referring to those who possess leftist political awareness to those who believe anyone who lacks that enlightenment should be punished, shunned or ridiculed.”
But this is about more than just tribalism and the ostracising of anyone who veers too far from the consensus. American writer James Lindsay — who, along with British pundit Konstantin Kisin, is responsible for bringing the term “woke right” to prominence — described the idea of wokeness as “a critical consciousness about the way the world is organised”. “What is ‘woke’? Woke up to a structural politics that marginalises people like me, and we need to band together in solidarity . . . to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the centre and claiming power for ourselves.”
For the woke right, the marginalised is of course a different group — namely white, straight, Christian males — but the framing is the same, with ethnic consciousness at its centre, and the idea that the system is structurally rigged against them. “Same energy, opposite direction,” as Lindsay puts it.
The difference with this form of wokeness, though, is that it now has state backing. After Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”, his administration proceeded to do the opposite, sending out lists of words that were not to be used by federal agencies, including “climate crisis” and “women”. He has banned journalists from the White House for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. And while the left were keen to “defund the police”, Trump is defunding the academy, pulling billions from Harvard under the guise of fighting antisemitism.
If the people so obsessed with preserving “Christian values” think the pope is “woke” because he has compassion for refugees and is aware of injustice, they might want to try reading the Bible. The woke right have inadvertently now become the only group using the term “woke” in its original sense. There is some beautiful irony in that.
