When I Think of the 'Woke Right' I Think of YOU

The ever-infuriating debate that calls to question, 'who is the woke right?'

There has surely been a revisionism of history. It’s coming from you…

I’ll be honest, a ‘woke right’ has very much shown its face lately in the wake of the atrocities on October 7th by the prison gang that broke out of Israel’s prison to the south and massacred civilians in Israel and the entire military that descended on the prison and commenced to flattening it and all of Israels prisoners.

So, who are they?

To be totally honest, I’ve been a fan of all these people, but every day it seems they become more and more like the ones they claim to be against. Hey, I’m a Triggernometry fan, I was a Rubin Report fan for a long time, and I still check back on some of his early interviews, it was the first place you could go to hear from Brett and Eric Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and others of the early IDW. They were great interviews, and I love

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but when you get so triggered as a “moderator” of a debate on Israel’s War in Gaza that you call the lady on the opposing side DEI Barbie, and then immediately jump on Twitter to proclaim how triggered she is. Boy was that pathetic and it starts to poison the well on exactly where your principles are. Then to call the ones who can take the heat and regularly do, they’re the ones being woke, Get the fuck outta here! By the way, that’s a euphemism, I don’t actually want you to go anywhere. I’m not done yet!

The criticism of the “woke left” I believe have always been correct. So, what do the woke left do? They call everyone who disagrees with them things like, nazi or a racist, instead of taking on ideas on their merit, they shout-down speakers who are saying things that might hurt their fragile little ears. They attack the source of income for anyone who disagrees with them (Sponsors, employment, etc.), they pile-on when someone says anything that challenges their sacred cows, to make it seem like more people agree with them then actually do. They pull up old tweets completely out-of-context and use them to discredit the sacred-cow-killer. They call it hate speech, misinformation, institutional words that lead to censorship. The very worst in my view, discrediting someone’s entire body of work, that they’ve put years into, simply because you disagree with one point they made. Like maybe check that person out before you mark them as illiterate or worse a nazi-sympathizer. You had time to make the stupid video, listen to a podcast, but here’s the thing, he tells both side of the story, in “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” he tells the Jewish side and the Palestinian side and leaves nothing out, and after you listen to it you come away realizing that everyone in that story are victims but none more than the children, but the woke right, just like the woke left, only want one side of the story told, and they were already indoctrinated with these beliefs so long ago, they’ve already, if I may, “Drank the Kool-aid”.

Even if what the guy said was the worst take in history, he has an entire body of work. Check into it. He spends months and months reading books and primary sources and looks at the story from every angle. The idea that you of all people would attack someone like him as illiterate. This is exactly the same if after you had the interview with Posie Parker, because it was controversial, it discredited every other episode of Triggernometry. Not saying she was wrong but, some people think she was, and only some people disagree with Darryl Cooper. Or because Joe Rogan had on a couple dissidents of the covid regime that he is an anti-vax lunatic, it’s the same thing to say that everyone on the good side of WWII acted totally moral. Not everyone agrees, that doesn’t mean everything they said is evil. Y’all shapeshift your principals with the landscape. Not Joe Rogan, let me be clear, Joe is the king, his principles have NEVER faltered. I don’t miss a single episode of his show.

When I think of the ‘Woke’ what comes to mind in the recent days is, against free speech, pro-war, too sensitive to hear you speak about either one but willing to send you to war to kill children, why? Because they’re GOOD people, that was the right wing for the longest time, then became the left when speakers started getting shouted down at speaking events. Then when Donald Trump got elected everyone went crazy. The left became against free speech, pro-institutions, as long as we’re not talking about racism because institutions are the most racist. I see what this is, this is a callback to the old neocon right/left that thinks every war is worth fighting because America is the ‘World Police’. We must suppress free speech because if ‘You’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists’. I’m not surprised by this; this faction of the right has had their hands in the air screaming out in anger for months.

When I think of the ‘Woke Right’ and I do think of it often, I think about people who have been railing against the suppression of free speech but any time someone speaks out about the things they disagree with such as Churchill, or Israel, or the War in Ukraine they call it slander, antisemitic, racist, hate speech, misinformation.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing piece about this, he calls it the “Israel Exception” I think it goes much further and deserves the name, the ‘Woke Right’, The Pro-Israel Right's “Israel Exception”—From Free Speech to “America First”—is Finally Dragged Into the Light, you can read this article by following him on Locals.com. I’m going to quote from it extensively in the following:

And many influential conservatives are now particularly scathing of the ongoing attempt to erode free speech rights in the U.S., and to impose various speech restrictions on American campuses and elsewhere, in the name of protecting Israel from criticisms and activism opposed to its actions. That is because the central principles embraced by the populist Right in the Trump era are squarely and irreconcilably at odds with the very consequential policies demanded by the Biden administration and their pro-Israel Republican allies.

This long overdue debate has been provoked by the refusal of many influential American conservative figures – former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Daily Wire host Candace Owens, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and numerous MAGA influencers – to accept or endorse a long-standing, gigantic exception to key conservative principles that one may accurately call "the Israel Exception." For years, "the Israel Exception" has signified the demand of pro-Israel conservatives to abandon multiple ostensible defining political values in order to protect and finance Israel, and to impose repressive censorship and cancellations rules at home designed to punish or silence critics of this foreign country.

Long-standing lurking contradictions on Israel

In the abstract, none of this is actually new. It has been going on for years prior to October 7. I have written and spoken over many years about this Israel Exception in American right-wing politics. In December, 2022, we presented a SYSTEM UPDATE episode entitled "How Many Different Countries Should the US Now Be Fixing, Changing, and Interfering In?" Exploring the anti-intervention ethos and anti-war rhetoric that has become dominant in the Trump-era conservative movement, that show was designed to press the question – in light of pervasive right-wing animus to them – of how many different countries or entities the U.S. should view as an enemy worth fighting a war against. 

In January of last year, we produced a separate episode entitled "The Right's Identity Politics: Exploiting Anti-Semitism to Suppress Debate and Defame Political Opponents." That program examined the long bipartisan history of suppressing speech in the U.S. in the name of protecting Israel.

Further in the article he continues to address the censorship hypocrisy on the woke right:

Beyond those foreign policy tensions lurking within the American Right, we have also often reported on the numerous censorship campaigns aimed at Israel critics in the West. These Israel-protecting censorship campaigns in the U.S. are, amazingly, often supported by some of the same right-wing or at least "anti-woke" figures who branded their lucrative media image around a supposed passion for free speech and free debate. 

Indeed, the causes of political censorship and restrictions on campus speech have had no better moment than the last ten weeks in the U.S. Suffice to say, when it comes to domestic conceptions of free speech, language policing, victimhood narratives, "cancel culture" crusades, and mass firing of critics, October 7 has become the George Floyd moment of the pro-Israel wing of American conservatives.

Pro-Israel censorship in the U.S. has been raging for years. On October 6 of this year – just one day before the Hamas attack in Israel – I tweeted this in response to a report that Israel supporters were angry at the University of Pennsylvania's President, the now-ousted Liz Magill, over her refusal to cancel a literary event featuring Palestinian writers: 

…In September -- before the Hamas attack -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Elon Musk that Musk's professed belief in free speech absolutism must, when it comes to Israel, be "balanced" with the need to stop "hate speech": the most common left-liberal justification for censorship. In other words, the Israeli leader was demanding that the speech rights of American citizens be narrowed to shield this foreign country that he leads……

…..Since October 7, there has been no single individual more adored and cheered among pro-Israel Americans than Bill Ackman. Much of the pro-Israel Right cheered as the liberal American billionaire and hedge fund manager encouraged "no-hire" blacklists of American college students who criticized or blamed Israel for the conflict (not who praised Hamas). Pro-Israel groups then paid for trucks to drive around their campuses with their names and faces on them, while speakers blared accusations of bigotry……..

This is getting really interesting, who does all of this sound like?

As just one example illustrating the instant abandonment of professed principles in the name of Israel, Dave Rubin – who has become a very wealthy man by self-branding as a defender of free discourse and the right of dissent – did not just cheer this censorship of anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests, but heralded such censorship as the possible salvation of the West:

From the start, this has been the tactic of pro-censorship conservatives, and it is a mirror image of the principal theories of pro-censorship liberals. They first take the pro-Palestinian views they wish to banish or punish, then define them as "racism" or "hate speech." Or they insist that long-standing political slogans – such as "Free Palestine" or "intifada" or "from the river to the sea" – have a secret meaning: kill all Jews everywhere. This is identical to the way liberals insist that right-wing speech on immigration, or affirmative action, or trans issues should be banned because such speech carries a secret, implicit message: commit genocide against Latinos, or black Americans, or trans people.

Gah! Glenn Greenwald is the fucking best. If you hate him, Good you hate him! He’ll never call for you to be censored or banned or have your civil rights suppressed.

That’s enough about Israel for now, but it is on the back of these pro-Israel censorship campaigns that this entire argument begins to crumble, the name of your video is “Thou Shalt Not Criticize the Woke Right” but that doesn’t logically follow, because nothing happens if you criticize the anti-establishment right. Someone says, ‘Right on’ and likes the video. On the other hand, a comment is made about a sacred cow like Churchill or Israel or the Ukraine war and everyone from the White House to the trolls on Twitter start to pile-on. Entire institutions attack, and this didn’t start with Darryl Cooper, maybe 6 months ago the establishment right (woke right) went off the rails when Tucker Carlson agreed with Dave Smith, one of great critics of the war-state, the woke right and the woke left, and dare I say public intellectual? He’s also a great comedian and libertarian, when he said that “Bill Buckley was one of the great villains of the 20th century.”

I’ll tell you this: Whatever this atrophy in like the intelligence of the American people, it’s, I think it’s accelerating. I mean it’s-. Look, and again, just like you said I’ll disclaimer as well: I’m talking about people who I don’t necessarily like. Like I view Bill Buckley as like one of the great villains of the 20th century. I think he ruined-”

At that point, Carlson interrupted to shout “I couldn’t agree more!” and pound his fist on a table with a laugh.

But, but, but he was a clearly very — also CIA by the way — but he was also a very intelligent guy and witty, and not speaking down to his audience, and like a popular show, his Firing Line show would be Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley arguing with each other,” said Smith.

The establishment right (woke right) proceeded with a complete meltdown. Ben Shapiro responded on his show. Many articles were written about it, commentators on the right couldn’t believe Tucker would agree with this! Dave Smith mentioned it on his show real recently, you can hear what he said about it below.

When I think about the woke right, I think about a group of people who purported to stand for free speech until you target one of their sacred cows, and they absolutely lose their shit.

In the Triggernometry video above Kisin says:

if you were to assert that you know how many genders there are, or quote facts about contentious social issues, such as police violence against minorities, that would be used as evidence of your poor character, and nefarious intent. All it showed was your bias, fragility, and so on….

Yes, this is true, and if you were to say, Bill Buckley was one of the great villains of the 20th century, or that we shouldn’t be arming another country against a nuclear power in Ukraine or backing the carpet-bombing of woman and children in Gaza and the West Bank, you use this as evidence of their poor character or nefarious intent just the same. You are the “Woke Right” my man. We’ve been saying this for months. Michael Tracey Spent 3 days at the RNC interviewing congressman and other Republicans who claimed they were for “America First” or supposed defenders of free speech until the subject is Ukraine or Israel.

This is fucking stupid, this is a dead subject, I spent way too much time writing on this one. Honestly 10 minutes is more of my time then this war propagandist deserves, and I’ve been writing and researching on this for 12 hours. This is bullshit. There has been fucking hate speech laws backed by both sides and passed. Here in AMERICA! That’s where this bullshit ends. Say what you want online but you're coming to America eroding our free speech laws in the name of carpet-bombing children overseas so that we can’t speak against that. This is simply a new faction of the Neoconservative movement. You can say whatever you want but if we attack one of your sacred cows it’s “Look, they’re woke”. This started way before you posted your little video, way before October 7th, the woke right were the same guys who got Bill Maher taken off the air in 2002 on Politically Incorrect, they’re the same guys who shouted down Chris Hedges for speaking out against the War in Iraq in 2003, and the same idiots who proclaimed that “You love Bin Laden if you disagree with us” all the way through the W. Bush years. The idea that you can now co-opt it to support pro-war neocons like yourselves is fucking laughable. If you were to take everything HE says as ‘Fact’ you would think there hasn’t been any censorship online, Vietnam really did start because American warships were attacked at the Gulf of Tonkin, Donald Trump WAS a Russian agent, the CIA did NOT trade weapons for cocaine to back the Contras against the Sandinistas, the CIA did NOT kill JFK or RFK or MLK. What I’m saying, is there absolutely IS a conspiracy behind all of these things, there IS a “Deep State”, another name for it is the Administrative State it surpasses party, candidate, administration and decade. They care about one thing and one thing only, maximizing power. It’s not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, they are but sock puppets for this ‘Deep State’. The fact that this argument is even happening means they are winning. They want in-fighting between all the groups so they can keep us attacking each other instead of attacking the real enemy, them.

Thank you for reading.

Jordan Lee Canter, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of Liberty