“Woke Right” Just Means Tribalism
James Lindsay Does Not Know What Wokeness Is
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A couple of years ago, Neema Parvini predicted that the mainstream would attempt to “put the woke away”.1 This caught many people off guard, but given the logic of power it made complete sense.
The power structure of the American imperial centre is highly ideological. The ideology of this centre is couched in abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy”, but more concretely, the ideology is a set of luxury beliefs in multiculturalism, dysgenics, secularism, individualism, rule of law, and so forth.
The problem for the centre is that, on the one hand, it is an empire, and so it requires a certain amount of competence in order to function, and on the other hand, its ideology has the effect of reducing competence over time. If the ideology goes too far, competence drops to a dangerously low level, China and Russia eat our lunch, and that’s the end of spreading democracy and homosexuality globally. As a result, there is an upper limit to how ideological the centre can be before it must change course, even for the purposes of furthering the ideology. This is what Parvini predicted, and this is what is now happening—the centre is “putting the woke away”.
And yet, it’s not possible just simply to change course. The American empire has been hurtling down the road to perdition in fifth gear for a long time—it’s not just going to slam it in reverse and say “umm yeah folks, remember how we told you in 2020 that there was a pandemic but sub-humans could still riot while we harvest unauthenticated election ballots for months? Sorry about all that, our bad. But yeah now we’re anti-woke.” This is too much. The change needs to be balanced delicately.
The strategy has been to call for competence or “meritocracy”, which a priori means the end of DEI, ESG, hiring quotas, etc. Ultimately, it means the end of civil rights law, but the regime is not prepared to go that far, and will settle for “just enough” competence.
For years now, there has been a contingent of classical liberals calling for the end of wokeness on the basis that it is “racist”. They have mostly been yelling into a void, because until now, racism is precisely the thing that was intended—wokeness is not simply “racist” but specifically anti-white. But unfortunately for the centre, anti-whiteness along with demographic change have forced white racial consciousness to be reborn. In the salad days of the Bush era, the frog was being boiled slowly. The election of Obama tripped something in the lizard brain of European man. We went from half of college students being open to interracial dating in 20002 to under 10% in 2017, with white men being the least open.3
The classical liberal response to the re-tribalization of white people is typified by figures like Christopher Rufo, Konstantin Kisin, and James Lindsay. This response has built from a serious concern over “racism of any kind” to a schizoid crescendo about white tribalism, which this contingent has dubbed the “woke right”. For two egregious examples, consider Kisin’s gaslighting of a victim of Muslim grooming gangs. In this clip, he says to her face that the one thing that could have prevented her victimization—a tribal identity—should be off-limits:
Now consider this word salad by James Lindsay, where somehow “regionalism” is equated to “globalism” and the two are being pushed by the “woke right”:
It gets worse for Mr. Lindsay, whose schizophrenic break with reality was completed with a tweet-essay where he claimed that the United Nations and the new age theosophist cult that controls the world convinced Trump to post the St. Michael’s prayer as a Luciferian dialectical inversion to usher in the Zoroastrian demon of chaos, which he predicted would implement a psyop by deep state counterintelligence operatives. He called this “Operation Michael”, and in the hall of mirrors that is James Lindsay’s mind, the only thing that stands against it is himself, the supposed “anti-woke right”.4
Twitter user “StopBSWokeCulture” offers a clarification of the matter, explaining how the goal of the “woke right” is to bring about—are you ready for it?
Islam.
So the “woke right” is apparently not easy to understand. But in a rare moment of lucidity, James Lindsay actually does give us a very clear picture of what the “woke right” is:
He has apparently been reading the Imperium Substack, because what he describes here is what we have been calling folkishness. And it’s true—what he is against is folkishness. But what he is not against, is wokeness. To understand why, we need to have a deeper understanding of wokeness than just “tribalism”.
In June of 2023, I wrote an article titled Saturn Eats His Children, where I explained that wokeness is a heterogeneous concept—it is not one thing but many. Wokeness consists of at least two elements: 1) the degenerate element as typified by sexual degeneracy and gender confusion, and 2) the ethnic element as typified by anti-white activism like BLM and the SPLC.
These two elements are somewhat in tension. First, because the ethnic element is based on thrownness and fixed identity whereas the degenerate element is based on freedom and chosen identity. Second, because ethnic identities often look askance at degeneracy quite rightly as a threat to their ethnic integrity—gender confusion has a tendency to suppress birth rates. So these two elements of wokeness cannot really live in the same room for any length of time—the degenerate element undermines the ultimate goals of the ethnic element. The only reason they made bedfellows in the first place was because both also undermine the integrity of European folkhoods. When normal people say “woke”, they ambiguously mean both of these.
Kisin, Lindsay, Rufo et al. are absolutely woke in the degenerate sense, because they are consistent classical liberals. They are quite willing to tolerate any sexual fetish however grotesque. They are quite willing to tolerate the absence of gender roles. This is because liberalism is about “freedom”, and this means freedom to make oneself into anything at all, pansexual dolphin or anything else. It is this sense of wokeness that evokes a disgust response in healthy people with a normally functioning prefrontal cortex.
However these classical liberals are “anti-woke” in the ethnic sense, again because they are consistent classical liberals. The ideology of liberalism from the English Civil War all the way to today, is to set oneself against what is fixed, unchosen, and inherited. From the Cultured Thug Handbook:
What’s the alternative to freedom? Is it slavery, as liberals would have it? No—the alternative to freedom is heritage. You’re thrown into a world, you’re born into a house, unable to choose your ancestors, your time and place, your kin, your genes. All these things are radically un-free. They are your heritage. And they’re also what makes you genuinely you. Not your choices, which are the result of, and radically bounded by, your heritage. Heritage and freedom can never coincide—liberalism wants to emphasize one; we want to emphasize the other. Which way, Western man? It really is that simple. Heritage is a fait accompli; it has to do with what is fixed and unchangeable, and ultimately with that most unchosen thing of all—the past.5
This hatred of the past is baked into classical liberalism, which is why it is a progressive ideology that bristles at the slightest hint of anything that came before it. And so, classical liberalism is powerless, even at the level of its conceptual apparatus, to oppose still more progressive ideologies such as Marxism. These are ideologies which simply take the fundamental imperatives of classical liberalism and run them to their logical conclusions.
A prime example of this conceptual confusion can be seen, again, in James Lindsay. Here he is speaking with Charlie Kirk about Kamala Harris’ Marxist sloganeering:
It is astonishingly un-self-aware for James Lindsay to claim that Harris’ slogan “we can see what can be, unburdened by what has been”, is not descended from his own classical liberalism. The idea of leaving old and irrelevant tradition behind comes directly from the French Revolution, a year-zero ideology that literally rewrote the calendar to make a hard break with the past, to “unburden” itself from “what has been”.
Marxism is unthinkable without classical liberalism, and in fact, Marxism is the logical conclusion of classical liberal premises. When you start from the idea that the past is something to be overcome, you end up with the idea that biology itself is to be overcome, because your biology is just your deep prehistory. This is precisely what the degenerate element in wokeness demands, and it is precisely what the ethnic element in wokeness forbids.
As a result, Rufo, Kisin, Lindsay, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and the entirety of what has been called the “intellectual dark web”, are unable to formulate a serious and philosophically grounded response to Marxism. It is for this reason that these thinkers—where they have wrestled with Marxism seriously at all—have resorted to increasingly elaborate genealogies, locating the origin of wokeness variously in German romanticism, Paulo Freire, and yet more obscure figures.
There are so many problems with this approach that one hardly knows where to start. Firstly, the error is to mistake the part for the whole. Classical liberals do not oppose wokeness, because wokeness is not a single thing but an ad hoc alliance between incoherent elements with the shared goal of overturning tradition. Classical liberals do not oppose that alliance but only part of it. What classical liberals oppose is the part of wokeness that equates to tribalism, and it is white tribal identities that they mean by “woke right”. Second, rather than just admitting that they oppose tribalism and not wokeness, classical liberals cook up an elaborate intellectual tradition that is born at an absurdly late date, as though everything was fine and we didn’t have tribal identities until 1807 when Fichte tricked us all with his lectures on nationalism.
Pitting oneself against tribal identities is akin to what the academic system does when it tries to “cancel” Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare is too big, too ubiquitous, too foundational to everything that came later, this move simply legitimizes everything outside of the academy. If you want to yoke Shakespeare to the “far right”, this doesn’t hurt Shakespeare, it helps the “far right”. This is what the contingent of nominally “anti-woke” classical liberals are doing in rejecting tribalism. It makes them look fundamentally unserious, because they are fundamentally unserious.
Wokeness is both degeneracy and anti-whiteness—and both are harming our civilization. Both are driving the competence crisis. Both are driving down social trust. There are two ways to fight this. On the one hand, we can push the two together and let the one sterilize the other. This is the humane solution and would allow the problem to solve itself peacefully within a few generations. Folks like Kisin, Lindsay, and Rufo want to keep them apart. They do not want the humane solution.
The other solution is to develop folkishness in Europeans and their diaspora. The classical liberal centre-right is contributing to the rebirth of folkishness by excusing the multiculturalism that is its engine and precondition. The classical liberal is the good cop in the good cop/bad cop dynamic that is forcing folkishness into being. It is no longer a question of tribal/not-tribal; it is a question of who/whom.
In 48 BCE, Julius Caesar fought against the forces of his erstwhile ally Pompey the Great, at the Battle of Pharsalus. Caesar was significantly outnumbered, but with his superior tactics he was able to reduce Pompey’s army to a heap of corpses on the field. As he surveyed the carnage, he lamented that this scene had been thrust upon him by the folly of his opponents, and he was heard to remark HOC VOLUERUNT—they wanted it so. The classical liberal would be wise to ponder these words.
He and I even did a stream where we debated this, though I think we were more in agreement than not.
Mike Maxwell, The Cultured Thug Handbook (Imperium Press: 2024), pp. 71–72.
They do exclude jewish tribalism from being encompassed by the pejorative term. As with many things, its function is found in the exception.
'As a result, Rufo, Kisin, Lindsay, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and the entirety of what has been called the “intellectual dark web”, are unable to formulate a serious and philosophically grounded response to Marxism. It is for this reason that these thinkers'
They are not thinkers. They are also not against ethnic tribalism. Rubin, Kisin and Peterson explicitly push ethnic tribalism. So, why do they oppose White ethnic tribalism? Well, we know the answer to that. They know if not intellectually, then intuitively, what game theory predicts about an organized tribe moving against disorganized, atomized individuals.
I think that, "putting the woke away", is not entirely accurate. I do think that AA is correct in some sense. It is being put away as the sovereign and the exception must now confront the consequences of the incoherence of their coalition. They must also confront that what worked to get others to bash and dispossess Whites in conjunction with a natural cloaking strategy has rendered the cloaking strategy problematic. On the other hand, the cultural genocide proceeds. The iconoclasm, the erasure in all media, the humiliation rituals and the detritus and patronage networks in all of the institutions remain. The Gollum lives.
In the end, Whites put down ethnic/tribal consciousness thinking everyone else would put it down. Ha! It was only exploited. We must now press the advantage and the mistakes of the "Intellectual" Dark Web that is probably awash in oligarchic money and networking advantages. That is to stop using the word Woke. Woke is tribalism and underneath it all is naked ethnic rivalry. The degeneracy is, I believe, an intentional distraction both for those who succumb to it, and for those who want to divert the conversation away from where it should be focused in its entirety. That is we should focus entirely on forcing any and all to call it anti-White. We must force them to answer why they espouse folkishness/tribalism for some but not for the targets of anti-White. Why is it okay to say one is just smarter but that others are not allowed to make the same claims.
The silver lining in all of this is that European man dropped his tribal identity and opened himself to any and all outsiders. Because of this he faces an eternal, existential peril. What plagued European man was his vast advantage over all the other tribes enabled him to engage in destructive brother wars and destructive vanities. Confronted with his awesome technological and martial prowess he retreated at once brimming with hubris and at once terrified of himself.
Now, across three continental homelands and smaller enclaves across the globe, he faces the same peril - the anti-White tribal alliance. Not only will his folkishness awaken, but it will awaken fully. He will be again an Englishman, an American, an Italian ... However, facing this peril and a colossal power behind it, he must unite into a deeper folkish kinship across the entirety of his kind. He will use his inventions/discoveries of DNA, anthropology, linguistics and history to unite as Occidental Man. So he will have simultaneously for the first time with no contradictions and causes for hesitation a potent local folk identity and an even more potent extended tribal identity across a burgeoning international imperium. The latter will prove the supreme bond across the entirety of the tribe out of necessity.
The more that Kisin, Rubin, Peterson, Lindsay et al try to suppress it, the more its virility will grow. What Caesar said!