Woke-Baiting and the New Left-Wing Smear Bund

James Lindsay and the establishment Right’s attempt to classify anti-interventionists as ‘Woke’ is an age-old Buckleyite gatekeeping tactic

James Lindsay is a former mathematician who has styled himself the right’s resident expert on all things ‘woke.’ Lindsay broke onto the political scene as a member of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ when he participated in the grievance study affair that showed the lazy unscientific standards that academic journals would go to in order to push social progressivism. Lindsay isn’t the first to do so, Alan Sokal being the first, but he and Helen Pluckrose rose to prominence off of this trick on academic publishers.

As of late, Lindsay has burned much of his credibility in attacking largely non-interventionist right-winger as ‘Woke Right.’ He has spent much of the last decade writing about how ‘wokeism’ (for lack of a better term) supposedly stems from Marxist through by way of the Frankfurt School in Germany. Critical theory, which is piloted by such thinkers as Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Ibram X Kendi, is, according to Lindsay, a dressed up racial Marxism that seeks to dismantle capitalism and institute racial communism. Now Lindsay has pivoted, accusing figures on the right as being ‘woke.’

He attacks libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Dave Smith; paleoconservatives like Paul Gottfried and The American Conservative’s very own Curt Mills; and assorted thinkers like Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper. He dubs them woke by the narrowest of veneer.

To Lindsay, woke simply means to be aware of some social conflict in society. This is an incredibly wide definition that includes anyone who has seriously thought about politics beyond Lindsay’s milquetoast centrism. He also says that the woke fit a few criteria, left or right: (1) identity politics, (2) so-called ‘grievance culture’, (3) a willingness to use any power at all, and (4) the use of cancel culture. The ‘woke right’ are simply the right-wing version of this in Lindsay’s mind. Figures like Konstantin Kisin, Douglas Murray, and Bari Weiss have all adopted his terminology to attack many of the same people Lindsay attacks.

Their supposed crime is their adoption of the ideas of several so-called forbidden philosophers, like Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, and Julius Evola—regardless of how they make use of their thought. Even more asinine is his lumping of James Burnham into his list of forbidden thinkers, a writer who wrote popular columns for William F. Buckley’s National Review. Burnham was hardly a forbidden figure when he agitated for the Cold War for twenty years on the right’s flagship publication—but because some thinkers have read the books that gave him fame, he is now forbidden to reference. If you do, you are woke.

Lindsay styles himself as a classical liberal. Not a Misesian classical liberal who would call for the abolishment of most government, but instead as a 1990’s Democrat. He is one of many popular pundits who can proclaim that “the left, left [them].” Lindsay appears to be a gatekeeper with no coherent philosophy and whose only role is to keep the right from moving to the right of the Clinton Administration. If one were to even mention that classical liberals like Frederic Bastiat and Adolphe Blanqui held to a class theory, he would denounce them as woke. Marxist Class Theory was shamelessly twisted and stolen from classical liberalism, a philosophy Lindsay claims to believe in.

If one were to confront Lindsay with many of the thoughts of actual classical liberal thinkers, he would balk at them and call them woke.

Lindsay’s definition of woke is so broad and vague that it is meaningless. All views of politics involve a sense of a class theory, of some party that makes up an oppressor group that harms the interest of another. One could call the American Revolution woke by that definition. All politics involves some sort of group thinking or identity politics, whether that be on the lines of class, an ideology, or a racial or gender group. Lindsay himself actively uses the woke right label to call his opponents ‘racists’ or ‘antisemites’ in the same way a leftist protestor calls Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson a Nazi. He is actively engaged in a form of ‘cancel culture’ by using the term to describe thinkers.

If Lindsay is correct about what makes something woke, then all of politics is woke and it can be discarded as a term. Wokeism describes a specifically left-wing phenomenon of agitative social progressivism. Woke right is as useful of a term as ‘square circle’ is.

What Lindsay is engaged in is an age-old tactic of gatekeeping on the right. Bill Buckley and National Review pioneered ‘red-baiting’ as a way of accusing antiwar or non-hawkish right wingers of being too sympathetic to Communists because they opposed open confrontation with the Soviets. Buckley and Frank S. Meyers helped to attack any and all figures and groups that would prove to be unhelpful to their agitation for war.

Murray Rothbard, often called the godfather of libertarianism and later advocate of the paleoconservative and libertarian alliance, was chased from National Review and the right for his celebration of Khrushchev’s visit to the U.S. and the hope for diplomacy. Buckley would later eulogize Rothbard as having “defective judgment” as a last attempt to spit on his grave. As Justin Raimondo shows, the Birchers were chased from the right in part because of the bombastic thoughts of Robert Welch but more importantly their opposition to the Vietnam War. Anyone opposed to further war agitation was smeared as sympathetic to the Communists and had to go. Buckley also denounced famed writer and American First Committee organizer John T. Flynn and rejected his writing because he didn’t “understand the nature of the threat posed by the Commies.”

It was revived easily in the early 2000’s by such figures as David Frum who denounced opponents of the Iraq War as “unpatriotic conservatives.” Paleoconservative and paleolibertarian thinkers who aligned themselves in opposition to the war were cast aside by mainstream conservatism. Pat Buchanan has been repeatedly smeared as an ‘antisemite’ (an accusation that Jewish libertarian Murray Rothbard refuted) for his opposition to wars abroad.

Lindsay continues this time-honored tradition by calling anti-interventionist and realist thinkers as members of the ‘woke right.’ You might call it ‘woke-baiting.’ This method has been a tactic of hawks: to paint anti-war advocates as sympathetic to ‘the enemy’ or adjacent to them and smear them as unrespectable and dirty. They try to relegate them to being a caste of intellectual untouchables.

The most recent example has been Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, and Lindsay attacking libertarian podcaster Dave Smith on grounds of lacking the proper credentials to oppose military support of Israel and attacking Iran. Lindsay has also called him a ‘woke libertarian’ as he fishes for terms to signal that Smith is ‘bad.’ Even gender-researcher Abigail Shrier, who now works with Weiss at The Free Press, attacked Smith and praised Murray’s debate with Smith.

Tucker Carlson has seen himself be attacked not only by Lindsay but also by Murray, Weiss, and Ben Shapiro. Carlson, who famously prevented U.S. retaliation and escalation with Iran in 2020, as of late has found himself in the position of voicing opposition to interventionist foreign policy measures. He has expressed concern over conflicts with Iran, has questioned support for Israel, and platformed figures like Dave Smith who have discussed foolish strikes in Yemen.

For this, Lindsay has dubbed Carlson ‘woke,’ and repeatedly quipped on social media that “The person who will take down Tucker Carlson is Tucker Carlson.”

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, has also come under fire from this same Intellectual Dark Web sphere for his negotiations with Iran. For a group that seems to have largely focused on social issues previously, they come across as quite content to focus on excising people with heterodox foreign policy positions.

Just yesterday, The Atlantic published a smear of Pat Buchanan as the “Godfather of the Woke Right.” Filled with the typical accusations of racism and xenophobia, it does not fail to mention the issue of Buchanan’s foreign policy. It decries his supposed isolationism:

He insists that all nations care only for their self-interest; international cooperation is a facade; America’s allies are parasites; and the one country with whom we should be seeking closer ties is Russia.

It seems that holding to social views that are, in fact, traditionally conservative is a manner by which to smear those opposed to any semblance of war. One cannot help but notice that these leftist expats continue to hold to the same social values as when they identified as left-wingers yet come to dictate what is, or is not, a ‘woke’ opinion on social issues.

The targets of these allegations of being Woke Right include Smith and Carlson but also popular online figures like Stephen Wolfe and Auron MacIntyre. All these thinkers have expressed passive disinterest in interventionism or come out as anti-interventionism while touting large audiences. It appears that this is another smear bund organized to attack anti-war conservatives. Often these attacks do not come out of the woodwork until the thinker or writer expresses their disinterest in foreign policy paternalism.

Anti-war conservatism has been on the ascendancy with the rise of Trump, even if just rhetorically. Those who want to gatekeep the right from the continued expanse of empire have long resorted to smear tactics and name-calling to force out anti-interventionism. Lindsay is simply a member of the latest round of formerly left-wing intellectuals who want to gatekeep the right. Stephen Tonsor said it best about the original neoconservatives:

It has always struck me as odd, even perverse, that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century. It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.