The Democratic Party that sought President Donald Trump's imprisonment and vilified his base is in shambles. The liberal establishment is on the back foot, struggling to retain power and relevance. The radical left is splintered, consumed by infighting and an inability to coalesce around a meaningful message.

The threat now posed to the MAGA coalition instead comes from the right — or rather from liberal interlopers whose latest smear, “woke right,” has started to gain traction.

While still used by relatively few, its strategic use online has sparked intense debate over both the definition of “woke” and whether the term belongs in discussions about the political right.

Some early adopters used “woke right” to describe conservatives fixated on identity politics — particularly those focused on race. Others applied the label to right-wing figures they viewed as sharing traits with Maoists or other authoritarian movements.

The current controversy over the term, however, is not primarily the result of these attempts to isolate identitarians and statists.

Rather, the chief popularizers of “woke right” have made waves by applying the term as a collective smear against national conservatives, right-wing populists, and others whose views and political agency appear unpalatable to liberals, as well as against Blaze Media and those other organizations where such traduced individuals can often be found.

By targeting prominent figures such as Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Christopher Rufo with the label “woke,” advocates of this rhetorical tactic aim to marginalize the activist conservative right. Their goal: recast the political spectrum as a contest between progressive liberals and classical liberals, effectively sidelining the MAGA movement and restoring the liberal order the new right set out to challenge.

Blaze News recently connected with two leading proponents of the term and its underlying critique — James Lindsay, a mathematician and self-described “professional troublemaker” credited with coining “woke right,” and Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee — as well as two of its most outspoken critics: BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre and Israeli-American philosopher, biblical scholar, and political theorist Yoram Hazony.

While public interest in the “woke right” controversy remains mostly confined to social media, the term has the potential to break out, much as “Christian nationalism” did when liberal intellectuals branded it a dangerous right-wing trend. Judging by recent reactions, “woke right” may prove even more potent as a slur, given the baggage it already carries on the left.

Whether or not it enters mainstream political discourse, the term and the campaign behind it risk fracturing the coalition that elected President Donald Trump. That fracture could open the door for genuinely woke forces and liberal interlopers to reclaim ground they recently lost.

Building momentum

The term "woke right" has been kicking around for at least six years. While Lindsay has done an inordinate amount of kicking by himself, others have periodically joined in.

For instance, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who, like Lindsay, has taken issue with Tucker Carlson and other prominent figures on the American right, defined the term "woke right" during a 2022 interview at the Texas Tribune Festival.

"When I say the 'woke right,' I'm referring to people, often disaffected liberals, who could have been Bernie Bros but in a split second chose a red jersey," Crenshaw said. "There's a lot who want to wear a jersey and just scream at the other side, and they remind me of the far left more than anything."

Crenshaw suggested that the utterance of the following words might give away a right-leaning individual's supposed wokeness: "RINO," "establishment," and "globalist."

'Conservative wokeness preys on people moved by … legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics.'

Just as "woke right" for Crenshaw was calibrated to his specific opponents on the right, subsequent definitions printed in the pages of liberal publications appear to have similarly been adapted to their authors' particular antipathies.

Jonathan Chait, a staff writer at the Atlantic, recently characterized paleoconservative Pat Buchanan as both the "godfather of the woke right" and a key forerunner for President Donald Trump, who, according to Chait, is apparently also "woke."

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Katherine Brodky, a supposedly anti-woke liberal, proffered censorious reflexes, an embrace of victim culture and identity politics, and efforts to suppress freedom of expression as defining characteristics of the woke right.

Tyler Austin Harper, another staff writer at the Atlantic, argued last year that "wokeness doesn't just have readily identifiable content — a set of opinions that leave adherents in good progressive standing," but also a "readily identifiable form."

The woke right’s "identifiable form" could easily be mistaken for a sense of humor and a backbone, or vice versa.

After all, here are just a few of the examples of the "woke right" that Harper settled on: Elon Musk flipping LGBT activists' terminology on its head to make a point, tweeting, "Cis is a heterophobic word"; Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk highlighting the impact of DEI hiring practices in aviation and second-guessing the qualifications of a hypothetical black pilot; or "'canceling' the New York Times columnist David French … because he's not conservative enough."

"Conservative wokeness preys on people moved by … legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics" and to "foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the cause of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve," said Harper.

Woke right quiz

According to Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, "there's nothing complicated about the 'woke right.'"

"It refers to people on the right who run the same operating system as the woke left: grievance-based identity politics rooted in critical theory,” Dillon told Blaze News via email. “They interpret the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed power dynamics, claim to have 'awakened' to hidden systems of control, scapegoat a dominant identity group, and justify the use of coercive power to establish a new moral order. It's the same system — just with different variables plugged in."

'If they're using woke methods to achieve right-wing goals, then they're better characterized as woke right — not leftists.'

Decades ago in his book "Leftism," self-styled “liberal of the extreme right” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn contended that such groups and individuals aren't so much woke rightists as they are just leftists. When asked if the same is still true today, Dillon told Blaze News, "If they're using woke methods to achieve right-wing goals, then they're better characterized as woke right — not leftists. And that's what they're doing. Their means or methods may be borrowed from the woke left, but their political and cultural ends are not."

After warning that "we should be careful not to apply these terms too loosely or they lose their meaning," Dillon referred Blaze News to the following series of diagnostic questions that he shared online to "help to identify who's 'woke right' and who isn't":

Dillon suggested that the term "woke right" serves an important function. "Accurately categorizing bad ideas is critically important for understanding and defeating them. It also serves the function of enraging those who say it's meaningless — which is quite a tell, I think."

The grand inquisitor

James Lindsay appears to have beta-tested a number of definitions of "woke right" in recent years before arriving at one similar to or perhaps reflected in Dillon's. Along the way, he hinted that "woke right" was effectively a substitute for "illiberal," "fascist," or "alt-right," the last of which he believes the "left ruined ... together with the theocratic Christian Nationalists."

Lindsay indicated on X that his working definition for "woke" in late 2019 was "viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call 'Social Justice.'"

In October, he decided that the "Woke Right is not Realist, but Idealist and Romantic, imagining a Romanticized past and an idealized civic realm connected to correct rule ('Right,' as in Rechts), largely based on authority and tradition."

In November, he noted that woke in the rightist context amounted to "calling everything you want to control Jewish or neocon until you control it."

In December, he said that woke right "means you think people in your particular identity group are oppressed and need to band together in your identity group to fight back and take power against your enemies" and indicated in a separate tweet that "not all Woke Rights are antisemitic."

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James Lindsay. Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

On his website, he stated:

Woke Right refers to right-wing people who have adopted the characteristics and underlying worldview orientation of the Woke Left for putatively "right-wing," "conservative," or reactionary causes. They are, as reactionaries, the image of the Right projected by the Left made real by players claiming to be on the Right. That is, they’re right-wing people who act and think about the world like Woke Leftists.

Lindsay echoed this definition in his written responses to Blaze News, in which he suggested that woke right "means using critical theories or Marxian analysis for right-wing or anti-Left causes."

"It is very specific," Lindsay continued. "Most conservatives do not meet this definition."

A sizeable portion of the MAGA coalition does, however, supposedly meet this or one of Lindsay's other definitions. Right-wing populists, for example, are on the liberal's naughty list, as are those who subscribe to national conservatism, which he dubbed "the Woke Right final boss."

The application of "woke right" to national conservatives amounts to the more tactical smear, as it not only cuts through the MAGA coalition but deep into the Trump administration and the Republican Party.

Past speakers at the National Conservatism Conference, which is run by the Hazony-led Edmund Burke Foundation, include Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Michael Anton, another senior State Department official; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby; White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; Trump border czar Tom Homan; and Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).

Of course, there's also JD Vance, who underscored in a NatCon speech — given just days before President Donald Trump chose him as his running mate — that while America was founded "on great ideas," it is not, as some have suggested, reducible to "just an idea."

James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term 'illiberal' — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives.

While Lindsay has danced around labeling Vance "woke right" for daring to express such thoughts, stating in December, "I haven't called JD Vance Woke Right anywhere yet," he has implied as much — calling him a "post-liberal" with a predominantly woke right team, who not only entertains the woke right definition of "nation" but did the unspeakable: speak at a National Conservatism Conference.

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Vice President JD Vance. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

In fairness to Vance and his fellow NatCon alumni, it is apparently easy to find oneself labeled "woke right." After all, even a fast-food chain has been tagged.

Lindsay recently indicated online that Arby's had veered into woke right territory with its post, "Unlike dad, our ham & swiss actually came back."

In the much ridiculed post, which he has since apologized for and walked back, Lindsay noted, "That's curtains for them. Cringe af."

When asked why national conservatives warrant their categorization as "woke right," Lindsay suggested that while "not all of National Conservatism is Woke Right ... the general thrust of the movement meets the basic definition."

Final boss

Hazony, the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" whom Lindsay has repeatedly targeted with the “woke right” smear, explained to Blaze News that the strategy behind the term is not new.

"The main people who are behind this — and James Lindsay is the one who's most explicit, but I don't think that he's at all the only one — they've been doing the same thing for many years, long before the term 'woke right' came out; at least as far back as Donald Trump being elected, you know, so it's almost a decade ago," said Hazony. "There was this game of saying that in between liberals and Nazis or racialist fascists — in between, there is no legitimate position. That is a standard argument of the anti-nationalist liberal camp that has been used by many, many different people, and it's always the same."

"When people started using 'illiberal' ... in the mid-2000s, what they were doing was eliminating the legitimacy of the word 'conservative,' because 'illiberal' is anybody who's an authoritarian or a Nazi or a theocrat or a fascist, plus anybody else who's not a liberal," continued Hazony. "So that strategy, using the term 'illiberalism' as a way of saying, 'No, I'm not going to recognize that there are any legitimate conservatives or nationalists' — that's been around in that form for at least 15 years."

Hazony noted that more recently,

James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term "illiberal" — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives. So they switched to "Christian nationalism," and it was the same kind of thing, where, you know, you pick the absolute least palatable people who can be called "Christian nationalists," you quote them, and then you say, "Well, everybody who's a nationalist and a Christian all the way right up to the borders of liberalism — that entire sphere of conservatives and nationalists who are basically normal but they have criticisms of liberalism — no, they're all illegitimate. They're all totalitarians. They all reject the American Constitution." And so they tried that; that peaked in 2023; and it failed. It petered out. They didn't succeed in convincing the average, intelligent person who's paying attention that the political spectrum is only liberals and fascists.

Whereas previous attempts failed, Hazony indicated that "this time, they have succeeded in drawing blood."

"This term [woke] was designed to be humiliating by taking the term that we were using for the Maoist-style cultural revolution that was taking over America and Britain and other countries. And now they say, 'Those of you who are fighting against this, you're exactly the same. You're the same exact thing.' And it upsets people."

'You got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest.'

Hazony further told Blaze News that "it's deeply insulting at a personal level for people who've devoted their time to trying to save America and the West from the woke, and at the same time, it's incredibly effective at destroying the coalition that was built — the anti-woke coalition — by making the different parties despise one another."

"The idea that liberalism is about toleration was just thrown out the window and you got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest."

Playing with fire

Lindsay has tried tarring Blaze Media with the same brush he has used on Hazony and others, characterizing it as "the first captured stronghold" in his imaginative woke right "takeover" narrative.

'The term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement.'

Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson, whom Lindsay has implicated as a key player in this supposed takeover, said, "I know Lindsay and we had a decent relationship until he suddenly lumped me and my tenure here at Blaze Media with his slur."

"Obviously, we have a wide variety of people and opinions at Blaze Media. We represent the broad MAGA-MAHA majority coalition, and I take that role seriously," continued Peterson. "But I do not need to say for the record that we are not 'woke right' because the term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement."

Peterson suggested that the term's capricious usage has helped empty it of meaning.

"What's puzzling and ultimately discrediting about the term is that Lindsay and others lump disparate people and groups together into a wild, grand conspiracy," continued Peterson. "He and his associates refer a lot to abstract -isms like hermeticism, communism, and gnosticism and call all kinds of people followers of various schools of thought: 'Nietzscheans' and 'Schmittians.'"

The "Schmittian" smear lobbed around evokes Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who critiqued liberalism, defined politics as the distinction between the categories of friends and enemies, and lent intellectual support to the Nazi regime in Germany.

Peterson noted that he once tried to explain his thoughts on Schmitt to Lindsay over text.

"As a student of political thinkers who were taught by Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany (as opposed to Schmitt, who became a Nazi), I think Schmitt's writings are important to anyone who wants to seriously consider the nature of executive power, which is why they are still studied by people of all kinds throughout the world," said Peterson. "But the idea that this makes me a Nazi or that I agree with everything Schmitt says or believed is ridiculous. James recently asked me to 'denounce Schmitt' on X at his command, which sounds a lot like he's trying to initiate the very 'struggle sessions' he often decries."

Peterson emphasized the range of people and institutions that Lindsay and his fellow travelers have lumped into his "grand conspiracy," noting, for instance, that "they throw in institutions from the Roman Catholic Church to the Claremont Institute, countries from Hungary to China, and individuals from General Michael Flynn to Yoram Hazony to Peter Thiel in the mix as part of whatever the 'woke right' is."

"It becomes silly pretty quick," said Peterson.

Threatened liberals

The host of BlazeTV's "The Auron MacIntyre Show" — one of Lindsay's frequent targets — said that when it comes to Lindsay, woke right "seems to be more of a branding exercise and a political weapon than it does anything with definitive content."

"I think that's the reason so many people have had difficulty when attempting to have even a basic discussion about the term," MacIntyre said. "The guy who is most famous for coining and popularizing it himself has admitted that it wasn't a great one, and it doesn't really have a lot of content besides its ability to be used as a political weapon."

'The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win.'

MacIntyre suggested that woke right's apparent transformation in the wild from a denigratory term for anti-Semites and identitarians into a strategic full-spectrum put-down is “the real trick of this term.”

"A lot of people assume that [anti-Semites and identitarians] were the original targets, and because of that, many people thought that perhaps there could be some value in it because, you know, not all of those groups are particularly ones that people enjoy being associated with," said MacIntyre. "That said, it's become quickly clear that the expansion of the term has now come to encompass Orthodox Jews like Hazony, guys who are big fans of Israel like Tim Pool, and others."

"He's included a large number of very well-respected people who are obviously well outside of this — guys like Matt Walsh."

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BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre. Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

"The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win, their willingness to fight back against the left, their willingness to say, 'Actually, we're going to take affirmative steps. We're going to take power. We're going to use power to win political battles.' And that seems to be the main violation," continued MacIntyre.

'What they're finding is actually, no, conservatives would like to be in charge.'

When asked whether this campaign might be, at least in part, the early stages of an effort to politically neutralize JD Vance ahead of the next presidential election, MacIntyre answered in the affirmative.

"Not only is that the case, I think he's been pretty explicit about that," said the BlazeTV host.

MacIntyre suggested that Lindsay and other "new atheists, rational-centrist types" feel threatened by Vance and the national conservatives, given their willfulness and refusal to "be ruled by people who hate them, hate their values, hate their religion."

MacIntyre suspects that while the "salience" of the "woke right" term has risen, the credibility of those wielding it has "plummeted."

"[Lindsay has] made many enemies of pretty high-profile figures with good reputations by throwing around this term and attacking people who clearly don't hold any of the nefarious views he's attributing to them," said MacIntyre.

The attacks have also served to expose bad actors who "ultimately were hoping to undermine the conservative movement rather than be a productive part of it," said MacIntyre. "That's something that's critical to know at this juncture."

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