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SALT LAKE CITY — President Donald Trump's first term witnessed the rapid rise of the "woke left" — a progressive movement known for its identity politics, historical revisionism and ideological orthodoxy.
The question now dividing the biggest names in conservative media is whether the second Trump term will unleash a "woke right," driven by a similar focus on power, grievance and aggressive online attacks.
Confrontations erupted in recent weeks between influencers on the right, including Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro — previously united in their support for Trump — debating where to draw the line within MAGA around topics like Israel and tactics like social media mobbing.
Some independent media personalities, including Matt Walsh, Tim Pool and Jack Posobiec, framed the schism as just another move by the Republican establishment to box out independent populist thinkers.
But some of the biggest conservative critics of "wokeness," including Peterson, Shapiro, Seth Dillon and Konstantin Kisin, insisted that without guardrails American conservatism could be hijacked by those with its worst impulses, leading the anti-woke right to fall prey to the same vices it once condemned.
What is the 'woke right'?
Few have made a career so focused on combatting "wokeism" as James Lindsay, "author, mathematician and online troublemaker."
A self-described "veteran of the first woke wars," Lindsay gained conservative celebrity status in 2018 when he successfully published hoax articles in high-profile journals to show that an oppressor-versus-oppressed worldview dominated parts of academia.
His relentless criticism of gender ideology and his provocative style earned Lindsay a wave of pushback, including "cancellation" when he was banned from what was then known as Twitter in 2022.
But after Elon Musk reopened his account later that year, Lindsay said he began to notice a new "woke war" stirring on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
"I lived through this once on the left, and I'm living through it again on the right, and it's identical," Lindsay told the Deseret News. "It's not similar; it's the same."
What Lindsay saw was growing momentum among Trump supporters who he believed were mimicking wokeism's emphasis on systemic inequality, race-based victimhood and in-group policing.
Whereas the "woke left" framed the West as an intrinsically racist place where minority groups are subject to obstacles created by a white ruling class, the "woke right" decried an America in decline where white Christians are targeted by a globalist conspiracy that threatens traditional values.
These opposing worldviews are structurally indistinguishable from each other because they both rely on critical theory's focus on group identity and power dynamics, Lindsay said. He pointed to his most recent stunt as proof.
In 2018, Lindsay succeeded in getting a journal of feminist social work to publish a rewrite of a section of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," updated with some intersectional vocabulary. In December, Lindsay did the mirror opposite on the right.
Using the pseudonym "Marcus Carlson," Lindsay submitted an edited portion of Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" to American Reformer, a Protestant political website, swapping proletariat with "the Christian Right" and replacing bourgeoisie with "liberalism."
American Reformer published the piece, describing it as "a powerful article." And after its true authorship and similarities to Marx were discovered, the publication's editors kept it on their website because it was a "reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas(.)"
This experiment confirmed Lindsay's perception of the "woke right" as a collection of "post-liberal" commentators who view the current system as irredeemably rigged against their preferred groups and who consider the stakes of "winning" so high that it justifies using the tools of the left.
"Anybody on the right who's basically pushing for Machiavellian power plays is probably woke right," Lindsay said. "You have to covet power to be woke."
Is there a 'woke right'?
Over the past year, Lindsay's concept of the "woke right" has gained momentum of its own, spawning supportive essays from a slew of pundits. Last month, the phrase exploded.
The fuse was lit on one of the world's largest media platforms, the "Joe Rogan Experience," where Jordan Peterson, a psychologist—turned-public-intellectual-superstar — said the "woke right" phenomenon isn't political at all.
It's the product of social media algorithms empowering "psychopathic pretenders" to "invade the idea space" and "use those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage," Peterson said.
"I've been watching these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain and a lot of that is cloaked in antisemitic guise," Peterson said.
The reaction from some of the most-followed right-wing accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, was immediate, and grew larger following Peterson's subsequent appearance on Fox News where he outlined "10 markers of political psychopathology," which include public claims of ideological purity, false cries of victimization and militant calls for vengeance.
Candace Owens likened Peterson's comments to "schoolgirl, ad-hominem attacks against people he dislikes."
The conservative comedy duo, the Hodgetwins, speculated about "a psyop going on to divide Trumps (sic) base."
And Dave Smith, a libertarian critic of Israel, called it "sloppy for a clinical psychologist to just throw out a mass diagnosis like this."
If you ask the founder of paleo-conservatism, and the godfather of the variously named "alternative" "dissident" or "non-aligned" right, the phrase "the woke right" has no basis in reality at all.
"It does not make any sense because the so-called 'woke right' have been the most relentless critics of wokeness," Paul Gottfried told the Deseret News. "As a matter of fact, they're much more radical in their criticism than the conservative establishment, which cut them off decades ago."
Gottfried claims that the "real right" — noted for its emphasis on decentralized government, America's European heritage and non-interventionist foreign policy — shares almost nothing in common with the woke left.
Lumping together individuals with divergent views like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Candace Owens, Gottfried said, shows that the origin of Lindsay's "woke right" campaign is likely a desire to further "marginalize" factions of conservatism which already lack the influence to "cancel" anyone.
And if this is the intention, Gottfried believes it is bound to backfire.
"There is a very, very large number of younger conservatives, ... they've sort of surfaced with Trump's victory, they now identify with the populist right," Gottfried said. "At some point, the conservative establishment is going to have to deal with this; you can't keep pushing people out."
