James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin & The Woke Right
What is the Woke Right, and why Konstantin Kisin is the best example of it.
Right Wing Twitter/X is in the process of having another civil war. This time, people are arguing over what is the Woke Right, and who can be labelled it. On one side you’ve got mainstream liberal-conservative figures like James Lindsay who believe that wokeness is a form of “critical consciousness” that is imagined to exist on the far-left, and so Woke Rightists are an element of the far-right possessing a form of critical consciousness and other attributes of the far-left. On the opposing side, critics challenge this perspective by exposing contradictions in James Lindsay's reasoning. They contend that wokeness is fundamentally rooted in a victimhood narrative and an anti-free speech ethos, arguing that the so-called Woke Right aligns most naturally with the Zionist-establishment Right as opposed to the Far or the Dissident Right.
I side with the second position here and so I will push back on the idea, that the far-right is actually “woke” by uncovering “hidden truths” (as opposed to being redpilled) as it is suggested and instead argue in favor of the idea that James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, Bari Weiss, Douglass Murray and many others constitute what is in fact can be regarded as the “Woke Right”. But first we must understand what is Wokeness.
For that I will refer to the world’s expert in studying wokeness and other dominant social trends - Eric Kaufmann who defines it as the sacralization of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.
He further expands:
This belief system elevates equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for such groups as its highest value. As a result, woke activists seek to cancel speakers or historical figures deemed to be offending the sensibilities of the most hypothetically sensitive member of a minority group. In this clash of values, cultural socialism trumps expressive freedom and symbolic attachment.
This definition of wokeness is not based around a critical consciousness, but rather around an emotional feeling akin to a secular religion in which certain groups become sacralized due to perceived or imagined oppressions or injustices committed against them. Eric Kaufmann has actually called out James Lindsay on his conception of the Woke Right, but James has only doubled down and suggested that you could only analyze Wokeness through Marxist lenses and for as long as there are some similarities between the far-left and the far-right they can be grouped together.
While, I don’t entirely disagree with that assumption given that horse shoe theory demonstrates that there are certain personality-trait similarities among the far-left and the far-right, but does that really mean that the far-left and the far-right have the same end goals in mind? Or even willing to achieve them in the same manner? There’s probably more agreement on the means question, but practically no agreement on the ends or the morality differences between the two.
This critique was leveled back to James Lindsay in an essay by Josh Neal arguing that:
To the extent that we ought to reify a ‘Woke Right’, we could say they are comprised of the grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) of the old Western hegemony. To say that they are indistinguishable from one another because they conduct themselves in a similar manner is like saying that the members of a local gang are indistinguishable from the members of law enforcement because they both wield firearms and organize themselves using advanced communications technology. Such logic is beyond ludicrous – it is positively self-discrediting. Or that Hamas is no different from the IDF because both sides manipulate public opinion via social media and they both attack civilians. Again, such argumentation avoids widespread scrutiny because it is wielded in service of the regime. Hence, I term it regime polemics.
There are other, equally grievous fallacies and inaccuracies in Lindsay’s logic (for instance, if it is ‘woke’ to come to a critical consciousness of structural politics, is Lindsay ‘woke’ for having uncovered the roots of ‘Woke Marxism’?)
These fallacies stem from completely misunderstanding and mischaracterization of wokeness by Lindsay and Co. It is not an academic Marxist-Hegelian magic spell, but an emotional state of mind which elevates certain groups they believe are sacred. The reality is that Wokeness is a new phenomenon that can be directly tied to the usage explosion of intuitive words and the decline of rational ones.
If you consult with a the very widespread graphs below, you could see that a majority of woke affiliated buzzwords has risen to prominence in the 2010s, just at around the same time the term “Woke” became popularized in Black spaces as a variant of becoming red-pilled before turning into a description of SJW behavior by the Right.
You could certainly consider James Lindsay’s arguments with regards to wokeness being a form of consciousness however, it is nonetheless an emotional consciousness by which certain groups that are perceived to be oppressed become sacralized and as a result status elevated as way of attaining justice.
Referring to the green table in the final graph, you'll notice that while transphobia and Islamophobia are relatively recent constructs, antisemitism alongside racism predates all other dimensions, making the sanctification of Jews as a group and unwavering support for Israel inviolable principles in the eyes of many boomer liberal-conservatives, such as James Lindsay.
If there was a competition between social views that diverge most highly between zoomers and boomers that would be views on Israel, including among Jews themselves, 50% of whom are not supporting further US aid to Israel if they are young.
Over 81% of both Republicans and Democrats over the age of 65 believe that the Israeli response to Gaza is fully justified compared to only 27% of zoomers, which includes both Republicans and Democrats. In other-words pro-Israeli sentiment is deeply entrenched among the older generation, and such a sentiment also includes the sacralization of the Jewish people as an ethnicity as well as embracement of all the narratives associated with them.
For instance, 97% of boomers disagree with the notion that Holocaust is a myth compared to only 51% of zoomers. The difference is not due to poor education, as every single zoomer that I am aware of including myself was exposed to Holocaust education in high-school. I suspect that the reason a Holocaust belief is so low among the younger generation has to do with the rejection of the victimhood narrative which arises out of the Holocaust as it is currently taught in schools. A sort of a rebellion, but this is a story for another post.
Anyways, the point is that the sacralization of Jews is pretty high among Conservative boomers and quite low among zoomers (of all kinds). Douglass Murray is probably the best case example of doing Jewish sacralization by older Conservatives. Below, I’ll attach a few video files where he refers to Jews as a blessing from God, dramatically exaggerates the threats Jews face from Hamas (while conveniently ignoring the experiences of Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians living as neighbors to the Jewish state), and implies that Jews are, quite clearly, of inherently greater value than non-Jews.
Watch this on your own (for some reason it won’t embed)
He seems really convinced that Europeans owe their unwavering support to the Jewish ethnostate, viewing any critique of Israeli treatment of non-Jews as little more than a misguided attempt to washing the sins of the Holocaust and perceives any attempt to shake the idea that Jews should be worshiped as a blasphemous act.
Mysteriously, him and those like him believe that Western civilization would not survive without the Jewish state, implying that the Jewish state is part of the West (or is even comparable to it in moral and cultural standards), while omitting the fact that the West was at its zenith before the Jewish state has even existed. However, when viewed as a deeply emotional conviction, resembling a religious experience, it suddenly begins to make sense.
I won’t attempt to unpack this highly complex topic here; instead, I will highlight that Israel and Jews represent the one aspect of mainstream conservatism and the older conservative ethos that remains virtually sacrosanct and beyond reproach which is why I call them the Woke Right.
Theoretically the Woke Right is expected to sacralize every historically oppressed group in the world as the left does but transgenders, blacks and Muslims do not receive even a fraction of their moral attention that Jews do. In fact, Muslims and the broader Islamic world are largely hated and despised by the Woke Right. In this regard, the Woke Left demonstrates significantly greater logical consistency.
The Woke Right solely and exclusively sacralizes Jews against criticism it regards as “harmful”, which in-effect means shutting down pro-Palestinian agitators and firing people from their jobs and creating specific laws motivated by the culture of Jewish safetyism. These people have the nerve to believe that a group as liked as no other is under constant threat of extermination.
Remember the time when the Israeli Maccabi fans have started harassing Arabs in Amsterdam, destroying property and screaming death to Arabs? Well, you guessed it! All of the Woke Right was crying “pogrom!”, while evidence on the ground pointed to the fact that Israeli Jews have acted in Europe as they normally act at home (meaning they started the violence), but this time around they didn’t have the guns to massacre the people they were just wishing death to. How antisemitic of the Dutch!
The Woke Right and the Shape-shifting
Anyways, this brings us to the next specimen - Konstantin Kisin, famous for advising Whites not to be race-conscious while encouraging and rewarding Jewish racial consciousness. The interesting thing about him (I learned when as I was researching about him on Wikipedia) is that he is only 1/4 Jewish himself and was raised in a Christian background. In one of the videos in which a pro-Palestinian activist accuses Konstantin Kisin of being woke, he brushes that aside because he only has one Jewish grandparent.
The biggest meme of all, is that Konstantin Kisin deeply identifies as a Jew online and in his comedy shows as well as perceives criticism of his position as being antisemitic even if it comes from the “woke left” who are supposed to like Jews.
However Konstantin Kissin’s wokeness and race grifting doesn’t just end there, he is also claiming to be a “dark skinned immigrant” in response to a Woke leftist telling him that the biggest threat to the country were White men (thus implying he is not White himself, while at the same time advocating that he doesn’t care about race LOL).
On top of that he was also caught darkening his skin color on purpose to appear less White on multiple occasions, here is one such example:
Funny enough, the reason why I got blocked by this race grifter was because I was trying to suggest to him that he shouldn’t tweet all the time about what a persecuted Jew he is.
Now I’m also not trying to police on who is or isn’t Jewish, but it appears to me that Konstantin Kisin having just one Jewish parent while being raised by Christians and married a Ukrainian woman has adopted a Jewish identity very recently probably as a way of acquiring woke brownie points as he is furthering the narrative that White racial consciousness is bad (unlike Jewish group consciousness!). In other words he feels that identifying as Jewish while help him climbing the social ladder. Can’t blame him! Not much different from 1/16 Aboriginal Australians or Canadians who hate Whites and identify exclusively as Aboriginal.
TLDR
As things stand now the Woke Right just as Woke Left work as particularist weapon in the hands of historically oppressed identity groups. The way they differ is that the Woke Right prioritizes only Jews, while the Woke Left prioritizes everyone who isn’t a straight White Christian male. In any event, they both undermine universalism and the Western liberal tradition while claiming they are upholding it.
The Woke Right attacks the Dissident and the Radical Right for the same thing they are guilty of themselves (of prioritizing one people over the others), except in the Dissident Right’s case its actually a form of self-interest and corresponsive to the challenges of the current period, while the Woke Right’s sacralization of Jews as well as their excuse of Jewish chauvinism appears immoral, illogical and lacking self-interest (unless they are Jewish themselves). Just take a look at this Woke Rightist description and try to tell me that it doesn’t apply to them.
At the end of the day, it is best to view the Woke Right as constituting another dimension in the Jewish Question, in which the Jewish community and their allies are once again rebelling against the convention that Jews should obey by the same liberal and universalist standards as everybody else does (or perhaps, it’s better to say supposed to obey). In this light, Woke Right shenanigans, are nothing more than a reactionary outcry of a privileged identity group and class being forced to abide by the standards it has not been accustomed to abide.
I like the term the Woke Right and Konstantin Kisin should serve as a key example of how the Woke Right manifests itself. To defeat it, we must give it as little emotional and moral consideration as we give it to the Woke Left. Their appeals to special status must be revoked and laughed out of the gate, for as long as the world is the way it is. They aren’t being oppressed but they’re oppressing other people with their behavior.