I accept that this is a strange headline. The woke right; what could you possibly mean by that? As a way of explaining, let’s call it the appetizer; consider the desire not to get caught up in your echo chamber. The urge to at least appear as if you are not trapped in a world of confirmation bias. Questions are always good. Doubt is never unreasonable. Challenging assumptions is a higher calling.
Under those circumstances, you would not likely find yourself a member of the woke right.
I’m not implying that any one or collection of us is free from any of the symptoms, only that, much like an addiction, the first step is accepting that the problem exists or that the potential exists. Before you pshaw, the Trump cult thing is a little creepy. He is still one of the most successful presidents in our lifetime, and he’s the only guy the folks driving the bus into the ditch seem to fear. That makes him the best choice right now, in my mind. However, he is neither perfect nor a god and should not be worshipped.
Far too many Democrats appear to do that on command, or is that just another presumption of the woke right? This paradigm seems to be true because it is what the media shows us. It is what our talking heads tell us is correct.
I’m not sure I am expressing this clearly, so let me defer to someone else’s effort to explain it.
Just like the Woke Left, the Woke Right has come to hate the West for the reasons I detailed here. But what is more, the “what else are they lying about?” question is a slippery slope down which you inexorably slide if it becomes the lens through which you see the world. Just as a woke leftist sees a conspiracy against him that he calls “systemic racism” in every workplace, classroom and interaction, so a woke rightist sees a conspiracy against him in every institution, media publication and historical consensus. Importantly, disagreement and criticism only reinforces his belief in the conspiracy.
Kisin doesn’t think the woke right is fully formed yet because while the left has straight white men to blame for everything, the Right’s bugbear isn’t as well defined.
When most people on the Woke Right think of the elites, they imagine a cabal of senior Democrats, billionaire funders and the leaders of other major institutions. The problem with that is that it is extremely difficult to believe that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are orchestrating a conspiracy given that they appear unable to get through a press conference.
I don’t entirely agree with Kisin here in part because no one I know who berates the UN or WEF or Bill Gates or the WHO thinks anyone like Biden or Harris is anything but a proxy propped up and manipulated by those more capable. And while that might be one of those things we just thought up, it’s not. The Joe Biden presidency is proof that someone else has been and is running America. Biden hasn’t been capable for some time, and no one on the right or left is prepared to argue differently. The question there is one of ignoring an inconvenient (and arguably unconstitutional) fact (the Left has known for some time) until it is no longer relevant.
Another problem with the targeting question is that the UN, Bill Gates, and the WEF have all been very open about a number of global projects labeled as conspiracies. They planned it, shared the news, and then we saw it happen. That doesn’t mean we should not be cautious. We are no less human because we think liberty and limited government are preferable to whatever projects our political opposites have or wish to deploy. And we at ‘Grok are as human as anyone, so this is as much an internal journey as one of projection.
Wanting it to be true isn’t enough. A lot of people saying what you think is not enough. This is not a prohibition on agreeing or sharing these observations; it is simply a reminder to myself, as much as it is to you, that we should do what we can not to become the zombie army of leftist parrots we claim to abhor.
There are lines drawn between exploring observable truth, offering opinions on facts or suppositions, even poking fun, and becoming an intolerable or insufferable ideologue. The Woke RIght is, presumably, the latter.
A problem we must also consider is the goal of those in power and who control our communication channels. We know that social media, by design, favors intellectual and political tribalism. It feeds, nurtures, and then blames it for being what it is. We can’t change the fact that we can only observe and report. Make suggestions. Challenge ideas. Try to be different.
We’ve never been shy at GraniteGrok about taking people or policy to the woodshed. Right, Left, Center—no one is immune. We do it, presumably in defense of Constitutional limitations on government power or rights meant to be free from political meddling. I doubt we always get it right, but with your help, we can do more than debate and discuss history, events, people, and issues. We can decide what the woke right is, if it exists, and whether or not that even matters.
