Twenty years ago, Tucker Carlson wore a bow tie and argued with liberals on CNN. This was in a different age – a different dimension, almost – to the one we live in today. People on either side of the aisle could disagree vociferously on things both could agree was part of a shared reality. Nobody felt the need to establish first whether the Holocaust happened or if men could have babies.
Today Carlson nods along as a podcast guest describes Winston Churchill as the real villain of World War II – worse than Hitler. The man who stood against fascism is recast as the monster by the sort of person who thinks nose rings and pink hair spell the end of civilisation.
This would be fascinating if it were just one man’s strange descent into the murky waters of conspiracy theory and paranoia. But Carlson is far from alone. He’s merely the most famous example of a new orthodoxy on the right that’s turning conservatism on its head and employing many of the same tricks as their adversaries on the woke left: purity spirals, grievance hustling, language policing, and more.
What “right” are we talking about?
This isn’t people on the right in the conventional sense. It’s not about the sort of voting behaviour or policy preferences that brought Reagan or Thatcher to power. It’s certainly not ordinary conservatism. It’s not even about Trump and the MAGA crowd, although there’s some obvious overlap.
I’m talking about a way of thinking, an epistemology that’s spread through parts of the anti-woke ecosystem, especially online. It’s what author James Lindsay coined the “woke right” – the curious phenomenon of people who claim to oppose woke ideology adopting its psychological habits.
Crucially, both the woke left and woke right refuse to engage with reality on reality’s terms. The woke left elevates “lived experience” above evidence, whereas the woke right declares all liberal establishment claims false by definition. In both cases, facts are adopted or discarded to support the original contention.
Isn’t distrust rational, given the last few years?
Yes. In fact, if you’re not sceptical of what our institutions and media are telling you by now, you might want to pause before sending the Nigerian prince another large sum. He’s probably not being straight with you either.
COVID was the breaking point. The truth is that institutions lied, the media played along, and those in charge gaslit the public with a mask-wearing straight face. The lab-leak hypothesis was plausible from the start yet treated as lunacy until it became the most obvious cause of the pandemic.
Then came Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was brushed off by the liberal media as foreign disinformation. Big tech suppressed any mention of it until the New York Times decided it was actually what everyone else said it was.
People noticed the lies and gaslighting – especially those on the other side of the political aisle, the ones who knew what a woman was and had little time for the knee-posturing of the progressive class.
But then something important happened.
“Show me the evidence” quietly mutated into “I’ve already decided you’re lying”. Rational scepticism ceased to be a powerful tool in the service of truth. It became irrational and selective, treating claims about reality as true or false based on who made them rather than the evidence and arguments at hand.
How does this style of thinking actually work?
One of the biggest tells is the inversion, which takes the following form:
If the liberal establishment says X, the truth must be not-X.
Churchill a war hero? He must be the villain. We put men on the moon? Obviously filmed in a studio – that thousands of engineers, astronauts, rival nations, and hostile intelligence agencies all politely agreed to keep quiet for half a century is put to one side.
These claims sound ludicrous because they are, yet they have real purchase among people convinced every official statement is a lie, every established fact a story for dupes. Exercise the smallest bit of critical thinking and it collapses. But that’s beside the point. The content barely matters because the possibility that we’re “in the matrix” is just too seductive, too thrilling to let go.
It borrows the aesthetic of inquiry but fails to direct scrutiny at itself. Questions are asked, but only in one direction. Counter-evidence is treated as suspect while expertise becomes “gatekeeping”. Professional historians are dismissed as regime functionaries, while the guy “doing his own research” on Telegram is granted room to posit debunked ideas as the host nods along and strokes his chin in agreement.
What about issues like Russia and Ukraine?
Here’s where the woke right’s selective criticism and moral inversions first showed themselves on the international stage.
In 2019, Carlson asked a guest on Fox News: “Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which, by the way, I am”.
Carlson later went on to insist that Ukraine wasn’t a democracy but a “tyranny”. When Russia invaded, he asked: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”
Then came the notorious Putin interview in February 2024. Carlson sat there nodding along, apparently gripped by Putin’s two-hour propaganda lecture that blamed Ukraine, NATO, and the West for Russia’s invasion. Not once did Carlson mention Russian war crimes. The imprisonment of opposition figures like Alexei Navalny didn’t merit a single question. Carlson just nodded and wore his “I’m serious” face while giving Putin the sort of leeway he would never give to, say, Angela Merkel or Macron.
The same Tucker Carlson who built a career prosecuting liberal hypocrisy gave an uncritical platform to a dictator who poisons opponents, defenestrates dissidents, and treats the rule of law with contempt.
This is woke right inversion in a nutshell. If Western elites support Ukraine, Ukraine must be the villain. If they oppose Putin, Putin must be doing something right. Principled scrutiny gets left at the door.
How about Israel and Gaza?
Here, the same inversions play out, but it’s even worse.
Candace Owens spent years mocking the progressive left for playing identity politics and treating certain groups as sacred victims beyond criticism. This was a good and necessary intervention by an articulate black woman, pointing out obvious progressive hypocrisy.
Somehow, she went from that to accusing Israel of “genocide” and claiming Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade. She’s called Israel an “occult nation” because of the Star of David on its flag – a “cultic hexagram” – and suggested Israel was behind JFK’s assassination.
Owens adopted the same framework as the woke left in her anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric: Palestinians are the oppressed and Israel is the oppressor. The October 7 massacre never gets a mention.
Clips of Carlson and Owens regularly surface obvious signs of what we’re looking at. But if there was any doubt, a recent study by the Jewish People Policy Institute analysed roughly 3,000 YouTube videos showing that for Owens, 96% of her mentions of Israel were classified as negative. 75% of her videos mentioning Jews in the past six months were flagged as antisemitic – nearly double the rate from earlier in the year. Carlson’s anti-Israel content jumped from 49% to 70% negative over the same period.
How did seemingly serious people end up here?
Carlson and Owens aren't stupid, which makes it worse. They know exactly what they're doing – they've just discovered that conspiracy pays better than principle.
In the attention economy that is YouTube and social media, outrage is the currency of choice. Combined with moral certainty and “just asking questions”, woke right commentators have struck gold – and the more extreme the position, the higher the engagement. Caution and nuance work in the opposite direction, weakening the brand or even inviting accusations of selling out.
Woke-right inversion is about maintaining a performance of truth-seeking while doing the opposite. The liberal establishment supports Ukraine? Russia must be in the right. It defends Israel? Hamas must have its reasons. The framework is identical to the woke left’s: identify the powerful, reverse the moral judgment, and monetise your audience.
Why does this thinking slide so easily into conspiracy?
Because once “power explains everything” becomes your operating system, nothing is allowed to be accidental. For the woke right, every institutional failure, every bad policy, every disappointing outcome – all of it must be connected, deliberate, and part of the plan.
More importantly, there’s money to be made from the outrage, the relentless and escalating provocations and protestations. Candace Owens didn’t peddle theories that Macron’s wife is a man because she got stupider. She went there because the algorithm rewarded it, the audience demanded it, and the revenue followed. This is why the internet is flooded with political grifters on the left and right. It pays.
Is this why antisemitism keeps showing up?
Of course. Conspiracy thinking always wants to put a face to the “mysterious forces” and “powerful cabals” controlling everything.
Enter the world’s oldest hatred. Sometimes introduced openly, but more often through euphemism, Jews offer one culprit for everything, one malevolent force to explain away personal grievances and the failures of your tribe.
People like Nick Fuentes don’t materialise out of nowhere. They’re what you get when “just asking questions” is mistaken for bravery and “spotting patterns” gets called insight. Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show in October 2024 – a white nationalist who denies the Holocaust – and offered no meaningful pushback.
The woke left spent years making Jews an acceptable target through “anti-Zionism”. Now the woke right is trying the same trick, the same ancient hatred pretending to be political analysis.
Aren’t you just doing “both sides are bad”?
What I’m talking about is a betrayal of Enlightenment liberalism by those who once claimed to defend it.
The backlash to woke excess was inevitable and justified.
What’s tragic is that parts of that backlash have abandoned the very habits of mind that made the original critique so effective. Where one side elevated lived experience above truth, the other decided truth itself was an establishment trick.
But truth is the one absolutely non-negotiable standard of a liberal civilisation. It’s what anchors the open society and prevents it from drifting into epistemic tribalism. Defending it means doing the boring job of providing evidence and being sceptical while staying rational. It means being willing to accept facts that don’t flatter your side. You don’t get to discard those just because your enemies abused them first.
What’s actually at stake here?
What began as resistance to one orthodoxy ended up creating another. Real dissent – the kind that might actually fix what’s broken – risks being absorbed by a version of scepticism that excuses the indefensible and treats every moral judgment as just another establishment lie.
The irony in all this is that a movement which began by mocking safe spaces and trigger warnings has built its own. Worse, each side feeds the other. The woke left's excesses prompt the woke right's conspiracies, which in turn validate the woke left's warnings about fascism. It's a perfect doom loop, and both sides need it to continue.
The anti-woke right was supposed to defend Western civilisation from ideological capture. Instead, parts of it got captured by the same psychology – the same purity tests and moral inversions. The same substitute religion, but with different saints and demons.
The ultimate villain, of course, is always the same. The woke left made Jews acceptable targets through “anti-Zionism.” The woke right is trying the same trick while rehabilitating old libels about Jewish control of finance and media, secret cabals pulling the strings.
Both sides think they're brave truth-tellers on the right side of history. In reality, both are abandoning reason, evidence, and moral clarity for the tribe. Neither will admit – or can even see – that civilisation depends on the principles they're busy discarding.
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This is a follow-up piece to last week's How to Deal with a Leftist (link below). This went through a dozen different versions before I landed on a Q&A, which seems the clearest way to highlight what's going on here. Comments are open for a bit. Let me know what you think of either piece. And thanks for reading.
https://www.gadflynotes.com/p/how-to-deal-with-a-leftist
Sadly and depressingly spot on. Tribal thinking has become so widespread. Could it be that as national boundaries are eroding, people need to identify with some kind of tribe and the internet makes it possible. Or is it the erosion of Christian values? Then there’s the slow indoctrination that’s been happening in the west via the Frankfurt School and the Fabian Society both of which want to destroy western democracies, values and culture. People want something to believe in and are currently scrabbling around to find a tribe amongst all the chaos. Unfortunately it would seem that too many educated people have lost the ability to think critically and are choosing the tribe that shouts the loudest. I can only think that they’re basically cowards.
I loved the piece from last week. I used to write comments in the Guardian during the Brexit debate and thoroughly enjoyed winding up all the emerging wokerati.