I used to give a three-part definition ofa critical theory, or critical consciousness, so Woke, derived from Max Horkheimer, who created the critical theory:

1) utopian concept of society
2) critical attitude towards everything opposing that concept
3) activist duty for 1 & 2 🧵 The question really is how can we tell "Woke Right" from people who want to save our country. The equally hard question from five years ago was how do we tell "Woke (Left)" from people who just have a socially progressive left agenda? It's hard, but these criteria are key.

Reading about Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign and thinking about the Woke Right. I don't know if that's what's going on, but it's definitely plausible. The bad part is that if so, it's even more devious than Mao was. 🧵 Mao launched his infamous Hundred Flowers Campaign in the wake of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956, which triggered a wave of "de-Stalinization" across the Communist world with everyone trying to put distance between themselves and Stalin and his abuses.

In light of recent developments, it's worthwhile to revisit George Soros and his methodologies for social change. He calls the method "reflexivity," and you cannot understand today's psychological manipulation and mass-formation psychosis without it.
newdiscourses.com/2024/04/the-re… Reflexive pushes take advantage of the gap between perception and reality to drive rapid social change. In practice, the first step is to create a widely believed misperception. This is accomplished through a "reflexive push" in which a desired fallacy is pushed hard all at once.

Many people misunderstand me about what I think the threat of the Red Conservatives ("Woke Right") really is. It's not to seize and claim power, although they'd gladly take it. It's to spark conflict and ultimately scatter the loose coalition that elected Trump and split MAGA.🧵 Understanding my perspective on the Woke Right's purpose requires understanding first that I don't think it's a fully organic movement but instead one that probably mostly started organically and has been co-opted by savvier enemies of America (or was their creation).

Despite the evidences of the last few years, many people remain skeptical of conspiracy theory-sounding explanations for social movements. Like, are they really centrally controlled, or are they organic? Well, let me ask you this: do you believe in venture capitalism?🧵 The venture capitalist model pretty neatly explains how you can have quasi-coordinated social engineering that isn't centrally manufactured. Think of large NGOs and such as operating like venture capitalists for cultural activism and you pretty much have the model.

I'm going to attempt to explain how Woke people (Left and Right) can say Marx got some things right and is still useful even though his specific conclusions were wrong and sound credible. I'm also going to explain why they're dangerously wrong. 🧵
This little sketch is the key to my argument, so let me explain what it is. It's a position together with a heading (think airplanes or sea navigation), or, alternatively, a depiction of position and momentum, not position alone. Understanding that both matter is key here.

Wtf is this? Some pompous post-liberal manifesto for the future that fails to understand how we actually got where we are through manipulation and acts of political warfare, is based on "belonging," and looks back to the golden era of the New Deal (and FDR) for its inspiration?!

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1867549950491480367

What amounts to "Conservatives for the New Deal" (big state power) immediately after a bunch of Tech Lords, ESG dudes, and Democrats get invited into the White House after a strong reelection win by Trump? What's going on here?

According to the All-Knowing Internet, I still haven't defined "Woke Right" and don't know what "Woke" means. So, let's do this AGAIN. 🧵

Woke means "woke up." It means "woke up from false consciousness." That means "woke up from reality as it is to belief in structural power." What is structural power? It is not institutional power. It is not individual power. It is not even government power. It's a far vaster conspiracy than any of those. Structural power is the power rooted in the way we have been programmed to interpret the world.

The founding fathers of America were not Woke, and particularly were not Woke by dint of seeking revolution from a tyrannical government. Woke is a set of underlying metaphysical commitments and an operating system that runs on constructivism and lust for power. Not American.

https://twitter.com/SovMichael/status/1866913622959513821

I want you to understand that the Woke Right who peddle these narratives about me are not doing so because they are stupid (or, not wholly so). They're doing so because they are lying, and they know they are lying. They are blending American and French Revolution ON PURPOSE.

"James Lindsay is wrong about Wokeness"
"[Some dork] outlined the differences between Marxism and Wokeness."

The Woke Right, almost unbelievably, is now trying to claim Woke isn't Woke Marxism, just like the Woke Left did, after years of recognizing that it is. Revisionists!
That Wokeness is a derivative of Marxism is really beyond dispute at this point, but for some reason, the Woke Right now wants to muddy that water and get away from it. The evolution of Marxism into what we've called "Woke Marxism" or "Wokeness" is easily and well documented.

If you're struggling with the term "Woke Right" because for you "Woke" means "Left" and "Left" means "them" while "Right" means "us," I want to suggest to you that you might need to realign your conception of "us" and "them" in a way that isn't "Left/Right." Personally, I don't think we should be splitting the population into antagonistic binaries at all since each of these different factions holds different positions, but if you insist on boiling it down to "us/them," you should probably identify the right "us" and "them."

The Woke Right are a joke. They parade about talking about how they alone have solutions, but they don't even identify the problems. Their solution is "give us power." They rage about cultural rot but never talk about solutions for the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act or ESG. For people who claim to have taken up a structural(ist) view of the world, they don't have the slightest idea what structures are causing the problems we actually face. They think it's that culture went sideways because people like them couldn't force them into certain values.

Let's do another lesson on propaganda! It's so important to understand the various elements of propaganda in shaping opinion, especially on social media, where it can look very organic. I want to talk about two paired phenomena here: manufactured consensus and audience capture. 🧵 I actually want to start by talking about something the Communists did in Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which, in the latter case, got described with the term "planned spontaneity." Manufactured consensus very frequently follows from orchestrated spontaneity.

The post-liberals (Woke Right) are actually progressives in the same way the Progressives/Marxists are a RETVRN movement. Post-liberalism holds that liberalism had its time and now the future is marching on to something different and they're AHEAD of the curve, differently. They believe they not only see the correct future but are its shapers, and anyone who doesn't get along with them and their ambitions is stuck in the past and therefore on... the wrong side of history. They're just progressives with a different view of progress than the Left.

I legit have a criticism of Israel about Gaza, just one, really, and I've only ever heard one other person say it. Everyone else whining about it seems to me to be whining about entirely the wrong thing or hooked on obvious propaganda. To be completely fair, my criticism is a potential criticism because it's HELLA conspiracy theory, but most of those that aren't really stupid pan out, so I'm pretty confident it's not wrong. To the degree that it's right, I'm concerned. To the degree that it's wrong, I'm not.

So this is my big-brained idea about why Marxism is always going sideways, particularly with the groups it claims to champion, as an analysis of their dialectical theory. This is just going to be a little technical, so not everyone is going to dig it. 🧵 So Marxism is dialectical, and the dialectical theory isn't just that there's a unification of opposites (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). There's an additional part of the story: the antithesis or "negative" arises from within the original thesis ("abstract" in Hegel's telling).

Someone sent me this clip of Tim Pool demonstrating fully that he doesn't understand virtually any of the terms in the debate at all, most importantly "Leftist." This is the most confused garbage take I've ever heard from him amongst much serious competition. Maybe because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'll try to explain some of this preposterous confusion. Not understanding "Leftism" is a philosophical, practical, and political orientation that qualifies as a worldview with its own suite of ideologies is the first hurdle.

My introduction to the Woke Right came almost four years ago at a small conference hosted by the Claremont Institute at which, at lunch, not from the stage, a fellow was already saying, "at least Hitler knew how to stop Communists," just like you're all seeing suddenly today. When I attempted to sound the alarm in early February 2021, I was almost cancelled. Maybe that's on me and how I worded it, but I was viciously smeared as anti-Semitic and found out a few months later that I had made a blacklist of major "conservative" media personalities.

It has unfortunately become time to talk about the catastrophic mistake that defined and created Fascism. The Woke Right have made this discussion unavoidable. Fascism is the bastard child of Marxism, a usurping son that seeks to complete the Marxist social vision "correctly." 🧵 Because Fascism is little more than a reactionary offshoot of Marxism, we have to understand just a little about Marxism to describe the fatal error of Fascism. Luckily, the Woke Right has spent the week endorsing Marxist analysis as far as this goes, so they'll accept this.

As many of you know, I have been annoyingly critical of the so-called "Woke Right," but I haven't yet put substance to the accusation that it's really "Woke." Well, I may have now.

Like I did years ago with Leftist academia, I have landed a hoax article against the "Woke Right." You can read about this little experiment here, but I'm also going to do a thread directly on X that explains the story a little differently.

The short version is that their leading publication accepted a hoax pulled from part of the Communist Manifesto.
newdiscourses.com/2024/12/a-comm…

It's excellent that we have stood in the way of a Communist revolution here in America and may be able to stop it now, and may be able to lead the free world out of it. I'll be dedicating most of the coming year to explaining this unique Communism, which is Marxist AND Fascist. As you've heard me saying for a long time if you follow, what I call 21st Century Communism, which derives from Deng Xiaoping Theory and depends upon our internet/social media technology, is a deliberate fusion of Marxism and Fascism. That's what we've been living through.