An Anthropology of The Woke Right (Why You Need US)

Join us in a riveting discussion on the evolution of the concept of the 'woke right,' which has become a contentious tool for targeting individuals like us. We will analyze a viral piece that breaks down the strategic methods employed by what is referred to as the 'non-woke right.' We delve into the nuances of identity politics, the transformation of the right-wing movement, and the criticisms from traditional conservatives. This episode examines the clash between the traditional right and the modern, so-called 'woke right,' exploring the contention over cultural norms, skepticism, and the evolving political landscape.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing the concept of the woke, right, and how it has evolved to be a tool to attack people like you and me. And we are also going to be discussing the play by play of a piece that has sort of gone viral on this.

That is a tool for how the the non-work Right. Can attack and destroy people like you and me.

Malcolm Collins (2): Ooh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: When the term was forced popularized by James Lindsay, I don't know if he coined it, but the, the broad vague idea is it was for sort of right wing extremist who used some tactics that reminded them of the left, like not really engaging in debates, not really engaging in the other side, critically, et cetera.

Simone Collins: Identity politics. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Identity politics. Yeah. It has dramatically evolved since then as a concept to mean the new Right. As a political movement to very explicitly attack people like you and me. And so to give you what I mean, I'll be reading a bit from the piece here. This, I obviously, I skip around to the center where it gets into the, like the meat of the topic.

Hmm. Title, the woke wright stands at the door. And so they say the MAGA right has strange and sinister qualities, which look nothing like the traditional religious wing of conservatism. Familiar from our era of William F. Buckley, or anti-government libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

It's. Anarchic rejection of truth. It's Nietzsche esque embrace of power as self-justifying it's unashamed anti-liberal and it's glee and transgressing boundaries and giving offense are something new to the right. And I'm gonna stop there before I go into the next part because I'd actually say everything he says so far.

Exactly this channel. Yeah, not the, not the traditional religious, right? Yeah. Certainly we're not libertarian either. We have criticized libertarianism the rejection of what he calls truth. Now, keep in mind when he says truth, he'll get into what he means by that later. He means the truth that's decided on by the elites.

Oh, no, basically. And how dare they question what, what us and the, the intellectuals say um, on really. And

Speaker: to protect the world from devastation,

Speaker 2: to unite all peoples within our nation to

Speaker: denounce the evils

Speaker 2: of

Speaker: truth and

Speaker 2: love. To extend our reach to the stars above

Malcolm Collins: then we talked about the, the nietzschean embrace of power itself justifying first we're fans of niche. We've said this in other videos, not enough to pronounce his name correctly. I read his stuff and I thought it was good.

It was more like I went to his stuff while we were doing a podcast. 'cause I was like, how bad can this really be? And I'm like, oh. This all sounds fairly inoffensive and like decent advice and even that niche guy. Decent advice. Yeah. Niche. Look, I'm not gonna dirty my mouth with un-American words or, or sounds Okay.

Again, transgressing boundaries with like, with a joke like that. Right. You know, sort of playing into this, the idea of power is self-justifying. Well, I wouldn't say that the do right sees power is just self-justifying. It does see power as and we'll get into this because we're also gonna get into, in this, this video, the concept of is there such a thing as like, like should we hold to the concept of no enemies to the right?

Simone Collins: And is it a reference to the PHAs.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, it might be. But the, the point of it means it's like the right wing and the right wing generally doesn't, is it doesn't eat its own in the way the left wing does. Mm-hmm. And it's like, let's not start that in the way these people trying to coin this new, this woke.

Right. Yeah. Because otherwise you'll

Simone Collins: break the line. That's why it was to the right shield. But I'll

Malcolm Collins: say, and we'll get into this later. Okay. Yeah. Is there is actually utility and being able to call out certain types of right wing beliefs as damaging and traitorous. Yeah. And here I'll get into, I'll, I'll use sort of Nick Fuentes as an avatar for this is specifically we need to, well, we shouldn't call out an individual for having beliefs that are extremely right wing.

I, I think that just shutting down conversation, not engaging with that stuff, I think that's bad, right? Yeah, totally. But, but. If you come to the table and you used the right wing sort of social media ecosystem to build a platform, and then you start to say if the mainstream right wing organizations like the president and stuff like that don't capitulate to my vision of the right wing party.

I will tell my voters, which he did to not vote for mainstream conservative candidates. You're just, and I'd even say that all of that is okay up until the point where the direction you want them to shift could never win an actual election cycle.

Malcolm Collins (2): Mm-hmm. And if

Malcolm Collins: you are playing this game, and it's clearly not like even if I secretly held all of your beliefs, I would not be doing the things you are doing because they are directly counter to your own stated beliefs.

And so if you are doing them, it must mean you don't really hold those beliefs and you're just sort of parasitizing the right wing social media landscape to build clout yourself.

Malcolm Collins (2): Mm-hmm. Or you're

Malcolm Collins: just incredibly stupid and can't think five steps ahead. But I'm gonna guess it's the first one. I mean, we'll get into evidence for that and, and, and other things here.

So I do think we do need to be able to say when somebody's regularly telling their followers to not vote or not regularly, if they ever use the goodwill of the right to build a right wing audience and then tell their followers not to vote for mainstream right wing politicians. E especially if it's over insane things like Trump's VP being in an interracial marriage, buddy.

If we go back to a party against interracial marriages, you're not gonna win any election cycle, even if only Republicans are voting. But we'll get into all that in a second. But, so I, the reason why I was just going over all this, you know, transgressing boundaries with degrees anti-liberal, a lot of people see a lot of our philosophy 'cause we've done videos where we talk about the benefits of monarchy, where we talk about the benefits of social systems, where it's not one individual, one vote.

Where we talk about ways that capitalism could fail us because we're open to criticizing these questions. And then the old right, just wasn't open to questioning or criticizing these things. And you see this across the right now you know, whether it's courtesy Arvin mainstream, right-wing monarchist who's been on our, our show.

So obviously, you know, aligned with us or the aristocratic utensil you know, another monarchist who's been on the show. And so when they say the woke right now, they're talking about. You, me and our friends, and they're saying, why can't we just go back to that theocratic system, that libertarian system?

Wow. That was still aristocratic and elitist where we held sway.

Simone Collins: Wow. But gosh, is really, I, I just this morning listened to Barry Weiss's interview with the author of the free presses piece on the Rise of the Woke. Right. And this is Recontextualizing so many of the things that the author was saying. Yeah.

Because he, yeah. He was really arguing that this is identity politics and it's just white nationalists and it's, they're coming for your sons. But then, you know, he was talking about various instances where there were people who were like a radicalized headmaster at his. Sons, I think it was a classical Christian school.

Yeah. And like he, yeah, he was clearly identifying as one of those more old guard nineties Republican Christians who wanted to legislate their values upon other people, whether or not they held his same religious beliefs, so, wow. Yeah. Which is not cool from our perspective. Yeah. Get off my lawn.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and, and, and I also note here that they try to police the arguments that you can make.

So they'll say something like, the woke right is, you know, white nationalists when they're generally not white nationalists. Mm-hmm. Because they play identity politics, right? Like, but, but they would play us as playing identity politics because we've pointed out before, right? Like. There genuinely is a, a sort of evolved cabal of interest that victimizes straight white males throughout most of the West.

And you are trying to set up the game board to say that we can't say that, that we can't see that we might have a shared common interest. Was anyone else who's victimized for this same reason now? No, this isn't just straight white males who are black males are victimized by this system. White women are victimized by this.

Well, white women are probably one group that's not let's say Chinese women are victimized by this

Malcolm Collins (2): system.

Malcolm Collins: You know, a lot of people are victimized by the system and have common cause to, to recognize that they are. But when you point out that we're not allowed to recognize that, and we're not allowed to have in-group preference as a system for rec, for, for fighting that you're sort of.

Defanging, one of the core arguments you can make that's not in the traditional theocratic camp of arguments to prevent us from having relevance. And yet it is absolutely something we need to recognize within the current world. But I wanna get back to the thing that they're getting fundamentally wrong.

And it's glee of transgressing boundaries in giving a offense or something new on the right.

An embrace of postmodernism, which until recently was exclusively property of the illiberal left. And this is what they're all getting wrong. They keep associating, and you'll see this throughout. This is the new right, or the woke, right, as they call it, with postmodernism. And they draw this because they see our glee and transgress values.

If you look at our video on the, a aesthetics of the new right. We did with Ra nationalist and sort of the aesthetics of his magazine. Men, what is it? Men Man's World. Yeah. You look at the art of this you see tons of boundary transgressions. You see integration of AI and anime was our memes and everything like that, which people see as like low culture and vulgar.

And they're trying to police us into not using these things, but we don't do it for the reasons that the postmodernists do it. Essentially and I, and I looked up like, what's the definition of postmodernism? Because if you're watching this and you're like, what is, what is postmodernism?

Postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of grand narratives in universal truths associated with modernism. And we'll get into what modernism is within these guys' minds and everything like that. And they're confusing anti-elitism. IE we reject their social norms with rejecting all social lures.

Ah

Malcolm Collins (2): hmm. So they

Malcolm Collins: basically came and they go, why won't you play with the rules that we set up? Oh, you refuse to play by my rules, the rules of the elite. Therefore you must be anti rule altogether. You seem to glee in violating my rules. Therefore, you must not have any system of ethics or rules. And that's not true.

We have a new system of ethics or rules that we are convergently evolving into. A great example of this that I've mentioned was, was man's world, is they did something originally that we did originally, which is that they published you know, trip breaking rules old Playboy like images like, like vintage stuff, right?

Because it's like classy, classic American transgressing boundaries. But then people are like, look, I wanna use this at the coffee table book. I have kids in my house, like, I understand why you're doing this, but I want this to be something that's consumable by kids. And in our video we used to curse and insert clips where people curse quite frequently.

And now I try pretty hard to remove all curse words from our episodes. 'cause some people were like, Hey kids, watch this. And so we are vulgar in that we transgress boundaries and we may talk about sex and sexuality, honestly, and we may talk about kinks honestly, but we, we don't insert vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity.

Right. And you see this in, you know, raw nationalist, intentionally not using punctuation correctly, intentionally not using grammar correctly. He's, he's doing this to thumb his nose at the elite institutions, right? Yeah. Well,

Simone Collins: and, and people with degrees from elite institutions sometimes choosing to adopt anonymous identities to hide the fact that they went to them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And you see this across the new, right? You see, obviously, once his face went to Yale the one who were chest ro no Bron age pervert, Ry Nationalist Oxford and Cambridge after he was dox. Like, you just keep seeing this after these people get dox, they are smart. They beat the old system.

They could be using the old system of a crutch in the way that this guy does, but they don't because they wanna play by the new rules. The rules were only your ideas matter, right? And I think that, that these, these guys, guys like this, they don't like that, right? And so they're, and, and so we'll keep going into this, but fortunately for us, because we're gonna go into his entire game plan, his, his entire game plan rests on misunderstanding that the new right has no social norms and is genuinely postmodern, except that it has a new set of social norms that is in incredibly against high culture, you know.

The academia culture that this is the right way to do things. This is the wrong way to do things. Because we learned that those forms of culture were used by the urban monoculture as a lure to entice people. They said, if you wanna be high class, you wanna go to the opera you need to speak and act and not hold these beliefs and not say things like this and not question these things.

And we're like, oh, you found a way to use all of this against us. We're not playing that game anymore. That's before I go further.

Simone Collins: No, keep going.

Malcolm Collins: And then he goes on to say a generation ago, normies in the academy and other elite cultural institutions failed to see the postmodern left for what it was.

And so they were run over. But from their failure can be gleaned the postmodern rights weakness today, and we can exploit them. So they're coming at us, these old fogies, these boomer rights, okay. They are one of our enemies and they've stated ourselves, we will go anti right where we can, if we can use it to maintain the boomer status quo.

If we can keep you from theorizing about is like, like in the same way that the woke said, oh, there's, there's questions and things you're not allowed to muse. They say you can't muse whether democracy actually works. You can you, you know, whether it's actually the best system anymore now that we have AI and other tools, you know, you can't muse about human genetics.

You can't muse about like, we decided that those were topics you're not allowed to talk about. You know, you can't muse about where human sexuality, you know, how it works because that's not something right wing thinkers do. And I'm like, well then you left a huge gaping window that the left is used to bludgeon us for the past 50 years.

Malcolm Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You know, we are, we're engaging with this stuff because you guys failed, your system failed, your beliefs failed. It led to the rise. All of this horribleness that we're dealing with now grew on your rotting corpse.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Under their watch. And I guess, but it only makes sense though that they would, there would be some kind of death throw, there would be some type, type of desperate attempt to reclaim control or fight back against that which is replacing them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. One, one of the funny things I'll often find is, is the person who often gets targeted as like the new, the woke right guy. And I think it's just 'cause he's decided to fight back against this concept, which good on him for doing this is oh, what's his, his name? He does Lotus Eaters. Sargon acad. Oh. And, and what's funny, it's funny, funny about Sargon acad, if you look at Sargon cod's, like actual values and, and policy I think he would frame us as being like left wing people in a right wing space. Yeah. When you actually look at our values rather than, than what we say or our public opinion we are to the right of him. The only space that I can find where he's significantly to the right of us is on abortion.

And I'd say that we are right of center on abortion. We definitely want a lot more restrictions on it. But we're not for life being as a conception. And I think that he's at around that area. But he's actually an atheist and we are quite religious now. While we started, our influencer lives the atheist. I even go to First Hills. We're religious extremists now. Which puts us also in, in quite a more conservative camp. But because our religion is different, other people are like, eh but it's probably no different than a conservative Mormon or something.

So, you know,. But I, but I always find that interesting that somehow he's known as this far right person, but it's actually just because he rose to fame during the era of cancellation.

And during the era of YouTube demonetization and everything like that. And so he was like de fenestrated for pretty milk toast views which is kind of sad, right? Like, yeah, he, he paved the ray for a lot of the rest of us. But you might be thinking, oh, it's just this one piece who frames the woke right?

As postmodern. So I'm gonna go to another piece. This is a, is there a woke right by the American reformer? Hmm. Okay. And, and they were quoting somebody else, oh is, so they say, for example, in 2020, I succinctly defined wokeness as society is divided into oppressed and oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, et cetera.

Now note, he wants to prevent people from saying that, right? That's a problem if society is literally divided into oppressed and oppressor class groups. And one of the oppressed groups is white, straight people and males, right? Mm-hmm. Like there clearly is a social hierarchy of ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations within the urban monoculture.

And he's like, you are on the woke, right? If you call that out. So. Hegemonic power, but privileged people are blind. So three, we need to defer to the lived experiences of the marginalized to four dismantle the unjust systems. Basically he's saying, you can't call out the current system that we're under right now, or you're in the woke.

Right. And this was the something that a lot of the old right people started ringing about when people went out there and been like, no, the system is rigged against men right now. There is an earning gap, a pay gap among youth. Apparently this was something we needed to panic about when it was women for young men right now.

And yet we don't have that. There is.

Simone Collins: Whoa, really? I didn't know that. So for like college grads.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's an employment gap. There's a obviously getting into college gap. There's an education gap. It's just sort of all across the board. Young men are obviously systemically discriminated against in society.

Yeah, I didn't know there was a,

Simone Collins: a pay gap though, honestly. I just figured like, if anything that the college gap was favorables, maybe it would drive more young men into the trades, which are lucrative and practical and going to do better, I think initially with ai. Anyway, so, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and so then he goes on here and he says, so from here he, he seeks to redefine woke, right?

And precisely analogous terms, one society is divided into straight white men and their enemies. Now very few. Like well-known people in the woke right here would say straight white men and their enemies. We would say the convergence, this is a bit like saying the left is about you know, trans black, gay women and their enemies.

And it's like, no. It's about all of the intersecting discriminated groups that have some reason to want equality to be reintroduced to our society. Right. Yeah. So it is. Straight men and white men and other, and there's a lot of other, like Asian men are, are, are in terms of college admission, for example much more discriminated against than white men.

Jews are, are more discriminated against in some context and believe because they outperform other groups just about any group that is generally speaking, outperforming other groups due to more work. You know, as we pointed out with Asian groups, they just spend a lot more time working on homework.

I think it was, it was like 11 extra hours a week and I was like,

Simone Collins: yeah, like,

Malcolm Collins: okay, I get it. They're trying to normalize for that, remove that from them. So they're trying to, why do they need to take this weapon away from us? Because when they do, then they can bring the right conversation back to only let's impose the, our theocratic norms.

Let's remove regulation. Right. Instead of let's try to build a society that works. Yeah. And then two hegemonic norms. The longhouse post-war consensus. Judeo Christianity, but normies are blind. So three, we need to red pill them. Four. Retake the west. Okay. But here's the thing, we, the west has been conquered by the urban monoculture.

This is very obvious. This is a new cultural movement. If you value. If, if you, if you view your culture as an iteration of the ancient Western tradition, and keep in mind there's many, they pretend like there's one ancient Western tradition. Like for example, the most base level, the Protestant tradition and the Catholic tradition are not the same tradition.

The, the Orthodox tradition is not the same tradition. The Jewish tradition is not the same tradition. Yeah. We are all allied together as descendants of a tradition. That used to allow multiple groups that were different from each other to work together in harmony because the fire nation attacked, you know, the, the urban monoculture came along and said, no, there can only be one way of thinking and one way of acting.

And if you look at one of the things that made the ancient Western tradition unique, like you look at the early Americas is it was many highly diverse groups. And I I I, I talk to people today who like just don't know their history and they're like, come on, early America wasn't as diverse as modern America.

And I'm like, no. It was culturally significantly more diverse. If you're contrasting Quaker and cavalier views on just about anything, or Quaker in Puritan or Puritan in Cavalier or Cavalier in backwards all of these cultures were, I mean, no one in America today are, are very few. You're not gonna have like a major cultural region in the US that's like, well, yeah, some humans should be owned by other humans because there are a genetic subways, you know, but that was common back then.

And, and it was like an ex, well, they must be

Simone Collins: referring to. Racial diversity than I guess, right?

Malcolm Collins: No. No. They, they, they have this myth of America as a Christian nation. No. When they don't understand that Christianity was in Quakerism was probably as, as distant. I, I would say that these two things are as distant from each other.

Like if you're viewing Quaker Christianity and Puritan Christianity. Yeah. As set, set, what is it? Roman Mass Catholics and Unitarian universalism. Oh yeah. No,

Simone Collins: super, super different. Well, and then you had the Cavaliers in the south who kind of didn't really care the, like they were just the second sons who were looking to make fortune.

They were so, yeah, there was, there was massive religious diversity. Like you had two religion religious extremists who were super against the Church of England, didn't like what they were doing. And then you had the guys who were like, yeah. I'm fine with the Church of England would've stayed had I inherited the house, you know, but,

Malcolm Collins: but what I'm pointing out here is they're coming to the table saying you can't point out that something like a longhouse exists.

That something like Judeo-Christian value systems exists crazy. That something like the urban monoculture exists and that they are our enemies. That's

Simone Collins: crazy.

Malcolm Collins: And you can't point out that people need to be red pilled or woken up that our mainstream narratives are wrong. Right? Like they, this is what they come to the table whi because they want to undermine us.

These people are not like of the right wing, right wing movement. You can try to come up with a phrase for them. But I, I, I think like in the same way that they, they call the woke, right? I, I, I, people are like, they're not real, right? It's not that they're real, right? I guess Boomer, right? They're boomer, right?

Simone Collins: Or Christian Caliphate.

Malcolm Collins: No they're not. Because there are extremist Christians on the woke, right? There are good guy extremist Christians, right? Yeah. So they're not that they are boomer, right? They are. They want to recreate the right, that created the wokes that the wokes already beat. You had your shot guys.

And yes, I am Ian and I view your weakness with disgust. But yeah. So it's not just them that are enemies. I've also noted, and I don't like syn. Anything bad about Nick Fuentes? Nick Foes is one of the first mainstream figures to talk about us. He talked about us in positive terms.

I don't I think that he's sort of doing a shtick similar to what Andrew Tate is. I, as we note, I sort of think Andrew Tate became the shtick. He reminds me of the guy in Tropic Thunder who forgot if he was playing a character or not anymore.

Speaker 2: For 400 years, that word has kept us down. What the ?

Took a whole lot of time just to get up that hill. Now we up in the big leagues getting out there the bat. Long as we live it. You me, baby.

Speaker 3: That's the theme song for the Jeffersons. You really need help

Speaker 2: and just 'cause the theme song. Don't make it not true.

Malcolm Collins: And now he's just the character every day when he wakes up.

I don't, I think Nick Fuentes is very aware of what he's doing. But I don't, I think that part of me makes me even sadder that he's doing it because he knows that his views hurt our overall chances of winning. And he's more concerned with his status. You know, like trying to make antisemitism institutional to right wing institutions.

Even if you and I were secretly anti-Semitic, we wouldn't push that because it wouldn't, you need to win the ink. We're mental victories first, even if that's your long term goal.

Simone Collins: Well, do you think maybe, maybe he sees it as trying to move the Overton window like he knows. It's not gonna lead to any real progress, but he just is trying to change what people think is the face.

Even, even

Malcolm Collins: if that was the case and he wouldn't tell people not to vote for Trump. But he seems to sincerely, and, and keep in mind, you can look at our videos of the, the bigots turned against Trump, you know, leather Apron Club did the same thing. Don't vote for Trump. David Duke did the same thing.

Richard Spencer did the same thing. We've sort of seen this across this sort of group that went really far in this one direction. So it's not just like Nick Fuentes who was doing this. Yeah. I think all of these guys can be perfectly pleasant human beings. I think a lot of them are intellectual powerhouses.

I really like leather Apron Club as a thinker. But I think that at the end of the day, if you gave somebody a knife once and they stabbed you in the back, you can never give them a knife again. That's the problem, right? Yeah. Like if they, they oppose our collective interest. Because they know Donald Trump winning is better than Kamala winning, like from their own stated value set.

So either they're lying about their value set or they don't actually care about that value set. They just care about using people. I'm just

Simone Collins: trying to think if there's any other thing. Maybe if they think that if there's four more years for unrest to be fermented among the right, then they will be even stronger.

Like there's something, there's an inherent weakening that takes place when your side has won and you become indolent. I'm, I'm just trying to think through what, what else it could possibly be, because it just seems so, otherwise

Malcolm Collins: intentionally self-serving. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I, fortunately a lot of these people have sort of been pushed out of the mainstream rite or the woke right.

Because the, the, when, when the right has more solidified our alliance with Israel. Mm-hmm. Which was really sort of forced through these recent wars. IE forced to pick a side and before a lot of people on the right didn't really feel like they had to pick a side. Mm-hmm. And they saw, oh, the left is the anti-Israel party.

I am enough anti-Semitic that now I'm conflicted and it might be worse supporting the left. So I think that's what we're getting here. But let's go back to this guy's writings because I think it's really interesting. It, this is back to the original article here it on how they're gonna defeat us in his 2004 book Explaining postmodernism, Stephen R.

Hicks posits three categories of thought about how the world has historically been ordered, premodern, modern and postmodern, where premodern emphasizes faith, hierarchy and duty to God. Modernism emphasizes reason, individualism, and autonomy, and. Postmodernism in turn sees reason as a sham authority, as a mass for power and groups as prior to individuals.

Now what's interesting to this is if you looked at the core actual ideology of the woke, right, it very clearly falls under not pre-modern face hierarchy and duty to God but much closer to reason, individualism and autonomy or what he calls modernism, but it doesn't reject the two other systems.

Mm-hmm. And this is what he's getting wrong, right? He thinks in the old mindset you have to choose one of these. Whereas what we say is we say, I believe in reason, individualism, and autonomy as core political values. But I think that also I need face hierarchy and a duty to God. And I also agree with what the postmodernist says.

Some people can use reason as a sham as they have captured the institutions that define what's true and what's not true.

Authority can be a mask to power. And many groups are using it as that right now. And groups do exist and have the capability of opposing my interests.

Simone Collins: Fair? Yeah.

Speaker: to protect the world from devastation,

Speaker 2: to unite all peoples within our nation to

Speaker: denounce the evils

Speaker 2: of

Speaker: truth and

Speaker 2: love. To extend our reach to the stars above

Malcolm Collins: Traditionalism or hicks equivalent to it anchors truth and holy books and prophets.

It's these people as spiritual beings in a divinely ordered world, traditionalism is ancient. Whereas modernism takes its cues from the enlightenment. Truth is what can be seen and provided reason and evidence, supplant, spiritualism, tribalism, and subjective intuition. And here what I note is I agree reason and evidence do supplant in the new right view in the woke Wrights view, spiritualism, tribalism and subjective intuition. Mm-hmm. But they do not supplant holy books and prophets.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You can, you can supplant, you can say Holy books and prophets have value, tradition has value.

Where spiritualism, tribalism into Tu subjective intuition, do not. That's like the core thing we rail against on this channel. Postmodernism is a NewCom emerging in post-war Europe. It adopts radical skeptical epistemology viewing claims to capital T. Truth as TEFL puts it as assertions of power efforts by dominant social actors to impose and legitimize their own often oppressive agendas.

Whereas you see. A truth claim, you should unmask it, look behind it to see whom it might benefit. Now here I'm saying why is it bad that we would want to do this? If somebody comes to me and they say, this thing is true, he's basically saying, if somebody more powerful than you, it's more degrees than you, with more institutional power to you, comes to you and says, this is true.

You shouldn't then ask how, who, who is this benefiting? This, this norm that you just created?

Malcolm Collins (2): Yeah. Who,

Malcolm Collins: who is it benefiting to say that men and women are actually exactly the same? Who is it benefiting? Right? Who, who is it benefiting to say that, that there are, I I, this is something that we need to ask whenever we hear something like this so we can understand why somebody might have a motivation to push a particular agenda.

Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: And yet he's saying, you can't do that. That's postmodern. You can't do that. Now, I would note you shouldn't pathologically do it. You shouldn't assume that nothing is true. But if anybody comes to you and says, this is true. Because I have more authority to you rather than because of reason or logic.

That is something you should be questioning. Scientific modernism wants to assess claims, not claimants. Postmodernism reverses the emphasis. Who were the scientists? CES Tofl, what color were they? What gender, what country were they in? What biases do they have? He's saying you can't ask those questions, but you need to.

It matters. If I have a study and it says Crest Toothpaste is the best toothpaste ever, and I know to the guy and I go, was there any chance that this was put out by Crest Scientist working on a Crest Grant? And the person is like, well, that's a pretty racist question to ask. You're like, it's not a racist question to ask.

It matters. Was it the Crest Scientist? And it matters just as much if you're talking about in group thing. If I read a report saying. You know, Catholics are the best. Everybody loves the Catholics and is put out by the Vatican or by like Notre Dame University, Moses. I mean, Notre Dame is super woke now, but you know what I mean, like old school.

I'm, I'm gonna need to have some skepticism around that, but I can't do that when it's an ethnic group. What, what, what, what if a Chinese scientist put out a paper in China saying Chinese people are better than every other asset group that could happen. You don't think that I should take into account that a Chinese scientist did that?

What you, what these people are trying to do is use core arguments in the same way. The left does, like simple arguments, like a Chinese report that comes out from China saying Chinese people are better than everyone else. That, that if I call that out, I'm a racist. They're trying to defang us of individual arguments here, individual pathways of argument until there's nothing left.

But their old system that they used in the fifties and sixties.

Malcolm Collins (2): Mm-hmm. Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Then to continue, you see what, you see what I mean there? This whole woke right thing is more insidious than you think.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yikes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. But when the enemy proverbially controls the definers of truth was in a culture. You know that and I know that and you tell me that, oh, sorry, this is something I wrote and I just said all that.

Oh, actually I actually think it's a good point, so I'll read it. Yes. But when the enemy proverbially controls the definers of truth within a culture, and you know, when I knew that they do, and you tell me I cannot question them, you are showing your hand. You are the enemy. Which is the truth about these people when they say you can't question dominant narratives, they're showing, they are setting the dominant narratives.

Malcolm Collins (2): Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many of these people vote against Trump and just say that they they are, they are on our side. But anyway radical skepticism is like the acid that eats through every container. And sure enough, postmodernism skepticism undermined itself. How could it be for anything if all truths claims, including its own, are mass for power?

The answer came in what Plecos and Lindsay identify as a second wave of postmodernism, which handily enough exempted itself from skepticism, identity and oppression now took center stage Society is best understood not as an association of autonomous individuals, but as contradict areas of groups contending for dominance and organized into hierarchies.

The third wave thus came to embrace exactly that sort of dogmatism and authoritarianism, which the first wave of postmodernism had set out to challenge an overthrow. Well, I see that this happened on the left, but that's not why we're throwing things out. We're not throwing them out reflexively in the way that previous groups are.

We are throwing them out as a matter of self-protection. We are examining them. We are saying people have used authority to mask things. People have used truth claims to mask hidden agendas, and therefore it's worth questioning them. And people have used high culture and saying, this is vulgar, and that's vulgar to control our actions.

Absolutely.

Simone Collins: They,

Malcolm Collins: they define questioning these things, like this entire string of questions I've been asking is a vulgar string of questions for a, a, a old right tea party. Right. You know, or whatever the f it is that they did. All right, so then to skip ahead, because it was unmoored from any commitment to objectivity or consistency, we could make both. You could work both sides of every street even better. It's radical skepticism. Here he is talking about the original wokes rejection of norms and revolutionary energy made it seemingly impervious to rational arguments and moral objections.

A perfect rhetorical fortress as George Luca, Enrique Scaffle call it Now, note here he's talking about you can't be radically skeptic. I think we need to be radically skeptic in a world where the dominant cultural force has basically said, it's our enemy, right? Yeah. Yeah. We need to reject cultural norms when the dominant cultural force is our enemy because they set the cultural norms and doing both of those gives us revolutionary energy.

That doesn't mean that we are anti rational argument. It means you need to actually make that rational argument and just say that you are confronting cultural norms.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Objecting to Wokes, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and empirical shoddiness got you mocked, disqualified, and personally attacked. However, philosophically unintelligible woke may have been.

Its rhetorical virality and sheer aggressiveness. Conquered the intelligentsia was astonishing speed. And he's right about this, that that did happen, but it doesn't undermine that we need to be skeptical and reject social norms to win. Stephen Hex 2004 book on postmodernism. So, so now I'm reading from, from the book.

Principles of Civility and Procedural Justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression. Born of asymmetrical power relations masks that can be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons add hominem arguments in your face shock tactics in equally cynical power displays, disagreements are met not with arguments.

The benefit of the doubt and the expectation that reason can prevail. But with as assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force, having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably. And again, here you can note that. This is trying to correlate skepticism with stuff like ad hominin in arguments fighting against powerful institutions as is a sort of pathology, right?

A decade later. His description is very accurately characterized in what might be called the alt-right. My own first glimpse of this strange new phenomenon came in 2014, was the Eruption of Gamergate, an episode in which anonymous trolls heaped abuse and threats on a female game developer.

No. The way here that this individual, this individual who claims to be on the right, our ally says

Simone Collins: Anti Gamergate

Malcolm Collins: Gamer Gate, an episode in which anonymous trolls heaped abuse and threats on a female video game

Simone Collins: developer. Oh, okay. He's not one of us. All right. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: These people are our enemies. They are our, they're not our enemies as much as the traitors are our enemies, because at least.

Presumably they still vote our way. But we need to keep in mind that they are coming for us and they have declared war against us. Right. And I think a lot of the right needs to pick a side, like especially the theocratic factions, because they can find a home on either side. Mm-hmm. They can either join people like this, who want the old social norms back, who want to control with power, or they can join the alliance the, the diverse alliance, which represents what these people call the woke.

Right. Which is okay with subverting cultural norms. And as we've noted in our other stuff, this largely also came as a shift as the cultural power center of the right, moved from the cavalier cultural region of the United States, or the deep south cultural region to the greater Appalachian or backwards cultural region.

Which basically went from an aristocratic cultural tradition to an anti aristocratic cultural tradition.

Malcolm Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which you see in right wing vulgarity is an anti aristocratic thing to do. It's, it's a way of signaling that you are not attempting to play the mainstream power game. And, and that's why it's seen as authenticating authenticity with, in what he calls the woke.

Right. It's, it's why Bronze Age perfect. Intentionally misspells things. Yeah. It's why zero HP Lovecraft intentionally breaks social conventions when he's talking. While the campaign was not political, it codes as white male, right wing and aggressively subversive. This is what he talked about.

Gamergate. Although better informed friends, warned me to pay attention. I shrugged off Gamergate as random online craziness. In reality, it debuted the joker, like nihilism of the postmodern. Right. And I'll note here, everything he said up until then was right. It did. You know, we've, we've had episodes where we talk about how the modern right came from this moment gamer game.

But gamer game, they were completely justified. Like it was insane. A woman was sleeping with games, journalists and they weren't disclosing this and they were writing about it, and she was cheating on her boyfriend the entire time. The, yeah, she wasn't

Simone Collins: exactly a bastion of the conservative values that I think this man stands for, but he's still choosing to side with her, technically speaking.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And. Right here. He's like, my friends warned me to pay attention to this. I thought it was beneath me very much. He's signaling I am not the type who cares about what goes on in gaming culture. Right. Like he's signaling why he doesn't engage with slow culture. He goes to the upper, he goes to plays in Broadway.

Even though those have been the, the, the vehicles of transmission of the woke mind virus of the urban monoculture.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But what, well,

Simone Collins: okay. I don't think opera is, but it, it's certainly been. A status signaler among those who are part of that community.

Malcolm Collins: But what he gets wrong is he says, in reality it debuted the joker like nihilism at the postmodern.

Right. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing about the postmodern Right. Is the nihilistic. You watch your episodes on this, but I'd argue it's the exact opposite. It's extremely vital. It's

Simone Collins: vitalistic. Yeah. In in, in the face of nihilism it says, no, we are proud of who we are. We will fight, we will endure.

We will take the future. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And he's like, but what about your weird pervy anime art? And I'm like, I'm not gonna let you police what I think is cool. Yeah. I think Hinze ish save Trump and hin. Big titty, anime girls look cool and that, you know, Trump is, is a, a, a ba with, with like missiles coming outta his mouth.

You, you, you want to police how vitalistic I can be because you see vitalism and a love of life without concern for your constraints as vulgar because you use vulgarity to police other groups to force them to fit into your cultural norms.

Someone who did notice and appreciate what was happening was Angela Nagel, whose 2017 book Kill All Normies Presciently identified the convergence of the alt-right with the far left. The alt-right she observed is a transgressive and wool breaking as the left once was true, like the left. It gleefully, averts, cultural norms struck, smug, ironic poses and or pros and embraced harassment and bullying.

First of all, no, you really don't get that much bullying on the right except when people have doubled down on positions that explicitly hurt other individuals. The gamer gate stuff happened because the girl who did all of this, when she was called out for it, didn't point out the fact that she was using the fact that she was sleeping with people to screw over other indie game devs in terms of not getting coverage.

She didn't pull back. She could, she. Immediately reached out and tried to attack and ruin the lives of the people who were calling her out. That is every time I have seen the quote unquote woke right, fight back, it is because somebody else attacked first. If you look at the Anna Valence, who was the most recent person canceled, who did all these attacks trying to ruin Kirsha the Fox v YouTuber's career again, like, we don't care about your norms.

We could be a V YouTuber, we can be an anime, Fox v YouTuber, whatever, right? Like, she could be a mainstream figure of the woke ride, but we, we do that and then some psycho comes in and tries to ruin our lives by lying about us with very normal takes. And we say, okay, f you, we can fight back. We're not afraid of figh