The rise of the woke Right

Read my full column on the Washington Examiner website.

Political commentator Tucker Carlson not only hosted a Nazi apologist on his show but celebrated him as “maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” this week.

Carlson was describing Darryl Cooper, who redefined former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, one of the heroes of Western civilization without whom Europe would have succumbed to Nazi rule, as the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also provided nuggets of laughably false historical non-analysis on social media this week, including the claim that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler made last-ditch efforts for peace with the United Kingdom and “would work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem” but was “ignored.”

Using the phrase “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem” is a red flag — featuring a white circle with a swastika in it.

And while others have debunked the unseriousness of these arguments, we are in danger of missing a deeper problem here: that we’re witnessing the rise of the woke Right.

Let’s take Cooper as an example. In one instance on social media, he shared two images from Paris. The first, on the left, was of Nazi leadership in front of the Eiffel Tower after occupying France during World War II. The second, on the right, was a collection of chubby drag queens during this summer’s Olympic Games opening ceremony.

“This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right,” Cooper wrote.

Now, of course, the yearslong Nazi occupation of France, including more than half a million French civilian and military deaths, was worse than a short on-screen appearance of drag queens this summer, with zero French civilian or military deaths to date. But this bizarre confusion of traditionalism for genocidal racism goes far beyond the shock-and-awe strategy of those who exist in the online world. At the heart of this belief system is the spread of populist wokeness that’s festering on both sides of the political aisle.

After all, is there any real difference between the woke Right and the woke Left? They’re both obsessed with identity politics. They both claim to be arbiters of objective truth while reveling in fantastical subjectivity to rewrite the history of the West in pursuit of power. And, of course, they both hate the Jews.

Once we understand the horseshoe of ideology, power, and antisemitism in this context, the true purpose of these sorts of “conversations” becomes clear. They have nothing to do with pushing boundaries or seeking the truth.

What we are actually seeing is reactionary rhetoric designed to capitalize on multiple social problems, including a distrust of tradition, a feeling of aimlessness, and a huge scoop of sheer ignorance, in order to reframe the bigotry of the past to cement leaders of the woke Right as movement-wide thought leaders.

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