Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right  ## Metadata - Author: [[Konstantin Kisin]] - Full Title: Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #woke - #political-ideology - #rhetoric Author: Anders Nøren Source: Substack (“Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right”) Reference: https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/thou-shalt-not-criticise-the-woke date created: {{date:2025-05-10}} {{time:14:30}} --- # Title: Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#📝-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#📖-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#🗒️-notes) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#🗣️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#📰-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#✅-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#🧪-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#📊-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#❓-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#🔮-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#💡-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#🧠-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#📊-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#🌍-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#✅-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#🔍-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#🔍-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#🎯-conclusion) ### References: 1. Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of Totalitarianism* 2. Community Notes debunking Darryl Cooper’s claims ## 📝 Summary: This essay traces how “woke”—once meaning alert to social injustice—devolved into a caricature that rejects objective truth as power play. It describes the Left’s shift to claiming “truth is violence,” dismantles history to sever collective identity, and warns that the Right is developing a mirror-image “Woke Right” logic: relativizing facts, exalting in-group narratives, and demonizing dissenters. ## 📖 Main Content: The author unpacks: 1. **Original “woke” ethos**: awareness of systemic injustice. 2. **Shift to power-linguistic theory**: truth as imposed narrative; claiming facts = violence. 3. **Historical iconoclasm**: toppling statues to erase shared roots. 4. **Arendt’s warning**: perpetual lying undermines capacity to discern right/wrong. 5. **Four-step woke logic**: in-groups as saviors, out-groups as villains, truth denies power. 6. **Emergence of “Woke Right”**: Carlson platforming extremist revisionists; reciprocal conspiracy framing. ### 🗒️ Notes - **Definition drift**: “woke” → insult for leftist extremism. - **Truth as violence**: powerful enforce “truth”; contesting is “linguistic abuse.” - **Statue iconoclasm**: physical & reputational erasure of history. - **Arendtian collapse**: endless lies destroy moral judgment. - **Woke Left logic**: - Victim/perpetrator identity groups. - Skepticism of all mainstream narratives. - Self-appointed “aware” minority. - Dissent = proof of bias. - **Woke Right parallel**: - Platforming Holocaust minimizers and Hitler apologists. - Historian Darryl Cooper debunked but embraced as “honest.” - Reciprocal relativism: “Your facts are lies; our lies are truth.” ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: > **Original**: “To claim that something is true is to abuse the power you have over others: it is an act of linguistic violence.” > > **Paraphrase**: Insisting on any supposed “truth” amounts to exerting dominance—words become weapons when used to enforce a version of reality. > **Original**: “History (and the truth more broadly) is to humans what roots are to trees… Strip a people of their history… and they are left unmoored.” > > **Paraphrase**: Just as roots anchor a tree, shared history grounds a society. Uproot those memories and people drift aimlessly, vulnerable to any prevailing narrative. ## 📰 Newsletter: Get primed for our next issue! We’ll explore how WordPress’s new default theme—Twenty Twenty-Six—leverages Full Site Editing to unlock true design freedom (no code required!). We’ll spotlight community hero @dev_jane’s plugin that auto-optimizes images on upload, and dive into the latest JavaScript framework trends powering headless WP sites. Plus: meet the folks behind WP Accessibility Day and discover 3 fresh Gutenberg block libraries. Delivered with our trademark wit and insider tips—don’t miss it! ## ✅ Action Items: “Draft a prompt that maps each new article to my goals as a GoDaddy Developer Advocate: - Emphasize open-source stewardship and transparent governance - Highlight strategies for onboarding contributors and funding sustainability - Tie each topic back to educational outreach in PHP, JS, Git, and core WP - Support my trajectory toward OSPO leadership and inclusive community building.” ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. **Narrative inversion** on the Right will mirror Left’s rise, accelerating mutual distrust. 2. Exposure to “truth-as-violence” rhetoric correlates with decreased media literacy. 3. Communities with strong historical literacy resist both Left and Right relativism. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Surveys** of online forums measuring belief in objective facts vs. power narratives. - **Content analysis** of mainstream and fringe media over past decade. - **Experimental design**: expose participants to relativist vs. fact-based messaging; test discernment. ### ❓ Questions: - How does teaching critical history impact susceptibility to conspiracy relativism? - Can early education in media literacy inoculate against both Woke Left and Woke Right logics? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Longitudinal tracking of “truth skepticism” in youth demographics. - Comparative studies of de-platforming effects on extremist spread. - Intervention trials using Arendt-inspired curricula on lie recognition. ### 💡 Implications: Understanding the mirror-politics of truth relativism can inform policy on education standards, platform moderation, and civic resilience against ideological polarization. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual**: Article lacks diagrams—add flowchart of “Woke logic” steps. - **Aural**: No audio version—recommend podcast excerpt for auditory learners. - **Verbal**: Rich in rhetoric and quotes—good for linguistic styles. - **Kinesthetic**: No interactive exercises—suggest role-play debates on “truth as power.” - **Logical**: Presents numbered logic—strong for analytical readers. - **Social**: No discussion prompts—add links to group forums on political rhetoric. - **Solitary**: Reflection questions could deepen engagement—include journaling prompts. - **Naturalistic**: No nature analogies beyond roots—could include ecosystem metaphors for ideas. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader**: Text is semantic, but images absent. - **Keyboard**: Plain text—navigable. - **Contrast**: N/A (text only). - **Resizing**: Responsive markup presumed—ensure CSS scales headings. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment: - **Cultural Relevance**: Focuses Western discourse—could add non-Western examples of truth politics. - **Inclusive Language**: Generally neutral; avoid “lunatic fringe.” - **Neurodiversity**: Dense prose—break into shorter paragraphs. - **Representation**: Limited identities—include global voices. - **Psychological Safety**: Trigger warning for extremist content recommended. ## ✅ Logical validity: - **Strong inductive reasoning** when connecting iconoclasm to identity unmooring (p. 3). - **Causal reasoning**: lies ⇒ loss of moral judgment, via Arendt quote—well supported. - **Valid counterarguments** absent—they dismiss Left claims without engaging empirical data. - **Fallacy**: **False dilemma** presenting only two camps (Left vs. Right) ignores moderates. Suggest adding nuance of center politics. ## 🔍 DARVO Analysis: - **Deny**: “Woke Left never claimed their arguments were true”—shifts blame to linguistic theory. - **Attack**: Labels critics as “lunatic fringe,” “charlatans”—ad hominem. - **Reverse Victim and Offender**: Frames Right-wing extremists as victims of “Woke” suppression. ## 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords**: “woke,” “truth,” “relativism” appear but not SEO-optimized. - **Meta description**: Missing—should summarize thesis in 155 chars. - **Headers**: No H2/H3 in original—add structured subheads. - **Length**: ~1,200 words—adequate depth. - **Links**: External (Arendt) but no internal cross-links. - **URL**: Friendly but add keywords (…/thou-shalt-not-criticise-woke-right). - **Images**: None—add infographic with alt-text. - **Mobile**: Single-column text—likely responsive. - **Engagement**: No calls to action—add share buttons, comment prompts. - **Schema**: Add Article schema for rich snippets. - **Social**: Enable Open Graph, Twitter Card tags. ## 🎯 Conclusion: This essay warns that both extremes on Left and Right weaponize “truth is power” logic: erasing shared history, privileging in-group narratives, and vilifying dissent. Only by reaffirming objective facts and teaching media literacy can society resist ideological polarization and preserve the roots that anchor collective judgment. - Document Tags: [[politics & society]] - Summary: Few people now remember what the word “woke” meant before it became an insult. - URL: https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/thou-shalt-not-criticise-the-woke ### Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right Few people now remember what the word “woke” meant before it became an insult. These days it is used by those of us who believe in reality to mock the lunatic fringe of the Left but it was not always thus. While the word has come to mean an ideology obsessed with victimhood, identity and the falsification of history to suit today’s political agenda, those who once proudly called themselves “woke” intended something else. It was, at that time, a self-congratulatory label which meant, first and foremost, being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues*,* especially in relation to racial and social justice”. As has been discussed *ad nauseam*, in practice, what this awareness of “facts” pertaining to various forms of “justice” meant was a framework in which certain groups were victims and other groups were victimisers. Some groups were suffering and their suffering was the responsibility of other groups which conspired to mistreat and take advantage of them. But a conspiratorial worldview of this nature cannot be maintained on faith alone. Explanations had to be given for why this false narrative was, in fact, not false at all. First, and highly relevant to our imminent discussion of the Woke *Right*, the Woke *Left* never claimed that the arguments they were making were *true*. Instead, rather than attempting to prove the impossible, they wisely made an entirely different claim: truth, they argued, is merely a linguistic projection of power. The powerful brainwash the rest of us into seeing the things they want us to believe as the truth. To claim that something is true is to abuse the power you have over others: it is an act of linguistic violence. This is why if you were to assert that you know how many genders there are or quote facts about contentious societal issues such as [police violence against minorities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruYXzlzoU_A&t=) that would be used as evidence of your poor character and nefarious intent. All it showed was your “bias”, “fragility” and so on. If this sounds a little abstract, a more concrete and even more relevant example is what the wokesters did to history. They attempted to destroy, both physically and reputationally, anything about the past that served as a reminder of the achievements of our society. Statues were torn down or defaced. Historical figures on whom we had looked with pride and to whom we looked for inspiration were attacked. [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6678bd34-2b5b-4c6e-9038-352216889461_1000x712.avif) Why? Because history (and the truth more broadly) is to humans what roots are to trees. It is a way of knowing which way is up and which way is down. Strip a people of their history, destroy the concept of truth itself, and they are left unmoored, floating in limbo, pushed and pulled in random directions by every new seductive force that comes along. As Hannah Arendt powerfully explained “the constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want”. The woke logic operates like this: 1) There are good and bad identity groups 2) You can’t trust anything you’ve been taught about history or anything you’re being told today because your beliefs are based on lies spread by people who are in control of society 3) There is a select group of people (us) who understand what’s *really* going on and we are bravely raising awareness of the issue 4) Anyone who disagrees with us or criticises us is doing so because they are a bad person and their criticism and disagreement just proves that we are right and they are bad The woke revolution which occurred over the last 10 years was bad enough. But the iron law of reality is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Having lived through a decade of this race Marxism which spread through our elite institutions like an aggressive cancer, I believe we are now witnessing the emergence of an equivalent phenomenon on the fringes of the Right. Tucker Carlson has just hosted a man called Darryl Cooper, on his show, describing him as “maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Cooper, who goes by the online moniker Martyr Made, is indeed incredibly honest. [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc1d49bd7-4896-4a9a-82e7-57a3805fe66a_1212x1182.jpeg) In addition to thinking that Adolf Hitler, a genocidal mass murderer, strolling through the Paris he had just conquered is highly preferable to drag queens, Cooper also explained that Churchill was the “chief villain of WW2”. The thread he posted on X following his interview with Carlson is so [historically illiterate](https://x.com/martyrmade/status/1831071833350901954) that every major claim he made was debunked on X itself within hours with Community Notes and in articles published by prominent historians. But this article is not about Cooper. I do not find him remotely interesting. There are and have always been lying charlatans and overconfident fools. What *is* interesting is the warm welcome he received on Tucker Carlson’s show and what it represents. The Woke Right for which Carlson is the undisputed spiritual leader is feeling its way to a logic of its own. It is far from being fully formed but it goes something like this:, Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right, Konstantin Kisin, 01jgbkfrdfxgv8ctevyav5zmq4.