Had no idea James had a thread here, but I'm not surprised. He's a distinct blend of hilarious, tragic, and insufferable, sort of like Tarl but without the fashion sense and cool thaumaturgy powers, and for the last year or two it's been increasingly clear where his story arc is headed. I'm guessing he's going to get a boost, what with Iran and this latest "MAGA Civil War" between Zionist neocons and everybody else, and while he can talk your ear off a la Jordan Peterson when it's just him and a free space to lecture, he does NOT handle confrontation well. He's got two modes: longwinded pretentious lecture, and shortwinded ad hominem snark, with the one he picks at any given moment largely depending on whether he feels he's getting pushback or not.
So even if the "woke right" forcememe continues to fail, I do expect him to produce some funny chimpouts in the near future.
(I missed the Arby's Saga when it happened, and I hope I don't miss the next one!)
he keeps arguing that "woke right" believe they're being "oppressed" by magical "systems" and it's a "big conspiracy theory they all cultish like believe in" even though the supreme court has ruled on cases involving this in favor of so-called "woke rights" lmfao just absurd
Two things you have to understand:
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First, a little bit before the "woke right" saga began, James got really into Gnosticism. I mean REALLY into Gnosticism. He started posting non-stop about gnostics and crytpo-gnostics, and how everything woke was really just the latest manifestation of an age old battle between gnostic cults on the one hand, and good, God-non-fearing boyos like himself on the other. His arguments were incredibly autistic, possibly even bordering on schizo, but this right here - the oppressive, magical system, conspiracy cult stuff - all stems from this (anti) Gnostic awakening of his.
I don't really save his posts, but the gist of it was that ever since Long Long Ago, gnostics - weird cult people who believe that the world is not what it appears to be, but is in fact an oppressive spiritual prison set up by a false god known as the Demiurge - were mucking about, trying to deny that the world was As It Appears. From this, James reasoned that Marxists - who believe they are oppressed and that the world is not as liberalism tells them it is - were in fact Gnostics. In a literal sense. He ran with this for months, growing more and more impassioned by it.
By extension, this becomes "everyone who believes they are oppressed and that the world is not as other people say it is, are Gnostics". The fact that belief in oppression and skepticism of what certain other people tell you is something which
everyone asserts at one point or another (even James, who thinks he's being oppressed by Gnostics, and that the world is not what Gnostics tell him it is), went unnoticed and unheeded. Instead, it slowly became "well, everyone on the right who believes they are oppressed, and that the world is not as liberal TV show hosts tell them it is, why, THEY must be Gnostics too!"
Hence the birth of the "Woke Right" meme. They're "on the right", but they also "think the system is flawed, which means gnostic, which means woke".
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But
second, and more importantly, James doesn't actually HAVE a definition for Woke Right, or at least not one which lasts more than a couple of podcasts. He's making it up as he goes along. As other people have pointed out, it's an emotive slur, like calling people "-phobes" or "Nazis" (increasingly, it's a DIRECT SYNONYM for calling people "Nazis"); he will apply it to whomever he feels is irritating him the most at the present moment.
Currently (by which I mean, as of the week or so I'm writing this), it's being used to refer to anyone who is not "a centrist", or more specifically, anyone who is neither a neocon, nor supports the state of Israel (Oct 7 was a major turning point for James, who is quite proud of having casually studied Hitler and the Third Reich, and is very much on board with the Shoah II Is Just Around the Corner school of thought). So, for example, everyone from Kanye to Thomas Massie to Tucker Carlson is "Woke Right", at least today, and all the people who weren't supporting the recent round of attacks on Iran (something like 85% of Trump's voting base)? Woke Rights, all of them.
I think the best way to understand the term,
as it is used in practice by James, is just to mentally replace it with "Alt Right" (which became a similar term of disparagement following Trump's first win) every time James brings it up. Or even "Nazi", because that's literally the final boss of Woke Right in James' mind (he can't actually SAY "Nazi", though, because much of his early work online was devoted to deconstructing and mocking lefties who called everyone Nazis. James is a solid upper-midwit; maybe not a genius, but certainly more than intelligent enough to see that he can't both smear his enemies as Woke AND openly adopt "Woke language" to do so).*
It doesn't have a real, objective, logical meaning. It simply means "somebody James doesn't like today".
*which is extra ironic, given that James' belief in shadowy gnostic conspiracies, imminent Nazi takeovers, and the unique need for special rights and regulations that benefit certain oppressed minorities (Jews) but not others, up to and including smashing traditional rights, like the First Amendment protecting antisemitism,
is itself pretty "Woke". The conspiracy theorist in ME tends to believe that James was smart enough to see where all his arguments were going to be heading, and thus came up with "Woke Right" as a way to pre-empt anyone from denouncing James as a woketard, too... but I could be over-estimating James' ability here.