Why Is The Right Becoming Like The Woke?

Reflections on the people who claim opposing foreign aid cuts makes them feel "radically unsafe"

I’ve spent many years being irritated by wokeness on the left. Some left-wingers, when you disagree with them, have a disappointing tendency to say that you are engaged in violent speech. So I’ve been irritated that the right has started becoming similarly woke—displaying the theatrics traditionally characteristic of the left—albeit in a way that is considerably dumber.

A particularly amusing goldmine of this kind of insanity is someone called Aimee Terese. Some representative tweets are shown below:

(The strange extra colon is only like the tenth weirdest thing about this).

There are, of course, many differences between hysterical left-wingers and hysterical right-wingers. The hysterical left wingers signal virtue, while the right-wingers signal vice. The left-wingers at least pretend to care minimally about morality. The right-wingers, in contrast, flout how little they give a shit about morality—wearing their callousness and indifference as a badge of honor. While both the annoying segments of the left and annoying segments of the right are obsessed with race and sexuality, it manifests itself in very different ways. The left-wingers go on about oppression of gays and blacks, while the right-wingers just call people the F-word and the N-word on the internet.

All this is to say that while I was quite irritated by left-wing wokes, the right-wingers are somehow worse. Not good!

But there are a great number of similarities between the two groups. First of all, both love painting themselves as victims. Even as Terese signaled to the world about her great love for the death of African children, she had to play the victim, complaining about bullying, how hard her life is, how hard her extended family’s life is, and emotional coercion. She described being “radically unsafe” because of the people advocating that we not abruptly shut off foreign aid, thus leading to the deaths of children.

I didn’t think there could be anything dumber than left-wingers invoking personal trauma to win arguments and saying that disagreeing with them makes them unsafe, but Terese has topped them. She thinks that if you oppose the current policy which is presently causing children to die, you are making her unsafe. Honestly, it reminds me of when left-wingers said that my presence made the debate community “unsafe” because I had tweeted in defense of free speech.

Oh Terese, you poor thing! I bet those starving Sudanese children who you support cutting off aid to really feel sorry for your privileged existence. While these people are starving to death, at least they do not have to feel “unsafe” from tweets in defense of foreign aid. They feel unsafe about other, more minor matters, like the fact that they do not have food and that their HIV treatment was recently cut off.

Another similarly foolish right-winger who also complained about the “emotional blackmail” of people arguing that cutting off foreign aid would cause deaths, even went on an extended soliloquy about his mother warning him of the importance of resisting emotional blackmail. Do we really need this degree of theatrics for a policy discussion?

During the heyday of the woke, it seemed like they used word games to avoid seriously discussing issues. They would advocate for abolishing the police, and then say a bunch of buzzwords when you point out the obvious downsides. But now the right is doing the same! They’re using buzzwords about emotional blackmail and bullying so that they can just ignore the downsides of their proposals. They’ve become obsessed with words, to the point of neglecting whether policies actually promote the good.

Another similarity between the woke and hyper online right wingers: these people tend to seem crazy and neurotic. I’m a longtime watcher of the Michael Knowles show—Knowles is a conservative who works for the daily wire. I disagree with him about just about everything, but he’s quite funny, and has impeccable vibes, so I watch his show regularly. One common segment of Knowles’s show involves reacting in video to hysterical people ranting on TikTok. In almost every video, as these people are ranting and raving, he’ll say smugly, with a chuckle, something like, “I don’t think these people seem too happy. Do you think they seem happy?”

I feel the same way about a lot of the right-wingers who have taken over Twitter. These people spend hours a day on the internet calling people slurs (note: it may sound like I’m making up that such people exist, but if you’ve spent time on Twitter, you know that I’m not). Is this really a fulfilling existence? Do you think Terese is happy? I don’t think she seems very happy.

Many of these people seem constantly filled with burning, inexplicable rage. Often they just seem to be mad at women in general. A while ago, some Gen-Z interns working in an office made a video of them dancing. The video bizarrely caused hundreds of thousands of right-wingers on the internet to write strange fanfiction about how these people represented what was wrong with western civilization. I even saw one person propose they should be deported, to mass applause from their right-wing fans.

I recently came across the following tweet from a charming fellow called Zero HP Lovecraft:

This is just insane histrionics reminiscent of the most insane left-wing behavior that the right makes fun of. Domalewski was not “crying out in pain.” Being on Twitter when lots of people disagree with you isn’t some form of severe subjugation. What is Mr. Lovecraft on about?

A while ago, Aly Louks posted the picture below, along with the sentence “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone.”

This picture of a woman smiling with a slightly social justicey-sounding thesis ended up being seen 126 million times! Huge numbers of people posted quite angry things directed at Dr. Louks. For example, one person responded:

(My favorite thing about this is the assumption that Louks had a thousand ancestors who fought mountain lions specifically for the benefit of their children. Is this a common occurrence? Does mountain lion meat boost fertility? What’s going on???)

Cue the Michael Knowles voice: “does this guy seem happy? I don’t think he seems too happy.” Huge numbers of people on the internet just seem to be constantly simmering with boiling, white-hot resentment and rage. The slightest thing sets them off. They spend their days glued to a screen, constantly raging at normal, happy-seeming women, and tweeting racial slurs. These people have taken over Twitter—when it was previously run by annoying and crazy left-wingers, it is now run by annoying and crazy right-wingers.

Another commonality between the left-wing woke and new right-wingers who have become ascendant: both are just strange and cringey. For instance, one of the more cringey left-wing tweets that went around the internet was the following:

But the cringiness of that pales in comparison to the tweet below, once again from the goldmine of craziness Aimee Terese:

It’s just so strange! I mean, first of all, it’s not hard to see why you’re not persuaded by arguments for foreign aid if you treat any argument about benefitting foreigners as a form of emotional blackmail. This is like complaining that people who are against beating children have no argument other than emotional blackmail about harms to children. Second of all…I have never described those who disagree with me as “not hot enough to seduce us,” even though it is true of those who adopt the self-sampling assumption.

(A guy who is not hot enough to seduce me into adopting the self-sampling assumption).

At a breakneck speed, much of the hyperonline right is becoming woke! Like the woke, they’re triggered and made “unsafe” by banal arguments.

But they’re becoming an even worse, hideous inversion of wokeness. Wokeness was at the very least based on pretending and attempting to be compassionate. The right-wingers, in contrast, seem motivated by the precise opposite of compassion. They revel in cruelty, delight in wickedness, cackle gleefully at the deaths of children, all wrapped up in a thin veneer of therapy speak and talk about emotional blackmail.

Leibniz famously believed that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I do not think he is right, but we may very well live in the stupidest. It would be almost amusing, if these people’s strange rage-filled resentment did not manifest in a hideous opposition to efforts to save poor children from fatal diseases.