The delusions of the online right

Was Churchill the real villain of the Second World War? Is Zelensky a bigger baddie than Putin? Are straight, white Christian American men the most oppressed people on the planet? These are just some of the nonsensical talking points being pushed by certain influencers on the online right. The ‘woke right’, as some have dubbed it, has embraced the grievance politics, censoriousness and historical revisionism of the identitarian left, only adapting them for their own regressive ends. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, joined spiked’s chief political writer Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss the delusions gripping MAGA world and much more. What follows is an edited extract of their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Can you pinpoint what you mean by ‘woke right’?

Konstantin Kisin: In its original conception, the ‘woke’ narrative is the adoption of identity politics and the framing of identity as a proxy for victimhood. In other words, there are some groups in society that are disadvantaged and oppressed, and the reason they’re disadvantaged and oppressed is because of their identity.

It’s not just about people on college campuses with blue hair – it’s also about people who think your identity is really important. That you are being uniquely victimised because of who you are. To make this make sense, we’ve got to adapt all the realities and complexities and nuances of life into a simplistic narrative.

The woke left says you’re being victimised because you’re black, because you’re a woman, because you’re trans. Well, the woke right says you’re being victimised because you’re a white man. Identity is crucial to this. It’s important to say that a lot of these woke right people will say to me in a private conversation, ‘The difference is, when we talk about the fact that white men are being oppressed by society, it’s true’. And I agree with them to some extent, that we have lived through a period when calling somebody white, or a white man, has been an insult.

But this exact argument also applies to the woke left. The woke left had some arguments which were true. It is true that if you’re an ethnic minority or a woman, you probably don’t get the start in life that you would otherwise. But the question is, do you tell people the way to respond to that is by anger, vitriol and resentment? Or do you tell them it is to attempt to correct the system and to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, and treated like an individual? So that’s what I see in terms of the parallel between the woke left and woke right.

O’Neill: Where do you see things heading for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement?

Kisin: It’s important to separate the MAGA movement from Trump. We saw a split when it came to the strikes on Iran, where there were portions of the MAGA movement that were melting down, predicting that this was the end of all humanity. ‘World War 3 is upon us’, etc. And Trump had to stare those people down and prove them wrong. Trump was extremely effective in this instance.

That being said, I think it’s important to analyse his presidency on a case-by-case basis. Take the issue of Ukraine. I think he has been taken to the cleaners by Vladimir Putin. He appointed this, by all accounts, very well-meaning, but completely clueless friend of his – Steve Witkoff – to negotiate with people in Moscow who’ve been at this for 30 years. Witkoff had this dazzling tour of the Kremlin and got lots of Putin’s time. But as Trump said recently, Putin is always nice, but he never follows through on what he agrees to. And it looks like Trump is finally realising that the MAGA narrative about Ukraine – the belief that the reason the war is not coming to an end is because Zelensky is some evil, corrupt dictator – is not remotely true. So on that issue, I think the naivety of the Trump administration has been found out.

On immigration, it’s a mixed bag. If I were a citizen of America, I’d be thinking, ‘Why have millions of illegal immigrants come to my country, and why are they still here?’ I think it’s a perfectly valid question for anyone to be asking. But in the process of dealing with that, there is the risk that you go so far, so quickly, that you make mistakes on individual cases. This, of course, is a bad thing. I want illegal immigration to be dealt with, but I don’t want innocent people to suffer.

As the Soviet proverb goes, when you chop wood, splinters fly – meaning some collateral damage is acceptable to achieve a greater goal. I disagree. I think you’ve got to deal with illegal immigration, and if mistakes are made, you’ve got to rectify them as quickly as possible. You’ve got to offer compensation, restitution.

O’Neill: What do you think the response to the Iran-Israel strikes by the likes of Tucker Carlson tells us?

Kisin: I think people like Tucker Carlson get to spew their nonsense over and over again, and never actually be held to account, because many of the people who listen to them don’t really consider their statements to be something that should be held against them in the future. Whatever they say today, they will still be considered an authority within the MAGA movement tomorrow. The fact that Carlson and others, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dave Smith, were proven completely wrong by the Iran strikes is inconsequential. They are going to continue to have a major voice on the right in America.

Trump has shown that to achieve peace through strength, you actually have to use that strength every now and again to deal with and intimidate people who want to threaten peace. That is what I think he did in Iran – and of course, what Israel is rightly doing, too. It is dealing with enemies who’ve been attacking it for a very long time.

It’s difficult to say what will happen to the MAGA movement over time. I think it’s partly a generational thing. Americans who are around 35 and older are instinctively pro-Israel. At the same time, there’s a section of the American youth, on the left and right, which is instinctively anti-Israel. I don’t need to tell you that the woke left is very anti-Israel on the basis that strength is bad, and therefore Israel defending itself robustly is bad. And of course, in the interest of not generalising, there are also a lot of people who have simply been confronted, for the first time, by the reality of war being fed to them in HD via their smartphones 24/7, and perhaps lack the historical context to understand it.

On the right, there is this conspiratorial fringe that has been looking for somebody to blame for the ills of America for a very long time. For years, the woke right struggled to coalesce around a single enemy. They kept talking about ‘globalists’, but they couldn’t quite pin it down. But the war in Gaza gave a lot of the latent anti-Semitism a focal point. And now, of course, everything is the Jews’ fault, which is where it has ended up. For now, they still say ‘Israel’, but eventually I suspect they will simply start saying ‘Jews’ – which some are already doing. They believe the reason we have mass illegal immigration, the reason that the economy has not been as successful as we want it to be, the reason all of these things are happening are because of Israel – by which they mean Jews. And it gives very stupid people a very easy way of understanding complicated geopolitical and domestic issues.

Brendan O’Neill was talking to Konstantin Kisin. Watch the whole conversation here: