OPINION – The woke mind virus is infecting the American Right — and now a Maga civil war is brewing

Immediately after Donald Trump’s victory, I wrote in the Standard that “wokeness has been comprehensively defeated in the US election.” On January 6, Kamala Harris swallowed her pride and confirmed the judgement of voters by certifying the electoral college votes in Congress, four years after Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol rather than offer Joe Biden the same courtesy.

Yes, “the economy, stupid” was the driving force behind Trump’s comeback, but the Democrats were soundly beaten in the culture wars dividing America. What I didn’t expect was the right would fall so quickly into the same trap. But here we are with the rise of the Woke Right.

The fall-out is already consuming the MAGA movement and has led to a split between nativist flame-throwers like Steve Bannon and globalist tech-bros like Elon Musk, as they wrestle for power and influence in the second Trump era. Musk, the world’s richest man and biggest troll with his own platform, X, has the advantage for now, but the spat has the potential to tear MAGA apart.

As with the messy squabble between Nigel Farage and Musk, I’m reminded of the social media post, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, has identified five key features of the new Woke Right. These boil down to an obsession with identity politics; an ingrained sense of victimhood; a preoccupation with microaggressions; support for affirmative action for one’s own tribe; and a zero sum mindset (somebody wins, somebody loses). As with the far left, it can extend to glorifying foreign autocracies, such as Russia and Hungary.

Nowrasteh has form regarding this blind spot among conservatives, having previously identified “patriotic correctness” as the right’s version of political correctness as far as regulating speech, behaviour and acceptable opinions are concerned. “Many policy positions I take are considered to be right wing, but on immigration, I’m considered to be left wing, so maybe I see things that others don’t,” he told me.

The biggest crybaby “victims” are the January 6 rioters and their defenders, who have partially succeeded in rewriting the history of that day. Those awaiting pardons by Trump fancifully promote themselves as unfairly punished patriots who stood up for “We the People” in defence of the US constitution against hordes of Antifa and agent provocateurs in the FBI and “deep state”.

The left’s embrace of cancel culture has been enthusiastically adopted by the right. This can take micro and macro forms. A petty example might be the recent decision to ban Spectator journalist Jacqueline Street from X for 30 days for debunking the popular leftwing conspiracy theory that a social media poster called Adrian Dittman was an alias for Musk.

Musk was furious with Sweet for identifying his alter-ego as a real person in Fiji. “I am Adrian Dittman. It’s time the world knew,” he responded tongue-in-cheek. Musk could have left the joke at that without deplatforming Sweet in a trivial act of revenge.

More consequential, however, is Musk’s promise to “tweak” X’s algorithm to promote “more informational/entertaining content”. With no sense of irony or self-awareness, he stated change was coming after “too much negativity is being promoted”.

This will surprise Labour MP Jess Phillips, whom Musk smeared only a few days ago as a “rape genocide apologist”, but is being seen in the US as a way of tilting the platform towards celebrating the awesome, upcoming achievements of president-elect Trump and suppressing his detractors.

It is too soon to tell what impact it may have on social media posts that criticise DOGE, the department of government efficiency, led by Musk and his sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy – now collectively known as “Muskaswamy” – when they start cutting federal programmes people care about.

Within the MAGA movement, the proposed algorithmic “tweak” has been fiercely criticised by Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, as an attack on free speech. Bannon laid into Musk on his podcast The War Room, which is broadcast on Rumble, an alternative platform to X.

“One of [Musk’s] weaknesses is that he needs to be loved. He needs the masses to love him,” Bannon said. “He’s got a glass jaw…he’s got the maturity of an 11-year-old, It’s obvious he can’t take criticism.” He accused Musk of operating like the Chinese communist party, which runs a surveillance state based on social credit scores for its citizens.

Bannon’s jabs are directly linked to a “wokelash” against Musk and Ramaswamy for being too soft on immigration – insofar as it affects their own interests (the tech industry), identity and ethnicity (Musk was born in South Africa and Ramaswamy has Indian heritage). On other matters, such as support for the far-right AfD in Germany and Tommy Robinson in the UK, there is not much to choose between them.

But civil war within the MAGA movement erupted over Christmas over the support by Trump’s new AI adviser, Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American, for lifting the cap on H-1B visas. These visas are popular with tech companies because they allow US employers to hire (cheaper) foreign workers with specialist skills, who are often tethered to the companies they serve.

Musk fanned the flames by agreeing on X with a poster that Americans were “too ret*rded” to fill skilled engineering jobs and attacked critics as “hateful unrepentant racists” who should be drummed out of the Republican party. Ramaswamy joined the debate by accusing Americans of being lazy.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy claimed. He made his name in the Republican party as the author of Woke Inc, criticising leftwing culture, but is now considered too “woke” for some. Meanwhile, MAGA Trumpist Laura Loomer fumed, “Our country was built by white Europeans, not third world invaders from India.”

Both sides have since claimed victory, with everyone agreeing with Trump the H-1B visa system needs reform. Entertainingly, given Musk’s criticism of Farage for “not having what it takes”, Bannon insists that Musk gave way because he was “not tough enough”. “It’s embarrassing,” Bannon said. Others believe the America First contingent that Bannon represents folded first.

As Nowrasteh has suggested, this is a zero sum game in which it is not enough for one side to win, the other must lose. “If somebody does well, they must be doing poorly,” he says. For now, he believes the Woke Right are at each other’s throats because the Democrats are too downcast to present a common enemy. “It will be amusing to see how this pans out.”

Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center and a contributing editor of the London Standard.

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