The Anti-woke Scolds

Against Rightwing Victimology

In this short article I want to articulate something that I’ve been quietly noticing for years but find difficult to put into words. That is: the slow metamorphosis of the anti-woke right into a kind of victimology which is as shrill, unattractive and whiny as the left only without the institutional power to back it up. Back when I first made my YouTube channel in 2016, the internet was full of woke scolds such as Kristi Winters. I have no idea if Kristi Winters still exists, neither do I care, but curiously as her structural place in the system has been replaced by – literally – the US government, Hollywood, pretty much every institution of any significance you care to name – you are much more likely in 2022 to find, in comment sections and live chats everywhere, the opposite phenomenon: the anti-woke scold! I first became aware of this in the review section of Steam. It was one thing to see this during the Gamer’s Gate saga of 2015, but now in 2022, I find it in the strangest of places: in the review sections of tiny indie games of the sort I play. I must be honest: I almost always find myself rolling my eyes at those anti-woke comments. I don’t think to myself ‘oh there are my guys’, but ‘God, give it a rest.’ Suffice it to say, they are never welcome and seldom point to anything significant at all.

The most recent example I found was when I was watching a livestream review of The Batman by a comic-book nerd I watch sometimes called Uncanny Omar. He runs a channel called Near Mint Condition. I like Omar, he’s just a massive old-school geek with probably one of the finest comic-book collections in the world. He’s a 43-year-old man and a father. He recently quit his job and went full-time with his channel. Omar is not woke; he’s just a nerd. He’s not our guy either but like many millions of people not into politics period. During this livestream, there were a few people in his live chat attacking The Batman as ‘woke crap’. It was interesting to see Omar, who had had a few beers that night, respond to the comments. He was almost going out of his way to demonstrate that he’s not woke himself, but also that he didn’t think the film was that woke. I did my own review of The Batman earlier and likewise had comments in the chat to the same effect and found myself giving pretty much the same answers as Omar did. Morgoth reviewed the film a few weeks back and similarly said he didn’t think it was that woke.

Now, the point of this piece is not to discuss The Batman, rather I want to try to remind people of what it felt like back in 2015 or 2016 to have people constantly tell you that this or that was racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever. It was a source of much irritation, these people who saw racism everywhere. So many of us are so far beyond all that now that it can be hard to remember what it felt like at the time. However, now it seems that there’s a curious reversal of that going on by which things are accused of being woke by rabid anti-wokesters and people feel the need to point out the ways in which said thing is not woke. My fear in this is that the system has sufficiently succeeded in giving a sizable portion of young white men a kind of victim-complex, which is just as irritating as when it comes from feminists or professional race hustlers. The problem is that it repels people and, much like the original accusation that X or Y is sexist or racist, serves to dilute the actual diagnosis of the problem. Not only is it irritating behaviour, but also, it’s strangely disempowering, passive and feminine. It is as if the system has manoeuvred young white men into being a pathetic mirror of the other victim groups.

The lapse into a victim-mindset on the part of white men reminds me of something the late great Jonathan Bowden once said:

And it’s not much fun being a minority, particularly when you’ve been allegedly top dog and been majoritarian in the past. Because then you have to use political correctness and all of these games to protect yourself because they’re really insurance policies that you use as armor in relation to other infractions and other in-groups and people that put things on you. You want a bit for your culture, a bit for your music, a bit for your architecture, a bit for your ancestry, a bit for your flag. And you get a bit, you get a slice, you get a token and you have to be pleased with that because that’s all you’re going to get in a group-based society as this has now become because the old class fissures of the past have largely been replaced by ethnic, racial, communitarian, and group-based tensions the like of which will always be exacerbated when the economy goes down rather than up and when tension between groups rises, as the result of the fact that they’re all different, they’re all chafing against each other, and they’re all looking at a receding socio-economic pot.

I sense that in anti-woke hysteria – especially in the many cases where it is not even warranted – are the stirrings of what Bowden is describing in nascent form. Our basic orientation should be one of strength. Victim groups are insecure about their identities because their history is not one of which they feel they can be proud. Therefore they must try to steal and appropriate bits of our popular culture for themselves: but it does not matter how many times you make James Bond black, it’s not going to change the past, and it’s not going to change the fact that James Bond represents white British culture, not black culture. They can do as much cultural terrorism as they want, but it’s toothless, flailing, weak, creatively bankrupt, a Spenglerian death cycle. Your response should be to glory in your history, glory in your culture, imbue yourself with the spirit of your ancestors, embody your race and culture. Ultimately you don’t need the institutions or power on your side in this regard because the culture and history live in you. This, much more than moaning in comment sections about how there’s now a black gnome in some shitty RPG, would be a more masculine and effective way to empower yourself against the forces of decay and entropy. To be Men Among the Ruins, we cannot let the enemy reduce us to their petty thieving level and to play their stupid game. They are nothing in the face of your history. And this too will pass.