#colin wright

Community Notes to the rescue.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

It’s been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump’s return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the “woke right” for months. In his mind, this group’s emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left’s identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement’s success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration’s thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of “selling out” — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of “authoritarian populism” that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process.

Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The “woke right” contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of “postliberals” on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one.

The “woke right” redux

The “woke right” debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of “wokeness” that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term “woke” postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers.

“Woke Right are ‘right-wing’ people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,” he writes. “Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.” Personally, I find Lindsay’s definition of “wokeness” so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone “woke” is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a “grifter” out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony’s main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there.

[...]

What the two fights reveal about the Trump era

Both the “woke right” and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The “woke right” debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the “woke left” should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there’s almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the “woke right” threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is “very.” In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin’s own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration’s policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition.

Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they’re losing or even betrayed.

On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a civil rights lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims.

Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:

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After a week spent denounced for reviewing the Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?, and for saying things I think will be boring conventional wisdom within a year, I was ready to never go near trans issues again and move to the impending financial disaster. But accident sucked me back. I’d made a point of pride of not reading a line of commentary about Heard-Depp, but listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported that touched on it after it was over, and learned three things that made me furious and think immediately of Chandler.

One, the ACLU, in apparent exchange for a pledge of $3.5 million, ghost-wrote Heard’s offending editorial, and in particular a line about her having “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” Two: Guardian writer Moira Donegan declared, “We are in a moment of virulent antifeminist backlash.” Three: Vice proclaimed without irony, “We’ve all failed Amber Heard.” Almost as one, the establishment press declared itself concerned with the suffering of a rich actress. However, there’s a gaping loophole in their concern for women, and Chandler sits in the middle of it.

Let’s talk about “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out” in the context of this case:

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The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns. While we at least heard about protesting Canadian truckers having their GoFundMe campaigns frozen, WoLF didn’t even bother trying to raise money on that platform, “because they just ban you really easily,” as legal director Lauren Adams put it.

They moved to a purportedly speechier platform, GiveButter, hoping they would have “less of a censorious kind of view.” But even GiveButter soon gave WoLF the boot (I reached out to the company, which hasn’t provided public comment yet). “It was just a general fundraiser,” Adams explains. “And they said we violated their community standards. So now we’re on GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site.”

If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company.

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Even people who submit declarations in WoLF’s prison case may not be immune. On May 31st, biologist and Substack author Colin Wright submitted a declaration in the Chandler case essentially testifying to the biological difference between men and women. “Being male or female is an immutable characteristic of each human,” he wrote.

On June 10th, Wright was informed by the online commerce platform Etsy that, after a “comprehensive review,” his account was permanently closed. A letter from the firm’s “content moderation team” deemed him guilty of “glorifying hatred or violence towards protected groups.”

Wright, known for writing on Quillette about gender, science, and speech, and for being one of the few PhDs still willing to publicly endorse “biological sex” — the iron unanimity on the cultural left against this once uncontroversial scientific tenet goes beyond anything I remember from the winger anti-evolutionists of the eighties and nineties — started selling merchandise on Etsy as a secondary revenue stream. His products included stickers and hats marked with the logo, “Reality’s Last Stand.”

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Clearly, Wright’s merchandise reflects a point of view about a controversial topic. But his ban came from a company that also sells “Fuck TERFs Skateboarding Cat” stickers and “Fuck J.K. Rowling / STFU TERFs” handmade greeting cards. Etsy did not respond to requests for comment.

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The payment processing company PayPal also told Wright it had “decided to permanently limit your account.” This ban chronologically took place before Etsy’s move, and the company denies it had anything to do with his editorial stances. There have been cases where PayPal has been open about suspending service over content, for instance in the historic decision to stop transfers to Wikileaks in 2010 after urging from the U.S. State Department. This instance is less clear, but that’s part of the problem with the content moderation era: the processes are so opaque that even in cases where reasons aren’t announced, service terminations still end up having a chilling effect on speakers.

“There have been organizations who’ve made promises,” says Wright. “They said, ‘We’re pro-free speech,’ only have to have them update their terms-of-service and retroactively start banning people,” says Wright.

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The Green declaration highlighted a growing schism on what was once the political left. The ACLU just proudly announced an attempt to challenge Chandler with other “LGBTQ organizations.” It’s weird enough to see the ACLU — which historically has used most careful language in defending everyone from Neo-Nazis to NAMBLA — issue a press release bluntly describing a feminist organization like WoLF as “bigoted.” It’s weirder still when the complainants are women, many with extensive histories of sexual abuse, suing on behalf of a community that is disproportionately LGB, as 42% of incarcerated women identify as lesbian or bisexual.

“It’s a huge disproportionate number,” says Adams. “Almost half. So it’s concerning when you have these publications who are supposed to be speaking for this population, who are dragging them for even speaking up about documented incidents.”

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And how does she show us that she's "non-binary"?

*Taps the sign* 👇