Beating the Woke by “Friendly Deception”
August 28 2024
A Review of Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and
Save the West by Charlie Kirk
Introduction
Charlie Kirk’s Right Wing Revolution is written by a man with so little respect for the Western canon that, rather like anxious high schoolers in a Noah Baumbach film, Charlie Kirk offers a list of recommended books to learn about our “shared Western heritage” before admitting he has “definitely not read” all of his own recommendations. Apparently he respects the idea of the West, but not enough to read anything about the content Kirk himself insists the “lazy” masses should take the time to learn about. As I will make clear, the only thing he seems to respect less than the Western canon is his conservative audience. Such casual disrespect for conservatives is the only way a book as full of cringe as Right Wing Revolution could be marketed to them with a straight face. So I submit.
Everything I Don’t Like Is Woke
In principle Right Wing Revolution is intended to describe a revolution of “things that can and must be done to fix a crisis that is shaking America to its foundations. This crisis, of course, is wokeness.” What “wokeness” is and where it comes from are topics which might be important for an audience to understand given the “crisis” they’ve supposedly induced. But one will find little insight into such questions given Kirk’s definition is “wokeness is a mental illness that believes itself to be the cure”-which is about as clarifying as saying “wokeness is a bad thing that imagines itself to be a good thing.” This lazy and flatulent kind of ambiguity seems to be intentional. Kirk admits that “to defeat wokeness we don’t need to know much about where wokeness came from” and that the “precise origins” of wokeness “don’t even matter much to the typical believer of wokeness” since it is more a “vibe, a pattern of thought, a social force that plays out in consistent ways over and over again.”
In the end, as the meme goes, “wokeness” seems to be anything Kirk doesn’t like. The short list includes transpeople, affirmative action, women challenging tradition gender roles, Barack Obama, “liberalism” sometimes but not others if the “Founders” stood for liberal principles, hate speech laws, the “left,” socialism, Disney, Marxism, HR departments, critical race theory, Civil Rights, and above all else the arch-villain Dylan Mulvaney (for those who are not living very online lives, Mulvaney is a “trans actress, comedian, content creator” who has 9.5 million followers on TikTok with 517 million likes). This is a lot of things to dislike. Especially for a man like Charlie who insists without evidence that conservatives are generally “happier” than smug liberals and would never see the world as “a constant cascade of attacks and injustices weighting them down.” That is before writing an entire book about how the “evil” of wokeness has “devoured practically every power center in America, became the national ideology taught in our schools, and even found its way into our pulpits.” Defeating this menace will require a “revolution as dramatic as the one that brought us wokeness in the first” fuelled by (I kid you not) “masculine energy.” But remember, Kirk is also a Christian. So when fighting the “blight” of “bums” and “vagrants” and “tramps” along with other “pathetic people” it will be important to “never get hateful or too nasty” since that is what someone like the “spiritually blind” woke would do.
Right Wing Revolution falls squarely into the burgeoning “counter-revolutionary” genre popular on today’s hard right; books like Chris Rufo’s American Cultural Revolution or Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change push similarly revolutionary ambitions at a far deeper level (in the latter case at least). It also drinks deep of other very online right wing trends ranging from Jordan Peterson like self-help to Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) and Raw Egg Nationalist style workout tips accompanied by diatribes about how “being fat is disgusting” and a “sign of national decay.” The last 100 pages or so of Right Wing Revolution could be summed up as “Don’t Watch Porn or the Woke Win” followed by dropping and doing 50 pushups. Little would be lost and much gained from such literary economy. About the only distinguishing feature of Kirk’s book relative to other influencers is its utter lack of intellectual distinction. BAP may long to scare people by calling himself “worse” than a normal fascist in between recommending coconut oil to get them abs gleaming. But at least he has something like a discount Nietzschean worldview that aspires to some kind of integrity and consistency. Or to say something interesting.
That’s asking way too much of Charlie, who isn’t much concerned with things like integrity and consistency. Kirk will posture as a libertarian defender of the First Amendment and rail against leftist efforts to silence people through accusations of “hate speech” and “racism” one minute. The next minute he will call for restrictions on drag shows and insist it is ludicrous to allow pornography to “sweep the country on the grounds that it is ‘free speech” since it is “not speech and pornographers are not artists or activists.” He’ll combine Marxist concepts of “praxis” with Nietzschean ideas like the “will to power” within a single paragraph, with no acknowledgement or concern for the vast differences between the two traditions. He will insist that conservatives don’t like to boss people around before patting the right on the back for its longstanding respect for hierarchy and authority. Kirk’s “philosophy” seems to basically be to coagulate whatever pastiches of grievances, impulses and identitarian concerns are agitating the contemporary MAGAsphere before directing them against a vast array of enemies whose very ambiguity serves as continuous stimuli for action (and of course the consumption of conservative media like Kirk’s).
And much like how he doesn’t care very much about diagnosing where “wokeness” came from Charlie isn’t all that interested in nebbish debates about the pros and cons of conservative versus liberal policies; let alone anything as grand as a deep dive into the longstanding history of conservative, liberal and socialist thought. The book feels the rightness of the pastiche of conservative positions (at least as Kirk understands them) while also feeling the wrongness of liberal and left alternatives, and lays out how they should be confronted by right wing revolutionaries systematically at every level of government and culture. Kirk’s book is miles wide and inches deep in this regard/ There isn’t much to argue against since Kirk never bothers to offer any arguments for his positions. To beat him, mobilization and then confrontation is the only solution required.
A Very Pure Kind of Post-Modern Conservatism
The more interesting parts of the book are where Kirk reveals his instincts and impulses and tries to transmute them into ideas and principles. At some points in Right Wing Revolution Kirk aims to present himself as a more old-fashioned and erudite kind of culture warrior; a kind of Bill Buckley Redux. At the close of the Right Wing Revolution Kirk launches into the typical bromides about how modern films and novels are “trash” where everything is a “sequel” or “reboot” of some kind. The explanation is of course “cultural” since modern media is “infused by the propaganda of wokeness.” Of course Kirk never engages anything like an Adornean analysis of the culture “industry” (the word is telling) and whether the endless onslaught of sequels, remakes he bemoans might have anything to do with the desire for guaranteed profits and the flattening of complexity into easy spectacle aimed at consumers rather than critical analysts. This would complicate the simplistically agonistic narrative that runs through his book, which itself ironically mimics the one-dimensionality of the culture it is very much a product of.
Rather like trying to paint himself as a forgiving Christian while describing his enemies as “disgusting” and “ugly” and “evil” the pitch isn’t compelling. In case the “recommended reading list” of books Kirk admits he hasn’t entirely read wasn’t an indicator, argumentation and cultural analysis aren’t where his strengths lie. Marketing is Charlie’s oeuvre.
Charlie Kirk’s book represents a very pure kind of post-modern conservatism. Albeit not a post-modern conservatism that is as self-conscious as Chris Rufo’s, who unsurprisingly Kirk admires a great deal. In an interview with far right website IM-1776 several years ago Rufo declared that the “biggest lesson” he’s learned is “that the secret to successful activism is not muscle, but information. The man who can discover, shape, and distribute information has an enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge-regime is language, fact, image, and emotion. Learning how to wield these is the whole game.” Kirk has spent his adult life running Turning Point USA, alternating between praising the “muscle class” of people who work “real jobs” in The College Scam (yes I read that too)before sneering at the “lower class that feels they shouldn’t face consequences” for their actions in Right Wing Revolution. So Kirk is quite familiar with what Rufo is talking about at an instinctual level even if he doesn’t put it as artfully. The most interesting and insightful point in Kirk’s book is when he talks about (what else) marketing. He lovingly notes that:
“Americans are phenomenal salesman, and we love a good sales pitch. Sometimes, we love the pitch more than the product. Only about one in seven Americans has Geico car insurance, but most of us can remember half a dozen Geico ads…Americans are, in short, the most successful people in the world at marketing and advertising. In other words, Americans are experts at a type of friendly-looking deception (Kirk’s words) because the heart of advertising is framing. In advertising, framing is about shaping a person’s perception of their own needs. ‘You have a problem, and this product will fixt it.’ ‘You should associate this drink with having a fun time.’…You can guess where I’m going with this. The political battle in America isn’t just a battle over policy. It’s an advertising battle. And that means it’s a battle between two sides over whose framing is better.” (Chewing gum as metaphysic as Horkheimer might say per Corey Robin).
This emphasis on framing is key to understanding much of Kirk’s outlook and strategy. The “friendly deception” of framing, rather like Trump’s own “truthful hyperbole,” isn’t intended to appeal to people’s reasoning faculties. And it certainly isn’t intended to provoke some kind of dialogue with the opposition which might imply the left has cogent arguments for its positions and principles which would have to be rebutted rather than just defeated. All of that is short-circuited. The goal is to frame information and facts in such a way as to affect endless resentment, anger, and attention in every media possible. In proper Trumpese, to present political struggle as the biggest and the greatest and the most exciting to solicit mass buy in. In such hyperreal contexts the simplest narratives, eschewing all complexity and uncertainty even where the world is in fact more complex and things aren’t as certain as they appear, is the way to go. What matters isn’t proving the “truth” of one’s views, whether understood as a correspondence between language, thought, and reality or even in some Platonic sense. And unsurprisingly Kirk has little to no interest in arguing for the truth his positions or against opponents in anything like a cogent way. What matters is insisting repeatedly on the “objective truth” of one’s own views while insisting the opposing one’s are ugly, evil, and untrue. This is so important conservatives must even “police [their] own thinking” precisely to banish any complicating alternatives. Their attitude towards everything must be as bifurcated and devoid of nuance as possible. We get a commitment to post-modern “truth” as a kind of pathological negation of complexity in favor of affect and agonism, with cognitive discipline lying in the emptying out of consciousness rather than filling it up. We’ve come a long way from John Stuart Mill’s “he who understands only his side of an argument understands its poorly” and moved very close to Walter Benjamin’s insistence on right wing politics as a kind of transformation of political ethics into impotently big entertainment and spectacle.
Lest one think I’m being unfair, Kirk is very upfront about this tactic. “So how do we turn back wokeness? It starts by refusing to give a single inch on framing. This has to happen on two levels. First, don’t let the woke set the frame tactically by deciding what words are used. But second, and even more importantly, police your own thinking to make sure you aren’t letting them set the moral framework of debate. We should be confident that our worldview is correct. Even if we aren’t fully certain what is right in a given context, we can definitely be certain that the left is wrong. So quite simply, stop giving them a pass. Chase a clear-cut, black-and white, Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader attitude toward every issue possible.”
Conclusion
So when you get past all the very longwinded diatribes about cultural decay and why we should read “Western” authors like Dostoevsky and conservative heroes like democratic socialist Orwell or anarchist Leo Tolstoy we get the real brass tacks. Kirk wants to frame politics, especially cultural politics, at Star Wars level of simplicity-Darth Vader vs Luke Skywalker shit. Ironically his own metaphor doesn’t even work. If we were feeling especially greedy today (and I am) we’d point out that even the original Star Wars trilogy basically turned Vader into a redeemed anti-hero and showed that Luke risked giving in to the temptations of the dark side. The implication being Kirk thinks conservative audiences actually need a sub-Star Wars level of complexity to be affected.
This is where I return to my original point of Kirk seeming to have almost no respect for conservative audiences. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why he’d think any conservative beyond the age of 10 would want a conservatism so purposely voided of substance it insists that its own followers stridently police their thoughts to further empty their minds. Ironically I can think of no more brutal condemnation of the right than it being the faction of the political spectrum whose own thought leaders need and so demand such a willful thoughtlessness from their followers to make their programme cogent. It borders on Kirk admitting conservatives must make themselves stupid to buy what he is selling. Which, to be fair, follows in a long line of salesmen and con artists Kirk admires who saw their marks as suckers for “friendly deception.”
So it should come as no surprise that Kirk never bothers to extend occasionally shrill platitudes he peppers throughout Right Wing Revolution to himself or the movement as a whole. He derides modern films and audiences for their bad viewing habits, but when it comes to politicking his aspiration is to produce material simpler than the Star Wars Christmas Special. Perhaps he should spend less time complaining about Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power and more thinking through Aristotle’s injunction that politics concerns the highest good. Banalizing political agitation into “framing” and calling for a meaner and less thoughtful right has wreaked havoc on America’s virtues and the “West” he claims to care so much about will not soon recover from it.
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