The anti-woke psyop, in which “dissident” right-wing figures like Musk, Milei, and Alex Jones sell pro-imperialist politics using a brand of combating wokeness, is a total diversion from reality. It’s designed to misdirect not just the conservatives, who it aims to make become obsessed with being anti-woke; but also the leftists and communists, who it wants to react to this right-wing trend by insulating themselves from society outside the left-liberal circles. In this way, this controlled anti-woke backlash is even more of a threat towards revolutionary politics than wokeism is on its own. It reinforces wokeism’s hold over socialist spaces, ensuring that the culture war continues to impede the class struggle. And it’s capable of influencing not just the left, but also the libertarian-leaning types and the MAGA supporters.
The recent pivot of the ruling class towards mainly utilizing the anti-woke psyop shows how big of a potential threat those conservative elements have become towards imperialist ideology. Targeting these elements in this way wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t a risk of them producing an effective challenge towards imperialism. The anti-woke “dissidents” are here to divert a growing element of conservatives who’ve come to have a proto anti-imperialist consciousness, getting them to fixate on the culture war instead of uniting with communists on fighting the war machine.
The escalation of the Gaza genocide in October of last year was the factor that ensured this pivot would happen. For fifteen years up to that point, an aesthetic kind of “progressivism” had been the main ideological tool of the ruling class. Conservatism had been the primary tool during the Bush era. Then Bush became one of the most hated presidents in history, and Obama showed how effective it would be to shift towards portraying neoliberal imperialism as “progressive.” The ruling elites stayed with this strategy for a long time, and they’re still using woke rhetoric to undermine the socialist movement (something that they’ve been doing since the start of the New Left). At the present stage, though, wokeness is no longer the best tool for influencing the broader discourse; the discourse that occurs outside of leftist and communist circles. The elites have needed to return to chiefly utilizing conservative ideology, except in a way that’s updated for the conditions of the post-Trump era.
With the start of Zionism’s latest mass murder campaign, the discourse has become unable to work in the way that it did prior to October 7. The liberals who promote Zionist lies are no longer able to reconcile their social justice posturing with their support for colonial mass slaughter, driving them to increasingly abandon wokeness (aside from when they use Israel’s LGBT inclusion to argue for genocide being “progressive”). And the narrative managers have had to redirect their attention towards keeping conservatives under ideological control, because many conservatives have recently gained a proto-revolutionary consciousness. One which Gaza has potential to deepen.
Our ruling elites have seen how much mass backlash their Ukraine proxy war has provoked, especially from the MAGA and libertarian types. And in the last year or so, these types have begun to enter into antiwar coalitions with progressives and communists, threatening the decades-old dynamic where communism is relegated to the “left” niche. So those whose job is to defend Zionism have needed to direct a psyop at the right.
This psyop has involved taking the anti-woke backlash that’s already been occurring for years, and injecting it with a particular foreign policy agenda. Prior to October 7, rightist demagogues like Candace Owens and Matt Walsh had already been poisoning the discourse with toxic culture war division. And they’ve been useful for injecting the religious right with false consciousness, but not so much for neutralizing the broader elements which this new psyop aims to target. Those being the conservatives outside the radical Christian niche, which have more potential to adopt anti-imperialist or Marxist positions. Owens and Walsh have taken an American isolationist position on Israel, making them only minimally useful to the ruling class. And while their counterpart Ben Shapiro is aggressively pro-Israel, he lacks the “dissident” image that’s capable of diverting conservatives who have substantial revolutionary potential.
The right-wing figures that the deep state has most been promoting since October 7 are ones who, unlike those Daily Wire hosts, can appeal towards conservatives who seek an alternative to the political mainstream. The Daily Wire and PragerU are only focused on promoting the agenda of the Republican Party. Musk, Alex Jones, and the more outwardly extreme actors within this intelligence-backed “dissident” rightist sphere put forth a type of anti-woke politics that can attract people who are alienated from both major parties.
Musk’s brand is based around him being a rebel against the political establishment who’s capable of leading humanity to greatness. Which distracts from the true role he’s taken on: an intelligence tool who facilitates censorship of pro-Palestine voices, and who redirects anti-Zionist sentiments by promoting ethnic bigotry against Jews. Jones is repeating Netanyahu’s lies about Palestine and Iran under the guise of providing inside information from intelligence agents, when really these agents have sought to give him propaganda talking points. Milei is promoting Zionism and fanatical anti-communism to libertarians, while getting portrayed by anti-woke commentators as a counter-hegemonic leader. There’s one anti-woke figure, though, who’s bringing the dissident right in a more dangerous direction than any of these others are. And whose ties to Israeli intelligence are the most direct.
I’ve talked about how Bronze Age Pervert, the influencer who’s been bringing conservatives to a radically pro-hierarchical “bronze age mindset,” has been in direct contact with an Israeli asset. And how this asset sought BAP out because he viewed the ideas BAP puts forth as particularly useful. More recently, BAP has given us a clearer idea of which foreign policy angle he and his handlers intend to use. Following Tucker Carlson’s interview this month with Putin, BAP did something seemingly counterintuitive: he voiced support for Russia. BAP had already been positioning himself as pro-Russia for a while throughout the Special Military Operation, and there are indications that he decided to do so in response to shifts in conservatism’s relationship towards geopolitics. Shifts which began years earlier than when Carlson’s interview made them more apparent than ever.
In July of last year, BAP said in his argument for rightists to support Russia: “This message is intended…to East Euros and also to American conservative nationalists, who are actually both in similar positions, where they believe they can live on unmolested by the cabal in charge of Washington and the European capitals; and also continue as if this was 1935 and they were mobilizing in the name of national honor against Russian imperialism. You don’t realize how weak and powerless you are.” BAP is taking the isolationist arguments of the Walsh/Owens camp further, saying that the best interests of rightists are in not just opposing foreign military aid but also in supporting the defeat of U.S. hegemony. This is the same thing pro-Russian Marxists like myself want to get conservatives to believe. Except whereas we seek to bring these conservatives towards socialism, or at least towards entering into coalitions with communists, BAP is trying to make them incompatible with any such coalition.
This is apparent right within his ostensibly pro-Russian argument. He makes sure to emphasize how the Soviet Union supposedly carried out brutal subjugation, and he reaffirms the narrative of the Ukrainian Banderite Nazi collaborators about how those who resisted the USSR were only acting to defend their “national honor.” This is a “pro-Russian” polemic that’s designed to sabotage any sort of effective alliance against imperialism by getting right-leaning individuals to view communists as untouchable.
The liberals and radical liberals who opposed the formation of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition have claimed the presence of the Mises Caucus makes RAWM unacceptable for communists to associate with. How do we know this argument is misleading? Because it aids the goal of BAP: to divide the “left” and “right” elements of the opposition towards NATO. If the Mises Caucus were as far to the right as the liberals portray it, it would be doing what BAP does: act so obsessed with attacking communism that one becomes unable to act as any kind of effective counter towards monopoly capital.
The Mises Caucus represents an element of libertarianism that’s compatible with the anti-imperialist goals of communists, because this element cares enough about resisting monopoly capital that it’s willing to assist communism. BAP represents a type of politics that’s so absurdly reactionary, it’s willing to strengthen the monopoly capitalist forces which it claims to oppose, all for the sake of upholding a “trad” kind of purity politics. The main priority of BAP’s camp is not to do what’s practically needed for ending the liberal order, but to achieve “bronze age” goals like a total ban on immigration and a return to extremely traditional “western” gender roles. The bronze age mindset is about getting conservatives to reject the revolutionary path which the anti-imperialist coalition offers them, and believe the solution is to bring society back to an idealized past. A past that can’t even realistically be resurrected, because its social relations were dependent on a mode of production which was made extinct by the progression towards capitalism.
The only way to help defeat the monopolists is by either becoming a communist, or aligning with the communists. Separating oneself from this emerging anti-monopoly coalition, whether on a left-wing or right-wing basis, can only have the effect of strengthening liberalism. The liberals and liberal-aligned “Marxists” seek to discredit this coalition by implying that its conservative-leaning members are like BAP. But if they were like BAP, they wouldn’t be working with communists in the first place. The anti-woke psyop’s purpose is to make it look like these distinctions don’t matter; like there’s no way those from different parts of the ideological spectrum can unite on an anti-imperialist basis. It seeks to perpetuate the polarization that the ruling class depends on, and that the anti-monopoly coalition increasingly threatens.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
