Shiloh Hendrix, a white Minnesota woman, went viral after repeatedly calling a child on a playground the N-word. The financial windfall she then received — reportedly over $700,000 — from crowdfunding donors, many of whom apparently saw in the unrepentant racist a fearless hero, is a despicable and miserable commentary on the current state of America’s soul.
But it isn’t shocking. Far-right racism and white grievance culture have been ascendant and increasingly mainstreamed for at least a decade. Their most influential avatar — President Donald Trump — is once again in power. (It doesn’t get more mainstream than the presidency.)
Never Trumper ex-Republicans and ex-libertarians loudly warned of the rising influence and genuine threat posed by what they now call the ‘woke right.’
But to many of those I call “MAGA centrists” — ostensibly nonconservatives who blame the left for making them either Trump supporters or very Trump-sympathetic — unabashed right-wing racism is a terrible, but entirely new, phenomenon. And wouldn’t you know it, they say “wokeness” is to blame. They’ve even coined a name for Hendrix and her donors’ style of racism: “the woke right.”
In the MAGA centrists’ telling, the woke left is obsessed with identity politics and clings to a perpetual victim mentality, a desire to cancel its adversaries and an adherence to bonkers conspiracy theories, and it rewrites historical facts to suit its political agenda. The woke right, they say, is merely an unfortunate mirror reaction to that.
An article by River Page published this week in The Free Press — among the most influential Trump-friendly sites that insists it’s nonpartisan despite ample evidence to the contrary — argued that “the excesses of the left — canceling all those innocent Americans — has triggered an equal and opposite reaction on the right, which has become more and more extreme in railing against cancel culture.”
Page added, “Basically: The left cried wolf, and now the wolf is here on your phone, calling a little boy in Minnesota the N-word on camera — and there’s a new, identity politics-obsessed far right waiting in the wings to reward her for it.”
This argument, to put it politely, combines an outrageous rewriting of history with a monomaniacal worldview that assumes the left is all-powerful and the far right has no agency.
This isn’t the first time The Free Press has put the responsibility of overt right-wing racism at the feet of the woke left.
In February, amid a spate of what looked like Nazi-esque salutes from powerful MAGA figures including Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, The Free Press published an essay by Richard Hanania, who previously wrote vile, racist content under a pseudonym for the alt-right’s flagship website. Explaining his past association with this particular racist, antisemitic, Trump-supporting movement, he wrote, “To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.”
Once again, the identity politics and victim grievance culture of right-wing racists, sexists and homophobes are waved away as unthreatening and understandable (though unpleasant) responses to left-wing wokeness. As far as other traits ascribed to the woke right by the MAGA centrists — rewriting history, dividing people by their identity groups and pushing conspiracy theories — I can think of a few people who fit that bill who can’t be dismissed as insignificant internet trolls.
How about Tucker Carlson repeatedly pushing the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory on his top-rated Fox News show?
How about Vice President JD Vance, who as a candidate last year chose to amplify what he knew was a racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were kidnapping their neighbors’ pets and eating them?
How about Trump, in his first term, telling U.S.-born members of Congress — who happen to be women of color — to “go back where they came from?” Or his more recent claim that immigrants are “vermin” and “poisoning the blood” of America?
The identity politics and victim grievance culture of right-wing racists are waved away as unthreatening and understandable (though unpleasant) responses to left-wing wokeness.
What the MAGA centrists call the woke right is merely an evolution of the online alt-right (a brand that few wanted to be associated with after its murderous rally in Charlottesville in 2017) and which was later also referred to as “the dissident right.” Though they don’t all share the same, exact worldview as the Nazi-adjacent alt-right, this “dissident” right also includes elements of Christian nationalism, QAnon and far-right street militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. All of these entities were inspired and emboldened by Trump and, to a great extent, he embraced them back.
Over the past decade, Never Trumper ex-Republicans and ex-libertarians loudly warned of the rising influence and genuine threat posed by what they now call the woke right. But we just called them what they were, racists and aspiring fascists, and refused to buy into the fiction that they were merely motivated by “economic anxiety.”
But a great many of us — who, before Trump conquered the Republican Party and most of the conservative and libertarian movements, had previously identified as on the moderate or center-right — were also critical of the excesses of significant segments of the activist left. Over the past decade, I’ve blasted elements of the left for mob-led zero tolerance cancellations, winking support for antisemitic terrorists, excusing rioting and wanton violence as righteous expressions of dissent, pushing incoherent definitions of racism and anti-racism as gospel and demanding the government be the arbiters of acceptable speech in the name of fighting bigotry.
It isn’t a heroic act to hold principles and call out both the left and the right when they stand in opposition to those principles. But many MAGA centrists are either unwilling or unable to do that.
Trump is purging librarians, artists, generals and civil servants who won’t pledge loyalty to his imperial presidency, and he’s issued executive orders against individuals who stood up to his big lie. That’s cancel culture. His administration includes people who’ve paid no price for their public displays of racism and antisemitism, he pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who wore Nazi-themed T-shirts and carried Confederate flags, and he’s aiming to gut the Civil Rights Act. That’s identity politics and victim grievance culture. And it’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to false conspiracy theories and rewritten histories emanating from this White House.
Self-reflection is hard and often painful, and for the MAGA centrists who are a bit embarrassed by the increasingly open racism of the MAGA right, it’s just easier to blame the “left.” But when it comes to warnings about Trump and MAGA’s racism, lies and predilection to cancel their enemies, the left and the Never Trump center-right (oft-derided as afflicted by “Trump Derangement Syndrome”) were a whole lot more prescient about the horrors we’re currently experiencing than the MAGA centrists — who never could accept that what they term the “woke right” was always there, inside the same MAGA big tent they shared.
The “woke right” isn’t an understandable response to the “woke left,” and it sure as hell isn’t new. It has a home in the White House, and MAGA centrists have spent a decade whitewashing its sins and enabling its rise to power.
Many Trump supporters say they feel liberated by his re-election to once again freely use slurs that had been previously socially verboten. It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder if the N-word-spouting Shiloh Hendrix — and her many donors — have felt similarly liberated by Trump’s return to power.
