Welcome to the Bizarro Awokening

Meet the new bluechecks, same as the old bluechecks

A week ago, conservative influencer and children’s book author Ashley St. Clair sent shockwaves across X by announcing that she was the proud mother of a five-month old baby fathered by none other than that same platform’s owner. She didn’t detail the circumstances of conception, giving rise to a great deal of speculation about whether this was the product of a clandestine tryst at CPAC or Mar-a-Lago or, as was the case with other Musk offspring, a test-tube baby. Her reason for disclosing this previously carefully guarded fact was that “tabloid media” was planning to reveal the baby’s existence.

What struck me on encountering this bit of MAGA world gossip was less the story itself, which was in keeping with Musk’s well-known reproductive habits; or even the fact that the Republican Party, whose leaders once denounced the show Murphy Brown for its nonjudgmental portrayal of an unwed mother, now has Silicon Valley’s most prolific baby daddy as one of its figureheads. Rather, what caught my attention was the reaction of the who’s who of fellow conservative influencers who rushed into St. Clair’s X replies to congratulate her and say “God bless,” but also to tell her they were so sorry for what she was going through and denounce the wicked media for its shameless disregard for privacy.

It reminded me of something, but it took me a minute to remember what. Then the phrase “Solidarity, Jia” resurfaced from the buried depths of my memories of ancien régime Twitter. This was the tagline of a minor incident that occurred on the site during the heady, peak-awokening days of summer 2020, when New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino revealed that some Reddit users had dug up a legal case in which her parents had once been charged with human trafficking. Like St. Clair, Tolentino explained she was only reluctantly revealing this because hostile entities had brought it to the public’s attention. Her replies looked a lot like St. Clair’s last week, with statements of love and support from accounts with blue checkmarks (which, recall, meant something different back then).

The “solidarity” line came from Princeton professor, New Yorker contributor, and prominent millennial socialist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The phrase went on to become a sort of shorthand in the “post-left” Twitter milieu I frequented back then for the true nature of the online left. You had a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world offering “solidarity” to a journalist at one of the most prestigious publications in the world, with the presumable implication that they somehow represented or embodied the wretched of the earth, even as the evidently affluent parents of one of them had been accused of trafficking migrant laborers. The actual “solidarity” on display was of one affluent professional to another over being subject to public scrutiny, but it dared not speak its name. This, more or less, is how Musa al-Gharbi accounts for the function of wokeness writ large in his excellent We Have Never Been Woke. (Listen to my interview with Musa here.)

If the ascendant clique of Old Twitter—the cool kids’ club of elite journalists and academics who held sway in the 2010s—used Marx-ish jargon as political cover for a basically self-regarding and self-interested project, their X equivalents use vaguely conservatives encomiums to the sanctity of the family to avoid acknowledging that they would impugn Musk and St. Clair as degenerates if they belonged to the enemy camp. St. Clair’s replies were awash with pious tributes to God and family values. “There’s no low that they won’t go to,” intoned Mike Cernovich, not someone who has ever sought to portray himself as particularly high-minded. But as a few people pointed out in the replies, St. Clair herself had attacked contemporary society for devaluing monogamous relationships and incentivizing single motherhood. So once again, there was a massive disjunction between the rhetoric being used to signal the virtue of in-group members and the actual situation in question.

Max Read’s term “soy right” is the best shorthand for this phenomenon:

“Soy” [is] a particular way of being bad at posting online: over-emotional, un-hip, sycophantic, sensitive, unoriginal, a rule-follower, reliant on stale formulations and hackneyed jokes. “Soy” is how the online right (always the vanguard of Trumpism) has perceived liberals since the Hillary Clinton campaign, against which they imagine and define themselves as “based”: Brave, authentic, unafraid, self-confident, cool. The simplest definition of “Soy Right”—a term that’s been in circulation for at least a couple years, but has picked up steam since the Trump election—is right-wingers who have adopted the sensitive, aggrieved victimhood pose and corny rhetorical and personal style that they have spent the last 10 years attributing to liberals.

“Doxxing a baby,” St. Clair declared, “is the bottom of the barrel.” The notion that any public attention from non-friendly parties even to people who have sought the limelight for years is part of a sinister conspiracy—all this was also on display when it was claimed that the media publishing the names of those employed in Elon Musk’s DOGE constituted “doxxing.” The rough equivalent among 2010s bluechecks was “harassment”: like doxxing a real and unpleasant online phenomenon, the definition of which was stretched beyond recognition to allow journalists and academics to construe any critical scrutiny of their public statements as tantamount to assault.

The new bluecheck aristocracy is posting astonishing levels of cringe in part because it now occupies a position comparable to that of the old bluechecks five to ten years ago. It is a symptom of hubris from the group that has rapidly achieved what we might call viral hegemony. Viral hegemony is arrived at not through a “long march through the institutions,” but a rapid stampede across the algorithmically mediated public sphere, which the logic of the attention economy tends to push far more rapidly into cycles of extremist one-upmanship. As River Page noted this week, its ascendancy has made the online right “high on its own supply,” prompting overreach—notably, like its predecessor, the promotion of views on race and sex very out of sync with the mainstream of public opinion—that will eventually bring about a backlash.

The bizarro awokening will come to grief at some point, but it probably still has a way to ascend before it reaches its peak, especially given the boosts it is receiving from the highest levels of the state (as was true for the woke left early in the Biden administration). One thing I expect to see is a ratcheting up of intra-right cancel culture, which will echo what we saw on the left a decade ago. We saw a hint of this in an incident that recalled various much-discussed campus incidents of the 2010s: the forcing out of the chapter president of the NYU College Republicans after she remarked in an interview that Barron Trump was “sort of like an oddity on campus.”

It’s easy to imagine a circa 2020 College Democrats equivalent to this, in which a leader would have been ousted for perhaps making a negative remark about Black Lives Matter. The difference in the content of the offending statement points to a contrast between the ideological formations in question: The problem was “punching up” at dear leader’s family member, rather than “punching down” at a coalitional constituent embodying the oppressed. (As Michael Clune observed in Compact a few years ago: “If the right has largely maintained leader images in the shape of individuals, the left has attained a more complex form of leader image, typically moving in the direction set by the image of the most oppressed person.”)

Nonetheless, in the 2010s awokening, the ascendant progressive faction became less tolerant of internal dissent as it consolidated its viral hegemony, and I expect we will see more of the same from the ascendant online right. Indeed, some of its epigones—including the provocateur Milo Yiannpolous and the writer Nate Hochman—already came out last year in favor of cancel culture when defending the Libs of TikTok campaign to pressure employers to fire people who had posted jokes about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. (I wrote about this at the time.) Well before that, various right-wing anons had laid the theoretical groundwork for right-wing cancel culture as a necessary tactic for vanquishing the left and achieving hegemony.

Of course, all this would merely be a reversion to and (intensification of) what we saw in the Bush era, the last period of extended Republican rule, when a pre-social media right-wing cancel culture held sway. The sad implication of all of this is that those of us who harbored some hope that this decade might be marginally less stupid than the last one will almost surely be disappointed.

This week at Compact

It’s been another packed week of wide-ranging political and cultural coverage:

• Daniel Kishi on why USMCA, which replaced NAFTA, wasn’t supposed to be permanent

• Valerie Stivers on Sophie Lewis’s hyper-woke anti-feminism

• Ryan Zickgraf on the Presidents Day anti-Trump protests

• Thomas Fazi on how Europe lost its seat at the grown-ups’ table

• Batya Ungar-Sargon on Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s labor secretary nominee

• George Beebe on the shifting dynamics of the Ukraine information war

• Jacob Shell on why universities need to hire more conservatives to save themselves

• Daniel McCarthy on Elbridge Colby’s confirmation battle as the neocons’ last stand

Thanks for reading!