Why Woke Is Right-Wing??

By Leo Gura - September 22, 2026

This is a very interesting political analysis which I have some strong disagreements with, but watch it before reading my commentary below.

Commentary:

I immediately felt a visceral wrongness in this video. Trying to frame wokeness as right-wing ideology just because it is counter-productive is very problematic and will lead to a misunderstanding of politics.
He’s basically making a no-true-scotsman argument: if left-wing people behave in ways that are counter-productive to leftism, then it isn’t true leftism but right-wing. This is wrong for two reasons: 1) The entire problem of politics is that political activity is often, even usually, counter-productive and stupid. You can’t just dismiss that as not truly your side. 2) You need to be able to own the stupidity and wrongness of your own side. Otherwise what happens is that your side can never be wrong, by definition, because anyone who is wrong is automatically classified as right-wing. In order to have healthy politics, you need to be able to admit when your own side is wrong, delusional, and counter-productive, not because they are crypto-fascists but because your own ideology (leftism) is wrong in fundamental ways. A key point against leftism is that people are not truly capable of embodying leftism. Leftism is easy to preach but nearly impossible for most humans to embody because people need survival, not morality. This is a valid conservative point. When some DEI-pusher turns out to be corrupt, selfish, egotistic, and authoritarian, that’s not some accidental bug, that’s why we can’t have egalitarianism and socialism. We can’t have egalitarianism because even the most extreme “woke” leftists are full of shit, conformist, corrupt, narcissistic, hypocrites and champagne-socialists with the development and self-awareness level of chimpanzees.
If you say that all of woke is really right-wing, what you’re actually saying is that much less of the population is truly developed enough to be left than we thought. Are you sure you want to say that? If you say that, that undermines your entire case for leftism. You are literally saying that most humans are not developed enough to even know they are right-wing! If being woke is right-wing, then your case for egalitarianism is totally undermined. How can we have egalitarianism if even the wokest leftists are too stupid it understand they are right-wing?
Woke people are left wing. They genuinely believe they are doing good and advancing the leftist cause, regardless of how counter-productive it is. Yes, of course the far left is counter-productive because it is utopian, moralistic, and foolish as hell. But that does not make it right-wing, that’s left-wing. The left is defined by utopian ideas that never work in practice. That IS what being left means. Being left means that most of your lofty ideas will be crushed by Reality, which is the entire reason being conservative has validity and merit. You cannot just blame this on the right! The blame for that must be owned by the left.
Corporations adopting left-wing ideas like DEI, Pride Month, anti-racism, feminism, etc is not entirely cynical. Corporations are run by people who actually believe in leftist ideals like equality, regardless of capitalist hypocrisy. It is wrong to blame corporations for adopting the left-wing ideas that you were crying for just decades ago. They adopted your ideas so you cannot blame them for that. Corporations largely stopped being racist, anti-gay, and anti-women. Corporations went woke. Own that. And own the excesses and BS that came with that. “But Leo! Corporate wokeness is not real socialism!” Yeah, so what? No one said you would get everything you want in politics. Changing corporations takes a long ass time.
The attempt to frame the Soviet Union and Maoist China as “not truly left because they were authoritarian” is a big mistake. The Soviet Union was lead by real leftists with crazy utopian ideas, and when those ideas met Reality, those same leftists like Lenin and Trotsky, were forced to back-peddle and turn to conservative methods to keep all of society from imploding. This does not prove that they were fake leftists, it proves that leftism is totally impractical and that conservatives are actually correct: authoritarianism turns out to be more necessary than leftists like to believe. The entire point of conservatism is not that it’s pretty or moral, but that it is necessary to keep society from imploding into a chaotic clusterfuck. As a leftist, it is crucial that you admit that the Soviet Union was a true example of leftism, actualized and failed. As a leftist you have to own that leftism fails. It is intellectually dishonest to play this game where any leftism that fails is not true leftism. Bullshit. Of course leftism fails when you take it too far. You do not get to blame that on the right. The Soviet Union failed not because of conservatives or capitalists but because the core leftist ideas were completely impractical and counter to social reality. Lenin and Trotsky were wrong and Ronald Reagan was right! If you cannot admit that yourself, you are lost in ideology and group-think. I am not saying Reagan was good, I am saying he was right.
Calling wokeness “religion” is wrong too. Wokeness is not a religion, it is ideology and group-think. But ideology and group-think are the bread and butter of politics, on both sides. You cannot claim that ideology and group-think only exists on the right, and that when leftists are ideological and conformist, that they are actually right-wing. That’s fucking crazy. That’s not correct. Of course ideology and group-think poison the left. This needs to be owned, not blamed on the right. The entire challenge of politics is how do you reign in the ideological lunatics on your own side. There is no easy solution, which is why you should be more conservative.
Woke is not a cult. It’s just your bog-standard political group-think, which cannot be eliminated from any political movement. How do you plan to win elections without mobilizing tens of millions of people, which requires group-think, conformity, and ideology? How do you get everyone to be a leftist without group-think? How do you get gay rights, trans rights, women’s rights, and Palestinian rights without profound group-think?
Things like DEI, Cancel Culture, and Abolish The Police, needs to be owned as genuinely left. DEI is a leftist cause. DEI is leftist policy, regardless of whether it backfires. Abolish The Police might sound stupid, and it definitely helps conservatives win elections, but that does not make it right-wing, it is left-wing, just stupid. The stupidity of politics is not to be minimized or ignored, it must be understood as the entire challenge of politics. What makes politics so challenging is that 90% of the actors are naive idiots who have no idea what they are doing but they think they are moral crusaders who can do no wrong. This is true of left and right alike. That’s why we can’t have leftism. That’s why we can’t have socialism. Socialism would work if everyone was smart, but everyone is stupid, so it doesn’t. Leftism fails so often because leftism as a worldview misunderstands how stupid humans are. This is something leftists are deeply in denial about because it is a fundamental feature of leftism. Leftists chronically overestimate human goodness. This is a fatal flaw of leftism that leftists need to take seriously, not blame on conservatives. Conservatives warned you many times that your weirdo ideas will lead to the destruction of society, and they were not entirely wrong, but the leftist was too busy moralizing to listen.
A deep lesson of politics that this video is missing is that extremists on your own side will sabotage your efforts and eat you alive. This is not really a bug, this is a feature in politics. It’s a feature in the sense that you can’t treat this as an anomaly, it is what you must expect because that’s just how nasty power games are. Power games being nasty should not come as a shocking surprise, your political worldview must anticipate that. The fact that you’re surprised by this demonstrates the inadequacy of the entire leftist worldview. Yes, ideological lunatics on your side will hijack your moderate leftism and turn it into crazy DEI, Abolish The Police, and trans surgery for kids. This is not right-wing, that’s the natural conclusion of extreme liberalism. That’s precisely why conservatives exist, to stop the slide down that slippery slope. Just because you are a sane, reasonable, moderate leftist does not mean that once we give your side power that the lunatics won’t seize power. Of course the lunatics will seize power! That’s why we cannot be too liberal. Why do we need a king? Because otherwise naive lunatics will seize power and destroy society. The leftist does not take this point seriously, but he should. Unless you understand this, you will never understand why conservatives exist. You will demonize conservatives and think they are just deluded bigots, but conservatives are more than deluded bigots. That’s way too convenient for leftists. Conservatives were right that the Soviet Union would fail and leftist were wrong. That must be owned by the leftist or the leftist is so stupid that he cannot be allowed to govern anything.
What the speaker in the video is fundamentally missing is that we do not have egalitarianism not because conservatives are evil bigots, but because all of mankind is evil and stupid, including leftists. The stupidity of leftism is in not understanding that humans are too evil to be egalitarian. The leftist misses that if you try to make evil and stupid people be egalitarian, what will happen is not socialism, but a total clusterfuck that ends in war, murder, Gulags, and dictatorship. If you try to go super woke, as the far left wants, you will instead end up with Stalin, Hitler, or Trump. And the entire challenge of politics is that the extremists on your own side are in total denial about this, because they are ideological fools. How do get the fools on your own side to stop being fools? When you tell them to moderate, they will kill you! When your own side kills you, that does not make them right-wing, that makes them left-wing extremists, which the conservatives warned you about.
The moralism of wokeness and SJWs should not be reframed as right-wing. Leftists are genuinely moralistic, they love to virtue signal, and this moralism is a genuine problem inherent to the left. Leftism is the delusion that anyone cares about your morality but you. The leftist thinks that her morality matters, but the truth is that in politics no one cares about your morals, it is a battle by psychopaths for raw power. When the leftist enters a knife fight armed only with morality, the leftist gets killed, which is why being too liberal is a mistake. This problem needs to be owned by leftists.
The fact that leftism ends up destroying itself is not a minor bug, it is the entire case against leftism! This is a valid case. You need to take this case seriously in order to moderate your extreme left views. That IS the thing that moderates you. Without that understanding you will believe that leftism can do no wrong, and you will end up doing a lot of wrong as you convince yourself that the further left you go, the more moral you are.
The entire point of conservatives, which is a somewhat valid point, is that feminism, LGBTQ, gender equality, trans stuff, anti-racism, affirmation action, endless immigration, atheism, materialism, free sex, birth control, free stuff for everyone, pacifism — it can all go too far. But the leftist is so ideologically blinkered and feels so moral that she doesn’t take this point seriously. The point of conservatives is that the leftist has good intentions, but the intentions are so naive that they will do more harm than good. DEI has good intentions, feminism has good intentions, Abolish The Police has good intentions, Communism has good intentions, open borders has good intentions, high taxation has good intentions, ending billionaires has good intentions, but it will also go too far and fail in many ways. And when it does, you cannot blame that on conservatives because they warned you. They fought you! That’s WHY they fought you with such a passion. If you don’t understand this, you are not serious about politics, you are lost in ideology.
The leftist wants his leftist ideas to be implemented across society, but when those ideas are implemented and start to fail, as he was warned they would, because human beings are too corrupt and selfish for them to work, the leftist wants to blame that failure on us not adopting even more of his extreme ideas. The leftist tells himself, “Well, of course those ideas failed because we were being too conservative! If only we went even more far left, then it would have worked out.” NO! That is the sneaky self-deception. What the leftist overlooks is that we couldn’t go even more far left because most people are conservative, by this own admission! The leftist expects everyone to just go far left, without understanding that they simply can’t, for reasons of survival, lack of development, and lack of education. The more far left you wish to go, the fewer people on Earth exist who can embody that lifestyle, including yourself! You yourself will betray your own ideals as soon as you run out of money and champagne. Don’t forget why you are a leftist to being with: Because your survival is easy. This is not the case for most.
You cannot take the attitude of: When leftism succeeds, I will take credit for that, and when it fails, that’s the right’s fault because people weren’t leftist enough. This is intellectual self-deception. That is like if you were a parent and you were so liberal you wanted your 8 year old child to play with lions. But conservative parents all told you, “No! A child cannot play with lions!” And after your child was eaten by the lion, you say, “Well, that’s not my fault! The lion wasn’t being a true leftist lion. That was a conservative lion!” But the point is that you should have known that a lion is conservative because all lions will eat you when they get hungry. That is why playing with lions is wrong. But you still believe that playing with lions should be a good thing. And in theory you are not wrong, playing with cute lions is a good thing. In theory. In theory, open borders is great, but if you do in practice, you are a fool, not because I dislike it, but because most people can’t handle it. If you do open borders, your own people will eventually kill you, but you need to be clear-eyed enough to anticipate that, which you won’t be if you are lost in ideology. When your own people kill you, in your last dying breath you will blame it on conservatives.
Notice just how much subtle mental gymnastics is happening in the video just to avoid admitting the leftist worldview can be fundamentally wrong. Of course the right does this too, but we can’t do whataboutism on this.
Look at this: If being a true leftist is so sneaky and hard, then hardly anyone is a true leftist, which means there are not enough true leftists to make a leftist society function without imploding. If you have to be mega-educated just to understand what true leftism is, then true leftism has already failed to scale, and the more you push it, the worse it will break until you need a Stalin just to restore order. If leftism fails and Stalin needs to be elected to restore order, that’s not the conservative’s fault, that the leftist’s fault.
The left is not defined by only whatever leads to egalitarianism. That’s way too easy. The left is also defined by all the evil shit you are willing to do to achieve it. If you are willing to murder puppies to achieve egalitarianism, that counts as left. If you accidentally cause a nuclear war because you want egalitarianism so bad, then that is left! You can’t define left by good outcomes alone.

Note: As usual, none of this is a personal criticism of the speaker. I generally enjoy his political videos. I am just pointing out deep nuances of politics here for your education, not as an attack against him. In general, the lesson here is that leftists have a tendency to cleverly disown and deny the failures of their own worldview, because that’s what all ideologies do. When you are an ideological leftist, you will blame all the failures of the left on the right, and that’s wrong because it keeps you blind to your own errors in understanding human nature. The leftist is fundamentally in denial that he has a wrong view of human nature.

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