How Anti-Woke Went Intellectually Bankrupt Look who’s elite now. (Ross Barkan, Apr. 19, 2025, UnHerd)
For those who made a great deal of money and attracted large followings over the last half-decade or so railing against all things woke, this is an uncertain moment. Unless they want to lie to themselves, they can’t pretend it’s still 2020 and millions are marching in the memory of George Floyd.
What do those aforementioned two paths look like in practice? They are probably best represented by two prominent activists, Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. Rufo rose to fame as the leader of the movement against critical-race theory, and he has found great influence in the second Trump administration. A longtime conservative, Rufo is now proudly MAGA. Trump’s attacks on higher education are ripped straight from Rufo’s playbook. If he still pretends woke is more dominant than it actually is — to a hammer, everything is a nail — he is at least openly supportive of Trump and understands that what he reaps is what he sows: an administration willing to violate free speech and due process in the name of combating socially progressive causes.
Hanania is, like Rufo, a warrior of anti-woke. Even more extreme, in some ways, he once posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites. If he disavowed that era of his ideological development, he still could be called, based on his public writings, a racist and misogynist. Hanania’s story has a new twist: He is now, unlike Rufo, explicitly anti-Trump. “I think there’s a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working that is unprecedented, at least in our recent history,” Hanania recently told Vox. Admitting, on “pure policy,” there was much he liked when he it came to Trump’s war on DEI, “if you’re looking at where the movement is going, [when it comes to] how political movements and how people in power should behave and act in their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it’s gotten pretty bad.”
Is anti-MAGA a new grift for Hanania? Or is he earnest? It doesn’t matter much; he, like Rufo, has made his public pronouncements, and he is taking the action he sees fit. The more intellectually confused position may be best represented today by Bari Weiss’s Free Press, which can neither strongly denounce Trump like Hanania nor, like Rufo, transition to being a full-throated arm of the conservative movement, like almost all right-wing media. Before Trump was inaugurated again, the Free Press had an obvious niche: There were a good number of centrists and left-leaning liberals who had grown disenchanted with the progressivism of the late 2010s and early 2020s. In retrospect, it was absurd that an opinion piece published in the Times by a sitting senator could trigger the effective firing of a top editor and mass revolts among staff. The performative aspects of woke were exhausting, and they did chill free speech.
But now it’s the federal government plainly attacking speech and behaving lawlessly.
The anti-Woke schtick was never anything more than a denial that racism, generally, still existed and that systemic racism, in particular, no longer had any effect, if it ever had. The character of those preaching this always exposes their own racism. And it is neverr limited to blacks.