The Woke Right & Hoopleheads

Nietzschean villain, Al Swearengen of Deadwood, overseeing the hoopleheads.

By Olivia Pierson
First published on the Good Oil, 4th April, 2025

Public intellectual, James Lindsay’s, "woke right" tries to name the people fracturing conservative politics and battling for cultural dominance for conservatism’s future, but it’s too neat and too derivative.

I call them "hoopleheads," a term borrowed from Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, which aptly captures the dimwitted foolery of opinionated semiliterates. Candace Owens stands as the poster child, her trajectory exposing the intellectual shortfall of this restless, eclectic crew.

Leftists who resisted vaccine mandates and lockdowns finally saw the Left’s grip—destructive, media-captured, and deep-state-driven—as a global lie machine. Up until then, they had militantly ignored it, cozy with its socialist creep after Reagan, until it caged them. Calling themselves "awake" (a term I loathe for its “woke” echo), they bolted rightward, suddenly joining conservatives who’d long decried freedom’s loss to a leftist-leaning, fascistic elite. (It’s the ideas stoopid!) 

Any sniff of the conservative Right, even its most moderate wing, had been "cringe" to the Left, a shallow recoil based on secondhand cultural optics, not on substance. They loved their creative, arty, compassionate image way too much.

Owens, the quintessential hooplehead, first dazzled by doing us all a favour and dismantling Black Lives Matter, her black identity lending her lethal precision against victimhood myths—which had resulted in white students literally kneeling to ask black, brown and immigrant peers for forgiveness. That stand, rooted in lived expertise, along with her support of Trump during his first presidency, was a conservative win and Owens took it superbly. But her leap rightward has spiralled rather oddly. Marrying a British lord’s son, George Farmer, embracing Catholicism, raising three small children, she suddenly fired off newly acquired takes on history, theology, and wars, her confidence outpacing her ken. Her audience swelled massively, drawn by her addiction to high octane controversy combined with an incredibly deft ability to run her yap like a machine-gun.

By late 2024, Owens trained that weapon on “the Jews,” earning a proudly accepted "Antisemite of the Year" title just two months before Israel’s February 2025 hostage exchange saw delivered the murdered remains of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas—horrors Owens sidestepped to keep decrying Israel’s nonexistent genocide, in a war it had not started but will certainly finish. 

James Lindsay’s "woke right" suggests a calculated revisionist bent, and Owens fits that mould. A little knowledge, as the proverbial saying goes, is dangerous. Historical understanding requires years and years of solid reading and cross-referencing.

Hoopleheads miss the core of conservatism and classical liberalism: liberty of conscience, with its hard-won place in Western history, fiercely battled for intellectually by figures such as the Jew Spinoza, the Christian John Locke, and the atheist Ayn Rand. I guess ‘atheist' is non-capitalised because the burden of proof is never upon them to assert anything is so, least of all any of the others already in play, a humanly rational starting point for the acquisition of knowledge, aka, epistemology.

In meme-ish fashion, Owens trades well-absorbed comprehension for reactionary opinion, spraying huge tracts of history with her scattershot zeal. She even wars on our "Judaeo-Christian" nomenclature, her newfound Catholic fervour pitting Christianity against Judaism once more. Christianity sprang from Judaism and, as a religion, civilisationally outperformed it—a fact that is certainly evident. Jews often maintained a tenuous relationship within the Christian nations where, through sheer competence, they rose to the top of nearly all professions. However, after Christian Europe’s 20th-century atrocities against Jews, Owens is regurgitating truly racist and foolish myths that tend to veer into alarmingly dangerous territory, as history demonstrates. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Still, overall these splits show a healthy sign. Conservatism and classical liberalism do well in fights and discussions, tangling with hoopleheads on their own side, not like the Left, which kills off disagreement and is dying in front of our very eyes because of it (and deserves to). Hoopleheads, kicked politically “awake” by Covid’s tyranny, get the era’s abuses right but trip over history’s greatest lessons, opting for revisionist versions of pretty much everything they can watch quickly in a Youtube clip. Owens proves this by her immense following, her ranks suddenly swollen by the antisemitic Left and the hoopleheads who snap back to the briar patch they momentarily escaped from. When it comes to Israel, they’re back in league with Leftism, which refuses to acknowledge any kind of Jewish exceptionalism (which even the vicious antisemite Adolf Eichmann recognised clearly) while they side tenaciously with an Arab Islamic death cult they see as “oppressed” by “the Jews.” In fact they commit an egregious moral inversion by now labelling Jews “Nazis.” That’s hooplehead on steroids. 

Owens’ major stumble is her antisemitism; that’s where she has fallen hard, morally speaking, though not in popularity. Nevertheless, she is striking at the heart of conservatism and the mind of classical liberalism, whose intertwined legacies enabled Jews, Christians, agnostics and atheists to live peacefully alongside one another in the West, as it ought to be. This coexistence reflects the principles of our heritage, which Deism and Christianity once effectively secured for us after the Enlightenment. She seems to have no clue, from a historically informed perspective, what she’s actually hitting out at, hooked on the drama of her own gladiatorial yap - and the hoopleheads absolutely lap it up with glee, as if they’ve been waiting all their lives for someone to give them an excuse to hate everything about Zionism and blame Jews for every problem under the sun. 

Whether or not the newly coined term “woke right” takes hold or continues to cover off the fracture we’re witnessing open up in conservative circles, these messy fights in the long run will help keep the centre-Right’s honour clean, an important edge that the Left and centre-Left lost somewhere between Woodstock and Obama.