The murder of two Israeli diplomats at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., was quickly seized upon by far-right influencers and conspiracist networks. Within hours, social media platforms were flooded with claims that the attack was a coordinated “false flag” or “psyop” orchestrated by Jews themselves. In this narrative, Jews are never victims—they are masterminds, manipulating violence for political gain or silencing dissent. Such reactions are no longer fringe. They reflect a growing ideological current on the online far right—often framed in the language of “free speech” and political resistance. 

A telling example of this ideological pattern occurred earlier this month, after customers at the Barstool sports bar in Philadelphia ordered a customizable sign reading “F**K THE JEWS.” The image quickly went viral. Dave Portnoy, owner of Barstool, a prominent media personality and himself Jewish, condemned the incident and ultimately offered the two alleged perpetrators an all-expenses-paid trip to Auschwitz as a “teaching moment.” However, after one of them—Mo Khan, who published the video of the antisemitic sign—walked back his admission of guilt, Portnoy rescinded the offer and issued a forceful video response that reignited public attention.

What happened next reveals more than just the fallout of a viral controversy. Rather than retreating from public view, Khan resurfaced days later as a guest on the Stew Peters Show—a podcast notorious for promoting conspiracy theories that ultimately cast “the Jews” as the root cause of all evil. There, Khan defended himself not by apologizing but by reframing the incident as a matter of free speech—a supposed act of resistance against censorship imposed by Jewish elites. Additionally, when Peters blamed Jews for “all the child porn and degeneracy [Americans] are watching on Netflix,” Khan implicitly assented, noting, “it is kind of absurd how much control they [the Jews] have over the entire narrative of the media.”

How does a college student go from a sports bar controversy to airing antisemitic talking points on a far right conspiracy platform in the space of 72 hours? The answer lies not just in the virality of digital outrage, but in the rise of a broader (online) ideological ecosystem: one in which identity-based victimhood, perceived systemic oppression, and moral awakening are now echoed beyond the progressive far left. Increasingly, this rhetoric is being adopted by a faction of the far right—what some have called the Woke Right— which mirrors the tone and tactics of their left-wing counterparts, but recasts Jews, rather than white males, as the primary oppressors and enemies.

The “Woke” Left

Although an “essentially contested concept”, woke is commonly used to describe a contemporary worldview centred on moral elevation and, as Eric Kaufmann suggests, “the sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups”. Since gaining prominence around 2012, this perspective—sometimes referred to by critics as “social justice orthodoxy”—has reshaped discourse across media, education, and cultural institutions, often presenting itself as a movement aimed at redressing historical injustices and driving systemic change.

At its core, what author and podcaster Konstantin Kisin calls woke logic functions as a tactical moral system grounded in moral identity binarism. It divides society into morally charged identity groups—victims and oppressors—where one's moral status is derived from group identity rather than individual behaviour. The perspective also advances a rejection of traditional knowledge, framing mainstream history and institutional narratives as ideological tools of the powerful. Those who then claim to recognise and spread awareness of these hidden dynamics are elevated through a process of epistemic awakening, positioning themselves as morally enlightened truth-tellers: “the awake” (or “woke”). 

This awakening is grounded in the belief that societies are structured around entrenched hierarchies of power—typically dominated by white, male, heterosexual individuals—figures who are regarded both as the source of systemic harm and the focus of moral scrutiny. Kisin describes this pattern as conspiratorial victimology: a narrative in which social suffering is understood as the result of deliberate, system-preserving actions by dominant groups. Within this structure, moral credibility is closely tied to perceived identity-based disadvantage, and criticism is often interpreted not as legitimate dissent, but as evidence of complicity in structural injustice.

James Lindsay reinforces this diagnosis but focuses on a different dimension—shifting from rhetorical dynamics to the underlying structure of knowledge. While Kisin highlights how woke operates as a tactical moral narrative, Lindsay offers a more systemic critique, grounded in postmodern and critical theory. He characterizes woke as a closed system of knowledge and moral reasoning in which an individual’s moral legitimacy and political authority are primarily derived from their group’s perceived historical oppression—a dynamic he terms “victimhood-based identity politics”. In this view, social inequalities are understood not as the result of multiple interacting factors, but as outcomes of hidden structural oppression—forces such as white supremacy, patriarchy, or colonialism—believed to shape institutions and outcomes at every level.

While both Kisin and Lindsay identify the rejection of traditional knowledge as central, they explain it differently. For Kisin, it is a rhetorical and psychological tactic to challenge dominant narratives and assert moral status; for Lindsay, it reflects an alternative epistemology—one that redefines how truth is conceptualized, justified, and circulated.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that woke is not merely a set of political beliefs, but a mode of interpreting reality, a worldview structured around five interlocking features: moral identity binarism, rejection of traditional knowledge, epistemic awakening and moral authority, victimhood-based identity politics, and a belief in hidden structural oppression.

The “Woke Right”

“There is a portion of the right across the West that is playing this very dark game,” Douglas Murray recently warned. “And they are doing it deliberately, and you can’t not be aware of that.” While criticism of progressive “wokeness” is widespread in conservative circles, a growing number of commentators—especially those on the right—have noted that some of the tactics and underlying logic associated with the Woke Left are increasingly being adopted by parts of the far right. Commentators such as Murray, Kisin and Lindsay now argue that a segment of the right has ‘gone woke’, mirroring the patterns of the very worldview it claims to reject. 

It begins, like its left-wing counterpart, with a moral identity binary: society is divided into victims and oppressors, but the roles are reversed. In this framework, white people, Christians, men, and heterosexuals are no longer cast as dominant, but as systematically marginalized. Cultural dominance, paradoxically, becomes evidence of vulnerability—the reason these groups are targeted, not protected.

This binary worldview sets the stage for a kind of epistemic awakening. Disillusioned by perceived double standards and cultural hostility, individuals come to see themselves as those who have ‘seen through the system.’ Influencers and alternative media figures adopt the posture of independent thinkers exposing uncomfortable truths—often under the guise of “just asking questions” in the face of elite narratives. But this scepticism is rarely open-ended. As Kisin puts it, “We are ‘Just Asking Questions™’. But we know what the truth is not: whatever the elites are telling you.”

Indeed, the awakening quickly flows over in a rejection of traditional knowledge and institutional authority. Legacy media, academia, the civil service, and electoral systems are no longer viewed as flawed but reformable: they are seen as irredeemably corrupt. The epistemic stance is not simply sceptical but fundamentally oppositional: if political elites, scientific authorities, or the press misrepresented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2020 U.S. election, what else might they be distorting? This mode of reasoning increasingly produces a closed system in which all dissenting information is treated as evidence of conspiracy or manipulation.

Such an epistemic stance extends to historical revisionism, where established narratives are recast as ideological deception. A notable example occurred when Tucker Carlson—described by Kisin as the “undisputed spiritual leader” of the “just asking questions” influencer class—hosted Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “perhaps the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper claimed Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of World War II” and ultimately responsible for the Holocaust. Carlson offered no meaningful challenge, allowing these claims to circulate uncritically among millions. For audiences not exposed to expert rebuttals, such distortions risk gaining traction as plausible counter-histories—displacing scholarly consensus with ideologically driven mythmaking.

The posture of “just asking questions,” when combined with a recursive suspicion—what else are they lying about?—often leads to a worldview in which institutions are not merely flawed, but fundamentally hostile. This dynamic reinforces what Kisin terms conspiratorial victimology: the belief that society is systemically structured against one’s identity group. Tucker Carlson illustrated this logic when he claimed, “I’ve never seen any population being treated the way Americans are being treated by their leaders now.” The remark is particularly revealing, given that in February 2024, he travelled to Russia—rated by Freedom House at 12 out of 100 in its Freedom of the World report, compared to 84 out of 100 for the United States—to interview Vladimir Putin. The contrast highlights the dissonance between the Woke Right’s rhetoric of victimhood and the global realities with which its figures directly engage.

Consequently, this logic culminates in victimhood-based identity politics, the operational expression of the initial moral binary, with its “victim groups being whites, Christians, men, and straight people.” Indeed, while reviewing a book on Christian nationalism, Kevin DeYoung notes how “white men” are told that “they are the country’s real victims”, an “apocalyptic vision” that “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you, borrowed from the playbook of the left”. Here, group membership is not only a marker of moral alignment but a claim to historical suffering and symbolic exclusion, which becomes the foundation for political legitimacy. Being white, male, or Christian no longer disqualifies one from victim status—in fact, these identities are reframed as the very reason for exclusion, oppression, and persecution. 

Yet one element of the Woke Right had long remained undefined: its primary scapegoat. As Konstantin Kisin has observed, the ideology “has yet to properly take shape” in part because “the scapegoat group behind the conspiracy is still unclear.” But that has changed. In the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, a growing number of voices on the far right have begun to frame ‘Israel’ not just as a geopolitical actor pursuing its interests among a community of nations, but as a Machiavellian symbol of global control, elite privilege, and institutional corruption. Although Murray and Kisin rightfully address the focus on Israel in this sense among far right influencers, they do not address how ‘Israel’ is now increasingly being used as a gateway to ‘exposing’ Jewish power and subversion, with accusations once coded or indirect now being expressed more openly.

Woke Right Antisemitism

As noted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), figures like Stew Peters have become increasingly explicit in their antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Peters, the ADL writes, “has dispensed with euphemisms, directly naming and blaming ‘the Jews’ for everything he believes is wrong with society.” As the ideological structure of the Woke Right takes shape, antisemitism is no longer peripheral—it is becoming a central and unifying narrative. It provides coherence to a worldview rooted in grievance and mistrust, following a consistent narrative logic: Jews hold political and cultural control; they use that control to silence dissent; and they wield it to subvert the nation’s moral and cultural foundations.

The first pillar of this narrative is the belief that Jews dominate the political system and broader institutional landscape, withholding any real influence from the perceived marginalised group— white people, Christians, men, and heterosexuals. “Jewish supremacy is the greatest threat to America, and I think it’s the greatest threat to the world today. I truly believe that,” said Dan Bilzerian, a social media ‘superstar’ with 31 million Instagram followers, in an interview with Piers Morgan. Stew Peters similarly asserted, “We don’t have any representation in Washington. We have a bunch of people that are sold out to Jews… literally that’s what we have. Nobody can argue that. It’s not antisemitic to say that; it’s freaking fact.” He added, “Every institution in this country is led by somebody who claims to be a Jew.” 

The second claim builds on the first: that this alleged power by Jewish elites is maintained through censorship and political repression. According to Peters, this dominance includes control over speech itself. “Our First Amendment is being torn to shreds right in front of our very eyes,” he claimed, “all in the name of the secular foreign nation state of Israel 6,000 miles away and its global legion of Jews who, whether secular or religious in nature, doesn't matter, have no problem working together to subvert the Western Christian world.” He further argues that accusations of antisemitism are used to suppress dissent, stating: “They hide behind the Jew label so that they can get people like Elon Musk to kick me off of X for saying that they’re a Jew.” Echoing this narrative, far right influencer and former MMA-fighter Jake Shields posted: “In the past when someone started to notice Jews controlled America they could get you blacklisted by yelling antisemite or Nazi. That stopped working so Congress rushed to pass laws making it illegal to question Jewish power.”

The third component of the Woke Right’s antisemitic framework is the portrayal of Jews as culturally and morally subversive actors. Within this logic, Jewish influence is not simply seen as excessive or oppressive, but as deliberately harmful to the moral fabric of society. Stew Peters frequently invokes conspiratorial claims about a “Jewish lobby” and the Talmud, alleging that they promote “sick gender ideology” and paedophilia. Myron Gaines—despite being of black-Sudanese origin—has platformed white nationalists such as Nick Fuentes on his show, which has amassed over 250 million views. He has accused Jews of entering societies to “destroy [them] from within,” linking Jews to pornography, LGBTQ+ rights, and the general “degeneracy” of Western culture. His conclusion: “Hitler was right.” Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel received over 700 million views, has similarly claimed that Jews created pornography “because they hate Christ,” and described Judaism as a “paedophile-centric religion that believes in demons... and child sacrifice.” She presents such claims as part of a broader mission to “wake people up” to the idea that “paedophiles are in power.”

This ideology seeks not only to assign blame but to legitimize counteraction—through consciousness-raising, historical revisionism, and the construction of parallel institutions. The call to “expose the truth” is central. Owens, for example, dismissed Josef Mengele’s atrocities at Auschwitz as “bizarre propaganda,” claiming the Holocaust has been instrumentalized by Zionists to secure moral deference for Israel. “They have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust,” she said. Stew Peters has similarly promoted Holocaust denial, stating on his show: “The gas chambers, the crematoriums, so often discussed—they were destroyed at the end of World War II if they were ever there in the first place.” Shields called the Holocaust “bullshit,” and Bilzerian claimed, “I would bet my entire net worth” that fewer than six million Jews were killed—arguing instead that “Jews have killed far more Christians than that” through their alleged role in the Bolshevik and Holodomor massacres.

Increasingly, these narratives are accompanied by the creation of alternative spaces intended to bypass “Jewish control” over mainstream institutions and financial systems. Peters’ launch of the JPROOF cryptocurrency was explicitly framed as a challenge to “this Rothschild Jew-run Talmudic cabal financial system that’s taken over our fake and unserious occupied country and the rest of the world.” In his launch video, he encouraged his followers to buy $110 worth of JPROOF—“110, that sounds like a great number: to symbolize that the ‘Stew Crew’ is going to lead the charge in making the United States of America 110th country to kick these demons the fuck out,” referring to the white supremacist antisemitic dog whistle that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries. He concluded: “Our first target? A six million market cap. Let’s give them a real six million to talk about” — a clear reference to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

What previously circulated at the margins of online discourse is increasingly central to far right digital ecosystems, reframed not as hate speech but as suppressed truth. As Peters remarked, referencing the growing wave of influencers engaging with antisemitic narratives: “There [is] a massive surge in social media figures who have long toed the line… [on] the JQ”—that would be the Jewish Question—“who are now suddenly coming out as ‘noticers.’” This convergence of political scapegoating, historical revisionism, and institutional withdrawal reveals how antisemitism is functioning not as an extremist outlier, but as a central organizing framework for the Woke Right. The Woke Right’s antisemitism is not merely reactive—it is increasingly strategic, recasting Jewish presence and influence as both the source of national decline and the justification for radical “restoration.”

Antisemitism Entering the Algorithm

The Woke Right mirrors the Woke Left in structure, adopting a similar worldview grounded in moral identity binarism, rejection of traditional knowledge, epistemic awakening and moral authority, victimhood-based identity politics, and a belief in hidden structural oppression. However, within the Woke Right and its surrounding digital ecosystem, these frameworks are reoriented around grievance narratives that centre on antisemitic conspiracies. Jewish power is portrayed as the force behind national and cultural decline, with white people, Christians, men, and heterosexuals recast as its primary victims.

Woke Right influencers who operate under the banner of “just asking questions” primarily gain visibility through alternative online media platforms, particularly podcasts. Although antisemitism was not the topic of discussion, figures such as Jake Shields, Darryl Cooper, and Ian Carroll appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast—which enjoys the biggest audience in the world—to speak on topics including combat sports, the Israel–Hamas war, and their revisionist interpretations of history—gaining exposure without their broader ideological views being scrutinized. Notably, when Douglas Murray confronted Joe Rogan about hosting guests who had promoted conspiratorial narratives, Rogan appeared unaware of the nature or implications of their views. With 14.5 million Spotify followers last year, and over six billion YouTube views, Rogan’s platform provides unparalleled reach—offering his guests legitimacy in the eyes of many and potentially serving as a gateway into the broader digital ecosystem of the Woke Right.

While platforms like Rogan’s can amplify their reach, Woke Right influencers do not rely on them to expand their audience. Their own podcasting networks have become highly effective at drawing in individuals beyond their usual ideological base. A striking example is Mo “F*** THE JEWS” Khan, who—despite not being white or Christian—appeared on Stew Peters’ Christian nationalist show within a week of the Barstool Sports incident. On the program, he echoed antisemitic narratives central to the Woke Right, including claims of Jewish control and censorship. Shortly after, Khan promoted the JPROOF cryptocurrency on X, describing it as a project to “protect people from evil characters [the Jews]”.

While Khan has now been suspended from Temple University, Stew Peters and his ideological colleagues continue to spread their antisemitic rhetoric with ease online. Given the accessibility of digital platforms, the conspiratorial narratives pushed within this far right ecosystem are already reaching millions. As these messages gain traction beyond their original audience, they risk pushing antisemitic ideas out of the political margins and closer to mainstream visibility—an important development to consider when anticipating and analysing the trajectory of the (online) antisemitic far right landscape.