Why right-wing anti-woke 'free thinkers' are total hypocrites: journalist

19 December 2022

In right-wing media, it isn’t hard to find pundits who relentlessly rail against “woke culture,” “cancel culture” and “the thought police” — only to turn around and exclude the viewpoints of Rep. Liz Cheney, attorney George Conway and anyone else on the right who is critical of Trumpism and the MAGA movement. Countless right-wing pundits view themselves as enemies of groupthink, but Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV are hardly full of hosts who go out of their way to hear what non-MAGA conservatives, let alone liberals and progressives, have to say.

Media Matters has often argued that right-wing media are redundant and predictable because they don’t welcome a wide range of viewpoints, even within the conservative/libertarian realm.

In an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on December 19, journalist Kali Holloway emphasizes that many right-wing “free thinkers” are guilty of the type of groupthink that they are quick to accuse liberals and progressives of.

“The ‘free thinkers’ see themselves as valiant truth-tellers in a time of overwhelming leftist wokeism — the last brave holdouts against liberal orthodoxy and social justice warriors who have pushed things too far,” Holloway writes. “They claim that left-wing overreach has quashed new ideas and open debate, and many of them profess to be one-time liberals who did not defect from the left, but were instead left behind by a movement gone off the rails and now careening toward a cliff built on meaningless politically-correct terminology and safe space obsessions.”

Holloway continues, “They have proclaimed themselves victims — no, wait, martyrs — of an all-powerful censorious and illiberal left that controls the universities, the media, the social media platforms, and Hollywood — demanding unthinking, lockstep ideological agreement. Worse, they say, this cabal punishes those who disagree by banishing them to the fringes of society, turning them into friendless and untouchable political lepers. It’s all very the-left-can’t-handle-the-truth. Yet despite all this, they boldly carry on, bucking the system, man, and defying the close-minded gender warriors and race-obsessives. It’s all such bu****t.”

Holloway cites Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk as a prime example of a self-described “free speech absolutist” who doesn’t practice what he preaches. Others she names range from Milo Yiannopoulos to rapper Kanye West.

The journalist writes, “Musk tweeted not too long ago that ‘the woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide,’ because, I dunno, there are black hobbits now…. The Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX boss went on to add that there ‘needs to be a counter-narrative’ to all this wokeism, as if conservatives haven’t been legally outlawing classroom discussions of race, and school boards haven’t banned books about racism and LGBT rights. As if Fox News doesn’t have a massive audience of ventriloquist dummies, some of whom have taken it upon themselves to threaten people’s lives for putting on drag shows or just living their authentic lives. As if ‘freeze peach’ absolutist Musk, himself, isn’t banning journalists whose coverage makes him feel bad while welcoming literal neo-Nazis back onto Twitter, essentially ensuring that a site that brought about the arrests of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers and the groundswell that was #MeToo never does that again?”

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