By Josh Appel
Monday, August 18, 2025
Anyone paying attention the past year has surely noticed
a surge in online conspiratorial narratives. It seems as though every week the
usual suspects—Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Nick
Fuentes, and Ian Carroll—connect new dots to uncover secret conspiracies.
Public exposure of this major trend began when Tucker Carlson hosted a revisionist
history session with Darryl Cooper (whom Carlson deemed “the most honest and
august historian in America”) in September 2024. In that episode, Cooper said
that “Churchill was the chief villain of World War II” and that the
concentration camps responsible for the death of 6 million Jews were the result
of poor planning.
At the time, it seemed as though this was just an
isolated discussion about incorrect history, thoroughly debunked
by historians. But soon, what started as a historical debate became a movement
itself. Podcasters began relitigating Jewish history, Zionism, 9/11, the Iraq
War, drug crises, and the moon landing.
Since then, writers
and thinkers have been trying to understand this phenomenon, with many theories
being offered. For some, those on the “woke right” are staunch isolationists,
born in the post-Iraq world, and they’ve gone too far, with theories of neocons
used to bludgeon any desire for intervention, no matter how small. A more
cynical read is that the true motivation is profit, and the most profitable
tactic is by way of incendiary claims sure to go viral. A third possibility is
that these actors have always had antiestablishment skepticism, and it is
President Trump who has changed course.
However, the evidence suggests that the new right-wing
conspiracy culture is more than just anti-institutional—it is a new adaptation
of an intellectual trend that has dominated the left for two generations. That
trend is “critical theory”—the study of the supposedly hidden systems of power
and oppression that shape society and must be exposed before being dismantled.
Critical theory has found its most salient and powerful expression in the
triumph of critical race theory, which posits that America was born in
original sin in 1619 and still functions as a machine to suppress black people
whose presence in the United States was a crime to begin with and whose
problems are the result of a centuries-long criminal conspiracy against them.
The woke right has adapted this and created what I call
critical religion theory. It holds that a small elite has hijacked Western
civilization and actively used its power to manipulate the world against
religion. For these thinkers, the danger isn’t the policy, but that the policy
reflects an anti-religious force subverting their worldview, and the world
itself, behind the scenes. This movement sees power as illegitimate and
influence as suspect. Those in “power”—by which they mean having wealth and success—are
clearly part of a group trying to influence the masses. The tools of
subversion are money, drugs, movies, devil worship (literally), and sexual
blackmail. If you disagree, it’s because you are in on it, too.
What appears to be random conspiracy theorizing of
disparate topics is, in fact, a coherent theology that views secular power as
inherently anti-Christian and positions authoritarian figures like Hitler as
preferable to modern liberal elites. In an article for the Free Press,
Rebeccah Heinrichs termed this “the 1939 Project,” a parallel to the left’s
1619 Project. But the analysis needs to be taken a step further. The 1939
Project isn’t just an attempt to sanitize Hitler—it’s about viewing the entire
world through a “critical religion” lens.
***
Classifying the woke right as “isolationist” or
“anti-Semitic” is unintelligible when considering the evidence. From a cursory
view of the past two months of Tucker Carlson episodes, you will find far more
wide-ranging topics: the true history of the Jeffrey Epstein “cover-up,” an
interview with the president of Iran, predicting World War III if the U.S.
strikes Iran, an interview with George Santos about the corruption of Congress,
how U.S. politicians run a drug empire with the Chinese mafia, who really killed
JFK, who really did 9/11, AIPAC, secret underground CIA bunkers, a top-secret
Area 51 helicopter, how vaccines are linked to autism, the dark truth about
SSRIs, MKUltra, how Big Pharma manufactured the opioid crisis, and WWII and
Hitler revisionism. Looking at others in the same field, such as Candace Owens
or Alex Jones, will yield similar results. To reduce such incongruent topics to
“skepticism” or “contrarianism” misses the point. It doesn’t explain why a
commentator who considers himself “America First” went on a tour of Russia and had
softball interviews with leaders of Qatar and Iran, praising the
authoritarian regimes for their success and cleanliness.
The most notable moment came in Carlson’s interview with Ted Cruz.
When Carlson was describing his opposition toward the Iraq War, he said that
invading Iraq had reminded him of “Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 saying ‘my men will
be back by the time the leaves turn,’ and of course that destroyed Christian
Europe” (my emphasis). According to Carlson, the cost of World War I was
not soldiers or economics, but “the destruction of Christian Europe.” Carlson
didn’t mention that the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Scientific
Revolution, and Secular Nationalism had all played a far greater role in
destroying Christian Europe. He didn’t because those ideas and the events that
stemmed from them were organic and uncoordinated. Instead, Carlson distorts
history to pursue a particular worldview about undercover manipulation.
After this, it was impossible to find an argument,
debate, or podcast in which some aspect of critical religion theory was not
present. For example, the CRT isolationist stance is not about the value
proposition of intervention; instead, the problem with funding Israel is, as
Jack Posobiec posted,
that in every single modern conflict, “Christians were killed en masse.”
Similarly, after secondary Israeli shrapnel accidentally
hit a church in Gaza, Candace Owens responded that
destroying churches was “always part of the plan.” She added that
every single one of Netanyahu’s wars “ends with the mass slaughter of
Christians.” Self-described comedian Dave Smith tweeted just a
year earlier that the reason Israel had wanted the removal of the horrifically brutal
Assad regime is that “in Syria, [Assad] protected Christians, so Obama,
Israel, and Saudi Arabia armed” ISIS to overthrow him. These commentators fail
to mention that Israel is unquestionably the safest place for Christians in the
Middle East and that most of the region is hostile toward Christianity. CRT
cherry-picks facts that fit the narrative, regardless of any broader context.
The same phenomenon is present when looking at the
Ukraine war. Just take the titles of Carlson’s most recent
episodes on the topic as proof: “Kamikaze Drones & Attacks on
Christians” and “Zelensky’s Mission to End Christianity in Ukraine and Why
America Is Still Funding it.”
Looking at history through a CRT lens makes Hitler—and
WWII revisionism more broadly—central to the woke-right project. While many in
the past venerated Hitler for his Jew-hatred, the current trend is more
interested in seeing him as an expression of religious nationalism in the face
of the post–World War I secularization. For example, according
to Dan Bilzerian, Hitler “was trying to encourage community… family values.”
Darryl Cooper put two images side by side in an X post: on the right was a
picture of trans activists reenacting the Last Supper at last summer’s
Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his supporters. The caption
read: “The picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every
single way than the one on the right.” This wasn’t just trolling or even
Aryanism but instead a false binary: Either choose national glory or surrender
to extreme secularism. In a different post, someone asked Cooper whether he
would rather the current outcome of World War II or the alternative, Nazi
Europe, to which Cooper responded: “I can’t think of anything worse happening
than what did happen.”
***
“What did happen” is the main concern of CRT. Its
adherents believe that the postwar order ruined whatever little hope existed
for a strong religious nation and that the ruination has been promulgated by
coordinated elite manipulation behind the scenes.
This echoes the sentiment of unapologetic
Christian nationalist Joel Webbon, who has said that
there were “1,500 years of Christendom and then since WWII, we allegedly won
and yet all of the West looks like it lost.” For this reason, downplaying the
atrocities of World War II goes hand in hand with critical religious theory.
Sanitizing aspects of concentration camps, such as Cooper saying that the
murdered 6 million “ended up dead,” minimizes the negative in order to salvage
Hitler’s “good
ideas.”
This also helps explains why the woke right doesn’t talk
only about foreign policy or history but seamlessly weaves other topics into
their global tapestry. In critical religion theory, the conspiracists view
vaccines and antidepressants as means of control to subdue the masses for a
secular bidding. “They”
manufactured an opioid crisis to maintain profit and keep the people addicted
to mind-control methods. The moon landing was a fake
not because of mistrust in government; no, it came about because Jack Parson, a
NASA rocket scientist during the Apollo years, was a devoted disciple of the
occultist magician Aleister Crowley (which he actually was). Parson is a
perfect symbol: the scientist-priest of a secular shadow cult that fused sex,
ritual, and scientific power to, according to them, destroy the Christian world
from within. Candace Owens says exactly as much when explaining why, in
addition to Jewish conspiracy theories, she has spearheaded the idea that
Brigitte Macron, wife of Emmanuel Macron, is a transgender pedophile. She says
that “these sickos [are] in positions of power. [As] a Christian… I do not want
my kids growing up in a world that is run by elite perverts. [Someone wrote] it
feels like a psyop to distract from Epstein. I don’t think so. I think it’s all
related. I do…. I think the world has been run in a certain way for a long
time.” Furthermore, modern psychology, too,
was just Freud’s project of sexualizing the world through Kabbalah, the study
of which they cast as a satanic, pedophilic cult. Additionally, the advent of
digital pornography was for the nefarious purpose of “destroying
Christianity.” In this world, Israel is cast as a state built
to harbor pedophiles and engage in satanic rituals.
It isn’t surprising then that this worldview often rubs
against the most antiquated forms of anti-Semitism. When the theory suggests a
secret elite controlling the world to destroy traditional religion, the eternal
scapegoat is as good a candidate as any. In this theory of everything, is it
any shock that Jeffrey Epstein—rich, powerful, sexually malignant, and with a
Jewish name—is the most important story?
It also makes sense, then, when this woke right overlaps
with the woke left. Both see the world categorized by victims and victimizers,
with power being the determinant of evil. This is why someone like Candace
Owens finds common cause with notable far leftists Norman
Finkelstein and Briahna
Joy Gray, just as one example of many.
This isn’t white supremacy. It’s exactly what woke was.
It’s the idea that there are oppressed people being kept down by an oppressor
responsible for all the world’s problems. In a direct parallel to woke leftism
but with interchanged words, as early as 2022, Georgian Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene said, “We should be Christian nationalists” in order to solve the
problem of crime, school shootings, and “sexual immorality” in America. Such an
equation makes sense only to those who believe in critical theory. Critical
race theory and critical religious theory are the same, with different
flavorings.
The degradation of religion in America is a tragic tale
indeed and something we should be seeking to reverse. This analysis also does
not mean that anyone who holds isolationist views or antiestablishment ideas is
anti-Semitic or part of a new critical theory. But if we are to take this trend
seriously, we need to note that it is more than just a grift, or a way to get
clicks or listeners or viewers. It is part of a larger ideological trend. Just
as it was crucial to reveal critical race theory for its illogical and
deleterious concepts, the same is true of critical religion theory. The ideas
and narratives we believe in shape our culture and politics. So we need to ask
ourselves: What is the story of America? Is it a nation hijacked by
anti-religious elites manipulating events from the shadows? Or is it a
providential land of opportunity built on the principles of liberty and
justice? If you believe in the former, you no longer believe in the latter. You
have become an antagonist of the American experiment and are seeking its
destruction, not its salvation.
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