What the ‘Anti-Woke’ Crowd Gets Wrong

By Abigail Anthony

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

I had the pleasure of attending a retreat last weekend for young conservative professionals. “Varieties of conservatism” was the organizing theme of the seminars, and National Review’s 1955 mission statement was included in the readings. Someone mentioned during the class that Buckley was opposing moral relativism. That’s true, but it misses the more important point.

 

The justification for establishing a forum like National Review was that a dangerous illiberalism, animated by hostility to truth and reason, had already conquered virtually every major institution. My verb tense matters: Buckley et al. were not worried that such a dubious philosophy might eventually capture a few prestigious establishments that failed to engage in an ideological battle. Rather, NR’s founders astutely detected that the radicals had already seized control everywhere it mattered. The publication’s purpose was not merely to argue against an existing ideology but to disrupt its monopolistic power, hence the mission statement’s phrases such as “liberal orthodoxy” and “liberal world” appearing in 1955. The diagnosis was explicit: “And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”

 

Such an assessment is so germane that it could have been written today; the founding editorial is one among many artifacts confirming Buckley’s prophetic wisdom. But the mission statement also identifies precisely the problems that supposedly “reasonable” liberals, allegedly friendly to the conservative movement, discovered only in 2016 or 2020 during the “Woke Era” — and those “dissidents” positioned themselves as insightful heretics for observing what NR described over 70 years ago.

 

The broadly “anti-woke” crowd, exempting self-described “conservatives” and “right-wing” individuals, suffers from the delusion that elite institutions were ideologically captured in roughly the past decade. Such liberals think that the New York Times was an exemplar of fair and rigorous journalism until 2016, but then, it was suddenly corrupted by a virulent opposition to MAGA; the ideological tilt was only obvious when an editor resigned in response to outrage over an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton. They’ll tell you that NPR was a fantastic source of insightful nonpartisan discourse until 2020, when the radio hosts and writers all suddenly suffered from Rapid Onset Wokeness. They’ll claim the media were neutral and accurate, then unpredictably shifted to call the BLM riots “peaceful.” They’ll say universities were environments for open discourse, deep learning, and character formation until there was some overblown debacle at Yale University over appropriately sensible Halloween costumes. Experts in government, doctors, and medical associations were entirely apolitical prior to Covid, or perhaps just until they endorsed performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, per the devoted readers of The Atlantic. The people who own a New Yorker tote bag and wear lanyards at work think corporations never engaged in left-wing social activism until grocery stores issued statements endorsing Black Lives Matter.

 

But that is all wrong, and our mission statement proves it. National Review detected the intelligentsia’s hegemony, and further denounced their falsehoods, decades ago. “Conservatives in this country . . . are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars,” we attested in 1955. However, since we still live in “a Liberal world,” this statement was only considered potentially true once the former conformists — “intellectual dark web” members, former Times staffers, harassed professors — who are licensed by Ivy League diplomas said it in the past few years.

 

Make no mistake: The “canceled” class of podcasters acknowledge the “liberal orthodoxy,” but these “dissidents” of the 2020 era are not genuine allies to conservatives. The left’s expats today — the people who criticized “woke ideology” when fleeing their employer’s building without actually interrogating, let alone abandoning, their own views — only disapprove of which progressives are in charge. We see a problem with the ideas, whereas they have a problem with the personnel.

 

The woke movement’s rejected celebrities don’t actually have any defensible principles, despite claiming otherwise. Hillary-supporting liberals who attended cocktail parties weekly with embroidered fabric napkins wondered aloud in 2019 if maybe they should be able to say that not all men can suddenly become women just because, in theory, an unusually bad guy might take advantage of flexible bathroom policies — but in general, they assured everyone, “trans” adults are broadly acceptable, and we should honor their “preferred pronouns.” Dress however you like, engage in whatever consensual sex you want, and I’ll happily use whichever pronouns you like, but just don’t punish a woman for not doing so, said the supposedly reasonable feminists demanding female-only spaces after spending decades destroying male-only associations. The articles in mainstream media nervously suggesting “gender-inclusive” policies are potentially troublesome still deferred to a deluded subject’s wrong pronouns. Every columnist or podcast interviewee who suggested “gender-affirming care” is bad for minors danced around the central claim that “being trans” is a farce. “You see, children can’t consent to surgically removing their reproductive organs or receiving hormone injections,” argued the left-wing critics of gender nonsense. “But adults can . . . it’s a free society! Be sure to enforce policies for single-sex facilities, though.”

 

None of the “centrists” pushing against the extreme progressives were actually willing to state the true premises — and that’s because they refuse to believe those premises for the sake of continued social acceptance. The “anti-woke” subtle resistance to totalitarianism claimed, ever so cautiously, that democracy (or some other sacred value) means we should allow at least some widely held views a teeny bit of airtime occasionally. (These people were paid thousands, even tens of thousands, to declare this on the campuses where conservatives still may not tread.) Yet these Free-Thinking Liberals do not claim, let alone defend, that men can never be women, “transphobia” be damned. Why not? The “open-minded” lefties all have a gay best friend, or they are gay, or their distant cousin is in a polycule, or their nephew is going by “they/them” now, or their amazing hairdresser (who charges upwards of $500 for blonde highlights) is gay. Ideological trespassing subverts the left’s chief virtue of appearing polite, so anything more aggressive than tepid disagreement would mean losing friends, and more tragically, invites to soirees. (They eventually started their own parties for the outcasts who have “forbidden ideas,” and those dangerous thoughts were things like “don’t cut off a teenage girl’s breasts” or “maybe affirmative action results in less-qualified students.” Rather mysteriously, the invites for people like Charles Murray got lost in the mail.)

 

Worse than the “anti-tribal” leftists who retreated while wearing an “I’M SO BRAVE FOR LEAVING” shirt are those who remained within their elite institutions, caved, and are now doing minimal damage control. “Forget the woke things we sanctimoniously shouted even though we condemned you, ridiculed you, and fired you for not saying them” is the unsaid message. (An actual apology will never come.) Given the gaping wounds to the public reputation of progressivism in light of 2020-era absurdity, and the growing resentment confirmed by Trump’s 2024 popular vote victory, supposedly self-aware editors at mainstream publications reluctantly publish an opinion piece every few weeks that mildly suggests a particularly bad progressive policy might have some consequences; defending even modestly conservative or right-wing opinions would be too far. “Conservative columnists” who recently joined high-profile outlets obtained good enough social standing by signaling that Trump is a bad guy. The tolerable principled conservatives, according to the “canceled” progressives, are those whose most important principle is reflexively opposing Trump. Anything that any major institution has done in the past few years that vaguely resembles a concession to conservatives is nothing more than attempted image rehabilitation. There has not been a single instance of restructuring of an organization, publication, or university in the past decade or so that actually removed the left’s chokehold by introducing a critical mass of conservatives.

 

Everyone agrees with a modern application of National Review’s initial evaluation: Yes, there is a “liberal orthodoxy.” The problem, then, as now, is that all liberals want that orthodoxy. They reject NR’s 1955 declaration that “the largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques.” Today, there’s just an internal leftist Struggle Session at every institution with a recognizable acronym or logo. The unapologetically radical activists (usually identifiable by a keffiyeh, an N-95 mask, or an assortment of small tattooed doodles schizophrenically placed all over the arms depicting random household objects like buttons or toast) will actually admit as much and openly defend keeping out “fascists,” defined as “everyone we dislike.” The other liberals (distinguished from the others by decent outfits, sometimes tailored) are simply moderating their views and occasionally posing with an anti-Trump conservative to maintain, or regain, control. For the sake of optics, these cultural curators will proudly announce a new token staff member who voted Republican once. To regain credibility, a single event will be organized each year at universities with a panel featuring someone who doesn’t totally love abortion so that the leadership can claim, “Look at the intellectual diversity thriving in our culture of academic freedom!” when it is time to solicit donations. A publication will boast, “Yes, we have political disagreements on our editorial board. There are both Kamala and Bernie supporters. And there’s someone who wrote in a name last election who writes for us about why capitalism might be okay!”

 

In the mind of the supposed Self-Sacrificing Dissident Elite who participated in no fewer than ten interviews about their own “cancellation” and published an essay titled “WHY I LEFT THE LEFT,” desired reform is simply restoring the culture to its 2010ish norms — an environment that would let them sit again at a long table in a meeting room, but wouldn’t leave a chair for anyone actually conservative or right-wing. The aim of the “moderate” Democrat is not to cultivate the conditions where every view can be debated but, rather, to ensure their own views are restored to prominence. National Review has long fought against moral relativism and illiberalism, whereas the leftists who decried “groupthink” only whined after being booted out of the group; they could not even briefly endure the treatment that had previously been reserved for conservatives.

 

What’s the justification for refusing to seriously engage with conservative or right-wing thinkers, and continuing to ostracize us? Liberals with a Wikipedia page, who are usually now on their second marriage, think with absolute certainty that they are superior to us — politically, morally, spiritually, and so on ad infinitum. As proof that their views are better and therefore correct, they cite public polling figures that were cultivated through their own media outlets by strategically avoiding discussion of any alternative views to coerce a consensus. “Look, we really just can’t run an article presenting concerns about IVF technology because most people are totally fine with IVF,” is a slight paraphrase of what I was told by an editor at a left-leaning outlet. (Notably, the article also had pro-IVF perspectives.) Only occasionally does a conservative argument gain enough traction that it must be acknowledged, but in those cases, it must be “balanced” with the Democrat-approved alternative. When I contributed to a different left-leaning paper that masqueraded as “unbiased,” an opinion piece about the pro-life movement around the time of the March for Life had to be published adjacent to a pro-abortion article for the sake of “presenting both sides.” The standard disappeared when an article about a large pro-abortion rally occurred months later.

 

When introducing itself to the public in 1955, National Review explained that “we begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History.” As it was in the beginning, it is now. But through tireless work through National Review and other avenues, there’s no reason it ever shall be a liberal world without end.