What Is The Woke Right? HEATED Debate with Michael Knowles

**Shabbos Kestenbaum** (0:00)
And so whether you want to call them liberal or retards or Woke Right, whatever the terminology is, yeah, we can say that those people are not part of the mainstream conservative movement.

**Kai Schwemmer** (0:07)
To say, well, why doesn't anybody know about, you know, the genocide happening in Ethiopia against the Ethiopian Christians?
Probably because the Ethiopian flag does not line the halls of the Cannon Building. The way that I saw the flag of Israel line the halls of the Cannon Building.

**Jake Munro** (0:21)
They need to leave. Muslims specifically need to leave. As far as Israel is concerned, I mean, I was detained by police recently in question of my beliefs and my contentions with the Jewish community here in the UK.

**Michael Knowles** (0:34)
Can I just, wait, why were you detained? It's funny, because you, the whole time you were saying, ah, the Israel issue is not a big deal in the UK. And then right at the very end, you're saying the Jews are helping the Muslims basically?

**Jake Munro** (0:44)
Yeah.

**Michael Knowles** (0:45)
Back in the middle of the 20th century, the big divide on the American right was between the conservatives and the liberal Rockefeller Republicans. Then you had the divide between the Reaganites and the Bushies.
You had the divide between the business Republicans and the more social conservative types. In the Tea Party, you saw this come to a head with a divide between the neo-cons and the paleo-con libertarian types. Then Trump comes in, brings in this new era of populism. And with the rise of the internet, there seem to be a billion different versions of conservatism. You've got everything from classical liberalism to the traditionalists, to working class populism. All the way, when you get all the way to the fringes, you basically get to boxcars. So what is the online right really about? I bring in people from all over the spectrum, variations from the mainstream to a little more eccentric. I'm very pleased to welcome Shabbos Kestenbaum, who you know from PragerU and also for Suing Harvard.
One of my very favorite things that anyone can do. We also have Kai Schwemmer, the political director of the College Republicans of America. And we welcome to the show for the first time, Jake Munro, who describes himself on YouTube as quote, an alt-right nationalist goth YouTuber from the UK, fighting the woke matriarchy in alternative subcultures. What a log line. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the show.

**Shabbos Kestenbaum** (2:18)
Thanks for having us.

**Michael Knowles** (2:19)
I want to jump right in on where the divides really stand because I referenced boxcars earlier.
Is it like a slight exaggeration of what you find on X? But you do see like very, very extreme kind of increasingly ethnic and religious tensions on the super online, right? And the way that that lands, I think, most reasonably in politics is in a divide over foreign policy. But to put it really bluntly, when I was a kid, the Christians generally viewed the Jews as people we generally liked, and the Muslims as people we generally were not that into because they kept doing it. We've been fighting them for like 1400 years. And now on the online right, it seems to have flipped a little bit. And I don't know, I'm seeing an increasingly kind of Islamophilic move on the right. A lot of that is centered around foreign policy and the Gaza war. But you get all the way down to not just people who are skeptical of America's relationship, to Israel, which has that's been around for a long time. But even you even get conservatives who are like pro-Palestine, which that actually kind of blew my mind. So let's start out. Let's start out in order.
Kai, you're the political director of the College Republicans of America. Am I imagining that? What where the divide on foreign policy, the kind of Islamophilic, even like pro-free Palestine stuff. Is that real or is that a shadow on the Internet?

**Kai Schwemmer** (3:43)
So I think it exists, certainly. But I actually don't think it really exists in the more authentic parts of the right wing, whether online or just in the youth spheres. It's certainly not in the College Republicans. I mean, the big thing that I see is you have people who co-opt and hijack some things that maybe historically appear right wing, but they end up not having any kind of ideological actual consistencies. This is where you get people who really just are motivated by the Israel issue, who begin adopting this ridiculous view of the world. Like I saw Jake Shields posting the other day and I made a post about it, about this TikTok edit about how Hitler would have supported Palestine.