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.
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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.”
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“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.
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
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