What if you created a movement that proclaimed its love and admiration for free speech while engaging in cancel culture with ferocious glee? What if that same movement proclaimed its love of the American founding at the same time that it got busy attacking the founding’s most important achievement, the Constitution?

Meet the anti-woke right. It’s a loose coalition of podcasters, influencers and Silicon Valley moguls who’ve led a mass movement against the left, a movement that helped return Donald Trump to the White House. If you’ve followed its rise to power, very little about the Trump administration’s first 100 days would surprise you.

First, let’s walk through a bit of recent history. The anti-woke right existed before 2020, but the combination of the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder and the Covid lockdowns (and the school closures and mask mandates that came with them) gave it rocket fuel. Its early messages were both simple and compelling — let us have a say, we don’t mindlessly obey, and the elite doesn’t possess a monopoly on the truth.

They had a point.

We might not like to dwell much on 2020 (it was a terrible year), but we can’t understand 2025 without remembering that both the racial reckoning and the early Covid response had a dark side. Cancel culture was real. Efforts to combat disinformation about Covid were often amateurish and heavy-handed.

I often think about the double standards applied to churches, for example. In October 2020, I covered a court case that perfectly represented the way in which selective enforcement and political favoritism turned so many Americans against the public health establishment.

Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a prominent church in Washington, sued the local government in 2020 after it continued to deny permission for the church to conduct outdoor, masked worship — even as restaurants were opening again for outdoor seating and even as the mayor of Washington had marched alongside protesters in outdoor protests against racial injustice.