Just had to share one more worthwhile newsletter from Woods.
Tom Wood's Newsletter
I don't want to mention names, because I have no interest in another fight, but there's a certain person you probably know who goes around calling dissidents like you and me "woke right" -- a meaningless and foolish term, but one he returns to again and again.
The right-wing dissidents he targets are "woke," he thinks, because among other things they believe in oppressors and oppressed, just like Marxists and the left.
What he doesn't mention, and probably doesn't know, is that long before Karl Marx and his "woke" descendents came along, the classical liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had developed their own class theory.
Marx himself noted that "no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes."
So in fact there is nothing inherently "Marxist" about noting the existence of classes, or of oppressors and oppressed. Marx himself admits that others perceived these phenomena long before he came along.
The classical liberal theory of classes was that the oppressors were the ruling class who populated the state apparatus, and the oppressed were the ordinary citizens who were expropriated by that apparatus.
(The late historian Ralph Raico discusses the classical liberal theory of class in an article called "Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes.")
Simply because someone uses language Marx used, or says something that sounds -- superficially -- like something Marx said, doesn't make that person "woke." As we've said, Marx actually adapted his theory of class from others, and furthermore Marx had a habit of saying things that might have been true had his subsequent analysis not been hopelessly confused.
For example, Marx had a theory of exploitation. It was entirely wrong. It is therefore not "Marxist" to adopt a correct theory of exploitation -- as in, the state exploits peaceful participants in the private economy. I realize the word "exploitation" appears in both theories, but that is where the similarity ends.
Thus I am unmoved by the accusation that I am "woke right."
More from the email
Yesterday I mentioned poor Senator Tim Kaine, who evidently despises the fundamental ideas of his own country, and who recently mocked those ideas in the U.S. Senate.
In particular, Kaine is appalled that people believe that "rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the Creator."
Common sense will tell you that if you have no rights until government grants them to you, then you really have no rights at all, because what government gives you, government can also take away.
Kaine is a perfect example of the kind of person we mean when we say we are ruled by people who hate us.