Copyright Newsweek
There’s a cancer growing on the right—a small but loud faction I call the "woke right." They scream hate and call it courage. They mistake shock value for strength. And if we’re not careful, they’ll do to our movement exactly what the Squad did to the left. The left’s radical takeover didn’t happen overnight. A decade ago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad were dismissed as a handful of fringe voices—too extreme to be taken seriously. But their party didn’t disavow them. Instead, they looked the other way. They called them “energizing,” “bold,” “the future.” Now that fringe has become the base of the Democratic Party, and that movement elected a socialist to run America’s largest city. The right should be learning from that mistake, not repeating it. Yet today, we’re flirting with our own radical fringe—an angry minority more interested in picking fights than winning arguments, more focused on conspiracy than conviction. They’re not building a movement; they’re burning one down. If we sit on our hands and allow the mainstreaming of people fantasizing rape, idolizing Joseph Stalin, and proudly saying they’re “team Hitler,” we don’t just lose every election going forward by legitimizing the left’s lie that we’re Hitler juniors—we lose the moral war that conservatives are supposed to uphold. If we keep excusing this crowd in the name of “unity” or “winning,” we’ll lose something far greater than an election—we’ll lose our credibility. You can be a bold conservative without being a bitter one. You can call out alleged corruption within AIPAC or the Israeli government without blaming “the Jews” for every minor inconvenience in your life. You can demand secure borders and a merit-based immigration system that puts Americans first without shutting the door to legal immigrants who want to contribute and build a better life. That’s not compromise—it’s common sense. We didn’t spend years fighting to end the old establishment and push out the neocon era of the Grand Old Party just to replace it with hate. Our movement was never supposed to be defined by who we despise—but by what we defend. We defend faith, freedom, family and the foundational values that make this country worth saving. Those principles don’t require purity tests or personality cults. They require clarity, courage and conviction. I’m part of a generation that came of age in an era of outrage—where anger drives algorithms and performance politics often gets rewarded more than principle. But leadership isn’t about who yells the loudest. It’s about who stands the tallest when it’s hardest to stand at all. The woke left fell for its own outrage trap. The woke right is walking straight into it. If we keep letting the most toxic voices define what conservatism means, then we’ll find ourselves not leading a movement—but managing its collapse. We can be the party that restores faith in our institutions, revives free speech and reminds America that conviction doesn’t have to come with cruelty. Or we can be the party that lets bitterness bury everything the conservative movement once stood for. Hate killed the left. If we’re not careful, we’ll be next. Brilyn Hollyhand is a 19-year-old political commentator, bestselling author of One Generation Away: Why Now is the Time to Restore American Freedom, and host of The Brilyn Hollyhand Show. He’s a freshman at Auburn University studying political science. For more of his hot takes you can follow him on socials @Brilyn Hollyhand or visit BrilynHollyhand.com. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
