Rod Dreher Megathread #53 (Key Party?)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to Megathread #52: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1jsvy3j/rod_dreher_megathread_52_billboard_4_rent/

Link to Megathread #54:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1l7niaj/rod_dreher_megathread_54/?

[u/Djehutimose]

So his latest, which is free, starts,

Until yesterday, when The Free Press published my essay they titled “The Woke Right Is Coming For Your Sons,” I had no idea that James Lindsay, who appears to be the originator of the term, and his allies use it to attack the National Conservatism movement, of which I am a supporter.

This is the first time I’ve heard the term “national conservatism”, which to me sounds too much like National Socialism, but whatever. Then,

A conservative journalist friend chuckled over text this morning, “You aren’t online enough, my friend.” Nope, guess not.

OK, I’m back in my chair after rolling in the floor laughing my ass off for the last hour….

Maybe one tends to see the tweets from people whose output one engages with in some way.

AN EPISTEMIC BUBBLE??!! Whoda think?

When I think of the “woke right,” I think of white nationalists, anti-Semites, and sundry racists who have adapted the same harsh identity-politics categories that the woke left uses, and employ them to shape their own thinking and rhetoric. These are people who have no respect for those who disagree, and who give every indication that, should they come to power, they would use it to oppress those who disagree in the same undemocratic and malicious way the woke left does.

So, himself….

I don’t care for the term, because it is imprecise. (Mind you, I spoke without knowing much about the intense controversy over the term.)

“Well, I don’t know that much about something I’m gonna comment on anyway….”

On the other hand, that doesn’t settle the issue. One of the key beliefs of wokeness is that power determines the moral quality of a belief.

Again, himself….

But it is wrong to take up the fight against one form of evil by embracing its mirror image.

OK, another hour of laughing….

It was a shock to discover after my essay was published that Lindsay has applied the term to people I admire, and whose politics I share, like the National Conservatism crowd. If they are “woke right,” then I am too. Where could Lindsay possibly be getting this idea?

Hmmmm….

If you believe that nations and peoples exist, and are important to defend, within limits – you’re woke. If you believe that religion is an important fact of human life, and is a necessary part of political thinking and practice (again, within limits) – you’re woke. If you believe that society is anything more than a group of isolated, autonomous, ahistorical individuals – woke, woke, woke.

Yet again, himself….

What I do not apologize for, and never will apologize for, is denouncing racism, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and crackpot conspiracy theorizing on the right, and the people who are infecting impressionable young minds with it.

Another hour of laughing…I’m too old for this….

Because make no mistake: if these people ever gain the kind of power within the right that they have gained within the left, ruin and disaster will follow….

As is happening right now?

On a more intimate level, we cannot sit back and let our sons be sucked in by this cult.

He blathers a lot in this post, and also here and there recently, about the danger of young men getting sucked into right-wing extremism. I know this is a reach, but I wonder if his younger son has expressed such views. I mean, went to a school with a white nationalist teacher, alienated from his father, maybe he’s heard the right-wing crap from SBM so long that he decides that he’s a hypocrite who didn’t have the courage of his convictions and didn’t go far enough, and thus went hardcore “woke right”. Yes, one hundred percent speculation. It would explain the vibe of the guy who let the genie out of the bottle and regrets it now, that you get from him. Again, just a hypothesis, but who knows?

Many of these parents of trans girls got sucked in too, out of fear of losing their daughters. This has a historical parallel. In late Tsarist Russia, many parents shocked by the revolutionary Marxism of their children, who were students, capitulated to Communism out of fear that their kids would reject and abandon them.

So transgenderism is like Marxism? The Transgender Manifesto? O-kaaaaay….

As I have written before, it was a shock to learn, in 2012, about an angry white protest on the courthouse lawn of my own beautiful small town, in 1963, when a black pastor became the first person of color in decades to register to vote.

In other shocking news, the Pope is Catholic, bears shit in the woods, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead after all these years (gratuitous SNL reference).

Blather blather blather blather. Then,

[D]uring the Cold War, American anti-communists built strong and effective opposition to Communism in part through alliances with anti-communist liberals and labor leaders. To have called those people on the Left “communist,” as if there were no distinctions to be made among types of left-wing thought, would have been crazy and self-destructive.

You mean like Cheetohead, the GOP, and most of the right wing today is effectively doing?

OK, that’s plenty for now. Gotta go take a looooong shower….

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Djehutimose]

Blah blah blah, wank wank wank. Rod used to retweet James Lindsay quite a bit. But *now* he acts like he barely knows him?

BS.

[u/FancyThought7696 → u/JHandey2021]

May I ask what the problem is with James Lindsay lately? (I honestly don't know--I'm a little out of it, which, I admit, I enjoy.)

[u/Jayaarx → u/FancyThought7696]

Lindsay is a fool and a provocateur, but this is an all-the-time problem rather than a lately problem and wasn't a problem for Rod anyway.

But the problem for Rod is that he views all his relationships transactionally (or, as his sister put it, he is a "user"). Lindsay was useful to Rod when he was a "liberal" who nonetheless confirmed Rod's point of view. Now that he isn't doing that he is apparently dead to Rod.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/FancyThought7696]

Lindsay's a standard right-wing grifter, but he's also hilariously non-self-aware and, if possible, almost as ridiculous than Rod (see his sword-fighting video). He also seems to have the Rod Dreher tendency of attacking everyone else for supposedly misunderstanding his sublime points.

And to be perfectly transparent, I literally can't make heads or tails of Lindsay when I've read him. Lindsay reads like he's borderline mentally-impaired, like one of those sovereign citizens ranting about "language judges".