Rod Dreher’s Bad Alt-Right Takes

Rod Dreher has a bad habit of posting these poorly researched takes about the Alt-Right on his blog. Normally, I just roll my eyes and laugh, but in this case I feel insulted:

TAC:

“The ideologies of the parties are rotten. The churches have nothing to offer but platitudes. The “opposition” from leftists is a totalitarian farce. And then, you hear from manospherians and right-wingers what is obvious, that no one else will say: that this system is obviously falling apart, and that we need new principles to organize this nation.

Rod, I read your blog because you share this premise with both me and the alt-Right, and because I want your Christianity to be true. But I do not believe the Benedict option will work, simply because I do not believe that young people will be able to build the relationship skills to form families. This seems like an abrupt pivot, but it’s very related. The alt-right is fundamentally a movement created by rootless, lonely people who have nothing to believe in and are looking for roots. In some, the desire for community is strong, so they gravitate towards white identity politics. In others, the desire for love is stronger, so they go towards inceldom, PUA, and the manosphere. Both they and the Tumblr Trannies are symptoms of isolation, as you’ve said before. Moreover, this is directly connected with the replacing of procedural norms with identity politics: lonely people without narratives in which to frame their lives will try to force everyone into their frame. This is totalitarianism.”

Do I sound like a rootless, isolated, lonely person who has nothing to believe in to you?

I’m a White Southern Christian. I’m a happily married father. I have a great relationship with my parents and family. I am surrounded by friends who share my values. I love my community. I love my neighbors. I am motivated by what I perceive as the ongoing collapse of my civilization. I feel like I have, you know, a moral duty to future generations to resist this because our country is a sacred trust which was created by the toil of all the generations who came before us.

I take great offense at being described as “rootless” because nothing could be further from the truth. I named my son after his grandfather who was named his father who was named after my great-great grandfather. My wife’s family are Germans from Missouri who have exhaustively traced every generation of their lineage back to their arrival in Pennsylvania from Alsace in the 17th century.

My family has lived in this part of Alabama since arriving in 1840 where they began carving our civilization out of the wilderness here. I grew up on what had previously been a plantation in the Black Belt where my ancestors have lived since the Reconstruction era. The town where I grew up is named after Braxton Bragg Comer who was the 33rd Governor of Alabama and who redeemed my county with the White League in 1874. Not only did all of my ancestors fight for the Confederacy on both fronts of the War Between the States, but the people in my community were the vanguard of secession and volunteered to fight for the South in Bleeding Kansas and later led Alabama into the Confederacy.

In the 1890s, this part of Alabama was a hotbed of populism. In the 1900s, it produced Alabama’s first progressive governor. In the 1940s and 1950s, it produced Gov. Chauncey Sparks and Gov. John Patterson both of whom opposed the Civil Rights Movement and fought to defend segregation. Then in the 1960s it produced Gov. George Wallace who dominated Alabama for decades and whose four presidential campaigns transformed American politics. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were both members of the Citizens’ Councils who literally met working for George Wallace.

I’m not the one who is alienated from my roots. On the contrary, I am the one who is well adjusted, who has embraced our traditional Southern identity and values and who has an encyclopedic knowledge of our history and heritage, which I am happy to share with my audience, not Rod Dreher. There is nothing on this blog which would have been unfamiliar to any Southerner before the 1970s. I would have been a moderate Democrat who could have supported Sen. Lister Hill or Sen. John Sparkman in the 1950s. It is Rod who they would have found weird for describing having a positive sense of White identity as a “demon.” Virtually no one in the South shared Rod’s beliefs until his generation.

It is true that there is a deracination crisis. It is true that angry, alienated and deracinated young White men who resent political correctness are gravitating toward the Alt-Right. I would argue, however, that the ultimate cause of that is mainstream conservatism. It is mainstream conservatism which is alienated from the American past, which holds that our White ancestors are illegitimate because of “racism” and “white supremacy,” which caved to the Left’s historical narrative and moral values, which regards Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hero, which condemns “identity politics” and represses White identity while simultaneously appealing to non-Whites on the basis of race, which surrendered to feminism, gay marriage and political correctness and the dissolution of our borders. It is abstract libertarian nonsense peddled by bimbos like Tomi Lahren on FOX News or grifters like Diamond and Silk.

If young White men are radicalizing, it is because they are rightly concluding that mainstream conservatism is a spent force populated by losers and cowards who offer nothing but token resistance to the Left and that its values have brought about the present crisis. It’s unfortunate that Rod’s grandfather doesn’t have a blog because he probably made more sense on this subject.

Note: The White working class guy who recently encountered Rod and saw his problem glasses and concluded that he is probably a liberal who listens to NPR and reads The New York Times and Ta-Nehisi Coates and doesn’t get it had a point.

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16 Comments

    • I dipped my toe in Trad Catholic Circles a few years ago. Mark She is a real POS, but great for lulz. Dreher seems like he is LARPing with the Benedict Option.

  1. A Jew kid got woke to the harm his own kind are doing to Christ and Christianity and turned into a Nazi? Why TF didn’t the Jew kid turn into a Christian?

    • “Why TF didn’t the Jew kid turn into a Christian?” – Rob’t Browning

      Why would we want him- or any Jew, frankly? This is the growing realization I am having, more and more every day, and was confirmed as I read this article by David Cole this morning- once a very forceful Holocaust-denying JEW, who then was ‘made to learn’ that this was ‘not good for the Jews,’ and backed away from his former positions… https://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2016/10/david-coles-denial-of-holocaust-denial.html

      And then became (in his own words) “a F*cking Journalist.” Yeah, right. NO.

      https://www.takimag.com/article/right-wing-boob-job/

      A Jew is a Jew- and, as such, he/she is FOREVER accursed, outside of the Civilization, and eternally a Xenos. And their eradication from off the planet, would be a great good for the REAL followers of Christ, and the restoration of Christendom. They (Jews) are NOT the heirs of the covenant, they are NOT the heirs of Moses, they are NOT the sons of Heber, and they are NOT the sons of Abraham. Their father, as Christ (the Son of God incarnate) said, ‘is Satan.’ [Gospel of St. John 8:44]

      As Andrew Anglin has said time and again, ‘I am so tired of all this kikery.’

  2. He always acts like”EWW”! When it comes to his southern heritage. Just a your with religious pretentions

  3. Do you really consider yourself a part of the alt-right, HW? I regard you as being more of a Southern nationalist. Alt-righters are fashy frat boy types like Conte and Spencer, no?

  4. This guy is a moron.

    If a guy yearns for love, he doesn’t go towards “inceldom.” Quite the opposite. Any one who has taken biology 101 knows that after food, water, and shelter that the sex is one of mankind’s mostly powerful drives.

    He’s obviously projecting his own lonely, rootlessness, incel predicament.

  5. My heritage couldn’t be less Southern if I had made it up. Parents from the Lower East Side and Chelsea, met at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, got married in the same church on West 29th Street where Trump married Ivana, raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (where Saturday Night Fever was filmed) as well as the suburbs outside of Boston…and yet I’ve always been a strong supporter of Southern independence. Maybe in a previous life I was General Pemberton or Ruggles?

  6. There are no redeeming values inherent in e-celebrity. As a general admonition, anyone who still is dumb enough to brand themselves “Alt-Right”, is a total moron.

    As such, Rod Dreher is at best, hanging a paper tiger. This faggotous affectation of Rightwingdom, is not to be taken seriously. Rod, might as well start writing exclusively for Russia Insider. Both are just gay and fake.

    My patience has become so sparse for our traitorous brethren, i am nearing the point of halting all capital contributions to this utter boondoggle.

    I’ve given several years of my life, and all of the grace my family is willing to extend, to making the case for this thing.

    My family barely trusts me now, because i am speaking honestly about race, and that destroys all hope of success for real people. Like poison. I might as well have AIDS.

    My family would be more accepting of me if I fucked a man in the ass, and brought him to a family reunion, than if I even suggested its ok to be white.

    In the meantime, Andrew Anglin still is the public face of White Identity because for all of the capacity our writers have to spin a sympathetic yarn for whitey, they still just care about d’nations.

    Give me an operative set of datapoints. Or be quiet.

    I have a good job now, at long last. Am trying to use my place to make more jobs for whitey. You know, real life?

  7. I like merle haggard much more authentic country musician then most, at least he never signed with Rick (((Rubin))) a Jewish record producer responsible for popularizing rap and satanic heavy metal like Johnny Cash did

  8. The crackup will come if Trump gets the country in a war with Iran. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon will attack Israel in response to an attack upon Iran, this is what is meant by Iran’s promise to retaliate against Israel. Israel will demand help from Trump in the form of U.S. ground troops to fight Hezbollah a few miles north of Israel’s northern border.

    This will result in many U.S. casualties, another broken promise i.e. shrinking the Empire, rapid depletion of U.S. military forces and political division on the Left and the Right. Those who support the U.S. Government fighting for Israel and those who are opposed to the U.S. Government fighting for Israel (for a variety of reasons) will come from both the Left and Right making for new political realignments. The Government would probably need conscription to keep the military staffed which would be another political crisis contributing to political realignment.

    A crisis is the only thing that can truly tip over the Left Wing Establishment that has been plaguing the U.S. since at least FDR. A crisis, the Great Depression, cemented in place the Left’s misrule after Wilson’s failed crusade of WWI. A greater failure than the Depression will destroy the legitimacy of the Establishment with its “conservative” supporters going down for the count. Good riddance. The Left will always plague us but they can be easily handled, it’s the backstabbing “conservatives” who conserve nothing but their lap dog careers who are the bigger problem.

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