Rod Dreher Quotes

Notice that none of this has to do with the government. If you think totalitarianism is only something that the state can impose, you’re wrong. This is what Woke Capitalism is doing to us. We are in a different world now.

It should go without saying that we must instruct our children that racism is evil. But this is part of any truly liberal education. What’s happening now is that ideologues, many of them not fully aware of what they are doing, are taking advantage of the persistence of an old and universal human evil — hating the Other by race — and using it to carry out a far more sweeping agenda. We cannot count on universities anymore.

The more I dug into Russian history, the better I understood where the radicalism came from. Ordinary Russian people had been kept down for so long that they were willing to believe that anything would be better than what they had. So, Russia had a revolution, and it got incomparably worse.

[H]istorians will look back at this era of American politics and find it absolutely deranged that the political left, and mainstream institutions, embraced antiwhite identity politics at the same time that the United States desperately needed to strengthen its traditions of classically liberal civic nationalism, which offers the best hope for a racially pluralistic democracy to hold together. But that’s not what’s happening.

The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism.

Everybody is afraid. The Gospel speaks to this fear! It offers a way out, and a way forward!

[A]n American public that has been so propagandized and demoralized that it cannot see the true nature of the threats to it, or if it can, it lacks the wherewithal to respond appropriately. The rot has gone very deep.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that people who circumcise for religious reasons should have the right to do so.

I utterly despise this shallow, mendacious, destructive habit of mind we have of demonizing people in the past who don’t live up to our supposedly perfect standards.

Don’t misunderstand: racism is a malignancy, and so is police brutality; decent people should stand up against them. But resisting these evils are going to occasion the embrace of other evils, masquerading as virtues and imperatives.

This is not a popular truth to say right now, in this time of moral hysteria and purity trials, but it remains true. The color of your skin does not guarantee virtue or vice. Rather, as King taught, and as the Bible teaches, it’s what’s in your heart. Jesus condemned the Pharisees as “whited sepulchres” — tombs that were gleaming on the outside, but that concealed foulness within.

[A] country whose elderly — considered by most societies to be repositories of wisdom and dignity — aspire to be perpetual rutting teenagers is not a country that has much to look forward to. If you want to have a future, you need a past.

Day 6 of Covid. Now my wife and kids have it too. All of us vaxxed; wife and I both boosted not long ago. Everybody we know who has omicron was vaxxed; most also boosted. So I gotta ask: what's the point of vaccine passports now? Security theater? Prepping social credit system?

Ross Douthat’s line can’t be said often enough: if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.

The hearts of men are exceedingly complex, as are their lives. Men who were capable of great good and decency were also capable of the exact opposite. One does not cancel the other. That is a very, very hard lesson to learn...