Top 15 Rod Dreher Quotes

Here’s what Viktor Orban knows: that “liberalism” has produced a society and a culture that despises itself, and is committing suicide. It hates the traditional family. It hates Judeo-Christian religion and moral norms. It hates the history and traditions of the countries where it governs. It hates certain people because of the color of their skin, and loves others because of the color of their skin — in both cases, irrespective of the content of their character. It has no respect for free speech, freedom of religion, and other traditional liberties. It believes that it has the right and responsibility to spread its beliefs globally. It has conquered every institution in the West — most importantly, Big Business — and is using soft power to silence and marginalize the “deplorable” people who disagree. The news media lie by commission and omission in order to prop up the Narrative. This is not liberalism. This is illiberal leftism, which wears liberalism like a skin suit.

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

Europeans think its weird for American Gentiles to be circumcised, and I think they’re right … but I remember the one kid we had in my elementary school class, a black boy who had been born at home, and who was not circumcised. All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that.

Bizarrely, as blacks and other minorities are growing in power, wealth, and influence, the Left acts as if America is little better than apartheid South Africa.

[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.

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.

How do you know that such a silent majority exists? I know a lot of people are planning to vote for Trump as their contribution to the fight against this madness. Vote for Trump if you want to, but understand that all of this has happened under Trump. I think there’s no question that it will accelerate under Biden, and in that sense, a vote for Trump is reasonable. But don’t think for one second that Trump is going to stop any of it. He doesn’t know how. Whether Trump is re-elected or not, the war on faith, family, and the foundations of American democracy will continue.

[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.

[T]hings we thought were permanent and stable are not. Soft totalitarianism is coming. It is time to prepare for the struggle ahead.

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.

“Do you believe in the civic religion of America?” Think of it like this: how could the Catholic Church hold itself together if a significant number of Catholics decided that Jesus Christ, St. Peter, and St. Paul were villains? It couldn’t. A nation is not a religion, but it has to hold its founders in esteem — and this is especially true of America, which was not founded on a tribe, as most other nations were. You don’t have to believe that Washington, Jefferson, and the Founders were without sin — of course they weren’t — but you do have to believe that what they did was good, even heroic. Certainly not villainous.

If you can’t prove that particular claims of systemic racism are wrong, you have no reliable way of proving that they are correct either. Again, though, what is true and what is false is a sideshow. The real deal is about power.

[C]laims of systemic racism in particular institutions are now accepted and repeated as fact, and that it is practically impossible to criticize or reject those claims in any way. "Systemic racism" is as fundamental to the construal of reality in the fast-emerging social order as “class conflict” was in Marxist social orders. It is the uncontestable axiom on which the entire ideological structure is built. Deny that, and you’re part of the racist system.

Hear me clearly: racism exists, it's a sin, and it should be resisted. But these SJWs, deeply embedded in institutions, and in command of the propaganda apparatus, are taking a genuine social problem — racism — that always needs attention, but construing it in a highly ideological way that has very little to do with addressing with this complex problem, and everything to do with advancing a narrative of command and control that demonizes an entire race of people as plunderers and parasites by nature, and incites others to despise them. We know from history where things like this go.

[T]he American media, whether it believes it is doing this or not, is seeding violent racial conflict — and that we are going to see it sooner rather than later.