Conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher just spent a few days in Washington investigating claims that many young Republican operatives have gotten into anti-Semitism and Fascism. He reports:
The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.Notice that these guys believe all the same things about our economy that Mamdani voters believe. It isn't true, but it is driving extremism across the political spectrum. I agree with these young men that they took a lot of execrable abuse over being straight white men, but the idea that the US ever had a "common culture" is absurd. And they seem to be discarding two of the things most of us have had in common: devotion to democracy and hatred of tyrants.
If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.
Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”
Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.
Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture. Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.
F—k that, seems to be the reaction now. Fuentes is a living, breathing illustration of what Hannah Arendt meant when she spoke of people willing to revel in transgression such that they tear down the pillars of civilization, just for the fun of seeing those who had been gatekept away breaching containment.
2 comments:
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I agree with these young men that they took a lot of execrable abuse over being straight white men
When black men in this country take execrable abuse - considerably more of it and far more severe in nature - their response is not to decry the Jews and seek to burn down civilization.
Not a single one of the young, actuallyabused black men I have ever known (victims of literal hate crimes, including being told they are subhuman vermin, being physically assaulted, having their churches or even their own homes burned in arson attacks, etc) have dedicated their lives to a nihilistic political movement whose only goal is to tear the system down and nothing else.
Even the most extreme, radicalized individuals I've ever come across at least have some kind of wants or demands - some of them absolutely want to tear the system down, but only because they view that as necessary to achieve some other goal, no matter whether you agree with said goal or not. They all, to a person, have some kind of personal vision of a better world - they are not at all the Nihilists that Groypers and their ilk are. Their victimization at the hands of other prompts in them rage, but also a fervent desire for justice and reform. They want to see the abuses they suffered eliminated, both for themselves and for others.
Ditto for ALL of the other minorities who routinely face monstrous abuse - whether they are female, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or what have you.
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Moreover, when black men in this country take execrable abuse, it overwhelmingly actually IS "over being black". When straight white men take execrable abuse, it's overwhelmingly NOT over their identity - it's over their behavior, words, and actions. It's over their openly displayed bigotry, their chauvinism, their abuse of others as lesser, et cetera.
Tolerant, civil, cosmopolitan straight white men who treat others with decency rarely complain that they're facing execrable abuse.
It is quite specifically the conservative, religious, racist, white supremacist straight white men who desire a privileged existence over others that overwhelmingly report facing "execrable abuse".
And it's an understandable form of confusion, granted the lack of self awareness of these individual. When people at large talk about how these men "as whites, and especially as white males... are what’s wrong with the world", they are speaking in shorthand. They are not literally saying that problems of society are caused by the existence of people of Caucasian ancestry with Y chromosomes. They are employing totum pro parte - referring to the specific toxic and bigoted behaviors commonly displayed disproportionately often by straight white men, but encapsulating that complexity in a simpler term.
But the reality is that the "execrable abuse" these straight white men ostensibly face over their identity, is in the vast majority of cases actually just the predictable consequences of their own deeds and speech.
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