The following is by James Soriano who does an excellent job of summarizing important points made by Dreher who, though prolix, is turning out good content on this and related topics.
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I link below a rambling essay by Rod Dreher on his visit to Washington, where he had a long conversation with VP Vance in the company of Hungary’s Viktor Orban on the future of Christianity in Europe and other things.
The essay goes into a long digression about the prevalence of Jews in certain walks of life, but at the end Dreher recapitulates the main points of his findings during his Washington visit.
I’ve shortened them and I would like to pass them along because they summarize the state of the civil war now raging in the ranks of conservatives. There is much to be pessimistic about.
1. The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement. It really has infiltrated young conservative networks.
2. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it.
3. It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down.
4. The gatekeepers of the Right can’t make it go away. They have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.
5. This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. It is primed to believe totalitarian things.
6. The Left got there first. Left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.
7. Conservatives hoped Trump’s anti-woke pushback would restore the meritocratic status quo. The Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.
8. This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically.
9. It poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance.
10. Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation. They’re getting it through online influencers. Their pastors and parents are not fighting back; they have lost authority. Some Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it. The same phenomenon exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants. This is spiritual poison.
11. The liberal media is going to have a field day with this to distract from the fact that antisemitism is triumphant among progressives. The new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani.
12. Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed. Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon.
13. The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it.
What I Saw And Heard In Washington