The Atlantic is terrified by the inevitable rise of the Alt-Right in a post-Christian West:
For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.
So are cucks like Dreher and Douthat:
Read the whole thing. It’s important. It’s a confirmation of a line Ross Douthat had a year or so ago, telling the left that if they didn’t like the Religious Right, just wait until the see the Post-Religious Right. I’m getting anecdotal reports from readers and from acquaintances that young people with smartphones are not only streaming pornography, but also getting massive doses of political extremism on their devices. One source who sees the boys in his conservative Christian high school embracing white nationalism speculates that the megachurch Christianity of these high school seniors is not facing the reality of the world around us. If true, then the pastors and other religious authorities in these kids’ lives are simply not forming them as Christians to live in the post-Christian world that we have.
On that point, last night in DC, I talked with a senior official of a prominent Christian college, who told me that institutions like his are at Defcon 1 on religious liberty for institutions like his — and he is as baffled as I am why so many churches are silent. He spoke to me after my Benedict Option speech about the point I made in it re: pastors and religious leaders who aren’t preparing their congregations for hard times, even the possibility of persecution, are failing in their responsibilities. He said that’s true in his experience. We agreed that Christians in America aren’t going to know what hit them.
It’s amusing that Rod calls it “the Douthat scenario” when Douthat only picked upon the obvious a year ago. Years before that, nearly everyone on the alternative Right was warning the idiot cucks and Churchians that they had better embrace and join the nationalist Right or they will find themselves being steamrolled by the ultra-nationalists.
FFS, Cuckservative was published more than one year ago. But the cucks never want to admit that they are wrong, or point anyone in the direction of the truth. They need to try to maintain the utterly risible fiction that they are the only responsible predictors of the future, when in reality their game is to try to spot the parade and then leap in front of it to try to redirect it. Then surrender.
The feckless, cowardly, and non-confrontational Dreher calls, naturally, for a feckless, cowardly, and non-confrontational approach he calls “the Benedict Option”. The Christian Alt-Right, on the other hand, anticipates Revival, Repatriation, and Reconquista 2.0 throughout the West.
Stop whining. Stop crying. Stop complaining. Stop prophesying inevitable doom. Stop cowering and stop cucking. The constant defeatism among the civic nationalist Right is remarkable, especially when compared to the growing confidence of the Alt Right. Spanish Christians were conquered and ruled by Muslims for centuries and yet they still didn’t give up hope, much less prophesy doom and defeat when they were still the overwhelming majority.
The problem is not women, or immigrants, or the government, or the electorate, or anything else. The problem is you. Because you’re afraid and you would rather indulge yourself by giving in to despair than pray, fight, and win. It isn’t the West or the European nations that have been defeated, only the fake Civic Right who never intended on doing anything but surrendering from the start.
Read any of the so-called conservative writers of the Official Right™ and you get the impression that the world began in 1938. Every bad guy in the world is Hitler and any hesitation about rushing into war is appeasement. More important, they think the great intellectual tradition of the Right starts with the day Bill Buckley penned God and Man at Yale. Everything before that is fairy tales and mythology from a foreign people.
Of course, this is not an accident. Buckley conservatism was a break with the old traditional Right, if it was ever actually of the Right, which is debatable. George Will famously called Buckley’s Yale book “a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater.” It was also a good way to describe the conservatism of Bill Buckley and his followers. It was and still is a lover’s quarrel with the Left. Put another way, it was the child admonishing the parent for not living up to the ideals the parent preached to their children.
To be fair, the Buckleyites borrowed some political objectives from traditional conservatives, along with some of the language of the Right, but it was essentially a Progressive heresy over the issue of communism. It’s why the Buckleyites had exactly zero wins in the culture war. They never bothered to fight it. Their singular reason to exist was opposition to communism, foreign and domestic. It’s why after the Cold War, they declared themselves Big Government Conservatives.
Just one man shocked their world. What will they do when there are not one, not one hundred, but 100,000 Breiviks taking action in the 4GW environment their actions have made inevitable?
Last weekend, a bunch of my students were waxing enthusiastic about the 4chan humiliation of Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” campaign. This barely made a ripple in the broader media, even in the traditional conservative media. But it was a major coup in the alt-Right media world, and my student knew about it within hours of it happening. The general consensus of my boys was “Do NOT mess with 4chan. They will wreck you for life.”
I was reminded of a recent post here about Islam being “the last bad-ass religion”. There’s nothing bad-ass about Christianity these days. I teach at a small Christian college that until just this year wouldn’t even let its faculty drink alcohol; I’m telling you now, there is no political action by a figure or organization on the old-style Christian Right, substantive or symbolic, that any of my students would care about — certainly not on the same level that they care about how 4chan is brilliantly messing with Shia LeBeouf. They know 4chan is a hot mess of racism and sexism; that came up in the conversation, without much push-back. But they just don’t care. The symbolic power of lowering that flag and raising a Trump hat was a shot in the arm in a way that anodyne calls for a more winsome Christian witness in the postmodern world can never be. I’ll take a 100-to-1 bet against ever hearing any of my students kibitzing passionately over the weekend about a David Brooks column, or a James K.A. Smith book. Or for that matter, a Rod Dreher book.
4chan’s pranks are a precursor. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that their actions are unlikely to be limited to humiliating left-wing actors for long as the left gets increasingly violent and unhinged. People often get upset when I observe that by the time this is over in 100 years or so, there will very likely be statues honoring St. Anders erected all across Europe. They complain, correctly, that he is a murderer, a killer. That is most certainly true. But have a look at the statues in London, in Paris, in Rome, in Olso, in Madrid, and in Washington DC sometime. Many, if not most, you will observe, were erected in honor of men with blood on their hands.
