A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece for Counter-Currents on “The Red-Pilling of Rod Dreher”, as I find him a barometer of neo-liberal collapse, the pathological altruism of his Christian universalism slamming up against the hard surfaces of race realism and its manifestation in multiculturalism.
In “The Nazi Next Door”, the always panicky Dreher clasps his pearls about the recent NYT profile of Tony Hovater:
I remember years ago, after I was well into adulthood, learning from older people in my hometown the identities of some of the men who were Klansmen back in the 1950s and 1960s. I was shocked. “You mean Mr. ____ was a Klansman?! Really? He’s so sweet.” There were more than a few of these men — men I was raised to respect, and who I saw only as neighborly and, well, normal. But back in the day, they had put on white hoods, burned crosses, and heaven knows what else. That shook me up, realizing how very close evil was. A lot of Southerners my age and older can tell the same stories.
It’s 2017 and the guy still holds a cartoonish image of what the KKK in the ‘50s & ‘60s was really about.
Last night I was reading from a book about contemporary German history. The Nazis began as outsiders, as fringe figures. People seem to have this idea that grotesque evil is always something you can see coming from a mile away…
However, in fairness, I do concede that there is an unavoidable element of “normalizing” in any story a major media outlet like the NYT does on a fringe phenomenon. Media bias usually expresses itself not by media telling readers, viewers, and listeners what to think, but rather by framing the possibilities of what is acceptable thought. Liberals upset by the “neo-Nazi next door” piece are afraid that by paying attention to Hovater, and by presenting him in a neutral way, the Times is giving permission to others to consider him within the bounds of the normal.
Dreher likes to draw parallels between today’s western decadence with that of “Weimar” (he does it again in this article) but is saddened to see the rational reaction against this tide by vilified whites.
His BenOp solution is that we retreat to mountainside monasteries, eat fine food, drink fine wine, and discuss Aristotle, yet pretend we don’t see the implicit whiteness such a setting entails.
