Rod Dreher vs David Hogg and March for Our Lives
The March For Our Lives rallies across the world have inspired a generation of activists to work and take back their schools and streets from the hopelessness of gun violence.
But that’s too much for Rod Dreher, who has never met a progressive movement he didn’t think was coming to personally arrest him at Whole Foods and ship him to Treblinka 2.0.
That is the horrifying moment that the anti-gun movement lost the chance of ever winning me over. David Hogg is emerging as a skinny young Robespierre, so filled with righteousness and certainty, and stone-cold purity. I have no problem at all with him criticizing Marco Rubio or any other lawmaker, and criticizing them strongly. But what that kid said goes way beyond that. And he’s being cheered on by adults who know better, but who find him useful. What a disgusting little creep David Hogg is — but not as disgusting as the grown-ups who are using him for their own cause.
Ditto for Black Lives Matter, who he calls “Black Lives Matter Campus Fascists”
Rod makes a great show of wringing his hands over gun violence, but of course, it is David Hogg who is coming with Mme Guillotine to separate his imaginative head from his neck in the fevered writing at The American Conservative. Likewise, he deplores police shootings of unarmed black men but just cannot abide anyone who would actually care enough to go onto a street and protest.
What is particularly striking is how personally threatened Rod seems to be, and one must wonder just how much of this is projection. Rod Dreher is an inimical opponent of GLBT people and a firm supporter of Christianity having special dispensation to run society. He has repeatedly called The Enlightenment ‘one of the worst mistakes’ in the history of Western Civilization. He is an authoritarian through and through….and he is especially frightened when ‘the mob’ (anybody who is not a conservative) takes to the streets and the podiums to say something he does not like.
Back in the1960’s and 1970’s, the “New Left” could not defend the excesses of communism, and Stalinism especially. However, they were still determined to agitate against the foes of communism and adopted what became the “anti anti” stance of being against critics of communism without trying to actually support communism itself. Of course, it is an obviously dishonest ruse and an intellectual dead end. This is where Dreher and his co travelers have arrived. They cannot defend the sale of military weapons to the public, or police brutality and shootings of African Americans…but they hate their fellow Americans more than these things that they merely dislike. Hence, the comparison of David Hogg to a murderous French revolutionary.
What is most confusing is that anybody takes this frightened little man seriously as some sort of intellectual.