The Free Press has just posted Rod Dreher’s long column “The woke right is coming for your sons.” Having toured the United States in support of the documentary Live Not By Lies! based on his book of the same name, Dreher writes that what he found “shocked me to my core.” He saw “the deep inroads, in such a short period, that right-wing totalitarianism, expressed most often as antisemitism, has made, especially among a growing segment of right-wing males. And unlike so many who point this out, this community is not exotic or foreign to me—this is my world.” Here is the passage that takes up Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and, in the unquoted continuation, Russell Brand, and Kanye West:
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The Great Awokening revealed to us how insane the political left was willing to make itself, and to attempt to coerce the rest of us to be, for the sake of upholding its ideological verities. Respect the female penis, bigot, and so forth. It spread with pandemic speed through the left because liberals who knew better were afraid to speak out. With limited exception, they were silent.
The right is not immune to this. Right now, too many of us on the right decline to stand up to antisemitism on our own side for the pleasure of seeing those who have unjustly excluded others get a taste of their own bitter medicine.
Witness Candace Owens, a highly charismatic right-wing podcaster with millions of followers, publicly doubting whether anyone ever walked on the moon. Elsewhere, she called the 1969 Apollo mission “fake and gay,” and denounced conservative commentator Matt Walsh for believing it really happened.
After Owens repeated outrageous blood libels against Jews and characterized Dr. Josef Mengele’s gruesome Auschwitz experiments on prisoners as “bizarre propaganda,” her own father-in-law, a devoutly Christian member of the British House of Lords, publicly distanced himself from her.
And yet as of this writing, Candace Owens has 6.9 million followers on X, 4.3 million subscribers to her YouTube channel, and hosts one of the most popular news and political podcasts in America.
Meanwhile, even more popular podcasters with audiences numbering in the tens of millions give airtime to people who claim that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II. There is nothing wrong with reexamining accepted narratives in light of new evidence, but to believe that the British prime minister was a worse man than the German dictator who launched the global conflagration and murdered more than 12 million?
That this is even admitted into consideration by serious, influential right-wing media personalities is hard to understand, and impossible to accept. “Just asking questions” is not a moral disinfectant.
Admittedly, it is difficult for a middle-aged conservative like me to keep up with the ideological acceleration within the online right, or to truly understand the shadow worlds of Gen Z activists. But I don’t need to be on TikTok to understand how far and fast this has taken hold. When popular online figures offering crackpot takes like Actually, Churchill was the real villain of World War II find their way onto mainstream podcasts like Joe Rogan’s and Tucker Carlson’s, you know something massive is happening….
Read the whole thing here.
