Rod Dreher: The Woke Right Is Coming For Your Sons

This article by Rod Dreher in The Free Press which is Bari Weiss’ rag is a beautiful illustration of where the Right is now in 2025. Yes, I know it is paywalled, but it isn’t worth reading anyway. I just wanted to share the controversy here as another milestone in our march into the mainstream.

The Free Press:

“Do you think wokeness is over, now that President Trump is in power?”

I was asked this question recently in Nashville on a tour across the country for screenings of Live Not by Lies, the documentary series based on my 2020 book of the same name. Both the film and the book tell the stories of former Soviet bloc dissidents who resisted Communist totalitarianism, and are disturbed by the totalitarian tendencies in the illiberal ideological movement across the West we came to call wokeness.

The experience of Soviet communism gives these people their instinct for danger. But Americans—whether because wokeness called itself “social justice” or because they have had the uniquely American luxury of being on a holiday from history—often don’t see the totalitarian threat.

By the time my book came out we were six months into Covid and after the summer of George Floyd’s killing. By that point what I was describing was undeniable …”

As many of you will recall, Rod used to be an edgy and influential social conservative writer at The American Conservative before Trump came down the escalator in 2015. It was Rod who introduced J.D. Vance in his Never Trump phase to the far right audience with his glowing review of Hillbilly Elegy. In 2021, he wrote the infamous “primitive root weiner” article which paved the way to his departure from TAC in 2023. Last I heard, Rod’s wife had filed for divorce and he moved to Hungary where he has fallen into obscurity after becoming a Viktor Orban fluffer and a fixture at the NatCon conferences.

Rod Dreher:

“We live in news and information silos. Until yesterday, when The Free Press published my essay they titled “The Woke Right Is Coming For Your Sons,” I had no idea that James Lindsay, who appears to be the originator of the term, and his allies use it to attack the National Conservatism movement, of which I am a supporter. If I had, I would not have used the term, or allowed it to be used in the headline. That’s on me.

A conservative journalist friend chuckled over text this morning, “You aren’t online enough, my friend.” Nope, guess not.

I’ve appreciated Lindsay’s work in the past, sussing out the ideological and psychological details of wokeness; I quote him in Live Not By Lies. I follow him on X, but then, I follow over 700 accounts on X, and only a relative handful of tweets from those I follow ever make it into my stream. I don’t know how the algorithm works. Maybe one tends to see the tweets from people whose output one engages with in some way. For example, I see nearly everything Wes Yang and David Rieff tweet, because I often retweet them. I see very little of what James Lindsay tweets. Consequently, I missed that he has been using the “woke right” designation to slam conservatives like … well, conservatives like me.

When I think of the “woke right,” I think of white nationalists, anti-Semites, and sundry racists who have adapted the same harsh identity-politics categories that the woke left uses, and employ them to shape their own thinking and rhetoric. …”

Rod has returned to form in this article in which he denounced the “Woke Right” before backtracking and writing a new article on his Substack in which he explained that he was trying to gatekeep the “Radical Right” which consists of antisemites, race realists and White Nationalists. He has always been one of these wimpy conservatives (he is most famous for his book The Benedict Option which was a strategy for tweeds to give up and retreat from the culture war), but the political landscape has radically changed over the past ten years and Rod now comes across like Rip van Winkle. He is a throwback to another time.

The problem for Rod is that the term “racism” was so discredited by activists in the Summer of Floyd in 2020 that it has lost the power it used to hold on the Right. As I explained in my speech at the Will To Power conference, “Woke Right” has been created as a substitute, but it isn’t working for several reasons. For starters, James Lindsay has wielded it against Yoram Hazony and the NatCons who has responded by labeling Lindsay a schmuck on X who is trying to undermine Trump’s anti-woke coalition. There is disagreement among gatekeepers over the usefulness of the term because antisemites, White Nationalists and race realists were around long before Wokeism and many recognize it is just a smear. The biggest problem, however, is that the people like Rod on the center-right who used to call us “racists” in the old days have lost credibility through their cowardice. No one cares what Bari Weiss thinks. The conversation on the online Right has veered all the way to White genocide in two years.

The taboo on “racism” which took 75 years to build was destroyed in a fit of mindless rage in 2020. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men – people like Rod – couldn’t put Humpty back together again!