Pictured above is Raymond Oliver Dreher, Jr. (born February 14, 1967), known as Rod Dreher. Dreher is an American expatriate writer and editor living in Hungary. He was a columnist with The American Conservative for twelve years, ending in March 2023, and he remains an editor-at-large there. He is also author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies.
The above information is coming to you by way of Wikipedia. Dreher's blog, should you wish to consult it, can be found by clicking this link. I have mentioned Dreher before (and actually more than once). I first became aware of him by way of a New Yorker profile.
Below is a rather long extract from Dreher's blog posting published on July 15, 2024. In that blog posting, Dreher reacts to the attack on former president Trump that occurred during a July 14, 2024, rally in Butler, Pennsylvania:
Whatever the motivation of the failed assassin, this was a monumental failure on behalf of the Secret Service. How the hell does a gunman climb onto that roof and crawl into place, with multiple people in the crowd screaming, “He’s got a gun!” and trying to warn police, and squeeze off shots at Donald Trump?! There were snipers already in place for just such a possibility. Why were there no Secret Service agents on that roof to begin with? It’s an obvious platform for an assassin, were one to be present. The conspiracy theorists are already going wild on this point, and understandably so. I say “understandably” not to endorse a conspiracy theory, but to say this Secret Service failure gives natural rise to such speculation.
My thoughts as I was falling asleep on the first night, on the fact political and culture war fact pattern emerging:
- They wouldn’t leave Evangelical Christian Jack Philips alone to bake his cakes and run his business.
- They won’t let parents know if their children are transing themselves in school.
- They won’t let parents remove pornographic books from school libraries.
- They teach little children and teenage minors to hate everything normal — their families, their own bodies, even their very identity.
- They told us that the President of the United States was a Russian Manchurian (Siberian?) candidate, and crippled his administration with these lies.
- They told us Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, though they knew it was not.
- They lied to us about Covid and its origins.
- They told us that we couldn’t have even a semblance of a normal life because of Covid … unless we were going out onto the streets to protest racism, or burn the cities down to honor George Floyd.
- “Mostly peaceful” riots.
- They have turned professional journalism into propaganda.
- For example, they ignored obvious signs of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline into decrepitude, until he choked on live TV — and are now shocked, shocked that the White House deceived them.
- They tried to ruin as a bigot a high school kid who wore a MAGA hat on the Mall, and was set upon by a provocative left-wing activist.
- They have conspired to destroy institutions essential to running society by keeping out the accomplished and the meritorious, for the sake of letting in those who are incapable of doing the work, but who possess the favored demographic profile.
- They have divided America and made us fear and loathe each other on racial lines.
- They have demonized white people — especially white males.
- They have destroyed statues and attempted to rewrite American history to reflect ideological convictions.
- They have led near-pogroms against Jews on elite American campuses.
- They secretly pressured, from senior government levels, a policymaking medical organization to abandon scientific considerations in order to eliminate lower limits on sexually and psychologically mutilating children.
- They passed laws in some states allowing the government to seize minor children from their uncooperative parents, for the sake of sexually and psychologically mutilating them.
- They are destroying women’s sports, and making women everywhere more vulnerable to mentally unwell men who think they are women.
- They gaslit us into war in Iraq, and now they’ve gaslit us into an ongoing, unwinnable war against Russia, risking World War III for no plausible national interest.
- They are wrecking the military with DEI, such that fewer normal men want to serve.
- They have frightened millions of Americans into silence over fear of cancellation.
- They have left the back door into the US wide open for migrants, including Hezbollah fighters, likely Chinese agents, and others.
- They shipped America’s manufacturing base overseas, and blame Americans for being unhappy with their economic prospects.
- They deregulated Wall Street, and when it blew up in 2008, managed to avoid punishing anyone for it.
- They failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no senior military commander lost his job for it, even though the 2014 Afghanistan Papers report revealed that the Pentagon didn’t know what it was doing, and didn’t care.
- All those American soldiers, physically and psychologically maimed by the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, and by the stupidity of trying to build a liberal democracy in Afghanistan — swept under the rug.
- In a country where you have to show ID to buy beer, this week they tried to defeat a law that would require people to show ID proving their are citizens in order to vote.
- They declared that Americans who dissent from all this are on the “far right” and might be “domestic terrorists” — while mollycoddling Antifa and violent leftists.
- They put Trump through a show trial in Manhattan on flimsy charges, to make him easier to remove as a rival to Joe Biden.
- AND NOW … they have tried to assassinate Trump.
Who is “they”? The Ruling Class. The people in power — including some Republicans; it wasn’t Democrats who led the invasions, nor only the Clinton Democrats who bent over for Wall Street). I’m talking about the people who benefit from the system as it is.
It's a nice gesture for Dreher to suggest that maybe some "Republicans" are implicated in all the insults he lists - all those outrages that "They" have perpetuated upon the American people. It is true, for instance, that the shooter who apparently just grazed Trump's ear, was a registered Republican, but it is pretty clear who Dreher thinks the bad guys are - who "They" are - as you read through Dreher's list.
In August of last year, when I referenced Dreher, the title of my blog posting read: "Songs of Resentment." If you want to track it down, you'll find a link to an actual song, too! Given this recent "They" listing, it looks like Dreher thinks that there are a lot of new verses that might be added to the tune!
I keep saying this, but it seems to me that what I am saying continues to be relevant. In the United States of America, WE ("we, the people") are "The Ruling Class." At least we can be, and we should be, and we have the right to be! There is no "They" who are ultimately responsible for oppressing and distressing us. In our "self-government system," our remedy for the outrages that we can see everywhere is to organize politically, and then to use whatever political successes we have to advance the agenda we think is best. I have had some people tell me that this "model" sounds good, but that it just doesn't work in our current economic situation. Not in "real life." Well, if it truly doesn't work, then we need to do something about that, don't we? Unless, that is, we are willing to stipulate that we are the powerless pawns of those with the big bucks, which is pretty much the theme of that "Song of Resentment" I linked above.
I'm not buying into a declaration of powerlessness, and I hope no one else is, either, because what we "think" determines what we "do," and what we "do" determines what happens.
While we are trying to work out a good strategy, allow me to give my opinion: Making up lists of all the horrible things that "They" have done to us (finding more verses for those "Songs of Resentment" that we so often love to sing to ourselves) is exactly the opposite of a successful strategy.
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