David French Update

By Rod Dreher.  My Substack take on French is entitled David French, Christianity, and Politics.

Filed under: Useful Idiocy and Idiots

Dreher readers on French. An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:

French, like most of the people who inhabit social conservative ghettos within neoconservatism, still thinks it is basically the 2000s. He acts as though the events of 2008 -- the year of the financial crash -- and everything that has occurred since then never really happened, and that if Americans knew what was good for them, they would have longed for a third Bush term, or a McCain administration. To the extent that they will even acknowledge the Great Awokening as a problem, they assume they can weather it the same way that they did the radicalism of the 1960s. These people have not processed or internalized that the key institutions of Big Business and the security state are now on the side of the Woke. It's not so much that the woke have conquered these institutions definitively, but rather that they have made those who run these institutions understand who takes scalps and who doesn't -- meaning that the Woke militants have made sure that the leadership class within American institutions knows what's going to happen to them if they don't comply. If the GOP isn't ready to start taking a few of their own like DeSantis has been willing to do with Disney, then social conservatives had best withdraw altogether from public life and try to insulate themselves from the next great purge.

Think about it: J.K. Rowling, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Elon Musk are all circa 2008 liberals who if anything are further to the left than French. But the moment they dissented on any issue they were turned into Enemies Of The People. And unless you have the kind of money that Musk and Rowling do, they have little to no recourse to fight back going through the motions and mechanisms that French believes in.

What to do? The alternative is for French to acknowledge that for all of his laudable legal efforts, he was completely incapable of preventing the Left from dominating every facet of modern life, and definitively winning the culture war to the point where the only debate is now the fate of the vanquished. And to do that he has to admit that the legal strategy he has dedicated his entire life to has failed. That's a high bar to ask anyone to clear.

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Bro Inky writes,

"An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:"

 

Thanks!  And thanks, One Such Reader! I would like to forward this to many, in many places.

What do you recommend as attribution?  This is EXCELLENT. So well composed AND written.

 

The identity of the writer is not supplied by Dreher.  So, for purposes of attribution, cite the post in question and say something like, 'this is an excerpt from one of the responses that Dreher received.' It was at the bottom of the list of responses, but it might not be at the bottom now. You can check that for yourself.