For years Rod Dreher at The American Conservative has been following the insanity of our sexual left, tracing its juvenile fads and fetishes, documenting its woke Kool-Aid authoritarianism. His blog there also has one of the sharpest groups of regular commenters on the Internet.
But when TAC posts Dreher's pieces on its Facebook page, the commentary is monochrome. Repeatedly, there's a literal horde weighing in within hours to savage him, nearly always in the same exact terms. What's interesting is that these are not garden-variety trolls, I think, but actual readers of TAC who somehow love to loathe Dreher's cultural conservatism. Which reveals something: many of our young "political" conservatives, at least those on Facebook, don't have a moment's patience for religiously grounded critiques of the Sexual Revolution. (Yes, not only "conservatives" follow TAC, but I think it's safe to assume that many of those posting consider themselves one type or another of conservative.)
I'll just post some screenshots from today's salvo. And honestly, this is perhaps the most polite series of comments I've seen this bunch give Dreher in months. Usually the savaging reveals a deeper discomfort--what I read as the fear of many thirty-somethings (?) to be even tangentially linked to someone who might be accused of being a "bigot". Thus, in this group of readers, Dreher simply must be savaged.
I used to engage these threads now and then. I now see it as wasted time, though I did deliver a punch today.
The comments are on a piece in which Dreher formulates a new law of public attention--the Law of Motivated Noticing. These are motivated noticers of a certain type, I'd say--people who can't sit still if anyone dares suggest in their presence that our sexual anti-culture is a civilizational problem. These are noticers who are sadly downstream in the Andrew Breitbart sense.
Oh, and of course:
If mainstream culture and the education system is daily prodding kids to discover they're "trans", if gay men celebrate urinating on each other as a kind of public rite, that's because "people want to be accepted as they are". If you see in such things a glaring sign of anti-culture, you should just take a lesson from Kindergarten (what Kindergarten?) and say nothing. Uh-huh.
