Tucker's Demons, Vance's Failure, and America's Spiritual War | Ep. 46 w/ Rod Dreher

Jeremy Boreing sits down with author and cultural critic Rod Dreher for a nearly two-hour conversation about his forthcoming book, Weimar America — and the argument that the same illiberal spirit Dreher once diagnosed on the left is now rising on the right.

Dreher’s 2020 bestseller Live Not by Lies described wokeness as a form of soft totalitarianism, drawing on the testimony of Christians who had survived Soviet communism. Five years later, after a long stint living in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, he returned to America convinced that the warning signs of a pre-totalitarian society — what Hannah Arendt called social atomization, a collapse of faith in institutions, the embrace of transgression, and a growing indifference to truth — are now flashing across the American right as much as the left.

At the center of the discussion is a generation: the Zoomers. Jeremy and Rod dig into the rise of white identity politics and Christian nationalism among young men, the pull of Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, and Dreher’s unsettling report from Washington that a large share of the young men now working on the right have drifted toward radical, “tear it all down” politics. His core claim is provocative — that the dissident right hasn’t rediscovered conservatism at all, but has imported Marxism’s founding impulse, that the inheritance itself is the enemy, and rebranded it for a right-wing audience.

The conversation doesn’t flinch from the fracture inside the conservative coalition. Jeremy and Rod discuss Tucker Carlson’s turn, his platforming of Fuentes, and the end of Dreher’s friendship with him; Boreing’s blistering assessment of Candace Owens and her treatment of Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk; and their shared concern about JD Vance — a man Dreher says he still hopes will one day be president, but who he fears may be making what he calls the “von Papen mistake,” the fatal 1930s miscalculation that a radical movement’s energy can be harnessed and controlled.

From there the two turn to faith and culture: the search for God among young men drawn to older, more liturgical Christianity; the pilgrimage to Chartres; the “vitalism” now competing with the gospel; and why Dreher believes a moralistic, therapeutic, feel-good evangelicalism is no match for the moment. They wrestle with classical liberalism as a “secular manifestation of Christianity,” whether the West can hold together without a living faith, and the lessons — and limits — of Orban’s project in Hungary.

The back half moves to technology and the soul. Jeremy and Rod debate artificial intelligence as a kind of “dark re-enchantment,” the fear that digital culture is neurologically reshaping a generation’s ability to perceive God, and Boreing’s counter that AI’s harms may simply be the front-loaded costs of every great technology. They make the case that freedom is only possible when it’s bounded by virtue, and consider where policy — on pornography, social media, and the protection of minors — is the right tool for the job.

It closes somewhere more personal: Dreher’s nostos, his journey home to Louisiana, the loss of his sister and father, the end of his marriage, Dante, and how he came to believe that the only real Ithaca is heaven. His advice to the young men who feel abandoned by their culture is direct — get offline, search for God, learn to suffer well, and refuse to give in, because “never again is now.”

Chapters:

0:00 Rod Dreher and the warning of “Weimar America”

1:18 Wokeness, soft totalitarianism, and the arrival of the “woke right”

6:00 Liberalism as secular Christianity — and the danger of its collapse

12:22 Chartres, young men returning to tradition, and “vitalism” vs. the gospel

16:51 The feckless church: evangelicalism, COVID, and the beauty deficit

36:01 The death of print, AI pastors, and the seduction of the fake

42:06 Hannah Arendt, atomization, and losing a shared reality

43:44 The DC trip, the Groypers, and the Weimar timeline

1:02:29 The right’s c