Rod Dreher Does What Twitter Will Not

For the past month the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has been ruffling a lot of feathers, especially for folks on the Left. He’s been doing this by basically gutting the censorship regimen that existed prior to his acquisition of the social media company. For those not familiar with the Twitter experience, beginning with Gamergate in 2014 (which more or less initiated the current “Woke Wars” in American culture), the platform became an increasingly repressive environment for people on the Right. Over the years, a greater and greater number of cultural and political touchstones were enforced to discourage criticism and analysis of progressive Left sacred cows. You could be deplatformed for running afoul of members of the Left’s intersectionality alliance, and eventually anything that contradicted official Regime narrative on issues like covid-19 or election integrity could get someone booted.

So the recent trend towards lifting this systematic censorship is welcome news for the reality-based community on the Right. A lot of boomer types may not recognise the value of Twitter, criticising it because the 280 character per tweet format “dumbs things down” (though my personal experience is that many of these same folks can’t be bothered to read something longer than a couple of paragraphs anywise). However, as a platform, Twitter is very useful for networking with like-minded individuals and for engaging in rapid information dissemination. This makes the current move towards free speech on the platform a much bigger deal than many might think.

What people need to understand is that up until very recently, Twitter formed a MAJOR part of the Regime’s information control and manipulation regimen. It’s a platform with hundreds of millions of users, including just about everybody with any kind of real-world clout. As such, it provides a way to quickly communicate all kinds of information, including Regime-driven narrative. But for that to be successful, competitive versions must be suppressed. Thus, the censorship on Twitter seemed to focus primarily on disrupting Right-leaning networks – the goal wasn’t to necessarily stamp out every last little groyper account with 50 followers, but to kill the nodes that were most successfully distributing counter-narrative information or ideological guidance. Restoring previously banned accounts would, of course, revive a good chunk of those networks. But even further, with Twitter now resisting Regime demands to censor users, the government’s (presumable and legal) access to the same level of information about account users – both named and anonymous – is much less than was previously enjoyed, which makes it harder for FedGov to track and disrupt opposition coordination, hardening Right networks against further interruption.

The Left – both official sources as well as the dregs – has been especially troubled by Musk’s threat to release “the Twitter Files” detailing the previous ownership’s collusion with the Regime to censor users and certain information. This collusion, of course, makes the typical “they’re a private company, they can do what they like!” arguments ring a bit hollow. After all, once you’re censoring private citizens at the behest of the government, the First Amendment does actually start to come into play. Further, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t just look bad, but also gives the Left’s enemies some concrete insights into how all of the behind-the-scenes stuff works, and thus how to interfere with and circumvent it.

Of course, there’s always a way around anything, and the Left thinks it’s found a way to make Twitter start censoring again. This is through the threat by Apple and other large Woke corporations to try to deplatform Twitter itself. Citing its unacceptable restoration of free speech access to its users, Apple and Google (to name the two main players) are threatening to remove Twitter’s app from their online app stores. This is almost assuredly being driven by these companies’ own collusion with the Regime, coordinated with the Biden administration (which has started to get fact checked by Twitter for several false statements made in recent weeks), which has promised to “keep an eye on” Twitter. Notably, Apple is currently helping the ChiComs crack down on anti-lockdown protestors in China by shutting down dissident access to apps that have helped them to coordinate action, so it’s not like Apple has any qualms about playing hatchetman for various communist regimes.

Given the recent volte-face in Twitter’s policy in this regard, it’s troubling to see that the same type of bad actors who previously made the platform such a disaster are still around. As an example, I’d like to discuss the recent kerfluffle that took place when Rod Dreher and Alastair Roberts doxxed a Christian school headmaster by the name of Thomas Achord. Achord – a private citizen who has lost his job because of the mob that Dreher managed to set upon him – was linked to an anonymous Twitter account that made several “racist” (but you know how that goes) tweets several years ago. Achord finally admitted to owning the account and regretting some of the things he said back in the day, but this doesn’t change the fact that Dreher and Roberts had set the wokester mob in motion well before this happened, and thus did so on the basis of what, at that time, was only innuendo and supposition.

At this point, I’d like to explain in a little greater detail what “doxxing” is. Essentially, it involved the unmasking of someone who desires to remain anonymous, done for the purpose of punishing that person for doing or saying things that the doxxer disagrees with. The intention is to then incite the mob to punish the target, getting them fired, debanked, and so forth. The thing to keep in mind is that while individual acts of doxxing (such as the Achord doxx) may be individually uncoordinated, they nevertheless are all part of an overall movement by the anti-free speech Left to suppress opposition. Doxxing is just another means that the Regime and Regime-approved lackies use to circumvent “formal” prohibitions on punishing people for “wrong” speech. It’s safe to say that doxxers deserve severe punishment.

Doxxing is essentially a way to use the mob to try, convict, and punish someone without that person really being able to make a defence for themselves. In the case of Dreher and Roberts, both of whom (questionably) profess to be Christians, this type of behaviour is especially egregious because it is contrary to the spirit of the scriptural injunction found in Deuteronomy 19:15-19 that one who is accused of a crime must be credibly accused by multiple witnesses and that judges were to make diligent inquest to see that the accusations actually had substance (so as to nullify it if witnesses colluded to make false accusations). The way Dreher and Roberts conducted themselves in this matter was completely contrary to Scripture.

Among the accusations made against Achord was that he was an advocate for “kinism.” Now, I had vaguely heard of kinism before but did not really know what it was about. It’s one of those things, however, that most often seems to be defined by its enemies, so the information provided about it is probably not very reliable. Wikipedia – which is admittedly not that trustworthy itself – stated about kinism,

“Kinism is a white nationalist interpretation of Christianity. The ideology is a ‘movement of anti-immigrant, ‘Southern heritage’ separatists who splintered off from Christian Reconstructionism to advocate the belief that God’s intended order is ‘loving one’s kind’ by separating people along ‘tribal and ethnic’ lines to live in large, extended-family groups.”

Ok. Now, given the propensity of the Left to call everything – from having manners and wanting to live in crime-free neighbourhoods to Western civilisation itself – “white supremacy,” a grain of salt is probably in order here.

But let’s grant that at least the basic idea is accurately represented there. On its face, the essential argument, as far as it goes, doesn’t appear to actually be unscriptural, at least in the general sense that the Church has always understood about ethnicity, globalism, and giving various national groups their own space. The emphasis on “race” is modernistic, of course, since the biblical emphasis with respect to the various people groups into which mankind is divided is on “nation” (goyim, ethne; גּוֹיִם, ἔθνη). The foundational teaching the Scripture gives in Genesis 11 is that God did, in fact, divide the nations of the world specifically to prevent globalist rebellion from happening again, and that division includes determining where each group will reside at whichever time (Acts 17:26). So fundamentally, the idea of “a place for everyone and everyone in his place” is not one that is unsound. “Race” is not necessarily scriptural, but does serve as an empirically useful umbrella term under which to group related ethnies, so is in principle neutral.

Further, recognising that different groups of people have different traits, etc. is neither racist nor unscriptural – after all, Paul (writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit no less!) even described an entire group of people (the Cretians) in negative terms. I guess Paul never learned that it’s unspiritual to stereotype? Neither is the bare fact of different nations being separated into their own lands – again, this has been the natural case for practically all of human history, and is a division that God specifically initiated, the reversal of which is rebellion against His will.

Now, if one actually hates other races or nations then yes, that is a sin. So also would be a refusal (which could be implied in the definition of kinism given above) to evangelise other people groups than your own despite the command to “go ye into all the world…” But merely noticing differences between groups is not and considering it to be is an idiotic redefinition of what “sin” actually is according to Scripture.

As such, this “kinism,” (sometimes coupled conceptually with “Christian nationalism”) even if that is what Thomas Achord actually believes, doesn’t seem so much to be wrong as merely misemphasised. Though let’s be honest, the concerns about white genocide may not actually be that offbase when one considers the very deliberate demographic decisions that the transnational ruling caste all across the West seem to be making. Indeed, many progressives have been very open about calling for it and celebrating that it’s happening. Nevertheless, it can’t really be called a “sin” or a “heresy” so long as it’s not coupled with an actual hatred of people of other races or ethnicities (merely pointing out things people don’t like doesn’t count as “hatred” however). Keep in mind that pretty much all of your favourite theologians of whatever stripe from before the 20th century would qualify as “Christian nationalists” simply because that was the baseline of scriptural understanding when it came to issues of nation, state, and filial loyalties.

But the point here is that Rod Dreher, while going on at length about “moral courage,” basically just helped to destroy a man’s livelihood – and that of a fellow professing believer – over something that is not even a sin. Indeed, over something which in fact rests on a good deal of scriptural truth, even if it’s a truth that squishes like Dreher find uncomfortable and distasteful. He essentially acted as a tool of Regime censorship, helping to muzzle someone who ran afoul of progressive Left sensibilities.

Let’s not forget that this is the same Rod Dreher whose wife is divorcing him after he basically abandoned his family and moved to Hungary. The same Rod Dreher who falsely accused a 15-year-old girl of sexually harassing another student, this after he posted pictured from her private Instagram account on his blog without permission. The same Rod Dreher who misleadingly misquoted a professor at Texas A&M in an apparent attempt to incite violence against him. Now, in the latter two cases, the protagonists in the story are not exactly sympathetic themselves (the first was a gay student at a Christian school who was herself essentially lying to them, the second is an anti-white “philosopher” who is himself a wokester). However, the overall impression is that this kind of behaviour is not exactly new for him, regardless of who it’s directed against.

What it all boils down to is that Dreher, and others like him, are not so much fighting sin as God defines it as they are “sin” as the Regime defines it. And we all know that the Regime has a pretty spurious definition of that term “racism.” Further, what’s also going on here is that Dreher and Roberts were trying – indirectly – to go after Stephen Wolfe, the author of a recent best-selling book entitled The Case for Christian Nationalism, by linking it in the public mind to a (somewhat) complementary fringe ideology which can be easily cast as “scary” and “radical” in the eyes of the normie news consuming public (Wolfe and Achord have a joint podcast). Thus, their recent efforts were an overt attempt at censorship that extended beyond just the livelihood of one man. But this is par for the course. Wokesters and their allies like Dreher are not exactly known for their ability to think deeply about complex subjects, and their schtick rests upon the assumption that the general public won’t either.

So while Twitter is now bucking the trend in Big Tech of compliance with Regime censorship efforts, so-called “Christian” writers like Dreher and Roberts are seeking to perpetuate the exact opposite. They are acting in a way that is functionally no different from how explicitly anti-God, anti-Christian woke progressives conduct themselves. Further, by carrying out much of their lynch mob activities on Twitter, they are undermining the stated direction in which Elon Musk has said he wants the platform to go. Even as Twitter frees itself from the grasp of the Regime’s anti-free speech, anti-freedom ecosystem, people like Rod Dreher willingly collaborate with the enemies of the American people to maintain that type of censorship.