Sometimes You Do Have To Punch Right

A reflection by The Odious Rod Dreher™

Actually, sometimes you should

I just listened to the two-hour Twitter/X debate about the proposition “Should conservatives have No Enemies To The Right”, hosted by Christopher Rufo. Affirming the NETTR position were Charles Haywood and Nate Fischer. Against were Neil Shenvi and the commenter who goes by Wokal Distance on Twitter. You can listen to the entire thing here.

I was startled to hear my name come up early, when Haywood, a former shampoo magnate whose contribution to American life has to this point being making your hair smell terrific, denouncing “the odious Rod Dreher” for supposedly ruining the life of a man “who made statements he didn’t like.”

Here is a good place for me to start this reflection, because it provides the context for my view on the question. I need to remind you all what this is about, or inform you, in case you’ve not heard. The articles I wrote about it on The American Conservative are now paywalled, so I won’t link to them here. The gist of it is as follows.

Late last year, it came to my attention that a fight within a group of Protestants had crossed into my sphere. Thomas Achord, who was at the time the headmaster of the classical Christian school where my kids attended, and where my ex-wife worked (and had since 2016), stood accused of leading an extensive online double life as a pseudonymous figure who advocated white supremacy, white nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. I was able to provide a small bit of information that proved that Achord was the man the critics had identified.

At first Achord, then the podcasting partner of Stephen Wolfe, strenuously denied it. His denials seemed plausible, because Achord was a mild-mannered academic type who was not at all anybody’s idea of a white supremacist. But then he finally cracked and admitted it was him all along. He resigned, or was fired, from the school, and seems to have disappeared. My understanding is that the people who worked with Achord were absolutely shocked by the revelation. My ex-wife felt so betrayed that she quit her job.

The revelation ruined Achord professionally. Haywood, Wolfe, and others hate me for my role in that affair. Well, tough. I certainly took no pleasure in participating in something that destroyed Achord’s career, but the fault is wholly Thomas Achord’s. He wrote pseudonymously that he was a rising figure in the world of classical Christian education (true), and that he intended to use his role within the movement to quietly radicalize people to white nationalism.

My older son took at least one class with Achord when he was a classroom instructor, before he became headmaster. My son told his parents at the time that Mr. Achord was trying to reach out to the boys in the class to lead them to the radical racist right. We didn’t take him seriously. It just didn’t seem believable, I guess. Today, my son says that watching what Achord did is a big reason that he identifies with the Left.

One of the young men Achord influenced in that school is Lucas Kelly. He started an earnest blog when he was a student there, but it never really got off the ground. Kelly went on to LSU, and got into conservative politics. In his online postings, he indicated a continuing interest in radical right politics. After graduation, he rose to be the political director of the Louisiana Republican Party.

Lucas Kelly is no longer in that position. Why? Because in March 2021, he was driving a car drunk one night, crashed it, and killed his two passengers — one of which was his best friend, a new father. I don’t know if he has been to trial yet, or what his situation is. It’s a terrible tragedy for everyone — and heaven knows it’s not Thomas Achord’s fault.

I bring it up here because Kelly was a rising star in institutional Republican politics in Louisiana. How on earth a man in his early twenties becomes political director of the state GOP, which dominates Louisiana politics, I don’t know. Was he still a far-right white nationalist? I don’t know that either. But there weren’t many years between Kelly’s advocacy of far-right, white nationalist politics, and his working in a powerful position in the state GOP. I would be very surprised if the older Republicans who put him in that position had the slightest idea of the kinds of ideals Kelly once espoused, and still might have done while working for them (again, I don’t know). As my son points out to me all the time, normie conservatives of my generation are really out of touch about how radical right-wingers of his generation are, based on what they’ve encountered on the Internet.

I also bring this up here because Achord put his quiet radicalization plan into place in my own children’s school. It affected Lucas Kelly. Who else did it affect? Did it succeed? Where are those former students today, and what are they doing with that knowledge? Nobody sent their children to this school to have one of their teachers quietly seduce them with white nationalism. Leaving aside the evil of a Christian school teacher and headmaster doing this — and Achord slipped radical ideas into an anthology of other writings he compiled for classroom use — that he would risk the reputation of this wonderful little school, all for the sake of advancing his malign ideology … well, it’s horrific and repulsive.

Yet according to Charles Haywood, I am “odious” for my part in exposing this man, who was in a position to mold young minds, and who openly said (well, “openly” behind a false name) that he was doing so for the sake of advancing white nationalism. That man, Thomas Achord, made himself an enemy of the truth, and an enemy of the good. If he worked at McDonalds and believed these things, it still would have been immoral, but nobody would have much cared. But he did not work at McDonalds. He worked in a classical Christian school, and was indeed becoming more prominent within the classical Christian school movement — within which he intended to quietly spread his race radicalism.

For people who believe in classical Christian education, this evil needs to be identified and cast out, to protect the movement from its critics. It needs to be identified and cast out to protect children in these schools from corruption. And it needs to be identified to protect the teachers and staffers who poured their hearts into educating children, and who do not deserve this taint.

I don’t bring this up here to rub it in for Achord, who is Lord knows where now. I hope he repents and puts his life back together. But what he was doing was not “making statements” that Rod Dreher “did not like.” He was teaching children something wicked, and attempting to mainstream it into an institution that I care about, classical Christian education. And he was exploiting the trust many people, both locally and nationally, placed in him.

This is why I am 100 percent on the side of Neil Shenvi and Wokal Distance in this argument. Wokal said on the show that we have to punch right from time to time to keep people with poisonous ideas from entering our institutions. Shenvi is more personal. Here’s a quote from his website, where he posted his notes preparing for the event (emphases in the original):

Before I offer a critique, let me clearly define our terms. Since Charles Haywood coined the phrase “no enemies to the right” and described it at length in a 2022 essay, I’ll quote him verbatim. He wrote:

Winning… means the total, permanent elimination of all Left power, and, even more importantly, the total discrediting, both on a moral and practical basis, of all Left ideology…. If we begin with the end in mind, we see that any firepower directed at the Right is necessarily antithetical to the goal of destroying the Left. Any contentious discussion with those on the Right, wherever exactly they may fall on the spectrum of “not Left,” should instead be done privately and be strictly tactical, to agree on how may we cooperate to achieve our joint ends. We may occasionally choose to ignore some on the Right, as charlatans, simpletons, or fools, or simply too different, even malevolent, in their beliefs, but attacking them publicly only serves to make it harder to reach our end.

This definition of NETTR contains two main elements: 1) no public rebuke 2) contentious private discussion must be “strictly tactical…to agree on how [to] cooperate.” Note in particular the absolute prohibitions offered by Haywood: any contentious public discussion is prohibited and even private disagreement must be strictly tactical. Both these stipulations are unbiblical.

More Shenvi (emphases in the original):

Here’s a final consideration that flows out of my first two points: we need to be concerned about young Christian men. Many young Christian men are sick of wokeness. I sympathize. But in response, they’re increasingly turning to non-Christian sources within the Dissident Right or the manosphere. What kind of message does it communicate if we never repudiate these figures publicly? Sure, we may privately deplore Neo-Nazis and alt-right pornographers. But does the 17-year-old kid who’s devouring Andrew Tate videos and Bronze Age Pervert essays know that? If we never publicly rebuke ideas or people “to the Right,” then they’ll wrongly assume these errors are not serious, or are not even errors. Again, this means that “no enemies to the right” (or NETTR) is impermissible. Racism within the alt-right and sexism within the manosphere are evil even if they “own the libs.” I will not let some redpill pick-up artist pimp become a role model to my sons or to other young men in my church because I refuse to rebuke them publicly. Christians have no authority to give one group a pass because they are our political allies. God detests unequal weights and measures (Prov. 20:10). We can’t send a message to young Christians that you can be as immoral as you want as long as you’re conservative.

If these theological arguments are correct, then NETTR is impermissible for Christians. Full stop. It doesn’t matter how successful NETTR is as a political strategy if the Bible forbids it. We cannot sacrifice our obedience on the altar of political expediency.

I cannot stand the idea that we should sacrifice our kids to being seduced into white supremacy, white nationalism, and the rest, because hey man, NETTR!

Though he doesn’t mention me by name, Haywood says in the episode that I went after Achord wrongly because he “has no power,” and that the part I played in his exposure was nothing more than “virtue signaling” to the Left that I’m not “like those awful people.”

Oh, please. I have been persona non grata for years on the Left because of my views on racial politics, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Achord may have had no power on the national scene, but he had significant power over the lives and imaginations of the kids under his authority at that school, and if he had continued his ascent undetected in the classical Christian education world, over many more. And, had he been outed years later, after he had risen to a position of greater authority, the damage to the whole movement might have been massive.

This whole idea that we shouldn’t call out people of influence who stand for wicked ideas because they don’t have power (as defined by some sort of state or national influence, I guess) is repulsively reminiscent of the Left’s idea of racism, which is inextricable from power. Back in the 1980s or early 1990s, I read an interview with Spike Lee in which he said black people can’t be racist because racism requires power, and blacks don’t hold it. That struck me then, and still does, as self-exonerating nonsense.

If you don’t identify and repent of the racism inside your own heart and mind before you have power, when you do gain it, you will do great evil. Besides, even if you never achieve power, you will still have a corrupt heart. You will still be a man who hates other people because of the color of their skin. Don’t you think God sees? Don’t you think God will hold you accountable?

It seemed to me, listening to that discussion, that Haywood, and to perhaps a lesser extent Fischer, were entirely concerned with power, not with virtue. Fischer said that you can’t accuse someone on the Right of racism, because in a world dominated by the Left, that will get them instantly cancelled. True! But that’s not what happened with Thomas Achord. He really was racist — and we have that in his many pseudonymous postings.

I think the truth is, Haywood and Fischer aren’t overly troubled by what Achord said. If he had been trying to convince young men that being a true right winger required submitting sexually to older men, like in ancient Greece, both Haywood and Fischer would have wanted to nuke him from orbit. But white supremacy? White nationalism? Anti-Semitism? Meh.

I’m not accusing either Haywood or Fischer of being white nationalists or any of the rest. I couldn’t possibly know. I’m saying that they don’t seem too bothered by it. Well, I’m bothered by it, because I am a Christian, and I believe racism is a sin. Anti-Semitism is a sin. My own late father, a man I revere, was seriously tainted by anti-black racism, as were so many whites of his time and place. I pray often for God to have mercy on his soul. He was a good man in most respects. But that racial blindness — it’s a horrible thing. I won’t tolerate it in blacks directing it to whites, and I won’t tolerate it in whites directing it to blacks. Jesus can deliver us from this hatred.

When asked about the pornographic misogynist Andrew Tate, who is hugely popular among a lot of young males, Haywood says we shouldn’t be too concerned with him, because unlike the Left, Tate is not out to “destroy” us.

YES HE BLOODY WELL IS! What Andrew Tate teaches will destroy the minds, the morality, and the souls of young men who follow him — and will deeply damage young women who are unlucky enough to get involved with such men. How can Christian men like Haywood and Fischer not see that?

In the end, Haywood, and perhaps Fischer too, are far too focused on political power — on getting it at any cost. I fear that their line of thinking leads not only to tolerating what ought to be intolerable among our political allies, but also to dehumanizing people who are not on the Right. And then what? What if exterminating left-wing ideology requires exterminating left-wing people? There are people on the Right willing to do that, you know. A couple of weeks ago, in Hungary, we ran into this guy on the street:

Look more closely at the tattoos on his legs:

On the right calf, “Good Night Left Side” shows a man beating a leftist with a chair, with swastikas on either side of the circle. On the left calf it’s a concentration camp crematorium, with piles of dead Jews. I hesitated to post this, because I know there will be people who say, “Ah ha, Hungary! I knew it!” For one thing, these cretins are relatively rare here, thank God. For another, if this man votes in Hungary, he votes for the party that opposes Viktor Orban from the Right.

So I ask you: is this man the enemy of us on the Right? Yes, he is. He is our enemy even if he has no power. He is our enemy because he has so given himself over to evil that he has permanently inscribed satanic evil in his skin. He is an extreme case, granted, but … NETTR? Really?

I am confident that Haywood and Fischer would reject this neo-Nazi. But why? He almost certainly has no power at all in the world. No respectable employer wants to hire someone like that. A man who festoons his flesh with that kind of filth is shameless. But he is not on the Left, and could probably be counted on to vote against the Left, and maybe even serve to blunt their power in more direct ways. Maybe he’s just going to work security at the door to keep Antifa away from a meeting of one of the right-wing lodges Haywood is setting up around the country. Would that be too much? If yes, why?

Look, I believe in the devil. And I believe that he in non-partisan: he will take you down if you’re on the Left, and will take you down if you’re on the Right just the same. It matters not one bit if you do as Charles Haywood desires, and achieve “the total, permanent elimination of all Left power,” if you have lost your soul.

Last point: Haywood says that if you want to call out someone on the Right, you should do it privately, not publicly. Sometimes, yes. But this is the exact same line of thinking that allowed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal to metastasize. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the enemies of the Church. Secrecy about evil — not moral misdemeanors, but evil — allowed it to grow in the darkened networks within the Church, until it was eventually exposed, and all but destroyed the Church’s moral authority.

Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the Left. Yeah, well, screw that. I know where that kind of thing leads.