Rod Dreher's "Weimar America" Diagnosis Lands Inside the Conservative Movement
In a nearly two-hour interview with Jeremy Boreing, the author of Live Not by Lies laid out a clinical case that the United States has entered the same conditions that produced Nazi Germany
Author and cultural critic Rod Dreher sat down last week with Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing for a nearly two-hour interview discussing his forthcoming book, Weimar America. Weimar Germany was the fragile democratic republic that governed Germany from 1919 until Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 — the classic case study in how a modern constitutional society decomposes into totalitarianism through social atomization, collapsed institutional trust, and a conservative establishment that believed it could tame the radicals.
The conversation, released July 27 on The Jeremy Boreing Show, is the most direct defense against the “woke right” to date by a prominent Christian conservative — and it names names. Dreher tells Boreing that Tucker Carlson privately disclosed his now-famous demon-attack story shortly after it happened — just months before Carlson was fired from Fox, and roughly a year before the story became public — and that Carlson's public trajectory grew 'darker and darker' in the months that followed. He also warns that Vice President JD Vance and other Republican leaders are making “the Von Papen mistake” by believing they can co-opt Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement.
The Weimar Thesis
Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, Dreher argues the United States now exhibits the same pre-conditions. “She said by far the most important factor was social atomization,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It was that people became disconnected from traditions, from places, from institutions, of society.”
He points to the speed of the Nazi rise as the warning. “As late as 1928, the Nazi party only got 2.6% in the national elections… Then comes the Great Depression of 1929. The 1930 elections, they shot up to 18.7%. The point is that it can fall apart just that fast if the rot has spread so deeply.” His conclusion is blunt: “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to get Hitler 2.0. We might. We might get Stalin 2.0.” The thesis expands on arguments Dreher previewed with Ross Douthat in The New York Times earlier this month.
The Tucker Carlson Timeline
The interview’s most consequential passage concerns Tucker Carlson. Dreher tells Boreing that Carlson texted him privately about the demon attack shortly after it happened — roughly a year before Carlson publicly disclosed it on Halloween 2024 in a trailer for the Orthodox-produced documentary Christianities?. “When Tucker came out and told the world that he had been attacked by demons, people laughed at him. I didn’t,” Dreher says. “He had told me about it right after it happened. He texted me because he knew I was a serious Christian being Orthodox. I do have a demonology.”
Dreher’s response was to offer help. “I said, ‘Wow, if this really happened to you, you need to talk to an exorcist.’ And I connected him with an exorcist I know. And the exorcist also brought in a second exorcist to work with him.” Carlson refused. “He said, ‘I’m too Protestant for that. This seems like witchcraft to me.’ That’s his actual word. I went back, I still had the text saved. I went back to read them recently.”
Dreher was baffled by the logic: “Wait, you think you were attacked by a demon, but a Catholic or an Orthodox exorcist coming is witchcraft?” Dreher says he even offered to arrange a Protestant deliverance pastor. Carlson turned that down too. “He told me he’d be fine, just him and the Bible.”
What Dreher describes next is a trajectory the public would come to see in the months that followed Carlson’s initial disclosure to him. “He gets fired from Fox a couple of months later in the Dominion settlement. And then that fall he launches his own network and goes really dark really fast,” Dreher tells Boreing — pointing to Carlson’s interview with historian Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War.”
“You’ve seen as well as I have. It got darker and darker and darker. And then he gets Fuentes on, and that’s when I finally felt like I had to speak out and say something. I just said this was a big mistake — you shouldn’t do this. We ought to keep the firewall there.”
Carlson’s response was to end the friendship. “Tucker texted me ending our friendship. That’s that.”
“The Demon of White Identity Politics”
Carlson is not operating in a vacuum. Dreher, who reported from Washington that senior Republican staffers estimate 30 to 40 percent of young conservative men in D.C. are Fuentes-aligned, describes the ideological terrain in explicitly theological terms. “They have called forth the demon of white identity politics. It’s here.” He adds: “They have legitimized and called forth a demon of white identity politics that they’re not going to be able to get away from.”
Asked what these young men want, Dreher recounts the answer from a senior Republican source: “They don’t want anything. They want to tear it all down.” That constituency, in Dreher’s telling, is the raw material any politician willing to court it can inherit.
The Von Papen Warning
Dreher’s central political argument invokes Franz von Papen — the German conservative who convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor in January 1933, believing radicals could be tamed by proximity to power.
“I fear that we’re going to have people like JD, maybe Marco Rubio, whoever runs for president, they’re going to think that they can bring these radicals on side and control them,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It won’t work. And we have a historical example.” Recounting how von Papen told Hindenburg he could make Hitler “squeak like a mouse,” Dreher concludes: “If people on the right — institutional leaders — think they can compromise with the Fuentes types, they’re making the Von Papen mistake. And I don’t want to be part of any Von Papen conservatism.”
The Vance Falling-Out
The warning is not theoretical. Dreher tells Boreing he flew to Washington late last November to see JD Vance — a man he considered a friend — and ask him to publicly break with the Fuentes-aligned wing of the right:
“Because of your background, because of your age, you’re uniquely positioned to draw a red line there. Say no, we are not going to accept that. And I asked him to do it.”
Dreher declines to disclose what Vance said in reply. What he will say is what happened after. “I don’t know that we’re friends anymore. He cut me off after I went to visit late last fall to talk to him about this very thing,” Dreher says. “After that November meeting where we disagreed, I just never heard from him again. He didn’t answer my text. And that was like — what — seven, eight months ago.”
In the interval, Vance has said nothing publicly. “JD Vance has done nothing to distance himself publicly from Tucker as his remarks have become more and more aberrant,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It’s very troubling that the vice president hasn’t weighed in on any of these topics.” Dreher is careful to defend Vance's character — "I do not think JD Vance is an anti-semite. I do not think he's a racist at all" — but his political indictment is clear. The man best positioned to say no has, to date, chosen silence.
The Fake and the Real
Dreher extends the diagnosis to technology, arguing artificial intelligence functions as what he calls a “dark re-enchantment.” He describes watching a pastor train an AI on his own voice to deliver sermons in his absence. “When people come to accept something they know is fake, but it gives them good feelings, we’re in real metaphysical trouble,” he tells Boreing.
Dreher’s counsel closes the interview: “Get offline, search for God, learn to suffer well.” Quoting Christian dissidents he interviewed across the former Soviet bloc for Live Not by Lies, he adds: “If you don’t know how to suffer and suffer well, then you’re not going to be able to escape the lure of totalitarianism.” His warning to the coalition that once employed him at Fox News: “Never again is now.”