The Josh Hammer Report

Josh Hammer

Newsweek Opinion Editor And Host,
"The Josh Hammer Show"

This week, my column and podcast shared the same theme and title: "The Only Way Out Is Through." (You can listen to my latest podcast on Apple, Spotify, or here.) My contention is that the modern Left's hegemonic impulse—aptly summarized a decade ago by syndicated radio host Erick Erickson with his catchphrase, "You Will Be Made To Care"—is to conquer and vanquish all that stands between it and total domination, whether that comes in the form of institutional, cultural, civic, educational, corporate, or some other sphere of life.

Put another way, there can be no "LARP"-ing and escaping reality. We cannot be content to retreat to our geographical and institutional redoubts and eschew the open public contestation of the most pressing civilizational issues. Rather, we must engage in the political, traditionally understood, and bring the fight. Boycotts and market pressure are some of the natural means we on the Right should utilize, whether those boycotts entail refusing to drink Bud Light after that brand's recent exercise in performative pro-transgender wokeism or boycotting Stanford Law School after the recent shouting down there of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan.

In terms of media appearances over the past week, I joined "Mornings with Maria" on FOX Business to discuss the Pentagon leaker and the pushback to Bud Light going woke, joined the Friday week-in-review episode of "The Steve Deace Show", joined "Bo Snerdley's Rush Hour" on 77WABC, joined "The Seth Leibsohn Show" in Arizona to discuss my thesis that "the only way out is through," joined Steve Bannon's "War Room" to discuss the same topic, recorded an episode of the new "JKC Podcast" on Israel's roiling judicial reform debate, joined Newsmax's "National Report" to discuss Florida's bold new pro-life legislation, joined Rita Panahi on Sky News Australia to discuss President Joe Biden's being in the tank for the transgender agenda and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's continuing fight against The Walt Disney Company, recorded a CenterClip audio op-ed on how corporate America is now the enemy of the American way of life, and joined "Always Right Radio with Bob Frantz" in Ohio to discuss how "the only way out is through." I also made my monthly regular appearance on the always-entertaining "Steak for Breakfast podcast".

Our highlighted right-leaning Newsweek op-eds this week include selections from Jon Schweppe, Lila Rose, Brian Blase, Jared Sichel, and Max Eden.

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The Only Way Out Is Through

In 2017, my friend Rod Dreher published his popular book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Dreher's basic prescription, already intimately familiar to Orthodox Jews, is a localist focus on the cohesive formation of tight-knit, virtuous, religious communities as the best way of enduring the cultural onslaught of progressivism and secularism.

There is nothing at all wrong with Tocquevillian localism, and surely it is part of the survival strategy for America's more traditionally inclined. But further extrapolated to its logical conclusion (something Dreher doesn't do in his book, to be very clear), the strongest-possible version of this argument—a singular emphasis on retreat to communal redoubts at the expense of the public contestation of core issues—is self-defeating, a surefire losing strategy. It amounts to one big "LARP," to use the common online abbreviation for "live-action role-playing"—an attempt to escape from reality and instead live in a different world than that which we actually inhabit.

To "LARP" in this manner, and to retreat from our decadent civilizational morass more generally in the hope that all can be cured by wishing it to be so, is not merely naive. It also evinces an underselling of modern progressivism-secularism's fundamentally hegemonic impulse. Much like Pac-Man, the modern Left has an insatiable appetite, attempting to gobble up ever-more cultural, political, and geographical terrain and permanently vanquish the forces of traditionalism and Americanism.

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