Rod Dreher

speaker

490 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Rod Dreher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Interesting Times · Preparing for ‘Weimar America’ · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

In fact, when I first arrived in Central Europe in 2019, just traveling through the area, I had lunch with an American diplomat who had spent his career in each of those countries.

And he said, look, the thing you have to keep in mind is you're a conservative journalist.

You're going to come here and be tempted to see what you want to see.

Liberal journalists do the same thing.

He said the thing that none of you American journalists really understand is that corruption is the name of the game in all of these post-communist countries.

And when there's elections, things shift from left to right.

It just changes who the beneficiaries of corruption are.

Well, and I think that's a fair criticism.

You know, it's interesting you ask that.

In my first – 2021, my first fellowship there, I went to see an academic, Peter Kreko, who was a really good man, very liberal, one of the leading opponents of the Orban government.

And I went to ask him, help me understand from the opposition point of view why you're all against Orban.

And he said, well, you know, there's this, there's that.

He said, I'm pro-LGBT, this government is not.

And he went on and on.

He said, but at the end of the day, I can stand in my classroom in my university, denounce the government, and nothing will happen to me.

And I said, Peter, that's really interesting you say that.

I believe you.

But in many American universities, if you said something that offended the political views of certain privileged students, they could bring a case against you, you would have to fight for your job, and you could lose your job.

And he didn't realize that.

Now, I'm not saying this as a defense of Orban, but what I'm saying is there was a lot more freedom there than you seem to realize.

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