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We have an epidemic of loneliness, particularly among males. Rod Dreher, a longtime conservative Christian, believes it is driving an increase in the antisemitic, woke Right. But the Church has answers for those who are lonely.

“I believe there is a Jewish conspiracy running the world. They’re the ones pulling the strings.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The man I was talking to was a fellow Hungarian Aussie, whom I’d known for years. And here he was, telling me in all seriousness that a Jewish cabal ruled the world. It was antisemitic as much as it was nonsensical.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time that I’d been exposed to antisemitism: there seemed to be a soft underbelly of antisemitism among some of the Hungarian diaspora I belong to.¹

And while I encountered antisemitism in the Hungarian-Aussie community, I didn’t experience much in the broader Anglo-Australian community. Overall, Australia and the West have been welcoming places for Jewish people.

But all that seems to be changing here in Australia and in the wider Western world.

The Rise of the Antisemitic Woke Right

I recently read an important essay by commentator Rod Dreher called “The Radical Right is Coming For Your Sons”, about the rise of the ‘Woke Right’. Dreher isn’t some feminist professor pontificating from the gender studies department at Columbia University. Instead, he’s a Viktor Orban-loving, longtime conservative white Christian male – a ‘conservative of conservatives’ – who has been a longtime critic of the totalitarian impulses of the modern woke Left.

And now, he’s seeing the same impulse growing on the Right.

He writes:

I knew that the Left had succumbed to the soft totalitarianism of wokeness… But I am now witnessing the deep inroads, in such a short period, that right-wing totalitarianism, expressed most often as antisemitism, has made, especially among a growing segment of right-wing males. And unlike many who point this out, this community is not exotic or foreign to me—this is my world.

And why is he writing about it now?

I don’t want to live in a right-wing totalitarian world any more than I want to live in a left-wing one. Even as wokeness declines, the indicators of a society ripe for totalitarianism are still very much with us. And so I feel the need to raise the alarm.

While many of us who aren’t spending hours online might have missed the rise of the online Woke Right, they are a growing minority. No, they’re not about to take over the world. However, what starts online doesn’t stay online. As more people, especially conservative and even Christian males, drink the woke-Right Kool-Aid, these beliefs jump across into the real world, with one example being the rise in antisemitism in the US.²

You see it in tweets like these from Ryan Matta, in a now-deleted post:

The Jewish banking cartel that has used pedophile to blackmail every NATO leader into doing their bidding is attempting to start WW3 with Russia. Every citizen who dies in this war is dead because Jews started this war. (June 2, 2025)

And this, from Darryl Cooper, the Holocaust-denying pseudo-historian who was interviewed by Tucker Carlson:

Yes, we should commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately. https://t.co/z9XxFxjhjf

— Martyr Made (@martyrmade) June 13, 2025

Why is This Happening?

But while Dreher’s essay is as fascinating as it is disturbing, what interests me is what he says about what makes many males ripe for believing such ideology.

While there are many factors according to Dreher, there is one that caught my eye.³

Why are We Seeing This Now? Male Loneliness is One Key Factor

According to Dreher, one of the key reasons why so many males find the online woke right attractive is that they are lonely.

We’re living through an epidemic of loneliness. We now live in a world where many millions live trapped in a digital web of their own making. Loneliness and social anxiety are off the charts, especially for the young. We have entered a dystopian culture in which lonely people are having affairs with AI lovers, and in which tech titans talk of improving the lives of the lonely by using AI to invent more “friends” for them.

Many people don’t have a strong community around them. So, they try to find this ‘community’ online.

And the research on this is stark.

According to recent Gallop Research, 1 in 4 young American males (ages 15 – 34) felt lonely ‘a lot of the previous day’. This is higher than the US national average and the average for young women (both under 1 in 5). Fifteen per cent of men today say they have no close friendships, a fivefold increase since 1990.

This is coupled with a collapse in the institutions that used to provide places for people to meet and form friendships: sports clubs, social clubs, unions, and even political parties. And without these groups, meeting and building relationships with others is even harder.

And so, many males gravitate to the online world to find friendship. And since AI algorithms drive us to extremes for clicks and engagement, a growing number of males are finding their way to the woke right.⁴

How Should We Respond as Christians?

Whether the false ideology is from the Left or the Right, Christians should first watch our lives and doctrine closely (verse), so that we don’t get sucked in.

These ideologies are attractive because they present themselves as real answers to real questions, scratching an itch for answers, meaning and purpose. And so, for many people, they will be tempting.

But if one of the key enablers of radicalisation (whether of the Left or the Right) is loneliness and social isolation, then churches have a powerful way to address this crisis. God designed our local churches to be a family (e.g. Ephesians 2:19, 1 Timothy 3:15), a household that gathers for the good of its members and those around us (e.g. Galatians 6:10).

We have the God-given motivation and tools to address ‘social poverty’ – I use that term deliberately – just like the church has the motivation and resources to address physical poverty (before the state took over much welfare). While the mission of the church is the spreading of the gospel, we’re also called to love our non-Christian neighbour in other ways (e.g. Galatians 6:10).

And in this epidemic of loneliness, one of the things we can do is offer the hand of friendship to those around us, just as previous generations of Christians offered themselves to care for others in biological pandemics. Sure, it will look different to care for a rich but lonely neighbour than to alleviate physical poverty or tend the sick. But it’s still an important aspect of loving our neighbour as ourselves (Mark 12:31).

And Christian men, in particular, have a role in this. We have an enormous opportunity to meet this need by building those relationships with the men around us, both for the sake of alleviating loneliness and reaching them with the gospel.

And even helping men avoid and escape dangerous and soul-destroying ideologies like the Woke Right.

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Republished with thanks to AkosBalogh.com. Image courtesy of Adobe.

1. This often reared its head in strange ways, with one Hungarian telling me at the time that PM John Howard was Jewish. Interestingly enough, although there is a sizeable Hungarian Jewish community here in Australia, we gentile Hungarians rarely if ever, mixed with them, nor they with us. [↩]
2. While some might push back against the term ‘woke’ applied to these right-wing people, seeing as woke is a more developed and totalitarian ideology on the political Left than on the Political Right, nevertheless, there are similarities. There are the oppressors (e.g. the Jews). And the oppressed (e.g. white males). And force must be used to throw down the oppressors and lift the oppressed. [↩]
3. Another key one, according to Dreher, is a reaction against the anti-male abuses of the Woke Left. I would also add the impact of Digital Media, and the age old ‘itching ears’ factor in 2 Tim 4:3–4. [↩]
4. Of course, this isn’t unique to males: similarly, females can be radicalised by the online Left. [↩]